The century from the 1820s to the 1920s was marked by one of the greatest struggles Canada has witnessed, the struggle for temperance. Men and women banded together in "cold water" societies. They sang songs like "The Old Oaken Bucket" and "I'll Never Marry a Man Who Drinks", that told of the dangers of alcohol and the joys of a sober life. Most Canadians have heard of the movement in the United States and of the prohibition laws that it won. Yet few know that Canada was a world leader in the movement, and that most of Canada had prohibition even before the United States did.
The temperance movement was more than a quaint sort of Victorian silliness or a sidelight on puritan uptightness. Alcohol was, and is, a serious problem. One did not have to be a puritan to recognize that. It also symbolized problnms that went beyond drinking and that were troubling Canadians greatly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Temperance began as an attempt on the part of individuals to discipline themselves for success in the individualistic world of the small farmer and the small businessman. That world changed drastically with urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. Economic self-reliance gave way to dependence on corporate employers; there developed extremes of poverty and wealth, of power and powerlessness; accepted social norms seemed threatened by foreign standards. Alcohol seemed to be linked to many of these changes--indeed, to lie at the root of them--and it was often through the temperance movement that Canadians tried to resist or control the changes. In the end, it would bring them to radically different ways of looking at their world. Temperance ideas can be found throughout recorded history, and they were present in Canada from the beginnings of white settlement. The Roman Catholic church in New France made frequent attempts to prevent the trade of alcohol to Indians, though with indifferent success. Jean Talon and other intendants established breweries and taxed distilled liquors heavily, partly in the hope that beer drinking would reduce drunkeness among settlers.
Organized temperance societies appeared in British North America very early in the nineteenth century, about the same time they appeared in the United States and Britain. The earliest appear to have been established in Pictou County, Nova Scotia, and in Montreal, Lower Canada, about 1827. There may also have been one a year earlier in Gloucester, New Brunswick. It is possible that they were influenced by societies founded even earlier in the United States, but it would be misleading to call the movement an American one. Rather, similar conditions and similar outlooks gave rise to similar movements in many countries, particularly English-speaking countries, at about the same time.
However, it would be unfair to suggest that prohibitionists were motivated only by fear and revenge. There was terrible poverty and sickness among the urban working class. Many of those active in the prohibition movement were active because they were moved by the plight of the poor. Since alcohol was believed to be a major cause of poverty and sickness, prohibition was seen as the most effective cure.
Though prohibition was largely a class movement, this class aspect has been obscured by other factors. One of them was the Dominion Plebiscite of 1898 which seemed to show English Canada in favour of prohibition and French Canada in opposition. But the plebiscite results were misleading. In fact, francophone Canadians shared many of the same values as anglophones. They were just as concerned about urban problems and just as quick to identify alcohol as the major problem. But in their tradition, beer and wine were acceptable as drinks of moderation. It was the degree of prohibition they opposed, not the principle. Moreover, the plebiscite was widely seen in Quebec as a method used by the Conservative opposition to embarrass Laurier and the Liberals. The plebiscite results in that province, then, were muddled by political considerations.
On other occasions when the issue was restricted to distilled liquor and freed of political implications, Quebec was as prohibitionist as any other province.
Another factor obscuring the class nature of the movement was the official stance of each church. Officially, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches tended to support prohibition. Anglican and Catholic churches tended to be opposed. These official stances were reflected in the leadership of the movement, and they led the Royal Commission on the Liquor Traffic (1895) to see the movement as a religious one. But the religious differences appear to have existed mostly at the upper levels of church government; they were not reflected in any consistent way in the voting behaviour of church members. And even at the upper levels, the differences were not so sharp as they might appear. There were many reasons why Anglican and Catholic hierarchies were not eager to support prohibition, but perhaps the most important was that the movement had become too closely identified with the Methodists. It was a time when the various churches were in tense competition with each other and when government appointments were closely scrutinized for signs of religious favouritism. Anglican and Catholic churches could scarcely give support to a movement so dominated by the Methodist church. This was also a factor in Quebec's opposition to prohibition in the 1898 plebiscite.
Prohibition was largely a class movement, however much it might have been complicated by political, cultural, and ecclesiastical factors. It was a means by which lower middle class Canadians tried to come to grips with problems arising from urbanization and industrialization, such as poverty, crime, changing moral standards, and shifts in power.
