JOHAN EDMAN
Temperance and Modernity: Alcohol
Consumption as a Collective Problem, 1885–1913
Abstract
My aim is to analyse how the alcohol question and its responses were framed in the
formative period in 1885–1913, when the international anti-alcohol conferences
were taking shape. How was the alcohol problem framed in terms of current discussions on general themes such as the individual’s role in society, the challenges of
modernity and the contribution of science in solving a problem that was traditionally seen as a moral issue? The anti-alcohol conferences of 1885–1913 can be seen
as an arrangement for the modern state where the temperance movement placed
itself in the service of the state and at the same time demanded that it be given some
responsibility for the future development. These were years when the nation acted
as a point of reference in several questions that were chafing within the modern
project: population qualities and the condition of future generations, the notion of
citizenship, industrial strength and competitiveness, the role and the strength of the
state. That nation which desired industrial competitiveness, an efficient infrastructure and a strong military institution also did well to ally itself with those temperance advocates who met at the transnational anti-alcohol conferences. The nation
which had such objectives and wanted to see sober and strong citizens was encouraged also by the progressive forces in the temperance movement to take up a whole
host of issues from women’s political status to an individual’s sex life.
Introduction
We have been happy to maintain some feeble bonds of union between our
friends in England, France, Germany and Russia, who are now engaged in a
frightful war with each other, but who still have not forgotten that they are
interested in the same ideal work and that they formerly enjoyed friendly
intercourse.1
Journal of Social History vol. 49 no. 1 (2015), pp. 20–52
doi:10.1093/jsh/shv029
© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work,
in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and
that the work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.
[email protected]
Temperance and Modernity
21
To Robert Hercod, who wrote these words in the autumn of 1915, the First
World War was an irritating obstacle to his work. He was the director of the
International Temperance Bureau (ITB), which in 1923 changed its name to the
International Bureau Against Alcoholism (IBAA) and was again renamed in
1964 as the International Council on Alcohol and Alcoholism (ICAA). The
International Temperance Bureau had been founded in 1907 as a central library
for temperance movements around the world. It was tasked with collecting literature and informing writers, authorities and the public about the temperance cause
in order to battle disinformation and myths and to strengthen the overall mission
of the temperance movement.2 Together with a permanent organizational committee, the ITB would go on arranging international temperance or anti-alcohol
conferences, which had already been held in various countries since 1885. It is
these conferences that this article will examine.
My aim is to analyse how the alcohol question and its responses were framed
in the formative period in 1885–1913, when the international anti-alcohol conferences were taking shape. While it may be somewhat misleading to treat this era
as a uniform entity—as a pre-war la belle époque—the period did embrace modernity, ideals of professionalism, struggles of popular movements, colonialism and a
relative innocence before the great disaster of 1914. I will therefore focus on continuity rather than change.
The investigated conferences were important in several respects. First, they
were an expression of the alcohol question having become such an important
social political question as to render possible meetings of this magnitude. Second,
they actually functioned as key sites for international knowledge and policy dissemination in the alcohol field ever since the very first conference in 1885 and
continued to do so for another hundred years. Some international conferences
had been arranged on the alcohol issue since the first temperance conference in
1846, but the studied conferences were the first institutionalised and frequently
held meetings for researchers, government officials and NGO representatives to
gather around the topic which was often described as the most critical issue for
Western civilization at the time. By focusing on alcohol related topics, the conferences also put society at large on the meetings’ agenda.
In the article I try to answer questions about how the alcohol problem was
depicted in terms of consequences, causes and potential solutions. However, this
functions primarily as a background to my main research interest: how was the
alcohol problem framed in terms of current discussions on general themes such as
the individual’s role in society, the challenges of modernity and the contribution of
science in solving a problem that was traditionally seen as a moral issue? My primary
source materials are the 14 conference proceedings from the international alcohol
conferences held during 1885–1913 (see table 1). These proceedings tell us who the
participants were and which organizations were present. The reports give us access
to formal speeches and other expressions of conference etiquette, to minuted discussions and—what is clearly most important in terms of this study—to the participants’ papers which had been dispatched and were read aloud in the conference.
The agenda listed such items as a temperance organization’s work, legislation intended to curb the misuse of alcohol, the degenerating impact of alcohol on the
next generation and the most appropriate way of providing treatment to alcoholics.
My account builds on the common and recurring topics and themes in these conferences. Previous research and theoretical aspects will be discussed with each theme.
22
Table 1: Conference Proceedings
Title
City
1885
1887
1890
1893
1895
1897
1899
1901
1903
1905
1907
Meeting international d’Anvers contre l’abus des boissons alcooliques (CP 1885)
Verhandlungen der II. Internationalen Versammlung gegen den Missbrauch geistiger Getränke (CP 1887)
Bericht des III. Internationalen Congresses gegen den Missbrauch geistiger Getränke (CP 1890)
Compte-rendu du 4me Congrès international contre l’abus des boissons alcooliques (CP 1893)
Bericht über den V. Internationalen Kongress zur Bekämpfung des Missbrauchs geistiger Getränke (CP 1895)
6me congrès international contre l’abus des boissons alcooliques (CP 1897)
VIIe congrès international contre l’abus des boissons alcooliques (CP 1899)
Bericht über den VIII. Internationalen Congress gegen den Alkoholismus (CP 1901)
Bericht über den IX. Internationalen Kongress gegen den Alkoholismus (CP 1903)
Xéme congrès international contre l’alcoolisme (CP 1905)
Den XI internationella antialkoholkongressen (CP 1907a) + Bericht über den XI. Internationalen Congress gegen den
Alkoholismus (CP 1907b)
The proceedings of the twelfth international congress on alcoholism (CP 1909)
Bericht über den XIII. Internationalen Kongress gegen den Alkoholismus (CP 1911)
Compte-rendu du XIV congrès international contre l’alcoolisme (CP 1913)
Antwerp
Zurich
Christiania
The Hague
Basel
Brussels
Paris
Vienna
Bremen
Budapest
Stockholm
1909
1911
1913
Journal of Social History
Year
London
The Hague
Milan
Fall 2015
Temperance and Modernity
23
I will next briefly examine the alcohol problem, the organization of the conferences and the role of the temperance movement. This will be followed by responses to the alcohol problem, the nature of this question as a collective problem
and the role of alcohol in the modern society. The article concludes with a
round-up of the arguments.
Temperance Movement and Conferences
“Ebrietas est mater omnium vitiorum,” drunkenness is the mother of all vices,
maintained Viktor Almquist, office manager of the Swedish Prison Administration
Board, making a reference to church father Origen at the 1907 conference in
Stockholm.3 This message was the undercurrent of the first decades of the conferences: as the sociologist Harry G. Levine has put it, alcohol was a scapegoat for all
kinds of social problems.4 It would seep into every nook and corner of society,
destroying all the good that civilization and modernity would have otherwise been
able to offer. The scientific and social advances that had been made over several
hundred years were now threatened, as mental disturbance increased more rapidly
than did the population. This, to a large extent, was due to the consumption of
alcohol.5 In the conferences, it was argued that drunkenness led to criminality,
poor health, increased mortality and poverty.6 Inspector of the British alcoholic institutions R. W. Branthwaite summarised the problem elegantly in the 1909 conference in London:
Every inebriate is either a potential criminal, a burden upon public funds, a
danger to himself or others, or a cause of distress, terror, scandal, or nuisance, to
his family and to those with whom he associates.7
It is against this menacing picture that the nineteenth-century progress of the
national temperance movements is to be understood. The issue also called for
transnational collaboration, especially because ever more people were being incorporated into an international world. Both people and information travelled
farther and more quickly, and the economic, social and cultural development
created new possibilities across national borders for various interest groups. As the
historian Lovisa af Petersens has shown in her study on the international women’s
conferences, the transnational context and the very use of an international discourse provided a resource for political struggle and debate.8 Political scientist
Mark Lawrence Schrad finds similar mechanisms at work in the alcohol conferences’ references to a global or international community: such references “served
to legitimize temperance activity as a worldwide moral battle between universal
principles of good and evil, right and wrong.”9 Schrad’s study on the international
anti-alcohol conferences in 1885–1934 seeks to establish their role as a formative
and legitimating arena for the prohibition cause within the temperance movement. The anti-alcohol efforts led, among other things, to the total prohibition
of alcohol in the United States in 1920–1933. It makes sense, in the context of
the transnational prohibition movement, to study how the conferences could
contribute to such an effect, but in my analysis the conferences serve a bigger
function as a site of political formation, scientific exchange and networking
between individuals and organizations.
The first in the series of international anti-alcohol conferences examined
here took place in the autumn of 1885 in Antwerp, with more than 500 delegates
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coming together around the alcohol question. From the vantage point of Schrad’s
research area, this conference paved the way for “the maturity stage of network development” in the international temperance and prohibition movement.10 The
conferences kept expanding, attracting more delegates and countries, and, as
Schrad argues, “the transnational advocacy network grew broader and deeper.”11
But the conferences played an even bigger role than this. The first contributions
already speak of a certain breadth of scope: one paper addressed the history of
English alcohol legislation, another presented the work of the Swiss temperance
societies and a third discussed the care of alcoholics in western Germany.12
But it cannot be denied that the temperance movement had an important
impact on the organization and agenda of the conferences during the first decades.
The conferences offered an arena for friends of temperance and prohibition to exchange information and experiences. They also inspired teetotallers to meet and
build new international societies with like-minded teachers, clergy and students, for
example. The middle-class base of the early temperance movement was much in
evidence in many other ways, too.13 The mood of the temperance movement can
also be gleaned from that the conferences did not really talk about the alcohol
problem. Rather, from the very first meeting in Antwerp in 1885 until the 1956
congress in Istanbul, these were conferences against alcohol misuse or alcoholism.
The preface to the first conference already determines that the ultimate goal in the
common value system of the temperance movement, “la cause de la tempérance,” is
a veritable fight, “la lutte contre l’alcoolisme.”14 This normative ambition was reiterated in the rules and regulations of the organizational committee.15
But the conferences kept growing, with more delegates from more countries,
more interest groups from different professions and more wide-ranging topics.
Schrad sees this as an expression of the increasing professionalization of the transnational temperance movement, while I prefer to explain it rather as a sign of the
conferences serving more and broader objectives than just meeting the needs of
the temperance and prohibition movement.16 This interpretation is also shared
by the historian Ian Tyrrell: the temperance movement did make a contribution
to the conferences, but it was not the only one to do so.17 The conferences were
in many cases magnificent events, producing declarations and debates over many
long days, mixing these with lectures open to the general public, smaller gatherings of specialist societies or professions, banquettes and excursions. The presentations and discussions focused on alcohol from a great many different perspectives.
One could also argue that alcohol was the framework for debates ranging from the
condition of women to the state’s role in the modern society. This is why my emphasis is not so much on alcohol as on the overarching themes which were characteristic of the period and made themselves felt when one of the big
contemporary problems was to be explained and solved. However, to understand
the alcohol problem which served as a sort of catalyst for these overall themes, I
will first elaborate on some frequently discussed methods for solving the problem.
Solving the Problem
The alcohol problem was of the most serious kind; this the conferences never
contested. The answers were necessarily comprehensive and drastic and entailed
variations of still recognisable alcohol policies: prevention, treatment and restricted consumption.
Temperance and Modernity
25
Prevention
Ever since its organization in the 1830 s, the temperance movement had
found moral suasion a plausible method of combating the alcohol problem.18 The
middle-class-based temperance movement had undertaken an education project
that aimed not only at sobriety, but as sociologists Pekka Sulkunen and Katariina
Warpenius argue, also sought to “discipline the rising working class for whom the
public drinking places were venues of political agitation and causes of relaxed attitudes toward factory hours.”19 Schrad maintains, however, that the steps from
moral persuasion to legislative coercion had already been taken at “the ascendant
stage,” that is, before 1885.20 According to him, this development coincided with
a professionalization of the transnational network: religious influences had to give
way to “leaders of national and international temperance organizations, representatives from local temperance lodges, government regulatory bureaucrats, and official delegates from legislative and executive bodies.”21 To Schrad, the increasing
number of government representatives and official state delegates at the conferences represents a more symbiotic relationship between the temperance movement and government powers.
