What Temperance Actually Wanted

The Preston Cockpit. September 1st, 1832.

It doesn't look like much. A squat brick building near Stoneygate, built for cock-fighting, it’s the kind of place where men gathered to bet on something bleeding. On this particular day, seven men walked in and signed their names to a piece of paper.

One of them was Joseph Livesey. He sold cheese for a living — the kind of unglamorous trade that doesn't usually get you written into history books, except this once. Livesey had grown up working a hand-loom, the trade Preston's mills were busy making obsolete, and he'd watched what happens when the work disappears and the pubs stay open. Men drinking their wages on a Friday. Families going without on Saturday. He wasn't a preacher. He wasn't a doctor. He was a tradesman with a ledger and an opinion, and the opinion was this: moderation wasn't working.

Here's the part that matters. Plenty of temperance societies already existed in 1832, on both sides of the Atlantic. Most asked members to give up spirits. Gin, rum, whiskey, the hard stuff. Beer, wine, and cider stayed on the table, because they were practically food, the way bread is food. That was the deal everyone was operating under.

Livesey and the six men signing with him in that brick cockpit were about to break the deal. Total abstinence. Not just spirits — everything. It was a small piece of paper, and on it was a distinction that would take a hundred years to play out: the difference between less and none.

A movement starts here — aimed at a problem like this one: too much drinking, real costs, real families. It runs for a century. It wins, in the sense that the thing it asked for actually happens: an amendment, ratified, makes alcohol illegal across an entire country. And somewhere in the middle of winning, it builds an industry it never meant to build. One that's worth more today than almost anything else on a grocery store shelf, and has nothing to do with what those seven men in Preston thought they were signing up for.

So: what happens when a movement spends a hundred years trying to take something away — and the thing it builds to fill the gap outlives the thing it was fighting?

That's where we're going. But it starts here, in a cockpit, with a cheesemonger and six other names on a piece of paper, on the first of September, 1832.

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To understand what Livesey's pledge actually broke from, you have to go back further than Preston — back to what “temperance” meant before it meant this.

To Aristotle, temperance was one of the cardinal virtues. It was the golden mean between excess and deficiency, the same logic that governed courage, the same logic that governed appetite generally. Renaissance painters gave it a body: a woman pouring wine into water, diluting it, finding the proportion. For most of Western history, temperance was calibration, not abstinence.

America in 1830 was not calibrated. The average person over fifteen was drinking around seven gallons of pure alcohol a year — roughly three times what Americans drink today. Whiskey was cheaper than coffee in a lot of places, partly for reasons of geography: corn didn't survive the trip east over the mountains, but whiskey did, so western farmers distilled their surplus into something that could travel. The economics pointed one direction, and consumption followed.

Benjamin Rush saw the cost up close. He was a physician and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. In 1784 he published a pamphlet — An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits Upon the Human Body and Mind — that would outlive him by more than a century. Rush wasn't against drinking. He was specifically against spirits. Beer, wine, and cider stayed on his approved list. What he was mapping was what hard liquor did to a body and a household over years, and later editions of his pamphlet illustrated it with something called the Moral and Physical Thermometer: a scale running from water, milk, and small beer at the top — labeled health, wealth, serenity of mind — down through wine, porter, and cider in the middle, to rum, gin, and brandy at the bottom, labeled idleness, debt, the workhouse, the jail, the gallows.

Rush's pamphlet became the intellectual seed. The institutional seed came in 1826, in Boston, when Lyman Beecher and Justin Edwards founded the American Temperance Society. The growth was fast enough to be its own kind of evidence: within five years, over two thousand chapters and a hundred and seventy thousand members. Within ten, more than eight thousand groups and over a million and a quarter members. This was one of the largest voluntary movements in the country.

Here's where the “hard liquor only” strategy ran into a problem it couldn't solve: people didn't stop drinking. They switched. Cut out the whiskey, and consumption of beer and cider climbed to fill the space. By the 1830s, reformers were watching their own success get absorbed by a substitution they hadn't accounted for — which is exactly the kind of failure that pushes a movement like Livesey's toward a harder line. If “less” got quietly converted back into “the same, in a different glass,” then the only position left that couldn't be substituted around was “none.”

One more thing happened in this same window, almost in passing. The following year — 1833 — a Preston man named Richard Turner was giving a speech in favor of total abstinence, and he stuttered. What came out was “tee-tee-total abstinence is the only thing.” The crowd liked it. The word stuck. Teetotal entered the language in the same town, within a year of the pledge that started it.