Some Effects of the Prohibition Movement
If prohibition as a cure was naive, it did at least break the commitment to liberal individualism and open the way to other approaches. To demand prohibition was to recognize that the principles of individualism were no longer entirely adequate, that they would have to yield in some respects to collective rights and responsibilities. By the 1890s, some prohibitionists were talking of competitive capitalism as the real source of the problem, for competition enriched the strong at the expense of the weak. Competitive capitalism, they argued, was inherently unchristian. It was even directly linked to alcohol as the concern for profit was the motive for alcohol manufacture and sale. The Christian way was surely one of cooperation. The prohibitionists who adopted such views were a small minority, but for these few it was only a short step further to socialism. At the same time, prohibitionism also succeeded in focussing the attention of churches involved in the movement on urban problems. This played a part in leading the churches to feel they could not content themselves simply with teaching Christian principles. They had a responsibility to apply those principles in daily life on earth. They had to educate their congregations to an awareness of social problems, to agitate for legislation, and even to become active themselves in social work. This development became known as the Social Gospel Movement.
The Reasons Why
In their first stages, temperance societies were genuinely temperance, intended to reduce the consumption of alcohol rather than to eliminate it. Moreover, there was no thought of legislation, as the decision was left to the individual. Usually, the motive was seIf-improvement. The man who disciplined himself by cutting down on alcohol hoped to profit through better work habits and a wiser use of his money.
Clergymen, both Protestant and Catholic, were frequently associated with the movement from the start, but it was never essentially a religious movement. However, those people who believed in the principles of self-betterment and individualism so dominated certain churches, that those churches came to reflect their values. Those people who supported temperance were the same people most likely to attend church, to be active in church affairs, and to produce clergy for the church. Churches became committed to temperance not because their theology demanded it, but because it was a concern of their members. Temperance was a secular movement with the support of many churches, not a religious one. However, it is true that church involvement often threatened to overwhelm the movement.
About the 1840s, many temperance societies shifted to total abstinence. Their reasoning was that temperance was too difficult to sustain. Since drink weakened self-discipline, any drink, even the occasional beer, might lead to stronger thirsts and ultimately to ruin. Teetotallers, as abstainers called themselves, even told the story of the young man who was brought to a drunkard's death by a taste for alcohol first aroused by his mother's brandied peaches. Though abstinence came to dominate the movement, many temperance people remained committed to genuine temperance, retaining a tolerance for beer and wine. This was particularly true of francophones in Quebec.
The third and final stage of the movement became evident during the 1850s. This was the shift to prohibition of the liquor traffic by law. Now there were groups committed to temperance, to abstinence, and to prohibition, with prohibition dominating through the remainder of the century.
The rise of prohibition was a fundamental change for the movement. Temperance had begun on the bedrock of individualism. The motive was self-betterment, and the decision was taken by the individual. Now, prohibitionists intended to use the power of the state to force everyone, willing or not, to be sober, upright and to work hard to get ahead. It was a shift that suggested that individualist principles were no longer adequate.
What had caused such a change? Temperance and the self-discipline associated with it were a part of the life style of the lower middle class, using that term to mean such people as small businessmen, white collar workers, and most farmers. This lower middle class, attuned to a life of hard work, self-improvement, and church attendance, felt its status threatened by a class which shared none of those values, the urban working class. It was frightened that the urban working class might come to be the dominant group in Canada and that, politically and socially, its values would come to rule the country. This was particularly true in cities like Halifax and Toronto, where the dominant Protestants faced a working class in which Irish Catholics were conspicuous. Popular prejudice had it that Irish Catholics were an immoral, corrupt, and drunken lot; thus the determination to impose prohibition so that the lower middle class could ensure that its values would prevail and, perhaps, to reassure itself that it still had political power.
Rural Canadians had an additional incentive to prohibition. For years they had seen political and economic power concentrating in the cities, and they had felt themselves victimized by urban institutions like banks and railways. They also distrusted the cities, seeing them as centres of crime, prostitution, and moral decay. To them, a vote for prohibition was a vote for rural virtue and against urban decadence.
