Few American reforms of the 19th century enjoyed such wide popular support as the anti-alcohol temperance movement. This study explores the historical background of that movement. It aims to explain how concerns about excessive drinking changed as American society evolved; how a religious mentality that viewed sin in the context of a divinely ordered world changed to a secular mentality; and how parochial reform organizations of local elites evolved into a national mass organization.

The first three chapters explore secular and religious attitudes toward drinking in colonial America. Drinking was widespread; however, religious attitudes deprecating drunkenness, occasionally reached extraordinary intensity under the force of periodic "afflictions" such as wars, epidemics, and earthquakes. At such times, the primitive belief in divine retribution for human sin associated these afflictive events with social vices such as intemperance, sabbath-breaking, and profanity. The ritual observance of penitential days of fasting and prayer illuminated the psychological link between awareness of sin and abstinence from food and drink. The main argument of the dissertation is that this underlying psychology, is the essential component of any movement advocating total abstinence from alcohol.

The four succeeding chapters focus on the most important precursors of temperance reform between 1780 and 1825. Several hundred local "moral" societies arose, which sought stricter enforcement of laws regarding sabbath-breaking, profanity, and intemperance. Additionally, the economic depression following the war of 1812 gave rise to societies "for the prevention of pauperism."

The dissertation's final chapters show how drinking changed in the expanding new nation and how voluntary organizations promoting total abstinence from alcohol arose. The rise of mass-participatory politics in the North meant that reformers no longer looked to an elite which distinguished among men according to their status. Short- and long-term social changes interacted with very long-term trends in the secularization and rationalization of religious belief. Intemperance "explained" what went wrong in a society which still suffered from age old social problems. In this reinvigorated version of an old view of sin lay the modern origins of mass organizations for a voluntary abstinence from alcohol, in which the demand for social control found its mirror in the need for individual self-control. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)