I argue that Schrad’s conclusions need to be qualified in two respects. My
own examination of the source material shows, first, that the conferences still
kept flying the moral, educating and individually-minded colours. And second,
the division or antagonism between moral education and state-issued control is
not made entirely clear. Governments can, with or without popular consent, act
more or less morally—and government legislation can therefore manifest a moral
will. Where the significant division lies perhaps is whether governments can be
persuaded to act (on moral, scientific or other grounds) or whether this action
should be delegated to individuals, associations and the civil society. Also, in
many instances action was taken by both entities, as Sulkunen and Warpenius
aptly put it:
In temperance discourse the modern individual unfolding in nascent industrial
culture was therefore divided into two parts: the inner Self and the external citizen.
The enlightened nation-state, imbued with aspiration and commitment to moral
and social progress, was thought to be the external instrument for constructing
the inner Self of citizens, capable of self-control and competent to act as sovereign members of society.22
The coupling of self-control and temperance was also made at the conferences,
and here one must register the ambiguity of the concept itself: while temperance
denotes abstinence from alcohol, it may also refer to a moderation of sorts.
Self-control is therefore both a cause and an effect: it is what one needs to abstain
from alcohol and what one loses by virtue of drinking, it was argued at the conference in Basel in 1895.23
In the fight for temperance, many conference contributions talked about the
role of the press, confidence in non-governmental action and freedom of the press
in general.24 But often the temperance movement also allied itself with other progressive causes in order to influence government and legislation. As social work
researcher Jim Baumohl and sociologist Robin Room have identified, such causes
included “movements for prison reform, for the abolition of slavery, for women’s
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rights, for national self-determination, and for the rights of workers.”25 The alliance with the women’s rights movement was to an extent linked with an image of
women as particularly adept temperance workers. This partly justified their political rights and partly gave them a special role in pro-temperance work. It was
heard on repeated occasions at the conferences that the fight against drunkenness
hinged on women’s ability to organise around the problem.26 In the words of
Charles Petithan, a physician: “Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut”—what the
woman wants, God wants.27 Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)
worker Charlotte Gray hence maintained in the 1887 conference in Zurich that
the future of the civilised countries depended on what women did and allowed to
be done.
The consequences of the misuse of alcohol were often felt at home, and in accordance with the familistic ideology common among the middle class, the home
was seen as the woman’s domain.28 This view was reinforced when a growing
number of working-class women also joined the ranks of housewives at the
time.29 The temperance movement highlighted the women’s role as mothers and
their impact on the rising generation. Women’s increased visibility in the public
space also contributed to concerns being voiced about their drinking.30
Expecting and breastfeeding women should be persuaded to abstain from alcohol,
and the conference in 1890 duly aimed to put right the general notion that beer
was beneficial to lactation.31 The 1907 conference in Stockholm idolised the
home and the mother while painting a picture of alcohol as the enemy of this
idyll. Women had a prescribed role in this fight, “for the world turns out in large
part what the women make it.”32 Their role had many facets: women were role
models, mothers and housekeepers—albeit not yet partners in legislative work.33
The home was not only a private sanctuary. As Mr and Mrs Bramwell Booth
argued in the 1909 conference in London, the home was “the seed plot of a
nation’s continued existence” and “the spring from which proceeds all that is essential to the true patriotism of a people, to the real power of any community, and
to the sustained influence of national life and institutions.”34
Treatment
The moral uplift that some in the temperance movement advocated can
mostly be likened to some of today’s efforts in preventive measures in the drug
abuse field. But we can also find that the treatment of individual misusers was
given increasing attention during the years that the first anti-alcohol conferences
were held. Medically-oriented alcohol treatment was justified in Great Britain at
the end of the nineteenth century as a humane and scientifically based alternative
to condemning moralism. Coercive treatment, too, was increasingly considered in
the early twentieth century as a means of incapacitating difficult misusers of
alcohol. In the early 1900s in English-speaking countries and Germany, alcohol
treatment institutions were at the height of their popularity.35 Different treatment
possibilities had been on the conference agenda ever since the first congress in
1885, and in 1899 the delegates learnt more about the treatment which had been
given at the Turva refuge in Finland since 1888. The inmates’ care consisted of
abstemiousness and restoration of physical strength through physical labour and
exposure to fresh air. The soul would gain its moral strength through Christian
discipline and rigorous drill.36
Temperance and Modernity
27
Treatment at Turva was subject to a charge, and the appropriately exclusive
clientele were expected to view their stay as relatively pleasant in a home-like environment. When it came to poor drinkers, coercive measures were rather more
prominent on the wish list. Coercion was advanced as a protection of sorts against
contagion, as a means of controlling the misusers’ bad influence on the environment but also as an opportunity to keep them from procreating. This aspect
became more important once the racial hygienic arguments spread in the early
part of the twentieth century (see below).37 In some cases coercive care was also
justified as a paternalistic measure against the misuse, to “protect the enslaved inebriate against himself.”38 However, the alcohol problem had tentacles all over
and the misuser of alcohol could appear in a multitude of guises. This led
R. W. Branthwaite to propose in London in 1909 a truly heterogeneous treatment
system that made use of the entire range of techniques from encouragement and
physical exercise to drugs and hypnosis, from “Christian science, faith-healing, or
even [. . .] judiciously applied humbug.”39 However, most cases would probably
not be helped without some sort of coercive measures.
Restrictions
The treatment of alcohol misusers touched on the larger question of government right and duty to solve the alcohol problem. In Great Britain, for example,
one discussed whether the state and the physicians should unite to solve the question. This development was recognised in other countries, too.40 Alcohol functioned, as criminologist Nils Christie has put it, “as a sort of trigger for state
action.”41 With reference to the liberal politician William Gladstone, the 1895
conference aired the view that the primary duty of the state “should be so to legislate as to make it easy to do right and difficult to do wrong.”42 Two years later, in
Brussels in 1897, the ideological conflict was plainly articulated. According to
the speaker, a French priest, it was equally self-evident for the state to act against
alcohol misuse as against private nuisance or vagrancy. This train of thought
could admittedly seem strange in the eyes of a true liberal—as exemplified by
“l’école Manchestérienne”—but when something as crucial as national population material was at stake, one was not to be deterred from state intervention.43
The foremost question was the sale of alcohol and whether it should be restricted or even forbidden. The alcohol industry was depicted as a notable enemy
in this fight. The industry was not content with producing the poison, but also
organised—as early as the 1860s—to lobby against the temperance cause.44
Additionally, many conference papers took up the question of alternative use of
spirits within the industry as a compromise that could please both the devotees of
sobriety and the alcohol industry.45
The question of a total ban long remained relatively abstract, as no country
had even tested this measure until prohibition was introduced in Russia in 1914
as part of the war mobilization campaign. At the end of the nineteenth century
one rather preferred to pursue the question of sales restrictions, in many cases as a
conscious strategy to counter demands for a total ban, which was advocated by
some factions of the temperance movement.46 The conferences eagerly discussed
the option of an alcohol state monopoly towards the end of the nineteenth
century.47 In 1890 Charles Robert Drysdale, a noted physician and advocate of
Malthus, proposed that alcohol, dangerous as it was, could only be sold through
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pharmacies. Reference was also made on many occasions to the so-called
Gothenburg system, which had been introduced in Sweden in 1865 and aimed to
remove the interest of profit from the alcohol trade. The system was later adopted
in Norway and Finland, too.48 According to Schrad, more than half the of countries in the world introduced or tightened some kind of alcohol controls at around
the same time in the 1910 s.49 But by now the European and North American
agenda also included a total ban, and in this process, historian Robert A. Hohner
argues, the anti-alcohol conferences played a significant part.50
But it would be a mistake to treat the conferences—or the heterogeneous
temperance movement—as a unified whole. The debates on alcohol restrictions
are a case in point. Several conference presentations discussed the pros and cons
of controls and an all-out ban.51 In the 1907 conference in Stockholm this led to
such heated debates that some speakers felt compelled to advise the delegates
“that they should remember that they were taking part in a congress which had
set as its aim to debate the alcohol question dispassionately and that this was to
be expected even more in a scientific session.”52 The presentation on the
American prohibition movement was also followed by a vehement debate, although not as severe as in the 1903 conference in Bremen.53 The conflict continued in London in 1909, when R. W. Branthwaite accused the organised
teetotallers of not being pragmatic enough to care for the unfortunate alcohol
misusers: “The cry of the total abstainer is ‘universal abstinence’, and nothing
short of that will please him.”54 The conference organisers took great pains to
create a tolerant debate climate, but this was not respected, and there was often
only a veneer of unity in terms of both aims and means.55
A Collective Problem
However, whether one championed sales restrictions or total prohibition,
moral education or treatment, the alcohol problem was part of a bigger picture.
Out of mainly epistemological necessity, causes were sought, for example, in regularities and principles of a medical or social nature. The answers were often a
match for the causes, also when they were brought from the general to the individual level, while the objectives would aim at a collectively binding solidarity.
Alcohol misuse was part of a complicated social problem, a formidable catalogue
of all sorts of evils which in the social historical studies on the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century have been called the labour question, the poverty
question, pauperism or the social question depending on what was to be examined
and for which ends.56 Modern social policies were to a great extent shaped by the
educated middle class, whereas the alcohol problem was archetypically embodied
by working-class men.57 Examples of copious alcohol consumption among the
upper classes further helped to carve out the source of modern social policies as
devout, orderly, entrepreneurial and middle class.58
The collective problem was firmly established in the growing and politically
ever more significant working class. The predominant problem formulation was
future-oriented and occupied itself with such entities as people, culture and
nation. To solve the alcohol problem was to safeguard a better future. The
concern about troublesome youth was evident in both contemporary debates and
crime statistics, and the anti-alcohol conferences frequently addressed the import
of children’s and young people’s temperance education.59 According to a
Temperance and Modernity
29
presentation in the 1890 conference, such education of children was “the wisest
and most certain method of combating intemperance.”60 The role of the school
and temperance education were conference staples, to such an extent in fact that
it was argued in Stockholm in 1907 that one rarely got to hear anything new, as
the question was already “debated to death.”61
It was nevertheless an important subject, for the youth was the future. The
increased alcohol consumption which had been reported in the German countryside was therefore alarming, because the countryside was “the well of youth from
which our tribe shall one day draw its vitality.”62 The youth were also a resource
in temperance work, partly because they were attracted by the patriotic significance of the temperance question and partly because they were fascinated by a
battle of this kind.63 The fight for the youth’s welfare was thus manifestly bound
up with the nationalistic character of the temperance question.
Nationalism
“Save the children and you will save the State!,” recited general secretary of the
United Kingdom Band of Hope Union, Charles Wakely, in the 1890 conference
in Christiania, and went on:
If the children of today are taught to grow up sober and intelligent, the manhood
and womanhood of the future will be secure. If, on the other hand, they remain
unwarned, and thus become intemperate and sensual, the national shame and
degradation will grow with the lapse of years, and the thraldom of drink will restrain as with hand of iron, every effort on behalf of social purity and peace.64
Youth and nation were inseparable. “Nation” held that force which could take
the anti-alcohol battle beyond individual inebriation. The temperance movement regularly found allies in other progressive causes, and as part of this partnership intoxicants came to be identified as a threat to the nation just when the
nation was a crucial tenet in the identity of the modern states’ growth. “Nation”
and “national character” were unquestioned points of reference, for example, in
the opposition to the alien opium trade, but also in the domestic defence of the
French wine production, which since the 1890 s had increasingly been depicted
as central to the French national character.65 The educated middle class of the
temperance movement made use of nationalism, as it gave them more widespread
popular support and confirmed their self-image as the leading force of modern
society.66
The conferences made regular reference to the nation as falling prey to the
alcohol problem. Drunkenness was the cause of “our national disgrace and degradation,” and alcohol was depicted with respect to “its baneful effects upon individual and national life.”67 The responses also rose from this context. For
instance, the good employer was expected to set an example in terms of temperance, “to sink self indulgence in a wise and patriotic effort for the good of the
people.”68 The citizens “should be an asset of the nation, not a liability,” which
called for a tribute:
Health, efficiency, wise economy, brotherliness, morality—these are qualifications which the twentieth century demands of patriotic sons and daughters of
the nations in their struggle upward toward the realisation of the ideal state.69
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The familistic idea of the home as a resource in this fight was also underpinned by
a nationalistic subtext.70 The home, the people and the nation were woven into a
normative ideal, as a contrast to the abuse of alcohol but also as its potential casualty. A contemporary movement—hygienism—brought the essentials of this
thinking together.