The Role of Women in the prohibition Movement
Women became active in the movement for much the same reasons as men and were drawn from much the same social groups. But prohibitionism had added significance for them. Alcohol was, after all, considered to be a male vice. It was an indicator that men were fundamentally weak, that even the finest manners and gentlest ways were but a veneer on the immoral and lustful brute that was man. So it was that man had the weakness for drink, and drink revealed him for the animal he was. Woman it was believed (wrongly) did not have that weakness. Her soul was pure.
It was a view of masculinity and femininity that found considerable support in popular literature of the time. It can be found in the novels of Ralph Connor and in Robert Service's The Trail of `98 in which, uncharacteristically, the woman does fall, but only briefly and only out of terror of an evil man. The purity of woman is very marked in Nellie McClung's Sowing Seeds in Danny. And it is as much a feature of literature produced outside Canada. In the works of Charles Dickens, for example, evil women were rare and even fallen ones usually had hearts of gold.
Such a view, widely accepted by both sexes, was a prime argument for placing women on a pedestal, keeping them from the contamination of business and political life. They were too pure, it was said, for the nastiness of the world.
But that pedestal could be used as a devastating club. If women were pure, then surely they should have some voice in politics and business. These matters were corrupt and nasty because the men who ran them were corrupt and nasty. Give women some influence and their purity would cleanse the world.
At its most extreme, this argument could lead to the vote for women and jobs on equal terms with men. Some did take it that far, but they were the minority. Most women prohibitionists accepted a role centred on home and church and simply wanted to make that role more influential. They remained very much women of their time. However, they had taken an important step that would make possible the feminism of the mid-twentieth century.
The Effect of Immigration and World War One
The immigration of the Laurier years and the 1914 War lent a sense of urgency to the prohibition movement, though it is not probable they brought it much additional support.
Most Canadians were apprehensive about the Europeans who came to Canada in the early years of the twentieth century. In language, religion, social customs, even in personal appearance, they were markedly different from native Canadians, many of whom had regarded the Irish Catholic immigrants of the nineteenth century as different enough; but their differences were minor compared to those of the Europeans. Further, the new immigrants were not scattered evenly across Canada but were concentrated in a few cities, a few farming communities, and in the construction, mining, and lumbering industries. Such concentrations made it possible for immigrants to retain their European character and also made them highly visible.
Some felt that the Europeans, especially those from southern and eastern Europe, represented a lower level of civilization and feared they might lower Canadian standards. Prohibitionists were among those concerned, particularly as they noted that the immigrants commonly used alcohol. So the immigrants became for these prohibitionists what the urban working class had been for decades, an alien group to be forced into conformity. Again, prohibition was seen as the means of forcing all to adopt the desired values.
The war was probably decisive in bringing prohibition to Canada, but not by convincing more people to turn against alcohol. Prohibition had had majority support in Canada for at least twenty years before the war. But war brought prohibition because it made it unpatriotic to oppose a measure that would save grain and would end waste of resources, money, and manpower. War made it impossible for governments to stall any longer - as they had been stalling for decades.
Legislation
In Canada jurisdiction over alcohol was divided and the division both delayed legislation and weakened much of the legislation that was enacted. In very general terms, the federal government had power to prohibit the manufacture, wholesale, retail, and interprovincial trade in alcoholic beverages. Provincial governments had power over retail sale. Prohibitionists, therefore, had to work at both levels, and at both levels most governments were reluctant to act, fearing loss of tax revenue as well as difficulties of enforcing any prohibitory law. And, in some provinces at least, the retail liquor trade had been fitted into the governments' electoral machines.
But prohibitionists represented an important vote too, so politicians usually responded in two ways: delay and compromise. Delays took the form of plebiscites, royal commissions and studies, and appeals to the courts to rule on matters of jurisdiction. Compromise usually took the form of local option. That is, legislation was enacted permitting each community to decide for itself whether it would permit retail sale of alcohol within its boundaries. The most important piece of such legislation was the Canada Temperance Act of 1878 which enabled cities, towns, or counties to prohibit the retail sale of alcohol by consent of the local electorate. The Canada Temperance Act, often coupled with provincial legislation, was widely used in all parts of Canada, including Quebec. But local option was, perhaps deliberately, difficult to enforce. In any case, it had no effect on manufacture or drinking, as its only effect was to make alcohol a little more difficult to obtain in "dry" communities.
