The Temperance Movement Was Totally Badass
Yesteryear’s anti-alcohol crusaders were the punks of their day— with lessons for today’s opioid fighters.
Anyone who’s ever battled an addiction and won has had to look outside themselves for inspiration, for models of sobriety to cling to for strength. For me my sobriety heroes were the straight edge punks of 1980s hardcore and their descendants — not so much the orthodox scene itself (which quickly devolved into a caricature of itself) but rather individuals I already respected who followed straight edge lifestyles. Whenever I worried about becoming a no-fun prude as an ex-drinker, I had only to think of Henry Rollins, Ian MacKaye, Alec Empire, Bif Naked, Japanese avant-noise artist Merzbow, and others to remind me that booze-free life can be pretty badass.
As a historian by training, though, it’s in my blood to look further back than this, back to the straight edgers of yesteryear — the teetotalists and temperance activists of the 19th and early 20th century. Like most people, I had long assumed that the anti-booze activists whose screeds against the evils of liquor ultimately led to Prohibition in the United States and much of Canada were more or less all puritanical Bible thumpers opposed to anything that resembled fun. That said, I had been aware of a certain convergence between the temperance movement and early feminism, which made me…