Hygienism
There was widespread concern at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth
century over the degenerating impact of the modern society on the population.
Public health, in a wide sense, emerged as an answer to this problem, and physicians were the guarantors for its maintenance. As the consequences on future generations became a key issue, the alcohol problem, too, was placed in a larger
context.71 The anti-alcohol conferences made it clear on repeated occasions that
the human race was growing weaker because of alcohol: it was worse-equipped in
many respects, because the sins of one generation impaired the chances of the
generation to come. In the 1907 conference in Stockholm a professor Laitinen
maintained that this was true at least of an animal population but he was less sure
whether this also applied to humans. At the next conference, in London in 1909,
he could confirm that it did.72
But as early as 1895 a delegate of the British Medical Temperance
Association had laid down that a person who misused alcohol became “gradually
degraded through the stages which civilization, education, religion and experience have slowly raised him.”73 And as a manifestation of national self-conceit,
the 1907 conference in Stockholm speculated on why people in northern Europe
were stronger and had more vitality than those in the south of Europe. This was
assumed to be the result of considerably lower levels of alcohol misuse over many
generations.74 But in the mind of the future-oriented hygienist Bror Gadelius at
the conference in Stockholm 1907, these were already degenerated times:
We can also with high probability suppose that we are still in the midst of the
effects of this conflagration whose devastating consequences we can witness in
the accumulated degeneration of many regions. A great many of our poor idiots
and incurable madmen are the withering ruins of this great fire.75
Hygienism was a conceptual construct which could mean many things. Somewhat
simplistically, it aimed to improve the population quality, while the means consisted of a host of measures, from improved sanitary conditions and more modern
housing to spiritual education and racial biological selection. The conference proceedings make it clear that hygienism was a loose mix of metaknowledge which
could accommodate—and legitimate—all kinds of demands. For example, calls for
the shaping of character and moral fibre in the face of alcohol came to be discussed
in terms of the hygiene of the I—Hygiene des Ich.76
The hygienic movement made bold claims, and its thought structures were
used, in the words of the sociologist Eva Palmblad, “to naturalise, rationalise the
existence of a given order and to make certain social circumstances appear as
natural.”77 Hygienism became both an explanatory and legitimating ideology to
lean on when one made a choice between moderation and abstemiousness (“the
preaching of moderation in the use of alcohol cannot be the correct aim of the
hygienist”).78 The conferences show that hygienism could embrace the most
Temperance and Modernity
31
different kinds of phenomena but also differing grades of severity: it was not only
alcohol but also the use of tea and coffee which was not “quite in accordance
with the strictest principles of hygiene.”79 Hygienism accommodated both public
health objectives of conventional medicine and health ideas of alternative movements. Within the German gesünder leben movement, for example, one encountered again such phenomena as natural therapy, physical culture, vegetarianism
and nudism. This life reform movement strove for an improved quality of life that
could be backed by large sections of the middle class.80 Some delegates in the
anti-alcohol conferences would at times make explicit the link to such ideals,
claiming that the vegetarian diet could cure and prevent the misuse of alcohol.81
One can to a certain extent understand the success of medico-hygienic thinking as a consequence of increased medical knowledge, but the perspective shift also
needs to be seen against the backdrop of more overall societal processes where, for
instance, the efforts of the temperance movement to ground its battle in scientific
thought were one of the reasons why medico-hygienic ideas came to occupy a more
prominent place in the hygienic movement at large.82 The temperance question
thus took place in a broader context of societal welfare and social relations. It was
argued in the 1897 conference in Brussels that scientific positivism urgently needed
to spread information not only about the physiological consequences but also about
the repercussions on the social organism, “l’organisme social.”83
Racial Hygiene
The notion of the people and the nation as a social organism made the collective into a morally compelling entity which mattered more than an individual’s welfare. This manifested itself especially clearly in the most radical variety of
hygienic thought, racial hygiene. In many countries in Europe, as also in the
United States, sections of the temperance movement found an ally in the eugenic
movement.84 Hygienic thought contains the seed of that racial hygiene which
would go on to produce its most hideous blooms after the period examined here.
Still, the German gesünder leben movement was, for example, clearly compatible
with ideas of selective breeding.85 Hygienism includes an idealising and aestheticizing current which can be seen in the racially and biologically objectified body
and in the organised physical culture in many countries at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century.86 For instance, we find this on the plaque that was
handed out to the participants of the 1911 International Hygiene Exhibition in
Dresden (figure 1). This exhibition was also visited by Robert Hercod of the
International Temperance Bureau.87
Contemporary eugenic thought had not yet been put to the test; it was relatively inquiring. This is especially true if one compares it to the eugenic thinking
of the interwar years. Some kind of loosely knitted theory of heredity was nevertheless on the agenda when the causes and consequences of alcohol misuse were
to be explained in terms of degeneration. Such trains of thought lent scientific legitimacy in the battle against drinking but also more gravity when an individual’s
alcohol consumption could be linked with the welfare of future generations and
national well-being.88
But this focus on heredity also challenged an older temperance paradigm
which had rather departed from the significance of the social circumstances in
the emergence of misuse.89 In the conferences, and depending on the speakers,
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Figure 1. Exhibition plaque from the 1911 International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden
(in the author’s ownership).
one could hear very different stresses being laid on the root causes of misuse, but
there were also attempts to mediate between heredity and environment as well as
a kind of Michurian theory of heredity which claimed that heredity could be influenced by such things as bad housing and poor diet.90 Michurian or Lamarckian
interpretations were the theories of heredity most referred to at the conferences.
Several presentations highlighted that alcohol destroyed not only the drinkers
themselves but also their offspring: a substandard quality of sorts was expected to
be hereditary.91 This is how alcohol use ceased to be an individual concern:
Inasmuch as the interests of the whole, that is, of the human race, must take precedence over those of the individual, an individual’s sexual hygiene must subordinate itself to societal sexual hygiene and all the more so as sexual hygiene is
first and foremost identical with racial hygiene.92
Alcohol would kill the individual and destroy the race—“mort de l’individu et
déchéance de la race.”93 Alcohol would lead to degeneration and in the end
become “a racial illness which is antisocial as it brings down the morals of a
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33
nation, encourages impure pleasures and is the enemy of pure enjoyment.”94 This
image of an impending racial war, if not literally then through evolutionary
contest, intensified the fateful gravity of the question. At the 1905 conference,
noted race biologist Auguste Forel spoke of an eastern threat—“schwarze Wolken
sammeln sich am östlichen Horizont”—and that the white race was threatened.95
The races were differently endowed—strong and weak, superior and inferior
(“überwertige und minderwertige”)—depending on the different characteristics.96
Then there was the modern problem of degeneration in which a race was debilitated by such cultural phenomena as alcoholism, excess and sexual debauchery.
The answer was racial hygiene.
The link with racial hygiene did not point to an immediately obvious direction. The Lamarckian mode of thought also allowed investment in favourable
social conditions as a response to the problem of degeneration.97 Nor was alcohol a
self-evident foe when the discussion tackled negative eugenics. There were debates
in Great Britain, for instance, on the possibility of letting alcohol help to eliminate
inferior individuals. In this light, all efforts to curb the misuse of alcohol were seen
as disturbing desirable natural selection.98 This response was, however, rejected by
Auguste Forel, who in the 1901 conference in Vienna pointed out that this would
mean that the old civilised races could now take their alcohol much better than the
uncivilised races who had not drunk previously. This was not true. Alcohol misuse
was not confined to the procreating section of the population, either, as it could
also announce its presence after childbearing age. It was for these reasons that
alcohol misuse could not be used to achieve a favourable natural selection. Instead,
alcohol consumption needed to be changed for the good of mankind.99
As opposed to interwar years, sterilization—forced or otherwise—was rarely
advocated as an answer to the alcohol problem. But the international conferences
brought together delegates from many countries with different experiences. In the
United States, the first draft law on forced sterilization was introduced as early as
1897 in the state of Michigan. It then took ten years for the first law to come into
force (in Indiana), and eight states had passed some kind of sterilization laws by
1912.100 The historian Mark A. Largent has convincingly shown that this early
wave of sterilizations can be coupled with the influential American Progressivism
movement.101 Similar socio-utopian modes of thought can be found in many
countries, Sweden included.102
The first National Conference on Race Betterment, held in Michigan in
1914, had an entire session to discuss the alcohol and tobacco problem.103 There
were thus manifest links between the anti-alcohol movement and the eugenic
movement, but the anti-alcohol conferences did not at the time debate sterilization as a plausible response to the alcohol problem. Extremely long periods at
alcoholism treatment institutions could stop unwanted procreation, but it was
also deemed to be a costly alternative.104 In many instances the reasoning
amounted to no more than taking some kind of “steady common sense at the procreation.”105 It was unclear whether good qualities should be favoured (positive
eugenics) or bad ones checked (negative eugenics). The problematic was rooted
in a social order that had precluded natural selection:
Thanks to medicine, humanity and individual hygiene, this selection has for the
most part ceased. Quite the opposite, a mass of wretched life forms are kept alive,
while the sane and sound are used as cannon fodder or as overworked slaves.106
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What remained was “artificial selection,” which would be aimed not only at
“health and intelligence but most of all at industriousness, ethical and social feelings, and cheery optimism.”107
Modernity and Science
The alcohol problem that was formulated during the nineteenth century
emerged at the intersection of recognisably increased drinking and new expectations being placed on the citizens of the modern society. The latter factor was in
all probability decisive: also when the per capita alcohol consumption stayed
constant, the striving for a population of “health, intelligence, industriousness,
ethical and social feelings, and cheery optimism” had contributed to constructing
alcohol consumption as a problem to be solved. It was not an end in itself to fight
the misuse of alcohol. The fight against alcohol rather took place (and to an increasing degree at the time examined) as part of a fight for the modern society—
and starting from the premises of what this society demanded from its citizens in
the name of progress and efficiency.108 Individual health was a collective
concern, which was evident in, for example, the increased collaboration between
life assurance companies and physicians.109 The anti-alcohol conferences also included presentations on how the insurance companies were to deal with consumers of alcohol, and statistical calculations of life expectancy among drinkers and
teetotallers.110
Industrialization made alcohol misuse more visible in the poorer urban areas,
and temperance work consisted in great part of disciplining the working class.111
The link between drinking and disorderly conduct raised among the propertied
classes the worst-case scenario of a revolution.112 If nothing else, the hedonistic
drinking habits were a direct opposite to orderly and entrepreneurial life. One can
therefore argue as Weber did that the more ascetic ideal of the temperance movement acted as a means of spreading “the spirit of capitalism.”113 Alcohol habits
need to be reinterpreted in light of the new working life demands and against the
fact that alcohol use obstructed industrial and economic efficiency.114 This development can be followed on the national level, where new legislation and control
mechanisms went hand in hand with the advances of the industrial society but it
is also visible on a very concrete level in that Henry Ford, for example, advocated
a total ban on alcohol as a manifestation of what the philosopher Antonio
Gramsci has read as an attempt to impose hegemonic power on the factory
itself.115 The American temperance movement and the Anti-Saloon League in
particular were obviously popular among the big companies.116
Working life was clearly an arena for the temperance cause. In the nineteenth century, the conferences debated the forced drinking—Trinkzwang—
which was still a burden on some occupations (and student life).117 Working
culture could in other words be a threat to the anti-alcohol battle, while the antialcohol battle was also the prerequisite of an efficient working life in the future:
“Clear heads and steady hands are needed in all the places of industrial
pursuit.”118 Still, it was not only working life but leisure, too, which appeared on
the agenda when several conference presentations dealt with the role of the
coffee houses in temperance work at the end of the nineteenth century.119 These
had organised in the National Coffee Tavern Association in England in the
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35
1870 s, which shows that organising was seen as a necessity and that the decision
could not be placed in the hands of the clients and the market.
Legislation was a response to the state’s apprehensions and ambitions, but
the fears were expressed most clearly in the debate on the place of alcohol in the
state’s core functions. The importance of sobriety on the railway was a recurring
theme,120 but the foremost of the state’s jobs was war. Here, the alcohol problem
could partly be seen as a problem of degeneration when the alcohol-damaged offspring were not good enough to fight, partly as another kind of problem when the
drunken soldiers could not do battle particularly effectively.121 From the end of
the nineteenth century onwards, alcohol was debated in the armed forces as
causing problems of discipline, illness and generally speaking poor performance.122 Modern warfare wanted sober soldiers. This was a costly lesson which
according to Auguste Forel and others the Russians had learnt in the war of 1905
against the sober Japanese.123
The period examined here coincides with the last tremors of many great
empires. The Russian, German, Habsburg and Ottoman empires all fell in the
wake of the First World War. But during the preceding decades there was rapid
imperial expansion, most of all in the colonising of Africa. The Berlin
Conference where the colonial powers laid down the boundaries for future
African colonization, among other things, closed the same year as the antialcohol conferences began, in 1885. Alcohol was a key instrument of trade with
the colonies and their exploitation, so the transnational temperance movement
acquired a new arena to take care of.124 In certain questions, argues Schrad, one
used a set of “temperance frames for understanding significant international political developments,” as in 1889, for example, when the conference resolution in
Brussels banned both the slave trade and liquor traffic. This was seen as a great
victory for the temperance cause.125 The 1893 conference called slavery and intemperance “the twin oppressors of the people.”126 But alcohol—so one maintained in the 1890 conference in Brussels—was worse for Africa than the slave
trade had ever been:
The slave trade takes people away out of the country. The drink destroys their
soul and body in it, and through the principles of heredity destroys coming generations’ body and soul.127
The conferences examined in this study were concerned about the increased
alcohol trade in Africa as a result of colonialism. According to Tyrrell, the
“supply of alcohol became a touchstone for wider anxieties over colonialism’s oppressions.”128 In 1886, one year after the Berlin Conference, the British temperance movement arranged a conference to manage the colonial liquor trade. The
issues were by no means unconnected: with the possession of these areas came
also the responsibility for their civilization. The 1887 conference in Zurich linked
the battle against alcohol with the white man’s burden: how could one civilise
the natives if one at the same time provided them with copious amounts of
alcohol and guns? This was a shameful development—“ein Schandfleck”—for
the Christian civilization.129 The superiority of the white race entailed a moral responsibility, for “the primitive peoples [were] like children, adopted by the white
peoples, who had taken on the responsibility to raise them when they had seized
the power over these peoples.”130
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Africa opened up to European trade and European civilization, which meant
that one had to take charge of the future development. “Is this European invasion
to be fraught with good or evil to the native races?” asked Josias Grant Mills, a delegate of the Church of England Temperance Society and the Native Races
Committee at the 1890 conference in Christiania.131 We may glimpse an underlying critique of a more general nature as regards the colonization of Africa, but
the situation now called for beneficial measures in order “to improve the condition of these countries, to carry blessings and not curses to them.”132 According
to the Brussels agreement in 1891, the alcohol trade in Africa would be limited,
but the 1907 conference in Stockholm still expressed a great concern about
alcohol misuse in Africa.133 This was now a large question. As a special theme
the conference discussed the alcohol problem among various native populations,
also among the Swedish Sami, for example.134 The development in Africa was
still morally reprehensible but it also did not make economic sense, as one needed
the black labour force to extract the African riches. The white colonisers did not
have what it took to work in the tropical climate, so a sober native population
was extremely important for the division of labour. The coloniser’s “work must, to
achieve results, confine itself to direction and supervision; he is the head and the
intelligence, and the natives are the arms which shall carry out the work itself.”135
This analysis of how “drunkenness impairs the negro’s working capacity” was also
heard in other contributions to this conference.136
Criticism of Modernity
The period examined here covers the breakthrough to modernity when new
communications, popular movements, industrialization, urbanization and democratization left their mark on the western societies. The anti-alcohol conferences
articulated the alcohol problem as part of this change whether the problem entailed the importance of a sober railway personnel or women’s new citizenship. At
the same time, however, modernity carried a kind of critique which did not see
alcohol in terms of a hindrance to progress but rather viewed the problem as a
consequence of modern progress. Two sides of the same coin perhaps? As historian of ideas Gunnar Broberg and historian Mattias Tydén have argued, one can
consider this a dual modernity which applauds science and engineering but also
cultivates a critique of civilization. Racial hygiene was among those constructs
which satisfied both needs and it is also in this context that one can explain the
German life reformers movement.137
The anti-alcohol conferences tackled the theme in its many manifestations.
The degenerating effects of cities were contrasted with the natural countryside,
which is why it was seen as particularly worrying if drinking occurred in the
(German) countryside, the “well of youth” of the future and the race.138 The
causes for the misuse of alcohol were found, for example, in the rapid scientific
progress and in the ubiquitous industrial machines.139 This was an unnatural condition and this was also why the alcohol problem, according to an American conference delegate, was larger in the United States than in Europe. American life
was more “unreal, more unnatural.”140
The criticism of modern destitution also contained the answer: social want was
on many occasions given as the cause rather than the consequence of much alcohol
consumption. The battle against alcohol misuse then came to resemble general
Temperance and Modernity
37
social policy, turning into a battle for shorter working hours and improved housing
conditions.141 “The motivation of an individual’s sobriety in our time is social,”
maintained the physician Knut Kjellberg in the Stockholm conference in 1907.142
This perspective was purposely contrasted with a view of the alcohol problem as a
medical question. The causes were rather located within a wider context:
The housing question, long working hours and the more or less exhausting
impact that many jobs have on the nervous system, the quality of nourishment
and the provision of meals, family life, education at home and school, efforts to
provide adult education, cultural recreation.143
But there were also those who found fault with the symptom-theoretical perspective. According to them, the widespread drinking among the upper classes hardly
implied that the drinking was due to social ills. Also, those who premised their
analysis on Marxist thought cast suspicion on that part of the labour movement
who were convinced that improved social conditions would solve the alcohol
problem.144 From a socialist vantage point, it was therefore important to highlight
the structural circumstances and at the same time condemn drunkenness as such.
It was pointed out on repeated occasions in the conferences that alcohol could be
both the cause and consequence of poor social circumstances.145
Science and Ideology
In Schrad’s analysis, the early anti-alcohol conferences represent resources in
the political battle for sobriety and for prohibition on the national and perhaps
also on the global level. Schrad argues that “transnational advocacy networks” operated through the conferences and that these associations were something else
than “epistemic communities” in their nature.146 Epistemic communities were
“international networks of professionals and experts who are bound by shared
causal ideas and technical information as a foundation to influence national
policy decisions.”147 These communities, Schrad holds, “shared scientific and cognitive understandings,” whereas transnational advocacy networks were “motivated
primarily by shared normative understandings of complex social phenomena.”148
This distinction helps Schrad to establish that epistemic communities are only
loosely connected to the political process, while transnational advocacy networks
“actively seek social and political change based primarily on shared understandings of right versus wrong and good versus evil.”149
I believe that Schrad’s division is misleading. No doubt the anti-alcohol
battle around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century was a moral
battle, often with Christian overtones, but I think it would be a mistake to picture
this as clearly opposed to a more scientific and dispassionate view of the alcohol
problem.150 As previous research has shown, a scientific rendering of a question
can also contribute to a de-ideologization of sorts which enables a stronger political mobilization in various questions.151 It is a fact that this objective of a scientific approach permeated many of the themes discussed in the anti-alcohol
conferences. For example, if the late nineteenth-century theories on degeneration
appear as imbued with a moral tone, one should perhaps rather understand that
they were so popular at this time precisely because they appeared secular and scientific.152 And the American Anti-Saloon League, a union which rather resembled the morally and politically active organs which Schrad recognised in the
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transnational advocacy networks, operated purposely—by collaborating with the
Scientific Temperance Federation, for example—in order to be seen as objective
and scientific.153 The powerful Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, too,
sought to influence already at the end of the 1800s by educational materials
where the alcohol question was illustrated with scientific arguments.154
At the time, one would increasingly refer to the various branches of science
to describe the alcohol problem and to come up with answers.155 The prestigious
position of science and medicine obviously came to have an impact on the work
around the temperance question—linguistically, strategically and methodologically—when, as Baumohl and Room characterise the changing nature of alcoholic treatment in the mid-1910 s, “the secularization of truth associated with the
rising esteem of science undermined the voluntary, quasireligious tradition.”156
But, as the historian David Harley has noted, in order to explain a problem in
medical terms, for example, one needed to be able to connect it to the “core
beliefs of a substantial group.”157 This makes the fracture between a moralreligious and medico-scientific interpretation less obvious. Previous research on
scientific alcohol studies at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century has
also shown that scientific facts were mixed with the researchers’ personal biases,
and it is clear in the context of the anti-alcohol conferences, too, that the scientific
description hardly revolutionised the work.158 Quite the opposite, the scientific observations were rather seen as anticipated corroboration of those principles that the
temperance movement had long relied on and battled for.159 Common themes
such as temperance education were approached from the scientific perspective as an
opportunity to boost the effect with the help of scientific arguments.160
It was not unheard of that one could also raise doubts in the late nineteenth
century about science which all too often produced conflicting positions. This is
where the moral approach found its defenders, as it was “of infinitely greater importance than the scientific aspect.”161 Still, to be able to deliver a study which
was “fully in accord with advanced scientific thought on this subject” was always
a bonus.162 The conferences dealt with such writing of history as advocated an
ever increasing degree of scientific involvement when religious and ethical
motives were being replaced with scientific research. The 1907 conference in
Stockholm sought to be nothing less than a scientific conference which could seriously discuss the scientific subject of “alcohology.” The programme was therefore
split into a scientific and a more public-oriented section.163 Prince Gustaf Adolf
opened the conference, laying it down in his opening address that it was now “scientifically proven” that alcohol led to misery. The honorary president Sixten von
Friesen similarly underlined that the question would now be solved scientifically.164 In the next conference, in London in 1909, one could confirm a particular kind of historical writing, which showed a “continual growth of the scientific
spirit,” and an earmarked session of medicine stressed the medical perspective in
the matter.165
The Disease Concept
A specific aspect in the scientific nature of the alcohol question was the
medical interpretation of copious alcohol consumption as an illness. The official
history of the International Council on Alcohol and Alcoholism (ICAA) describes this as a shift of perspective in conjunction with the first conference after
Temperance and Modernity
39
the Second World War, in 1948, “which recognized alcohol as a medical, moral,
and social problem and expressed the wish that in every country alcoholism be
considered a disease.”166 But the question of the pathological status of alcohol
misuse is far older than this and can be traced back to such influences as the late
eighteenth-century studies by the American physician Benjamin Rush; the early
nineteenth-century British physician Thomas Trotter; and the accounts of the
Swedish doctor Magnus Huss in the mid-1800 s.167 The historian Jessica Warner
has gone as far as locating the first reports of alcohol misuse as an illness in the
early part of the seventeenth century.168
Towards the end of the nineteenth century in Britain, one promoted the
concept of illness as an alternative to the dated moralistic notion. According to
the British historian Virginia Berridge, this was about “a strongly physicalist
concept of disease” which at the same time matched “the professional strategies of
a wide range of middle-class groupings in society.”169 Still, while alcohol misuse
could be seen as an illness, there also appeared a clear and lingering resistance to
such a notion in the medical spheres themselves.170 Several medical articles were
published in the mid-1800 s which extolled the virtues of alcohol both as a foodstuff and as a medicine. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that
one could note a more distinct opposition to using alcohol in medical care.171
The anti-alcohol conferences of 1885–1913 criticised the all too liberal use of
alcohol as a therapeutic preparation in medical treatment, and several speakers reported that special temperance hospitals had been established to provide medical
care without alcohol.172
The interpretation of alcohol misuse as an illness obviously made those physicians who were involved in the temperance cause dissociate themselves from
providing treatment by way of alcohol, but the notion of illness also correlated
with the idea that big problems must be grounded in substantial causes. As a physician put it in the 1897 conference in Brussels: alcoholism must have an exceptionally deep root cause, “une cause originelle profonde, exceptionnelle.”173 The
link to a human being’s physical constitution satisfied this need for a deeper and
uniform cause. According to the president of the British Society for the Study of
Inebriety, Norman Kerr, inebriety was “a disease of the nervous system allied to
insanity” and an “abnormal condition, in which morbid cravings and impulses to
intoxication are apt to be developed in such force as to overpower the moral resistance and control.”174 When characterised in these terms, the notion of an illness
was obviously a distinct alternative to moralising interpretations.
