Such is the story of one of the most powerful transatlantic social reform movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the temperance movement. This movement failed, of course, not least because it did not and could not address the culture of restraint on which the particular interest of temperance depended. In the end, the ideal of “temperance” finally expired in derision with the repeal of the Volstead Act in 1933, the word now having disappeared from our public vocabulary.
