Why abstinence matters to Americans

Ideas that persist over time, that have mass appeal and that transcend the barriers of race, class and ideology are usually taken seriously by scholars. Not so for abstinence in America. Its attractions are obvious to the millions who believe in it. However, to the millions who do not, the very word conjures up everything the Guardian dislikes about America—its intense religiosity, its rejection of the sexual revolution, its refusal to be more like Europe. Nowhere is the idea more despised than in academe. Richard Hofstadter, author of the otherwise magisterial The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R. (1955), dismissed temperance and Prohibition as distasteful aberrations. Andrew Sinclair was no less dismissive in Prohibition: the Era of Excess (1962). James Morone, whose Hellfire Nation: the Politics of Sin in American History came out in 2003, is sure that he has his finger on the pulse of American history. It all comes down to ‘two vital urges—redeeming “us” and reforming ‘them”’. The list continues. Whether abstinence is good, bad or indifferent we leave to the reader; but we are convinced that no purpose is served by dismissing the concept out of hand. To do this is to write America's history as H. L. Mencken might have done, as a series of unfortunate exchanges between yokels and sophisticates. It also misreads the way in which ideas work. Ideas that are merely disagreeable, that confer no benefit whatsoever, tend to have short histories and few followers. If abstinence were one of those ideas, if it were a pointless exercise in Grundyism, it would never have gained the ascendancy it has over the American imagination. This begs the question: what are the attractions of abstinence? The first is its utter simplicity. It is something anyone can master. It is a big-tent idea, open to all comers and both sexes. It requires no special talents, no money, no advanced degrees: hence its particular appeal in a country that has always regarded its intellectual elites with extreme suspicion. One is reminded of the verses penned by Samuel Thomson (1769–1843), the self-styled ‘people’s doctor': We wish every family a part To understand the healing art, Without so many forms and rules Coined and packaged by the schools [1]. It is not simply the practice of abstinence that is accessible: it is the concept itself. Where other ideas are burdened with elaborate theories and a multitude of exceptions, abstinence offers but one dictum: if one consistently avoids a particular activity, one will consistently avoid the risks associated with that activity. The underlying logic is so simple that it can be summed up in just one sentence—‘Just say no’; ‘There is no absolute safety for either man or woman except in total abstinence’[2]; ‘Abstinence works every time when it comes to making sure somebody may not have an unwanted child or someone picks up sexually transmitted disease’; and so on [3]. On a scarcely more elaborate note there is the old temperance song ‘Never Begin!’: In going down-hill on a slippery track, The going is easy, the task getting back; But you'll not have a tumble, a slip, nor a stop, Nor toil from below, if you stay at the top. So from drinking, swearing, and every sin, You are safe and secure if you never begin; Then never begin! Never begin! You cannot be a drunkard unless you begin [4]. Another attraction of abstinence is its capacity to redefine pleasure in more exalted terms. This quality is not immediately obvious to the many people who believe (wrongly, in our opinion) that abstinence and pleasure are polar opposites. The more abstainers insist that they are having just as much fun as everyone else, the more this impression is reinforced. One can only laugh at the forced jocularity of so many temperance meetings, at earnest teetotallers toasting each other with cold water or hot coffee or, in the case of one prohibitionist, with ‘empty glasses or with none’[5]. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), herself a passionate believer in temperance, attended one such event in Edinburgh. Her host was forced to improvise: ‘If it had been in the old times of Scottish hospitality, he said, he should have proposed a bumper three times three; but as that could not be done in a temperance meeting, he proposed three cheers, in which he led off with a hearty good will’. A certain defensiveness can also be detected in the words of the Reverend Thomas De Witt Talmage (1832–1902), as quoted in the National Temperance Orator for 1874: ‘I don’t believe there is a man here who has taken anything stronger than Hyson tea or Old Dominion coffee; and have you ever seen a merrier group?'. True abstainers define their actions in very different terms. For them, abstinence is not about stamping out something they find pleasurable: it is about creating an altogether different kind of pleasure, one that cannot bedefined readily in sensual terms. Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979), an American Catholic theologian, put it best: Our Lord never asked us to give up anything; He asked us to exchange. When someone is in love with God, he finds that there are some things he can get along without (his own pleasure), and something else he cannot get along without, namely, the peace of soul that comes from obeying God's Will. So he exchanges one for the other, surrenders the lesser good to gain a Kingdom [6]. John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943), an infinitely less subtle thinker than Sheen, was none the less able to grasp the essential paradox of temperance: that it is only superficially about renunciation. Like Sheen, he spoke about trading-up. Here he is, 500 pages into Plain Facts for Young and Old (1877), rhapsodizing over the benefits of going without sex: ‘There would be less sensual enjoyment, but more elevated joy. There would be less animal love, but more spiritual communion; less grossness, more purity; less development of the animal, and a more fruitful soil for the culture of virtue, holiness, and all the Christian graces’. Yet another attraction of abstinence is its optimistic faith in the individual, a quality it shares with evangelical Protestantism. Abstainers do not blame society for their failings: they blame themselves. Abstinence, to use Michael Mason's phrase, is ‘plainly antienvironmental in spirit’[7]. It is the converse of this equation that is so seductive: if individuals can set themselves right, everything else will fall into place [8,9]. Alcoholics Anonymous pays homage to this principle in Step 4 of its 12-Step programme. This is the crucial juncture where the recovering alcoholic looks inward and makes a ‘searching and fearless moral inventory’. There is only one way forward, and that is to stop blaming ‘conditions’ and instead accept the ‘need to change ourselves to meet conditions’. The cogency of the formula, its promise of something bigger and better, its essential optimism—these are the primary attractions for ordinary individuals. But there are also attractions for groups, starting with those engaged in the hard work of gaining respect. The most obvious way to do this is