In Christiania in 1890, Kerr named this illness as “narcomania” and said that
it could occur periodically or constantly, and that the periodical nature could be
due to a host of factors ranging from weather to access to money.175 Constant inebriety would lead to “tissue-degeneration of the brain” which then led to “perverted cravings and impulses for intoxication.”176 Even more basic causes for the
initial misuse of alcohol included “[h]eredity, especially, of inebriety but sometimes of insanity.”177 This predisposing constitution could lead to topical alcohol
misuse as a result of a great many social circumstances:
The existing causes are often to be found in some form of nerve-chock, such as
from financial business or domestic trouble, disappointment or bereavement; in
head and other diseases and injuries; in certain occupations which exhaust
rapidly the nervous energy; in overwork or idleness; in monotonous dullness and
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in association; and in intoxicating agents themselves, alcohol being a potent
inebriate excitant.178
The particular reason was important, as one could cure the drinker by identifying
the cause: “Find out what has driven him, if you wish to effect a cure.”179
As Mariana Valverde has convincingly shown, the notion of illness never
really took root during this period, not in the United States and Great Britain at
least, and certainly not in the actual treatment.180 But several conference presentations from the late nineteenth century nevertheless referred to alcohol misuse
as an illness. Alcohol had “a special tendency so to alter the nervous system as to
create a desire for the daily repetition of the dose.”181 According to writer Gallus
Thomann at the 1893 conference in The Hague, the United States had long ago
already “adopted the Rush theory that drunkenness is a disease and should be
treated as such.”182 The notion of alcohol misuse as an illness was not an empirical given, but an agreement with its own therapeutic and administrative consequences. The American Association for the Study and Cure of Inebriety had, for
example, decided in 1887 on a set of principles the first of which laid down that
“[i]nebriety is a disease,” followed by: “It is as curable as other diseases are.”183
The illness could be “inherited or acquired; but the disease is usually induced by
the habitual use of alcohol or other narcotic substances.”184 The battle on the
definition was clear in this conference presentation from 1893 where the speaker
maintained that “it is the duty of the civil authorities to recognize inebriety as a
disease, and to provide means in hospitals and asylums for its scientific treatment.”185 This determination about the medical status of alcohol misuse manifested itself on other occasions, too. A presentation in 1899 argued that this was a
“mental and sometimes bodily disease.”186 The 1907 conference made a plea for
the misusers to the treated as ill and drunkenness to be seen as an illness, while in
London in 1909 R. W. Branthwaite argued that this was a question of treating
people “whose condition demands the application of measures similar to those
applied to cases of recognised infectious disease.”187
The Alcohol Question on the Verge of Modernity
The alcohol question, such as it was discussed in the anti-alcohol conferences
of 1885–1913, was both homogeneous and disparate. The conference delegates
agreed on and departed from the premise that alcohol was destructive; they
sought to tackle this serious question in different ways and successfully discussed a
great many subjects. If one were to pick an overarching theme for the entire
period, one could describe it as an arrangement for the modern state where the
temperance movement placed itself in the service of the state and at the same
time demanded that it be given some responsibility for the future development.
But these temperance advocates were not content with trying to make the old authoritarian state see things more soberly. The temperance movement was in great
part a radical force with liberal and socialist overtones.188 The authorities in
Russia, for example, were deeply dubious about the radical temperance movement
which was considered to threaten the imperial order—and it was therefore a surprise to many that it should be Russia which was the first country to introduce
prohibition in 1914.189 The battle against the alcohol capital was also an early
formation of political activity and class consciousness.190
Temperance and Modernity
41
The situation looked very different from one country to the other. According
to Baumohl and Room, the temperance movement retained strong links to the
progressive forces in the Nordic countries, while in the United States it rather
allied itself with conservative forces towards the end of the nineteenth century
(and was something of a spent force in Great Britain).191 But the anti-alcohol
conferences kept discussing the temperance question with political overtones.
One speaker argued in 1897 that anarchy and other antisocial movements represented a moral perversion and were the result of alcoholism, but it was more
common to connect the fight for sobriety to a more general political battle for
welfare and influence.192 The socialists were called upon to fight the battle of
sobriety, as alcohol was “the chief factor in producing social inequality and suffering.”193 For its part, the alcohol industry exemplified the capital in which the
product—alcohol—“enables a few to become rich while it impoverishes the very
many.”194 In the 1901 conference in Vienna the labour movement and the temperance movement were urged to collaborate: the labour movement had to realise
that the fight against alcohol was necessary in order for progress to be made in the
social battle, whereas the temperance movement should understand that the fight
for sobriety could be won only if it shared an ambition to improve the workers’
material conditions.195 Most parliamentarians of the labour movement were teetotallers, according to a representative of a British temperance organization
United Kingdom Alliance, which proved that political influence could easily find
an ally in sobriety.196 Women’s political participation similarly benefited from
support from the temperance movement in several countries.197
The decades before the First World War have been described as the heyday
of confident internationalism, a period when knowledge, capital and political interest formations found allies across borders and hope was found in the collective
rather than the narrow nation-state.198 It was in this spirit that the temperance
movement took up its project. At the same time, these were years when the
nation acted as a point of reference in several questions that were chafing within
the modern project: population qualities and the condition of future generations,
the notion of citizenship, industrial strength and competitiveness, the role
and the strength of the state. Given the historical context of the alcohol question,
it is interesting that the responses seem to centre on the very themes that appear
entirely modern even more than a century later: treatment, prevention and restriction. This can mostly be regarded as the author’s creative inability to find
new categories, but the responses nevertheless stand out as somewhat loosely connected—almost banal—when one considers the magnitude of the problem. Still,
the states’ willingness, ability and legitimacy to force certain measures on the citizens in order to solve the problem points to vitalised governmental social political
ambitions. The alcohol problem was now bound up with a kind of core in the selfimage and purpose of the western nation. Alcohol was depicted as one of the
great epidemics and hence also as a fundamental threat to the potential strength
of the modern nation.
The transnational context of the conferences did not necessarily entail an
internationally-minded community. Quite the opposite, this context was at least
as frequently an arena for national examination and self-assertion. Obviously, as
much then as it is now, it was also a manifestation of national limitations in politics. It was the population of one’s own nation, their education, hygiene, working
and housing conditions that could be set against the demands of and on the state.
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That nation which desired industrial competitiveness, an efficient infrastructure
and a strong military institution also did well to ally itself with those temperance
advocates who met at the transnational anti-alcohol conferences. The nation
which had such objectives and wanted to see sober and strong citizens was encouraged also by the progressive forces in the temperance movement to take up a
whole host of issues from women’s political status to an individual’s sex life. The
fact that the alcohol question was made into a question for science was in this
context a delicate resource: the problem could be lent that import its political formulation demanded, while the notion of an illness and the state’s alliance with
the physicians allowed more or less drastic responses in the different countries.
Notions of alcohol misuse as an illness and racial hygienic problem descriptions
opened up for a dramatic reformulation of the alcohol-consuming individual’s
role in the modern state—consequences that would make themselves known only
after the investigated period.
The 1913 conference in Milan was in many respects similar to the previous
conferences. Most questions turned up again; we can recognise the problem descriptions and proposed responses. These questions had been discussed for almost
30 years, and to a certain extent, one had also seen some of the responses tried
out and tested in the different countries. The foremost response—a total ban on
the sale of alcohol—was yet to be realised. The conference closed on September
28, 1913. In exactly ten months’ time the First World War broke out. Then everything changed.
Endnotes
The research leading to these results or outcomes has received funding from the European
Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013), under Grant Agreement n°
266813—Addictions and Lifestyle in Contemporary Europe—Reframing Addictions
Project (www.alicerap.eu). Participant organizations can be seen at http://www.alicerap.eu/
about-alice-rap/partner-institutions.html. The views expressed here reflect those of the
author only and the European Union is not liable for any use that may be made of the
information contained therein. Address correspondence to: Johan Edman, Centre for
Social Research on Alcohol and Drugs, Stockholm University, SE-106 91, Stockholm.
E-mail: [email protected].
1. Robert Hercod, Seventh Annual Report 1914–1915 (Lausanne, 1915), 6–7.
2. Virginia Berridge, “Prevention and social hygiene 1900–1914,” British Journal of Addiction
85 (1990): 1005–1016; Curt Wallis, “Kongressen,” in CP [Conference Proceedings] 1907a.
3. Viktor Almquist, “Alkohol och brott,” in CP 1907a, 79.
4. Harry G. Levine, “The alcohol problem in America: from temperance to alcoholism,”
British Journal of Addiction 79 (1984): 109–119, 111.
5. N. S. Davis, “Is there any causative or etiological relation between the extensive use of
alcoholic drinks and the constituted increase of epilepsy, imbecility and insanity, both
mental and moral in all the countries of Europe and America?” in CP 1899.
6. L. D. Mason, “The pauper inebriate, his legal status, care and control,” in CP 1899; Dr
Stein, “Sjukkassorna och alkoholfrågan,” in CP 1907a; Dr Holitscher,
“Livförsäkringsbolagens erfarenheter,” in CP 1907a; T. Alexander Mac Nicholl, “Alcohol
and heredity,” in CP 1907b.
7. R. W. Branthwaite, “Legislation for inebriates,” in CP 1909, 250.
Temperance and Modernity
43
8. Lovisa af Petersens, Formering för offentlighet. Kvinnokonferenser och Svenska Kvinnornas
Nationalförbund kring sekelskiftet 1900 (Stockholm, 2006).
9. Mark Lawrence Schrad, The Political Power of Bad Ideas (Oxford, 2010), 46.
10. Schrad, The Political Power of Bad Ideas, 48.
11. Mark Lawrence Schrad, The Prohibition Option. Transnational Temperance and National
Policymaking in Russia, Sweden and the United States (University of Wisconsin–Madison,
2007), 130.
12. M. Jos. Malins, “L’historique de la législation anglaise,” in CP 1885; M. Rochat,
“L’action des sociétés de tempérance en Suisse,” in CP 1885; M. le Pasteur Hirsch, “Les
asiles pour les alcoolisés de Lintorf,” in CP 1885.
13. Robin Room, “The liquor question and the formation of consciousness: nation, ethnicity, and class at the turn of the century,” Contemporary Drug Problems 12 (1985): 165–172;
Jim Baumohl and Robin Room, “Inebriety, doctors, and the state. Alcoholism treatment
institutions before 1940,” Recent Developments in Alcoholism 5 (1987): 135–174.
14. “Préface,” in CP 1885, 1 f.
15. “Réglement d’ordre adopté par le comitè organisateur en séance du 25 juin 1885,” in
CP 1885, unpag.