Four things were driving all of this, and they would keep driving it for the next ninety years, in shifting proportions. There was the economic argument — drink as lost labor, lost wages, lost productivity, the language of an industrializing country that had started to think of workers as a kind of machinery that alcohol breaks. There was the evangelical argument, amplified by the religious revivals of the era, which increasingly framed drinking not as a bad habit but as sin, full stop. There was the domestic argument — temperance as protection, specifically protection of women and children from the economic and physical consequences of a husband's or father's drinking, which is not an abstraction; it's the most commonly cited personal motivation for the women who were about to become this movement's engine. Then there was the medical argument, Rush's argument, updated and re-amplified across a century of physicians who kept finding new evidence for the same basic claim.

Four strands. Keep them in mind. Almost everything that happens for the next ninety years is some combination of these four pulling against each other, or pulling together with a force that surprised everyone, including the people doing the pulling.

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By the late 1800s, the temperance movement had a machine, and the machine had two parts that didn't entirely agree with each other.

The first part was the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and from 1879 to 1898 it was run by a woman named Frances Willard. Under Willard, the WCTU adopted something called the “Do Everything” policy — which was exactly what it sounds like. Thirty-nine separate departments. Temperance was still the core, but it was surrounded by labor reform, including the eight-hour workday. Prison reform. Child labor laws. Age-of-consent legislation. And — this is the piece that matters most for where the country was headed — women's suffrage, framed under something Willard called “Home Protection”: the argument that women needed the vote specifically so they could vote against the saloon that was draining their household's income.

By 1892, the WCTU had over two hundred thousand dues-paying members. It was, by a wide margin, the largest women's organization in nineteenth-century America. And it worked as a kind of training ground — a huge number of the women who went on to organize for the Nineteenth Amendment, the one that gave American women the vote, got their start in WCTU chapters, learning how to run meetings, raise money, lobby legislators, organize at scale. That's a real legacy.

This next part of the story doesn't resolve cleanly, and it shouldn't.

In October of 1890, Willard gave an interview to the New York Voice. In it, she talked about the South, about prohibition votes that had failed there, and about who she blamed — describing Black voters in the language of plague, “the colored race” multiplying “like the locusts of Egypt,” and invoking the language of threat to womanhood and home that, in the South in 1890, was not abstract language. It was the language used, over and over, to justify lynching.

Two years later, in Memphis, three of Ida B. Wells's friends were lynched. Wells — a journalist who had already lost her newspaper office to a mob for writing about it — started documenting lynching with the kind of detail that's hard to argue with: names, dates, the actual stated reasons versus what she could show actually happened. In 1894, on a speaking tour through Britain, Wells had Willard's 1890 interview reprinted in a British journal. The fight that followed played out in the press on both sides of the Atlantic for months. The pressure worked, at least partly — in 1895, the WCTU passed its first formal resolution condemning lynching.

Both of these things were true at the same time, about the same organization, often about the same person. The WCTU built the organizing infrastructure that helped American women get the vote. Its most powerful leader also, in print, used the rhetoric that was actively getting Black Americans killed, and it took a Black woman journalist building an international case to get the organization to formally say lynching was wrong, fifteen years after Emancipation should have made that a non-question. Neither of those facts cancels the other. Both of them are the WCTU.

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The second part of the machine was smaller, and narrower, and — in terms of raw political effectiveness — probably more important. The Anti-Saloon League was founded in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1893, and it did the opposite of “Do Everything.” It did one thing. Under a lawyer named Wayne Wheeler, the ASL became a single-issue pressure operation — what people at the time started calling “Wheelerism.” The ASL didn't care which party you belonged to. It delivered blocs of voters to whichever candidate voted dry, and punished whoever voted wet, regardless of party. It used church networks — already organized, already trusted, meeting weekly — as a ready-made distribution system, with “Anti-Saloon Sundays” turning sermons into get-out-the-vote drives. By most accounts, it's the first organization to run what we'd now recognize as a modern Washington lobbying campaign.

The two machines together — the WCTU's broad moral mobilization and the ASL's narrow political muscle — got the country to the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919. Buried in the enforcement legislation, the Volstead Act, was a number that a lot of the people who voted for Prohibition didn't fully clock at the time: 0.5% alcohol by volume. Not “less alcohol.” None, for practical purposes. The same distinction Livesey's pledge drew in 1832 was now federal law.

While all of those politics were happening, for almost a century before Prohibition ever arrived, something else was happening in parallel. Every time the temperance movement closed off one option, somebody invented the thing that went into the empty space. And because the people building these replacements were often sincere about the cause themselves, they kept reaching for the old vocabulary to describe the new thing.

