November 18, 2024: AmericanTemperanceStudying: A 1623 Origin Point

[150 yearsago this week, the Women’s Christian TemperanceUnion was founded at anational convention in Cleveland. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handfulof key temperance histories, leading up to a weekend post on that 1874convention!]

On acouple historical and movement lessons from the 400th anniversary ofa foundational law.

As withmany things early 1600s, it’s difficult to find too much specific informationabout the groundbreaking temperance law enacted in Virginia on March 5th,1623. The colony’s first royal governor Francis Wyatt and the recently-established coloniallegislature deemedthat date Temperance Day in an attempt to prohibit, as the law put it,“public intoxication.” That was just the first public and political step in acentury-long debate in the colony over alcohol and its effects, as traced atlength in Kendra Bonnett’s 1976 PhD dissertation Attitudes toward Drinking and Drunkenness inSeventeenth-Century Virginia (I’ll admit to having only brieflyskimmed the beginning of that thesis for this post, but it’s linked there foranyone who wants to read more!). While those specific Virginia and 17thcentury contexts are of course important to understanding this law, I want touse that 1623 moment to introduce a couple key lessons about temperance inAmerica for this entire weeklong blog series.

For onething, it’s crucial to understand how longstanding, widespread, and indeedfoundational American temperance debates have been. Much of the narrativearound this issue links it to early 19th century reform movements,which were certainly influential and about which I’ll have a lot more to say intomorrow’s post. But it’s pretty striking and telling that one of the veryfirst laws passed in collaboration by two of the first European Americanpolitical entities—both Virginia’s royal governor and its colonial legislaturewere only four years old at the time—addressed the issues of alcohol,drunkenness, and temperance. Moreover, while we might expect that the otherprincipal English colony at the time, Puritan Massachusetts, would enact such alaw—and while the Puritans most definitely had strongopinions on strong drink, but similarly more in opposition to publicdrunkenness than alcohol itself—this took place in the far less overtlyreligious (or at least religiously governed) Virginia colony. Clearly the issuewas consuming across the new colonies from their outset.

But it’sjust as important to note what this groundbreaking law specifically did anddidn’t do. The temperance movement is often closely associated in ourcollective memories with—if not directly defined by—the goal of prohibition, anunderstandable connection given that particular, prominent early 20thcentury Constitutional amendment and 13-year period (with which I’ll end theweek’s series). Indeed, the association is so strong that one definition of“temperance” has come to be “abstinence from strong drink.” But I would arguethat that definition emerged because of the association of the movement withprohibition, and that another definition—“the quality of moderation orself-restraint”—is more foundational to the word and movement alike. Virginia’Temperance Day didn’t ban or even legally restrict alcohol, just “publicintoxication”—a demonstrable lack of moderation or restraint in the consumptionof such drinks. There’s at least a spectrum in play here, and one that wouldcontinue to shape the movement’s goals and laws throughout the subsequent 400years.

Next temperancehistories tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?