16. Schrad, The Prohibition Option.
17. Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World. The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton and
Oxford, 2010).
18. Baumohl and Room, “Inebriety, doctors, and the state.”
19. Pekka Sulkunen and Katariina Warpenius, “Reforming the self and the other: the temperance movement and the duality of modern subjectivity,” Critical Public Health 10
(2000): 423–438, 427. Also: Levine, “The alcohol problem in America.”
20. Schrad, The Political Power of Bad Ideas, 48.
21. Schrad, The Political Power of Bad Ideas, 52.
22. Sulkunen and Warpenius, “Reforming the self and the other,” 430.
23. J. J. Ridge, “Scientific reasons for total abstinence from alcoholic liquors,” in CP 1895.
24. J. W. Leigh, “La collaboration de la Presse,” in CP 1893; Th. Belval, “La collaboration
de la Presse,” in CP 1893; Hermann Blocher, “Die Aufgabe der Presse im Kampfe gegen
den Alkoholismus,” in CP 1895; Henry Osborn, “The press in relation to the liqour traffic
and to temperance reform,” in CP 1895; J. A. Savoy, “Quelles sont les mesures prises, dans
ces vingt dernières annèes, dans les divers pays, pour combattre l’alcoolisme par l’initiative
privée, les sociétés, la presse, les conférences, etc.?,” in CP 1897; M. Van Coillie, “Presse
antialoolique et action de la Presse en général,” in CP 1897; Ch. Gray, “Histoire de la
Presse antialcoolique et collaboration de la Presse en général à l’œuvre antoalcoolique,” in
CP 1897; Dr Oudaille, “Le rôle de la Presse dans la lutte antialcoolique,” in CP 1899;
M. l’abbé Rossé, “Avantages de la Presse antialcoolique,” in CP 1899; Robert Hercod, “Die
Presse im Kampfe gegen den Alkoholismus,” in CP 1907b; F. Hähnel, “Die Presse im
Kampfe gegen den Alkoholismus,” in CP 1907b.
25. Baumohl and Room, “Inebriety, doctors, and the state,” 136.
26. Charlotte A. Gray, “Oeuvre de la tempérance parmi les femmes dans tous les pays du
monde,” in CP 1887; Ottilie Hofmann, “Die Frauen und die Alkoholfrage,” in CP 1901.
27. Gray, “Oeuvre de la tempérance parmi les femmes dans tous les pays du monde,” 128.
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28. Orvar Löfgren, “Känslans förvandling: tiden, naturen och hemmet i den borgerliga kulturen,” in Den kultiverade människan, eds. Jonas Frykman and Orvar Löfgren (Malmö,
1979), 19–130.
29. This applies to Britain at least: Wally Seccombe, “Patriarchy stabilized: the construction of the male breadwinner wage norm in nineteenth century Britain,” Social History 11
(1986): 53–76; Joanna Bourke, “Housewifery in working-class England 1860–1914,” Past
& Present 143 (1994): 167–197.
30. David W. Gutzke, “‘The cry of the children’: the Edwardian medical campaign against
maternal drinking,” British Journal of Addiction 79 (1984): 71–84.
31. Sulkunen and Warpenius, “Reforming the self and the other”; Berridge, “Prevention
and social hygiene 1900–1914”; Kate Mitchell, “Alcohol during pregnance and the
nursing period,” in CP 1890.
32. Agnes E. Slack, “Kvinnan och nykterhetsfrågan,” in CP 1907a, 123.
33. Maria Sandström, “Kvinnan och nykterhetsfrågan,” in CP 1907a.
34. Mr. and Mrs. Bramwell Booth, “Alcohol in relation to the home,” in CP 1909, 125.
35. Virginia Berridge, “The origins and early years of the society 1884–1899,” British
Journal of Addiction 85 (1990): 991–1003; Berridge, “Prevention and social hygiene 1900–
1914”; Baumohl and Room, “Inebriety, doctors, and the state.”
36. A. v. Henrici, “Ueber die Trinkerheilanstalt ‘Turva’ in Finland,” in CP 1899;
Jukka-Pekka Takala and Juhani Lehto, “Finland: the non-medical model reconsidered,” in
Cure, Care, or Control. Alcoholism Treatment in Sixteen Countries, eds. Harald Klingemann,
Jukka-Pekka Takala and Geoffrey Hunt (Albany, 1992), 87–109.
37. Mason, “The pauper inebriate”; T. D. Crothers, “Inebriate asylums in America,” in CP
1907b; R. W. Branthwaite, “Alkoholisthemsfrågan,” in CP 1907a; Branthwaite,
“Legislation for inebriates.”
38. Norman Kerr, “How to deal with inebriates,” in CP 1890, 154.
39. R. W. Branthwaite, “Legislation for inebriates,” 252.
40. Berridge, “The origins and early years of the society 1884–1899.”
41. Nils Christie, “Foreword,” in Alcohol, Society and the State. A Comparative Study of
Alcohol Control , eds. Klaus Mäkelä et al. (Toronto, 1981), xiii–xvii, xiii.
42. J. W. Leigh, “The tyranny of the liquor traffic,” in CP 1895, 428.
43. M. l’Abbé Lemmens, “L’Etat a le droit d’intervenir dans la repression des abus alcooliques,” in CP 1897, 23.
44. Dr Eggers, “Alkoholkapital und Gegenkapital,” in CP 1905; Robert Hercod, “Activité
du capital alcoolique contre le mouvement antialcoolique?,” in CP 1913; A. Holischer,
“Die Umtriebe der Alkoholinteresssenten gegen die Antialkoholbewegung in Deutschland
und Oesterreich,” in CP 1913; William E. Johnson, “Activity and methods of American
liquor organizations against temperance,” in CP 1913.
45. Dr Dasinska-Golinska, “Die industrielle Spiritusverwendung als Mittel zur Bekämpfung
des Alkoholismus,” in CP 1905; Klemp Tanár, “A spiritusz technikai alkalmazása, mint az
alkoholellenes küzdelem egyik eszköze,” in CP 1905; Dr Malcomes, “Die technische
Verwertung des Spiritus als Kampfmittel gegen den Alkoholismus,” in CP 1905; Victor
Frestadius, “Industrialkoholen,” in CP 1907a.
Temperance and Modernity
45
46. Schrad, The Political Power of Bad Ideas; Robin Room, “The formulation of state alcohol
monopolies and controls: case studies in five nations,” Contemporary Drug Problems 12
(1985): 1–9; Baumohl and Room, “Inebriety, doctors, and the state.”
47. Herr Milliet, “Das schweizerische Alcoholmonopol,” in CP 1887; E. Cauderlier, “Un
projet de monopole élaboré pour la Belgique,” in CP 1887; Fr. Naef, “Le monopole, son
utilité dans la lutte contre l’alcoolisme,” in CP 1887; J. W. Leigh, “Das Monopol des
Spirituosenhandelns,” in CP 1887; Gallus Thomann, “Fiscalische Maassregeln,” in CP
1887; F. Baetzmann, “La question du monopole de l’alcool en Norvège,” in CP 1890;
L. P. Walburgh Schmidt, “Mémoire sur l’effet et l’application de la loi reglant le débit
d’Alcool avec un maximum de 2 litres dans les Pays-Bas,” in CP 1890; E. Cauderlier, “Les
monopoles ou privilèges pour la fabrication et la vente des boissons fortes, comme moyens
de combattre les abus,” in CP 1893; H. Goeman Borgesius, “Les licenses ou autorisations
pour la vente des boissons fortes en détail, telles qu’elles sont réglées par la loi
néerlandaise,” in CP 1893; Dir. Milliet, “Aperçu sur le monopole de l’alcool en Suisse,” in
CP 1895; S.-W. Milliet, “Le Monopole fiscal des spiritueux distillés,” in CP 1897; A. de
Bulowsky, “Le Monopole de l’eau-de-vie en Russie et son influence sur la vie du people,”
in CP 1897; Nicolas Grigorieff, “Premiers resultats obtenus en Russie par la monopolisation
des boissons spiritueuses,” in CP 1897; M. Lombard, “Le monopole des alcools en Suisse,”
in CP 1897; M. de Boulowski, “Le Monopole des spiritueux en Russie,” in CP 1899;
M. Borodine, “Le Monopole en Russsie,” in CP 1899; M. Raffalovich, “Le Monopole en
Russie,” in CP 1899; M. Lombard, “Rapport sur la loi du Monopole de l’alcool en Suisse,”
in CP 1899; M. Baatz, “Le Monopole de l’alcool en Russie,” in CP 1899.
48. C. R. Drysdale, “The superior longevity of total abstainers from alcohol,” in CP 1890;
Herr Wieselgren, “Von den Wirkungen des Gothenburger-Systems,” in CP 1890; Sv.
Aarrestad, “Das Gothenburger System in Norwegen,” in CP 1890; H. E. Berner, “Les
monopoles ou privilèges pour la fabrication et la vente des boissons fortes, comme moyens
de combattre les abus suivant le système dit ‘Gothenburger System’,” in CP 1893; Lars
O. Jensen, “Les monopoles ou privilèges pour la fabrication et la vente des boissons fortes,
comme moyens de combattre les abus suivant le système dit ‘Gothenburger System’,” in CP
1893; J. Malins, “Observations on the Gothenburg System,” in CP 1895; P. Fitger, “Das
Gothenburger System,” in CP 1903; Dir. Rubenson, “Das Gothenburger System,” in CP
1907b; Red. Ljunggren, “Das Gothenburger System,” in CP 1907b; Jur. Dr Eggers, “Das
Gothenburger System,” in CP 1907b.
49. Schrad, The Political Power of Bad Ideas.
50. Robert A. Hohner, Prohibition and Politics. The Life of Bishop James Cannon, Jr.
(Columbia, 1999).
51. Gallus Thomann, “Liqour-selling in prohibitory States,” in CP 1893; M. Guichard,
“Moyens propres à combattre l’alcoolisme et la possibilité de leur application en France,” in
CP 1899; M. Fielden Thorp, “Sur la prohibition de commerce des boissons alcooliques,” in
CP 1899; Matti Helenius-Seppala, “Some modern problems of prohibition,” in CP 1909.
52. Curt Wallis, “Alkoholen som födoämne,” in CP 1907a, 25.
53. Curt Wallis, “Alkoholförbrukningen i Förenta Staterna,” in CP 1907a, 90.
54. R. W. Branthwaite, “Legislation for inebriates,” 254.
55. George Snow, “International congresses on alcoholism,” in Alcohol and Temperance in
Modern History. An International Encyclopedia. Vol. 1, eds. Jack S. Blocker Jr., David
M. Fahey and Ian R. Tyrrell (Santa Barbara, 2003), 318–319.
56. See, for instance: Birgit Petersson, Den farliga underklassen. Studier i fattigdom och brottslighet i 1800-talets Sverige (Umeå, 1983); Svenbjörn Kilander, Den nya staten och den
46
Journal of Social History
Fall 2015
gamla. En studie i ideologisk förändring (Uppsala, 1991); Inger Knobblock, Systemets långa
arm. En studie av kvinnor, alkohol och kontroll i Sverige 1919–55 (Stockholm, 1995); Lars
Båtefalk, Staten, samhället och superiet. Samhällsorganisatoriska principer och organisatorisk
praktik kring dryckenskapsproblemet och nykterhetssträvandena i stat, borgerlig offentlighet och
associationsväsende ca 1770–1900 (Uppsala, 2000); Marika Hedin, Ett liberalt dilemma.
Ernst Beckman, Emilia Broomé, G H von Koch och den sociala frågan 1880–1930 (Eslöv,
2002).
57. Gunnar Broberg and Mattias Tydén, Oönskade i folkhemmet. Rashygien och sterilisering i
Sverige (Stockholm, 1990); Johan Edman, Torken. Tvångsvården av alkoholmissbrukare i
Sverige 1940–1981 (Stockholm, 2004).
58. General Rappe, “Alkoholismen och de högre samhällsklasserna,” in CP 1907a.
59. John R. Gillis, “The evolution of juvenile delinquency in England 1890–1914,” Past &
Present 67 (1975): 96–126.
60. Charles Wakely, “The education of children in temperance principles,” in CP 1890, 125.
61. Curt Wallis, “Skolan och alkoholfrågan,” in CP 1907a, 49
62. J. Gonser, “Alkoholen på landsbygden,” in CP 1907a, 84.
63. M. Enderstedt, “Ungdomen och alkoholfrågan,” in CP 1907a; Curt Wallis,
“Ungdomen och alkoholfrågan,” in CP 1907a.
64. Wakely, “The education of children in temperance principles,” 126.
65. Howard Padwa, Social Poison: The Culture and Politics of Opiate Control in Britain and
France, 1821–1926 (Baltimore, 2012); Kim Munholland, “ ‘Mon docteur le vin’. Wine
and health in France, 1900–1950,” in Alcohol. A Social and Cultural History, ed Mack
P. Holt (Oxford, 2006), 77–90.
66. Sulkunen and Warpenius, “Reforming the self and the other.”
67. Charles Wakely, “Primary schools and Bands of Hope as a means of preventing intemperance,” in CP 1893, 209; J. Martin Skinner, “Socialism and the drink traffic,” in CP
1895, 315.
68. James H. Kellog, “What employers may do to lessen the ravages of strong drinks,” in
CP 1890, 163.
69. Cora Frances Stoddard, “The relation of juvenile temperance teaching to national progress,” in CP 1909, 39.
70. Bramwell Booth, “Alcohol in relation to the home,” 125.
71. Broberg and Tydén, Oönskade i folkhemmet; Berridge, “Prevention and social hygiene
1900–1914.”
72. Taav. Laitinen, “Alkohol och degeneration,” in CP 1907a; Taav. Laitinen, “A contribution to the study of the influence of alcohol on the degeneration of human offspring,” in
CP 1909.
73. Ridge, “Scientific reasons for total abstinence from alcoholic liquors,” 66.
74. Dr Lidström, “Historiens lärdomar i alkoholfrågan,” in CP 1907a.
75. Bror Gadelius, “Alkohol och själssjukdom,” in CP 1907a, 21.
76. Dr Gruber, “Die Hygiene des Ich,” in CP 1905.
77. Eva Palmblad, Medicinen som samhällslära (Göteborg, 1990), 13.
Temperance and Modernity
47
78. Alice Vickery Drysdale, “Total abstinence and moderation,” in CP 1899, 603.
79. Drysdale, “Total abstinence and moderation,” 600.
80. Michael Hau, “Gender and aesthetic norms in popular hygienic culture in Germany
from 1900 to 1914,” Social History of Medicine 12 (1999): 272–292; Florentine Fritzen,
Gesünder Leben: Die Lebensreformbewegung im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 2006).
81. Jules Grand, “Du régime végétarien comme moyen préventif et curatif de l’alcoolisme,”
in CP 1899; Dr Larsen, “Alkoholen som födoämne,” in CP 1907a.
82. Palmblad, Medicinen som samhällslära; Berridge, “Prevention and social hygiene 1900–
1914”; Margot Opdycke Lamme, “Alcoholic dogs and glory for all: the Anti-Saloon
League and public relations, 1913,” Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 21 (2007): 138–159.
83. Dr Van den Corput, “L’alcoolisme. Ses causes mésologiques; son extinction physiologique,” in CP 1897, 18.
84. Sulkunen and Warpenius, “Reforming the self and the other.”
85. Fritzen, Gesünder Leben.
86. Fae Brauer, “Making eugenic bodies delectable: art, ‘biopower’ and ‘scientia sexualis’,”
in Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti, eds. Fae Brauer and Anthea Callen (Ashgate,
2008), 1–34.
87. Robert Hercod, Fourth Annual Report 1910–1911 (Lausanne, 1911).
88. W. F. Bynum, “Alcoholism and degeneration in 19th century European medicine and
psychiatry,” British Journal of Addiction 79 (1984): 59–70; Baumohl and Room, “Inebriety,
doctors, and the state”; Berridge, “The origins and early years of the society 1884–1899”;
Berridge, “Prevention and social hygiene 1900–1914”; Mariana Valverde, Diseases of the
Will. Alcohol and the Dilemmas of Freedom (Cambridge, 1998).
89. Berridge, “Prevention and social hygiene 1900–1914”; Edward Higgs, “The statistical
Big Bang of 1911: ideology, technological innovation and the production of medical statistics,” Social History of Medicine 9 (1996): 409–426.
90. Auguste Forel, “Alkoholen och den sexuella frågan,” in CP 1907a.
91. Mary Clement Leavitt, “The liqour traffic and native races,” in CP 1890; Alfr. Ploetz,
“Der Alkohol im Lebensprozess der Rasse,” in CP 1903; Ernst Rüdin, “Der Alkohol im
Lebensprozess der Rasse,” in CP 1903; Karolina Widerström, “Alkoholen och den sexuella
frågan,” in CP 1907a.
92. Forel, “Alkoholen och den sexuella frågan,” 75.
93. Auguste Forel, “La corruption de la civilization par l’alcoolisme, étudiée au point de
vue physiologique et social,” in CP 1897, 65.
94. Dr Legrain, “Alkohol och degeneration; rashygien,” in CP 1907a, 70.
95. Auguste Forel, “Alkohol und Geschlechtsleben,” in CP 1905, 96.
96. Forel, “Alkohol und Geschlechtsleben,” 96.
97. Fae Brauer, “Eroticizing Lamarckian eugenics: the body stripped bare during French
sexual neoregulation,” in Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti, eds. Fae Brauer and Anthea
Callen (Ashgate, 2008), 97–138.
98. Berridge, “The origins and early years of the society 1884–1899”; Berrridge,
“Prevention and social hygiene 1900–1914.”
99. Auguste Forel, “Die Alkoholfrage als Cultur- und Rassenproblem,” in CP 1901.
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100. Brauer, “Eroticizing Lamarckian eugenics.”
101. Mark A. Largent, Breeding Contempt. The History of Coerced Sterilizations in the United
States (New Brunswick, 2008).
102. Mattias Tydén, Från politik till praktik. De svenska steriliseringslagarna 1935–1975
(Stockholm, 2002).
103. Proceedings of the First National Conference on Race Betterment (Battle Creek, 1914).
104. Branthwaite, “Alkoholisthemsfrågan”; Curt Wallis, “Alkoholisthemsfrågan, CP
1907a.
105. Forel, “Alkoholen och den sexuella frågan,” 75.
106. Forel, “Alkoholen och den sexuella frågan,” 74–75.
107. Forel, “Alkoholen och den sexuella frågan,” 75.
108. Geoffrey R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency, 1899–1914 (Oxford, 1971);
Harry G. Levine, “The discovery of addiction: changing conceptions of habitual drunkenness in America,” Journal of Studies on Alcohol 39 (1978): 143–174; David T. Courtwright
and Timothy A. Hickman, “Modernity and anti-modernity: drug policy and political
culture in the United States and Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” in
Drugs and Culture: Knowledge, Consumption and Policy, eds. Geoffrey Hunt, Maitena
Milhet and Henri Bergernon (Burlington, 2011), 213–224.
109. Marguerite Dupree, “Other than healing: medical practitioners and the business of
life assurance during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” Social History of
Medicine 10 (1997): 79–103.
110. Ch. Drysdale, “Das von den vollständigen Abstinenten durchschnittlich erreichte
höhere Lebensalter, durch die Berichte der Lebensversicherungs-Gesellschaften nachgewiesen,” in CP 1887; Drysdale, “The superior longevity of total abstainers from alcohol”;
James Whyte, “La longévité et la santé des abstinents prouvées par les rapports des sociétés
d’assurances sur la vie,” in CP 1897; Dr Drysdale, “Alcool et longévité,” in CP 1899;
M. Whyte, “Longevity and alcoholism,” in CP 1899; M. Bingham, “Tempérance et assurances sur la vie,” in CP 1899; M. Helenius, “Die Thatsachen der Statistik über den Einfluss
des mässigen Alkoholgenusses auf die Lebenswartung,” in CP 1901; Holitscher,
“Livförsäkringsbolagens erfarenheter”; Dr Ekholm, “Livförsäkringsbolagens erfarenheter,”
in CP 1907a; K. Kögler, “Alkohol und Versicherung,” in CP 1913.
111. Joseph Gusfield, “Benevolent repression: popular culture, social structure and the
control of drinking,” in Drinking. Behavior and Belief in Modern History, eds. Susanna
Barrows and Robin Room (Berkeley, 1991), 399–424; Schrad, The Prohibition Option.
112. Roy Porter, “Introduction,” A History of Alcoholism, Jean-Charles Sournia (Oxford,
1990), ix–xvi.
113. Sulkunen and Warpenius, “Reforming the self and the other,” 426.
114. Michael R. Marrus, “Social drinking in the Belle Epoque,” Journal of Social History 7
(1974): 115–141; Berridge, “Prevention and social hygiene 1900–1914”; Mack P. Holt,
ed., Alcohol. A Social and Cultural History (Oxford, 2006).
115. Tyrrell, Reforming the World.
116. Levine, “The alcohol problem in America.”
117. Carl Rudolf Burckhardt, “Bitte an die Versammlung, den Trinkzwang bei den
Studenten betreffend,” in CP 1887; Dr Bonne, “Ueber den Trinkzwang beim Broterwerb,”
in CP 1899.
Temperance and Modernity
49
118. Kellogg, “What employers may do to lessen the ravages of strong drinks,” 165. The
Hygiene Movement also presented the labouring body as a desirable ideal of the new age
(Anthea Callen, “Man or machine: ideals of the labouring male body and the aesthetics of
industrial production in early twentieth-century Europe,” in Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus
Delecti, eds. Fae Brauer and Anthea Callen (Ashgate, 2008), 139–161).
119. M. Rochat, “Rapport sur les résultats de l’œuvre des coffee houses en Angleterre,” in
CP 1885; Arthur Jepson, “Sur l’origine et les progès de l’œuvre des coffee-houses en
Angleterre,” in CP 1885; Arthur Jepson, “Oeffentliche Cafe-Häuser,” in CP 1887;
O. Paulson, “Brief über die Cafehäuser von Bergen,” in CP 1887; H. A. Short, “The coffee
taverns as a means of promoting temperance,” in CP 1890; Charles Leonard, “Temperance
coffee houses in Great Britain,” in CP 1895; Ch. Léonard, “Résultats des Coffee-Houses en
Angleterre,” in CP 1897.
120. M. Thomson, “The United Kingdom Railway Temperance Union,” in CP 1899;
O. de Terra, “Alkoholen och trafikväsendet,” in CP 1907a; A. Faulkner, “Alcohol and the
efficiency of the railway,” in CP 1909.