Generally, dry communities were rural, but not because prohibition was necessarily stronger in rural areas. Rather, rural areas tended to be homogeneous in social composition and either heavily in favour or heavily opposed to prohibition. Cities were more diverse in their population, with "wets" and "drys" closely balanced, so that clear majorities for local option were difficult to obtain.
The limitations of local option and the difficulties of winning it in the cities led prohibitionists to continue agitation for provincial prohibition of the retail sale of liquor. Prince Edward Island was the first to do so, in 1901. All other provinces but Quebec followed during the First World War. Quebec passed a prohibition law in 1919, but it prohibited only distilled beverages, and it was in force for only a short time.
Even provincial prohibition, however, affected only retail sale. Manufacture, wholesale, and importation were unaffected. The federal government blocked those loopholes by orders-in-council in 1918. However, the orders-in-council expired shortly after the war. In 1921, Ottawa passed legislation banning interprovincial trade in alcohol at the request of any province. Liquor could still legally be manufactured in Canada and, until 1930, could be exported to the United States, despite prohibition in that country. Thus the continuing popularity of Canadian rye whisky in the United States. Canadians could still purchase liquor by prescription as a medicine and Ontarians could legally buy Ontario wine.
The Decline of Prohibition
In the course of the 1920s, all provinces but Prince Edward Island abandoned prohibition in favour of government monopoly of liquor sales. The reasons for that abandonment are all but obscured by myth. For example, there is no reason to believe that drinking became more fashionable or more common as a result of prohibition. It is not true that Canada saw a spectacular growth of crime that can be related to prohibition. Nor is it entirely true that voters saw the experiment as a failure and rejected it - though it is true that support did decline and that in some areas prohibitionists fell to a minority.
Far more important was the question of money. Provincial governments were pressed for funds in the 1920s. Few had been sympathetic to prohibition, and now they saw government sale of liquor as a way to raise money without increasing taxes. Some also may have wanted to end pro- hibition in order to attract thirsty American tourists and perhaps even to facilitate the smuggling of liquor into the United States.
The end of prohibition, then, can be explained more easily by looking to the politicians than to the people they represented. Yet there remains some decline - a continuing decline - in popular support that must be explained. Part of the explanation can be found in the skilful campaigns waged to discredit prohibition, but that may not be the whole story.
One possibility lies in a change that occurred in the economic role of the lower middle class. Abstinence had been important to them when they had expected to get ahead by their own efforts in operating their own farms and businesses or by being employed by small businesses. But such conditions were disappearing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Farmers formed a diminishing proportion of the population, and small businesses were giving way to large corporations. Advancement was becoming dependent on being a good member of the company team. And nothing is less welcome on a team than someone who is pure. Better to have some small vice, an occasional drink or cigarette, to suggest a willingness to tolerate small failings in others to be one of the boys. Individualism was on the way out, and morality was losing its market.
Social reformers, too, were losing their interest in prohibition. The struggle for prohibition had brought them a greater familiarity with poverty and crime, and this had shown them that alco- hol was only a part of the problem and more a symptom than a cause. By the 1920s, they were look- ing to other remedies ranging from expanded social services to socialism. Prohibition had played its part in defining the problem, but its day as the solution was done.
There remains another great puzzle of prohibitionism in the 1920s - the women. They had been considered to be overwhelmingly prohibitionist, yet the years in which they began to vote are precisely those in which prohibitionist support at the polls declined. Even allowing for the possibility that working class women voted "wet", the decline is startling. Perhaps the belief in their prohibition sympathies was simply one more facet of the myth of womanly purity. Or perhaps liberation went a great deal further than the ladies of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union had anticipated.
The Achievements of Prohibition
Did prohibition fail? The usual answers are that it did, that it was unenforceable, that it gave rise to increased crime and drunkenness, and that we have now learned to handle alcohol, anyway. The first three answers are unproven and doubtful. The last is ridiculous. But whether prohibition failed or succeeded is less important than the question of what the movement accomplished. It was an early means by which Canadians identified the problems of social change and formulated responses to them. And it was a ladder by which some women climbed down from the pedestal to fight for a useful and satisfying place in society. In those terms, it was not only one of the most popular movements in Canadian history, but one of the most significant.