Start with the room itself. In the 1770s, Joseph Priestley — yes, the oxygen guy — figured out how to carbonate water. By 1832, a man named John Matthews had a commercial carbonating apparatus running in New York, and the people who ended up operating these machines were pharmacists, called druggists at the time. It made perfect sense. They already had the counters, the equipment, the chemical know-how, and a captive audience of people walking in feeling unwell. They started mixing carbonated water with medicinal syrups: stimulants, tonics, things containing cocaine, kola nut, caffeine. The soda fountain became, architecturally, a direct replacement for the saloon. Marble counters instead of dark wood, “this is a temperance bar” signage, and a new kind of worker behind the counter: the soda jerk, doing the job a bartender used to do, but serving something else.

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In 1875, a young pharmacist named Charles Elmer Hires was on his honeymoon when he bought a recipe for “root tea” from a New Jersey innkeeper. As the story is usually told, a minister named Russell Conwell told Hires he was making a mistake calling it “tea” — that the Pennsylvania coal miners he was hoping to sell it to would never order something called tea, but they might order something called “beer.” Hires renamed it to root beer. At the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, he handed out free samples with a sign calling it “the temperance drink” and “the greatest health-giving beverage in the world.” The name did the work the ingredients didn't. It gave a non-alcoholic drink the social permission of a saloon order, in a building designed to look like the inside of a pharmacy.

Belfast, the 1850s. An apothecary named Thomas Cantrell was trying to solve a specific problem: ginger beer, the traditional drink, got its fizz from fermentation, which meant it was mildly alcoholic and inconsistent — some batches were stronger than others, depending on how the yeast behaved. Cantrell's solution was to skip fermentation entirely. Carbonate the water mechanically, flavor it with ginger, and you get something with the same fizz and flavor profile, minus the fermentation and minus the alcohol. He called it ginger ale. The company that grew out of this — Cantrell & Cochrane — put “The Original Makers of Ginger Ale” right on the bottle. And notice the word they chose. Not ginger water or ginger soda. Ale. Same trick as Hires: borrow the vocabulary of the drink you're replacing.

Now, the best story in this whole episode. Vineland, New Jersey, 1869. Thomas Bramwell Welch was a dentist. He'd trained for the ministry first, then switched to dentistry, but he was the communion steward at his Methodist church. And he had a problem that was, on its face, tiny: communion wine. The Methodist church was increasingly uncomfortable serving real wine at communion, for the same temperance reasons everyone else was uncomfortable with alcohol, but the only alternative anyone had found was grape juice that fermented into wine within days of being pressed. Welch had just read about Louis Pasteur's work on pasteurization — heating a liquid to kill the organisms that cause fermentation — and he applied it to Concord grapes. He pressed the grapes, filtered them, bottled them, then submerged the bottles in hot water to kill the yeast. It worked. He bottled it as “Dr. Welch's Unfermented Wine.”

The venture failed.

Completely.

Some clergy called it heretical — communion wine that wasn't wine. So, Welch shelved the whole thing for years. It was his son, Charles, who revived it decades later, rebranded it as a children's drink rather than a religious one, and pushed it hard at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. By 1916, the Methodist Episcopal Church had gone from rejecting Welch's invention to mandating it — unfermented grape juice became the official communion standard. A dentist's solution to his own church's discomfort, shelved as a failure, became Welch's.

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The pattern compounded. 1885, Waco, Texas: a pharmacist named Charles Alderton invented what became Dr Pepper — a year before the drink everyone's actually waiting for. 1893, New Bern, North Carolina: Caleb Bradham invented Pepsi-Cola, named for the digestive enzyme pepsin, one more product born behind a pharmacy counter.

Then there was Atlanta. In 1885, Atlanta and Fulton County passed local prohibition ordinances — dry, ahead of the rest of the country by decades. A pharmacist named John Pemberton had a problem: his most successful product was something called French Wine Coca — wine, plus coca leaf extract — and wine was now illegal to sell where he operated. So he did what Welch did, what Cantrell did, what Hires did. He took the alcohol out, added carbonated water, and on May 8th, 1886, launched it as a temperance drink. Coca-Cola. The cocaine stayed in the formula for years afterward — that wasn't the part that violated the local prohibition law — and it wasn't until around 1903, under Pemberton's successor Asa Candler, that the company started transitioning to “decocainized” coca leaf extract, a process that took until 1929 to fully complete.

Every one of these — the soda fountain, root beer, ginger ale, grape juice, Coca-Cola — was built by someone who was, by most accounts, sincere about temperance. And every one of them was still wearing the name of the thing it replaced. Beer. Ale. Wine. The vocabulary never left. Only the alcohol did.

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So here's where the argument actually lands, and it's more complicated than “Prohibition failed.”