121. Berridge, “Prevention and social hygiene 1900–1914”; Schrad, The Prohibition Option.
122. W. J. G. van der Veur, “Les mesures prises par le ministère de la Guerre, pour combattre
l’abus des boissons fortes dans l’armée Néerlandaise,” in CP 1893; Conrad Dillon, “La temperance dans l’armée et la marine,” in CP 1897; Dr de Vaucleroy, “De la lutte antialcoolique
dans l’armée et par l’armée (armées de terre et de mer),” in CP 1899; Conrad Dillon, “De la
lutte antialcoolique dans l’armée et par l’armée (armées de terre et de mer),” in CP 1899;
Agnes Weston, “De la lutte antialcoolique dans l’armée et par l’armée (armées de terre et de
mer),” in CP 1899; J. Repond, “De la lutte antialcoolique dans l’armée et par l’armée
(armées de terre et de mer),” in CP 1899; Gen. Wolseley, “De la lutte antialcoolique dans
l’armée et par l’armée (armées de terre et de mer),” in CP 1899; B. F. Parker, “De la lutte
antialcoolique dans l’armée et par l’armée (armées de terre et de mer),” in CP 1899;
M. Guieysse, “De la lutte contre l’alcoolisme dans l’armée et par l’armée, CP 1899; Dr de
Vaucleroy, “De l’alcoolisme dans l’armée et les moyens de le combattre,” in CP 1899;
M. J. Repond, “De l’alcoolisme dans l’armée et les moyens de le combattre,” in CP
1899; Conrad Dillon, “De l’alcoolisme dans l’armée et les moyens de le combattre,” in CP
1899; M. Zouïeff, “De l’alcoolisme dans l’armée et les moyens de le combattre,” in CP 1899;
B. F. Parker, “Effects of intoxicants in the Spanish-American war,” in CP 1899; Agnes
Weston, “On temperance work in the Royal-Navy,” in CP 1899; Dr Richard, “Des mesures
prises en France dans l’armée, pour lutter contre l’alcoolisme,” in CP 1901; Dr Rudler, “De
l’éducation antialcoolique du soldat français,” in CP 1901; G. King-Hall, “The efficiency of
the National Services: the Royal Navy,” in CP 1909; M. G. Popovic, “Alkohol im
Balkankrieg,” in CP 1913.
123. Forel, “Alkohol und Geschlechtsleben”; Major Tögel, “Alkohol och militär,” CP
1907a; L. G. Fawkes, “Alcohol and the efficiency of the army,” in CP 1909.
124. Lynn Pan, Alcohol in Colonial Africa (Helsinki, 1975).
125. Schrad, The Prohibition Option, 142.
126. Leigh, “La collaboration de la Presse,” 185.
127. Leavitt, “The liqour traffic and native races,” 173.
128. Tyrrell, Reforming the World, 131.
129. Arnold Schneider and C. Hauptmann, “Die moralische Entartung der Naturvölker
durch den Spirituosen-Handel,” in CP 1887, 96.
130. Curt Wallis, “Alkoholen och naturfolken,” in CP 1907a, 69.
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131. J. Grant Mills, “The demoralization of native races by the liquor traffic,” in CP 1890, 168.
132. Leavitt, “The liqour traffic and native races,” 173.
133. J. Grant Mills, “La corruption physique et morale causée par le commerce des boissons
fortes chez les peuples non civilisés, particulièrement chez ceux de l’Afrique, par rapport à
l’acte du Congrès international de Bruxelles en 1891,” in CP 1893.
134. Ol. Bergqvist, “Alkoholen och naturfolken,” in CP 1907a; L. von Skarzynski,
“Alkoholen och naturfolken,” in CP 1907a.
135. Gov. Noët, “Alkoholen och naturfolken,” in CP 1907a, 55.
136. I. K. Victor, “Alkoholen och naturfolken,” in CP 1907a, 61.
137. Broberg and Tydén, Oönskade i folkhemmet; Fritzen, Gesünder Leben.
138. Gonser, “Alkoholen på landsbygden,” 84.
139. Van den Corput, “L’alcoolisme,” 17.
140. Crothers, “Inebriate asylums in America,” 128.
141. Otto Lang, “Alkoholismus und Classenkampf,” in CP 1901.
142. Knut Kjellberg, “Alkoholismen och den sociala frågan,” in CP 1907a, 178.
143. Kjellberg, “Alkoholismen och den sociala frågan,” 179.
144. Skinner, “Socialism and the drink traffic”; Ernst Blomberg, “Alkoholismen och den
sociala frågan,” in CP 1907a.
145. James S. Roberts, “Alcohol, public policy, and the Left: the socialist debate in early
twentieth century Europe,” Contemporary Drug Problems 12 (1985): 309–330;
A. F. Harvey, “The economic effects of alcoholism in relation to family life,” in CP 1913;
Lang, “Alkoholismus und Classenkampf”; Kjellberg, “Alkoholismen och den sociala
frågan.”
146. Schrad, The Political Power of Bad Ideas, 33.
147. Schrad, The Political Power of Bad Ideas, 33.
148. Schrad, The Political Power of Bad Ideas, 33.
149. Schrad, The Political Power of Bad Ideas, 33.
150. This point is also made on the tobacco question by Matthew Hilton and Simon
Nightingale, “ ‘A microbe of the Devil’s own make’: Religion and science in the British
anti-tobacco movement, 1853–1908,” in Ashes to Ashes. The History of Smoking and Health,
eds. S. Lock, L. A. Reynolds and E. M. Tansey (Amsterdam, 1998), 41–75.
151. Palmblad, Medicinen som samhällslära; Robert Martin, “Context and contradiction:
Toward a political theory of conceptual change,” Political Research Quarterly 50 (1997):
413–436; Michael Th. Greven, “Dimensions of politics. A critique of the common onedimensional concepts of politics,” Redescriptions 5 (2001): 89–112; Johan Edman, “What’s
in a name? Alcohol and drug treatment and the politics of confusion,” Nordic Studies on
Alcohol and Drugs 26 (2009): 339–353; Johan Edman and Jan Blomqvist, “Jakten på den
verksamma vården. Kunskapssträvanden och målsättningar inom den svenska
missbrukarvården under ett sekel,” in Narkotika. Om problem och politik, ed. Börje Olsson
(Stockholm, 2011), 101–137; Johan Edman, “The ideological drug problem,” Drugs and
Alcohol Today 13 (2013): 9–19.
152. Bynum, “Alcoholism and degeneration in 19th century European medicine and psychiatry”; Berridge, “The origins and early years of the society 1884–1899.”
Temperance and Modernity
51
153. Opdycke Lamme, “Alcoholic dogs and glory for all.”
154. Philip J. Pauly, “The struggle for ignorance about alcohol: American physiologists,
Wilbur Olin Atwater, and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union,” Bulletin of the
History of Medicine, 64 (1990): 366–392.
155. Berridge, “Prevention and social hygiene 1900–1914.”
156. Baumohl and Room, “Inebriety, doctors, and the state,” 167.
157. David Harley, “Rhetoric and the social construction of sickness and healing,” Social
History of Medicine 12 (1999): 407–435, 414.
158. Bynum, “Alcoholism and degeneration in 19th century European medicine and psychiatry”; Joanne Woiak, “‘A medical Cromwell to dispose King Alcohol’: medical scientists, temperance reformers, and the alcohol problem in Britain,” Historie Sociale 27 (1994):
337–365; Paul A. Garfinkel, “In vino veritas. The construction of alcohol disease in liberal
Italy, 1876–1914,” in Alcohol. A Social and Cultural History, ed. Mack P. Holt (Oxford,
2006), 61–76; Tom Decorte, “Blinding ourselves with science: the chronic infections of
our thinking on psychoactive substances,” in Drugs and Culture. Knowledge, Consumption
and Policy, eds. Geoffrey Hunt, Maitena Milhet and Henri Bergernon (Burlington, 2011),
33–51. For similar ideas in the narcotics field, see: Virginia Berridge, “Morality and
medical science: Concepts of narcotic addiction in Britain, 1820–1926,” Annals of Science
36 (1979): 67–85.
159. T. Marchant-Williams, “Die Temperenz-Frage vom Standpunkt der Wissenschaft und
der Erziehung,” in CP 1887.
160. Wakely, “The education of children in temperance principles”; Wakely, “Primary
schools and Bands of Hope as a means of preventing intemperance.”
161. T. Marchant Williams, “Education in relation to alcoholism,” in CP 1890, 135.
162. Mason, “The pauper inebriate,” 403.
163. Curt Wallis, “Kongressen,” 3.
164. Wallis, “Kongressen,” 5.
165. John Turner Rae, “Editor’s preface,” in CP 1909, 4.
166. http://www.icaa.ch/history_2007.html (2014-04-09, 22:59).
167. Levine, “The discovery of addiction”; Peter Conrad and Joseph W. Schneider, Deviance
and Medicalization. From Badness to Sickness (St. Louis, 1980); Sarah E. Williams, “The attitude of physicians towards alcoholism in the U.S. from 1790–1860,” in The Social History of
Alcohol. Drinking and Culture in Modern Society, eds. Susanna Barrows, Robin Room and
Jeffrey Verhey (Berkeley, 1987), 143–144; Jean-Charles Sournia, A History of Alcoholism
(Oxford, 1990); Karl Mann, Derek Hermann and Andreas Heinz, “One hundred years of alcoholism: the twentieth century,” Alcohol & Alcoholism 35 (2000): 10–15; William
L. White, “The lessons of language: historical perspectives on the rhetoric of addiction,” in
Altering American Consciousness. The History of Alcohol and Drug Use in the United States,
1800–2000, eds. Sarah W. Tracy and Caroline Jean Acker (Amherst, 2004), 33–60.
168. Jessica Warner, “‘Resolv’d to drink no more’: Addiction as a preindustrial construct,”
Journal of Studies on Alcohol 55 (1994): 685–691.
169. Berridge, “The origins and early years of the society 1884–1899,” 999; Berridge,
“Prevention and social hygiene 1900–1914,” 1009.
170. Patricia E. Prestwich, “Drinkers, drunkards, and degenerates: the alcoholic population
of a Parisian asylum, 1867–1914,” Social History, 27 (1994): 321–335.
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Fall 2015
171. Berridge, “The origins and early years of the society 1884–1899.”
172. Charles R. Drysdale, “Abstract of a paper on alcohol as a therapeutic agent,” in CP
1890; Charles R. Drysdale, “Therapeutics without alcohol,” in CP 1895; Dawson Burns,
“The experience of the London Temperance Hospital,” in CP 1895; Charles R. Drysdale,
“Therapeutics without alcolhol,” in CP 1899; Max Kassowitz, “Alkoholdiät und
Alkoholtherapie,” in CP 1907b; Dr Ridge, “L’œuvre de l’Hôpital de Tempérance de
Londres,” in CP 1899; Charles Wakely, “The London Temperance Hospital and the
International Congress against Alcoholism,” in CP 1905.
173. Van den Corput, “L’alcoolisme,” 10.
174. Kerr, “How to deal with inebriates,” 151.
175. Kerr, “How to deal with inebriates,” 152.
176. Kerr, “How to deal with inebriates,” 152.
177. Kerr, “How to deal with inebriates,” 152.
178. Kerr, “How to deal with inebriates,” 152–153.
179. Kerr, “How to deal with inebriates,” 153.
180. Mariana Valverde, “‘Slavery from within’: the invention of alcoholism and the question of free will,” Social History 22 (1997): 251–268.
181. I. I. Ridge, “The British Medical Temperance Association,” in CP 1890, 162.
182. Gallus Thomann, “Concerning the treatment of habitual drunkards,” in CP 1893, 354.
183. Pierre F. Spank, “L’association américaine ‘for the Study and Cure of Inebriety’,” in
CP 1893, 155.
184. Spank, “L’association américaine ‘for the Study and Cure of Inebriety’,” 155.
185. Spank, “L’association américaine ‘for the Study and Cure of Inebriety’,” 156.
186. Norman Kerr, “Legislation for inebriates in Britain,” in CP 1899, 344.
187. Crothers, “Inebriate asylums in America”; Branthwaite, “Legislation for inebriates,” 251.
188. Roberts, “Alcohol, public policy, and the Left”; Baumohl and Room, “Inebriety,
doctors, and the state.”
189. Schrad, The Political Power of Bad Ideas.
190. Sulkunen and Warpenius, “Reforming the self and the other.”
191. Baumohl and Room, “Inebriety, doctors, and the state.”
192. Van den Corput, “L’alcoolisme.”
193. Skinner, “Socialism and the drink traffic,” 314.
194. Skinner, “Socialism and the drink traffic,” 315.
195. Lang, “Alkoholismus und Classenkampf”; Dr Hayem, “L’attitude des partis socialistes
dans la lutte contre l’alcoolisme,” in CP 1905.
196. Skinner, “Socialism and the drink traffic.”
197. Ch. Gray, “Le rôle electoral des femmes au point de vue de la tempérance,” in CP 1899.
198. Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann, eds., The Mechanics of Internationalism.
Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War (London, 2001).