A Failed Experiment

This 1846 print warns of the evils of alcohol by showing the stages of a man going from social drinker to death, while his family cries under the archway.

- Laura Phillips

By the mid-1800s, Americans were consuming alcohol and hard liquor at alarming rates—at least according to some people. Also around that time, a religious revival swept across the nation. Its supporters, who hoped to define correct moral behavior, saw intoxicating liquor as the major root of the country’s many social problems. In response, many communities started temperance societies. At first, members signed pledges agreeing to limit the amount of alcohol they drank. As the reform movement grew in the 1840s, society members promised not to drink any alcohol at all.

At the time, husbands and fathers were often a family’s sole wage earner. When men began to spend more time and money consuming alcohol, it created hardships for their families. A wife had no legal protection for herself or her children if her husband came home drunk and abusive and without any money to buy food or to pay the bills. In the fall of 1874, a group of Protestant housewives in Cleveland, Ohio, took action. They started the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). The organization adopted the motto “moderation in all things healthful; total abstinence from all things harmful.” In its view, alcohol had to go.