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Selling Sobriety : How Temperance Reshaped Culture in Antebellum America

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Selling Sobriety : How Temperance Reshaped Culture in Antebellum America University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 1-1-2000 Selling sobriety : how temperance reshaped culture in antebellum America. Graham, Warder University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1 Recommended Citation Warder, Graham,, "Selling sobriety : how temperance reshaped culture in antebellum America." (2000). Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014. 1272. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1/1272 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. SELLING SOBRIETY: HOW TEMPERANCE RESHAPED CULTURE IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA A Dissertation Presented by GRAHAM WTVRDER Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY February 2000 Department of History © Copyright by Graham Warder 2000 All Rights Reserved SELLING SOBRIETY: HOW TEMPERANCE RESHAPED CULTURE IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA A Dissertation Presented By GRAHAM WARDER Approved as to style and content by: Kathy Peiss,' Chair Bruce Laurie , Member David Glassberg, Mender .-Karen Sanchez-Eppler ^^.ij^ber Mary Wilson,^il/son, Department Chair Department of History DEDICATION To Jackie, Molly, and Casey. You were always there for me. I will always be there for you. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My most sincere thanks go to Kathy Peiss, a mentor and scholar to whose standards I will always aspire. Her classes were always an eye-opening joy, and her help in preparing this manuscript was absolutely essential. I was perpetually amazed at her ability to focus on my work despite the vertigo of a busy life. She often understood what I was trying to do far better than I did. My special thanks must also go to Bruce Laurie. He kept me grounded in social realities without clipping the wings of imagination, and his passion for history was contagious. David Glassberg and Karen Sanchez-Eppler read drafts of my dissertation and offered both support and insight. Brian Burns, a teacher at Torrington High School, introduced me to the values of an intellectually active life. Mary Kelley of Dartmouth College taught me to value intellectual and cultural history. I will always be indebted. To Jerry Schanz, Matt O'Connor, and Dave Malcom, thank you for keeping me (somewhat) sane. Susanna Yurick and Scott Peeler helped me through my early years in graduate school and introduced me to caffeine addiction. To Matthew Crocker, my sincere appreciation for help with the primary research. V Incalculable thanks go to my mother, Lilla Warder, could never have finished this dissertation without your generous help. To Jacqueline Walsh, everything. Your presence, not that of French Roast, always made my heart beat a little faster. It's been an intoxicating experience. vi . — ABSTRACT SELLING SOBRIETY: HOW TEMPERANCE RESHAPED CULTURE IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA FEBRUARY 2000 GRAHAM WARDER, B.A., DARTMOUTH COLLEGE M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS 7\MHERST Directed by: Professor Kathy Peiss "Selling Sobriety" explores the uneasy symbiosis between the antebellum temperance movement and a distinctly American commercial culture. Entrepreneurs used the reform to reshape and legitimize public amusements, especially among those influenced by evangelical Protestantism who thought of themselves as the moral middle. Morally suspect forms of entertainment became the media through which temperance morality was inculcated. The dissertation examines three forms of commercial entertainments temperance fiction, temperance speaking, and temperance theater "Selling Sobriety" uses George B. Cheever's 1835 story, "Inquire at Amos Giles' Distillery," to establish the sources of temperance imagery and the limits to clerical cultural authority. Cheever's story was part of a split between orthodoxy and Unitarianism in Salem, Massachusetts. The minister was tried for libel and gained vii the support of Justin Edwards, a founder of the Americ an Temperance Society, and William Lloyd Garrison. The career of John Gough suggests the theatricalization of temperance and the popularity of the temperance narrative. The reformed drunkard Gough gained notoriety by relating his past at Washingtonian experience meetings, beginning in Worcester, Massachusetts. Wrenched by both the Market Revolution and delirium tremens, Gough was promoted by John Marsh of the American Temperance Union. In 1845, the National Police Gazette discovered an intoxicated Gough in a house of prostitution. William H. Smith's temperance melodrama. The Drunkard , opened in 1844 at Moses Kimball's Boston Museum. The play defused the antitheatricalism of many Americans and was also presented in P.T. Barnum's dime museum. It appealed to middle-class women who had hitherto avoided theaters. T.S. Arthur's career points to the links between temperance and a rapidly changing publishing industry. A fixture of domestic literature and Sarah Josepha Hale's Godey's Lady's Book , Arthur published the bestselling Ten Nights in a Bar-room in 1854. Arthur's novel sets up a Manichaean battle between Demon Rum and domesticity, between the bottle and the book. Alcohol was one means by which Americans formulated evil during a time of economic and theological optimism. viii "Selling Sobriety" argues that antebellum temperance was popular culture. Entrepreneurs used the reform as a wedge to open up new public spaces in American cultural life. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS V ABSTRACT . vii LIST OF FIGURES . XI CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: TEMPERANCE AS A CULTURAL PRODUCT 1 2. THE DEVILS AND THE DISTILLERY: THE SOURCES OF THE AMERICAN TEMPERANCE TRADITION 22 WOES, 3. WOUNDS, AND WORDS: GEORGE B. CHEEVER AND THE LIMITS OF CLERICAL TEMPERANCE WRITING 70 4. "DELIRIUM'S DREAD CHAIN": THE DRUNKARD'S PAST UNBOUND, JOHN B. COUGH'S VOICE FOUND 108 5. "THE MIRE OF HIS BASE DEBAUCH": THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF MUDSLINGING AND BACKSLIDING 175 6. PITS AND PENDULUMS: THE DRUNKARD AND THE THEATER OF MORALITY 226 7. LOADED WITH MEANING: DRUNKARDS, READERS, AND THE LITER7VRY CAREER OF T.S. ARTHUR 287 8. THE DISENTHRALLED: CONCLUDING THOUGHTS ON TEMPERANCE CULTURE, PROHIBITION POLITICS, AND AMERIC7VN DEMONS 352 BIBLIOGRAPHY 363 X LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Deacon Giles finds his workforce. A woodcut from Cheever's story published as a pamphlet 25 The 2. frenetic climax of "Inquire at Amos Giles' Distillery" ZD 3. The truth revealed 27 4. Edward Hitchcock's Argument against the Manufacture of Ardent Spirits 5. Hardly a picture of health. Much of the temperance movement viewed the drunkard as passive fodder for demons -^^^ 6. Welcome to the Sickle and Sheaf 317 7. "Father, dear father. Come home with me now." . 320 8. Timothy Shay Arthur--safe visitor to the homes of respectable women 335 9. The home of the drunkard 341 10. "The Home Circle" of the temperate reader 342 xi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: TEMPERANCE AS A CULTURAL PRODUCT As Americans ardently attempted to improve, even perfect, humanity during the first half of the nineteenth century, they busied themselves with a myriad of causes— antislavery, women's rights, hydropathy, spiritualism, labor reform, phrenology, the asylum movement, education reform, communitarianism, and others. Of the panoply of reforms energizing and captivating Americans in the mid- nineteenth century, temperance was the most popular. From today's perspective, it is difficult to visualize the depth and breadth of animosity toward Demon Rum held by large segments of the American people, especially in the North. By the 1840s, temperance activities had expanded far beyond the efforts of a narrow cadre of elite ministers and merchant capitalists, the leaders of the first temperance organizations. Crossing class, racial, and gender boundaries, temperance became a veritable national obsession. Alongside this peculiar obsession rose a national commercial culture recognizably "modern." A large and mass-oriented publishing industry thrived with unprecedented vigor. Drama lost much of its aura of immorality and attracted ever larger numbers of theatergoers. Lecturers, some of them national 1 celebrities, toured from city to town to village and back again. The Age of Barnum had begun, and American culture was irrevocably changed. Whereas earlier public entertainments encouraged the sale and consumption of alcohol, the newer commercialized leisure activities were distinguished by the absence of alcohol. This dissertation argues that the contemporaneity of a popular temperance movement and the rise of a popular commercial culture was no mere coincidence. At least by the 1840s and early 1850s, the two enjoyed an uneasy but essentially symbiotic relationship. The ironies of this symbiotic relationship reveal a pervasive instability in American cultural identity during the years before the Civil War. Temperance was part of a popular culture in which protection of the home sanctioned ever wider activities outside the home. Capitalistic forms of amusement proliferated in the name of circumscribing the excesses of capitalism. Visions of hell were sold in the hope of creating heaven on earth. A therapeutics of individual conversion became a path to social transformation.
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