Everything you know about alcohol prohibition is wrong. Discover the global history of prohibition and the anti-alcohol movement through a global lens in the Age of Empires. This Learn about how temperance wasn't "American exceptionalism" but rather a widespread and successful transnational social movement of all time from Mark Schrad, author of Smashing the Liquor Machine.
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Location:
ZOOM
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7:00PM - 8:30PM
About the Book
For ages, we've been told that prohibition was a quintessentially American, reactionary movement of white, right-wing, evangelical Bible-thumpers trying to take away Americans' "freedom" to drink. Nothing could be further from the truth.
This global history of prohibition looks at the anti-alcohol movement around the globe in the Age of Empires, through the experiences of pro-temperance leaders like Thomas Masaryk of Czechoslovakia, Hjalmar Branting of Sweden, Kemal Ataturk, Vladimir Lenin, and Leo Tolstoy. We quickly find that temperance wasn't "American exceptionalism", but it was the most widespread and successful transnational social movement of all time. And everywhere around the globe, we find temperance forces aligned with progressivism, social justice, liberal self-determination, democratic socialism, labor rights, women's rights, indigenous rights, and communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory "liquor machine" that made both the state and the aristocracy exceedingly rich off the misery and addictions of the poor.
Applying these insights back home in the United States requires a fundamental re-appraisal of much of American history: just as in the rest of the world, American temperance history was associated with progressivism, social justice, labor rights, women's rights, minority rights, and indigenous protections against the corrupt and debauching liquor traffic. Consequently, we examine American leaders rarely considered in traditional temperance histories, who nevertheless favoured restrictions on the liquor traffic: Presidents Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt; Native American leaders from Little Turtle to Red Jacket and Black Hawk; abolitionists and Civil-Rights leaders from Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Booker T. Washington; suffragists from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to Frances Willard; Progressives from Walter Rauschenbusch to William Jennings Bryan.
American temperance and prohibition history are traditionally told as white-peoples' history. Not any longer. This book amounts to the decolonization of temperance and prohibition, giving full voice to minority and subaltern voices in the United States and around the world in resisting alco-imperialist incursions.
This is certainly unlike any "dry" histories you've ever read before.
Temperance was not reactionary, it was revolutionary.
About the Author
Mark Lawrence Schrad is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Villanova University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His previous books include The Political Power of Bad Ideas: Networks, Institutions, and the Global Prohibition Wave (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State (2014) has gone through two editions and has been translated into Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian, and Chinese.