The Victorian Era was the time where the concept of the prohibition of alcohol took form, most of all, in the English speaking countries. 

The idea that alcohol turned men into beasts – and it was specifically men – became ever more popular. Associations of worried citizens – some of which were predominantly associations of women – started to lobby for the introduction of laws against the consumption of alcohol. It was in the United States that this crusade proved to be most successful. 

The Noble Experiment: Prohibition in the United States

Since the beginning of its history, the United States had been a place of hard-drinking. In its very early times, drinking alcohol was more common than drinking water. It was safer.

Still, American society was also predominantly Protestant, and temperance was deeply felt. Already in the very early 1800s, many Temperance movements started to act and ask for the prohibition of alcohol.

In the 1800s, it was the churches and the women’s movements that sustained the fight more strongly. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (founded in 1873), an association of wealthy women, soon became one of the main players in the campaign. These women believed that alcohol was responsible for the bad behaviour of many men who would lose their jobs and mistreat their wives and children when intoxicated. The actions of the WCTU was often showy and even violent. Women would pray outside saloons and sometimes destroy premises. They did indeed mobilised a lot of women, but their effectiveness was always limited. Their actions were often seen as amusing rather than political. Then, the Anti-Saloon League came onto the stage. 

The League was founded in Ohio in 1893, but already in 1895 it reached national influence. Under the guidance of his more fervent leader, Wayne Wheeler, the League successfully attained national Prohibition in 1920. 

Though Prohibition might have seemed a movement against alcohol, it was most definitely a social fight of the wealthy against the poor, Protestants against Catholics, native against ethnic people, as the division between Drys (who sustained Prohibition) and Wets (who opposed it) clearly shows. 

Discourses of anti-immigration, suppression of minorities, control over the masses certainly entered into the Prohibition mindset.

Still, it eventually affected the lives of everyone, even of the wealthy. If Prohibition was moderately successful in the countryside, it was never so in the big cities. Here, people would regularly break the law to go drinking and dancing in underground (more or less) speakeasies, which were provided with alcohol by the many underworld organisations that became extremely powerful because of the huge black market of alcohol and bootlegging. 

It is widely thought that this thirteen years of Prohibition in America created a widespread disregard for the law without really solving any of the problems Prohibition allegedly set out to solve.

And these are among the main reasons why in the end, the Eighteen Amendment was repealed in 1933. It’ is the only instance of an amendment repeal in the history of the United States. 

Temperance movement around the world

Although the US was the only state that ever approved a national prohibition law, around the world, the idea of temperance was more widespread than it’s normally credited for. 

This was mostly true for the English speaking country that tended to be Protestant. The idea of the prohibition of alcohol never arose in the southern and central countries of Europe, for example, where the consumption of alcohol had always been a social activity widely accepted. 

In the United Kindom, the Preston Temperance Society was founded in 1813, preaching mostly temperance, rather than prohibition. It’s probably this association that coined the word teetotal, thought the legend about how the word came to be are different and all equally possible and unproven. 

All in all, temperance was more popular than prohibition in the UK, where no Prohibition law was ever passed.

The idea of a national prohibition on the model of that in the US did reach Australia, but it was finally only passed in the Australian Capital Territory in 1910, ten years before the American Prohibition. Still, the act only stopped the concession of bar licences. It never prohibited the consumption of alcohol. Nothing prohibited anybody from crossing the border and buying or bringing back alcohol from the town of Queanbeyan, which was just across the border.

The law was broken so easily and so often that it was finally removed in 1928.

RESOURCES

History – 10 Things You Should Know About Prohibition
Independent – How Britain’s 18th-century teetotal movement expressed its message through song
Australian Geographic – On this day: Canberra’s prohibition begins

Coffey, Thomas M., The Long Thirst Prohibition in America: 1920-1933. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1975

Kobler, John, Ardent Spirits. The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Da Capo Press, New York, 1973

Okrent, Daniel, Last Call. The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Scribner, New York, 2010