to forswear the habits other people hold against them [10,11]. The 19th-century Irish nationalists who gave up whisky are one example [12,13]; the African Americans of the antebellum period are another. They were among the earliest supporters of temperance. One reason was the sympathy abolitionism enjoyed in temperance circles. But there was another and equally practical reason for African Americans to make a conspicuous display of sobriety: to ‘show the public now that we are trying to promote one another’s interest for the elevation of ourselves and the rising generation' [14]. The leaders of these groups are another constituency for abstinence. They are attracted to its ascetic dimension, to the discipline it instils and the energy it releases for the struggle that lies ahead [15–17]. Before Cromwell was a commander of men he was a ‘commander first over himself, the conqueror of himself’[18]. John Howard (1726–1790), the indefatigable prison reformer, made his body the ‘servant of the mind’ by going without meat and liquor [19]. Lenin despaired for the young comrade who ‘reels and staggers from one love affair to the next. That won’t do for the political struggle, for the revolution. The revolution demands concentration, increase of forces' [20]. American radicals are no exception. ‘It is the sober, thinking slave who is dangerous’, Frederick Douglass wrote in My Bondage and my Freedom (1857). ‘When a slave is drunk, the slaveholder has no fear that he will plan an insurrection, no fear that he will escape to the north’. Malcolm X would make the same points in his own autobiography (1964). Why should African Americans give up pork, tobacco, alcohol and drugs? Why should they refrain from dancing, gambling, going out on dates, attending movies and sporting events, and taking long vacations? Because the ‘white man wants the black man to stay immoral, unclean and ignorant. As long as we stay in these conditions we will keep on begging him and he will control us’. Britain had its own temperance movement. Its progression, from moderation and suasion to teetotalism and coercion, closely paralleled events in America. The two movements shared publications and inspirational speakers, and they were remarkably well-informed about each other. The Christian Observer, a newspaper published by the evangelical wing of the Church of England, reported on the doings of America's first temperance societies. Nothing, it seemed, was too trivial to escape their notice—not even the resolution of 612 men in Connecticut to ‘abstain entirely from distilled liquors’[21]. Lyman Beecher (1775–1863), one of the great figures of the early American temperance movement, was a huge admirer of Wilberforce and his Vice Society. The American Temperance Society knew exactly when and where the word teetotal was invented: in 1833 in the Lancashire town of Preston. Yet, from an early date, the British movement lowered its sights, opting for the local veto instead of national prohibition. Some of the reasons are obvious. The Dissenters who championed abstinence were outside the political mainstream. The brewers and distillers were better organized. Socialism put down deeper roots. (Many people will remember the Fabians and their careful study of the Gothenburg System; but who remembers the American Committee of Fifty and its equally careful study?) A more fundamental reason, we suspect, is the much greater importance Americans attach to the doctrine of Christian perfection. The irony is that the modern form of this doctrine originated in 18th-century England, with John Wesley. Today it finds its most committed following among American southern evangelicals, and especially among the Pentecostal churches that grew out of the Holiness Movement of the 1870s and 1880s. But already in the 1840s Americans were taking the doctrine of Christian perfection to its logical extreme, calling for ‘total abstinence from sin’, for the ‘subjugation of all our appetites and passions to the will of God’, for the ‘entire sanctification of the body’[22]. This was a far cry from saying, as had Wesley in 1742, that ‘Our religion does not lie in doing what God has not enjoined, or abstaining from what he hath not forbidden’. It is telling, for example, that the early American temperance movement did not simply oppose alcohol: it also opposed tea, coffee and all other stimulants; this at a time when its British counterpart was busily hosting tea parties. By the 1890s abstinence was losing ground in Britain. In 1895, Britain's leading temperance organization, the United Kingdom Alliance, was dealt a crushing rebuff in the general elections. In 1898, the Fabians issued the first of several blistering critiques of the temperance paradigm. In 1899, the Royal Commission on the Licensing Laws was unable to reach a consensus. Even Lady Henry Somerset, president of the British Women's Temperance Association, had her doubts. Did she think that ‘simply drinking by itself is wrong?’, the Royal Commission wanted to know. She did not. Did she favour ‘Prohibition by act of Parliament’? She did not. However, abstinence is not losing ground in America. The New Virginity movement, with its strong ties to the Southern Baptist Convention, is proof enough of that. The logic has not changed, but the groups attracted to it have, from north-eastern reformers in the 19th century to social conservatives, most of them southern, in the 20th century. Again, the best explanatory variable is Christian perfection. The doctrine was decidedly unpopular in the south before the Civil War, and so was abstinence. After the war, the equation reversed: Christian perfection became popular and so did abstinence. Irony and wit, the affects of the Enlightenment and the inheritance of the chattering classes, also stood in the way of abstinence's putting down deep roots in Britain. Where, in antebellum America, was there a publication such as Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Punch or the London Times, each a relentless critic of temperance? Where was there a Matthew Arnold to warn against sacrificing ‘all other sides of our being to the religious side’, or a John Stuart Mill to insist that the ‘the interests of truth require a diversity of opinions’? What Britain had, in short, was a class with the intellectual wherewithal to challenge the perfectionist impulse of evangelicalism. Most importantly, the critics did their homework. When, for example, George Eliot took on Dr John Cumming (1807–1881), the popular evangelical writer, she first made a point of reading everything he had ever written. It was hard going for someone whose preferred fare was German philosophy, but she did it none the less; and her critique was more devastating for it. Which brings us back to our academic colleagues. We are not asking them to like abstinence; but we are asking them to understand its appeal and place in American culture. Without that, they will continue to be blind-sided each time American evangelicals offer a simple solution to a complex problem. This study was funded by grant 410-050-037 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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