Prohibition ran from 1920 to 1933, and on its own narrow terms — did people drink less? The data says yes. Consumption dropped to somewhere between twenty and forty percent of pre-Prohibition levels in the first couple of years. It climbed back afterward, but even by repeal, and for decades after, it settled around sixty to seventy percent of where it started. That's not nothing. The movement that started with Livesey's pledge in 1832 got, by one important measure, exactly what it was asking for.

It would be tidy to stop there and call it a partial win with an unfortunate ending, but the data doesn't quite let you do that either.

What Prohibition actually destroyed wasn't alcohol. It was a huge, specific, irreplaceable slice of American drinking culture. Somewhere between thirteen hundred and fifteen hundred independent breweries closed between 1920 and 1933 — most of them never reopened. Regional distilling traditions that took generations to develop simply ended. German beer gardens, Irish and Italian saloons — these weren't just businesses, they were the social infrastructure of immigrant communities, and a significant part of the energy behind Prohibition was nativist hostility to exactly those communities, dressed in the language of moral reform. And the pre-Prohibition cocktail — built around the assumption of decent base spirits — got replaced by something else: sugar and citrus and whatever else it took to make bathtub gin drinkable. A lot of what people now think of as “classic” cocktail style is actually Prohibition-era camouflage.

Go back to the four strands, and look at what each one actually got. The economic argument got a more sober workforce… and the collapse of an entire tax base that took until the Depression to find a replacement for. The evangelical argument got the saloon destroyed… and a level of public contempt for law, in the form of routine, casual lawbreaking by otherwise respectable people, that some historians trace forward into a broader twentieth-century skepticism about Prohibition-style moral legislation generally. The domestic-protection argument got less public drunkenness, and abuse that didn't go away, it just moved behind closed doors, out of any record that could measure it. The medical argument got falling rates of cirrhosis, and an epidemic of poisoning and blindness from bootleg liquor made with industrial methanol, because there was no legal, regulated alternative.

Every strand got exactly what it asked for, and every strand also got something it didn't ask for, attached to the thing it wanted like a shadow it can't put down.

But here's the part that the “Prohibition failed” framing misses entirely. The Eighteenth Amendment got repealed. Fourteen years, and gone. The only constitutional amendment in American history to be flat-out reversed. Nobody ever repealed the soda fountain. Nobody held a referendum on Coca-Cola. The entire substitute beverage culture that got built, piece by piece, by sincere believers trying to give people something to reach for instead of a drink, is still here. That's the part of this movement that actually won, in the sense that matters most: it's the part nobody ever got the chance to vote against.

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1933. The Twenty-First Amendment repealed Prohibition, and what came back wasn't what left. Thirteen years is long enough to bankrupt almost everyone — the breweries that survived were the ones with the capital reserves to sit out a decade with no product: Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, Miller. The landscape that returned was narrower than the one that disappeared — fewer breweries, a beer style trending toward the lighter, blander end of what used to be a much wider range, and a Three-Tier distribution system, separating producers from wholesalers from retailers, that still shapes how alcohol gets sold in most of the country today.

One more thing came out of the enforcement side of Prohibition, almost as a footnote. In the rural South, bootleggers running moonshine needed fast cars and better drivers than the law, and after repeal, some of those same drivers started racing each other — informally, for money, on beaches and back roads. In 1948, a man named Bill France Sr. took that informal scene and organized it into a sanctioned racing body. NASCAR's first official race ran that February. It's about as far from a temperance pledge as you can get, and it's also a direct descendant of Prohibition's enforcement landscape — the cars got fast because the law was watching.

Today, walk into a serious cocktail bar and you'll find a section of the menu that didn't used to exist: zero-proof. Shrubs, made the way they were made in the eighteenth century — fruit, sugar, vinegar — sitting on the same menu as the spirit-forward drinks, not as an asterisk, not as the “if you're not drinking” option, but as its own category, with its own technique and its own audience.

Here's the difference, and it's the whole episode in one sentence: the temperance movement wanted to take alcohol out of the glass. The zero-proof movement wants to put something else in the glass, next to it, as a choice — not instead of it.

The global soft drink market — the direct, traceable descendant of the soda fountain, root beer, ginger ale, Welch's, and Coca-Cola — is worth somewhere between seven hundred and forty and eight hundred and twenty billion dollars today. Every one of those products started as someone's sincere attempt to give people a way to put down the glass. None of them succeeded at that. All of them succeeded at something else — they gave people another glass.

The argument that started in Preston in 1832 is still going.

The glass is the same.

What's in it is still being negotiated.

Pay attention to what's in the glass.

DISTILLATE is a production of The Alchemist's Bar — craft mixology through the lens of alchemy as chemistry — and part of the Obscura Meridian family of projects. New episodes every Tuesday at 6:00 AM Central.