UC Riverside

The history of temperance and prohibition has long been constructed as either a rural backlash against modernity or a defining feature of middle-class culture. Early scholarship inaccurately denounced prohibition as a consequence of rural discontent in an increasingly urban immigrant America. More recent scholarship has relocated temperance in middle-class culture and politics, often to the neglect of the agrarian sector. Using an exploration of the production of space, this dissertation reexamines the place of temperance in the transition of the North American colonies from a largely subsistence-oriented society to a modern market-centric nation-state. I contend that as a middle-class movement, temperance emerged out of the enclosure and improvement movements and trace the movement’s history as a cultural arm of enclosure through to the passage of national prohibition. As shown herein, dry crusaders of the early republic were antagonistic to the subsistence farmers who were viewed as a threat to the national project. This antagonism was extended to new stock immigrant farmers who arrived in waves through much of the 1800s. In an attempt to redefine American farms and fields, across the nineteenth and early twentieth century, temperance advocates pushed farm commercialization and the transformation of farming and food systems to meet the needs of an industrial society. But because temperance ideology failed to address the very real economic concerns of farmers in their struggles with the transition to commercial production, agrarian America remained ambivalent to temperance up to and following the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment.