Under the Influence: Working-Class Drinking, Temperance, and Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1895–193

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The investigated conferences were important in several respects. First, they were an expression of the alcohol question having become such an important social political question as to render possible meetings of this magnitude. Second, they actually functioned as key sites for international knowledge and policy dissemination in the alcohol field ever since the very first conference in and continued to do so for another hundred years.

Some international conferences had been arranged on the alcohol issue since the first temperance conference in , but the studied conferences were the first institutionalised and frequently held meetings for researchers, government officials and NGO representatives to gather around the topic which was often described as the most critical issue for Western civilization at the time.

By focusing on alcohol related topics, the conferences also put society at large on the meetings' agenda. In the article I try to answer questions about how the alcohol problem was depicted in terms of consequences, causes and potential solutions.

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However, this functions primarily as a background to my main research interest: My primary source materials are the 14 conference proceedings from the international alcohol conferences held during — see table 1. These proceedings tell us who the participants were and which organizations were present. The reports give us access to formal speeches and other expressions of conference etiquette, to minuted discussions and—what is clearly most important in terms of this study—to the participants' papers which had been dispatched and were read aloud in the conference.

The agenda listed such items as a temperance organization's work, legislation intended to curb the misuse of alcohol, the degenerating impact of alcohol on the next generation and the most appropriate way of providing treatment to alcoholics. My account builds on the common and recurring topics and themes in these conferences. Previous research and theoretical aspects will be discussed with each theme. I will next briefly examine the alcohol problem, the organization of the conferences and the role of the temperance movement.

This will be followed by responses to the alcohol problem, the nature of this question as a collective problem and the role of alcohol in the modern society. The article concludes with a round-up of the arguments. Levine has put it, alcohol was a scapegoat for all kinds of social problems. The scientific and social advances that had been made over several hundred years were now threatened, as mental disturbance increased more rapidly than did the population. This, to a large extent, was due to the consumption of alcohol. Branthwaite summarised the problem elegantly in the conference in London: Every inebriate is either a potential criminal, a burden upon public funds, a danger to himself or others, or a cause of distress, terror, scandal, or nuisance, to his family and to those with whom he associates.

It is against this menacing picture that the nineteenth-century progress of the national temperance movements is to be understood. The issue also called for transnational collaboration, especially because ever more people were being incorporated into an international world. Both people and information travelled farther and more quickly, and the economic, social and cultural development created new possibilities across national borders for various interest groups.

As the historian Lovisa af Petersens has shown in her study on the international women's conferences, the transnational context and the very use of an international discourse provided a resource for political struggle and debate. The anti-alcohol efforts led, among other things, to the total prohibition of alcohol in the United States in — It makes sense, in the context of the transnational prohibition movement, to study how the conferences could contribute to such an effect, but in my analysis the conferences serve a bigger function as a site of political formation, scientific exchange and networking between individuals and organizations.

The first in the series of international anti-alcohol conferences examined here took place in the autumn of in Antwerp, with more than delegates coming together around the alcohol question. The first contributions already speak of a certain breadth of scope: But it cannot be denied that the temperance movement had an important impact on the organization and agenda of the conferences during the first decades. The conferences offered an arena for friends of temperance and prohibition to exchange information and experiences. They also inspired teetotallers to meet and build new international societies with like-minded teachers, clergy and students, for example.

The middle-class base of the early temperance movement was much in evidence in many other ways, too. Rather, from the very first meeting in Antwerp in until the congress in Istanbul, these were conferences against alcohol misuse or alcoholism. But the conferences kept growing, with more delegates from more countries, more interest groups from different professions and more wide-ranging topics. Schrad sees this as an expression of the increasing professionalization of the transnational temperance movement, while I prefer to explain it rather as a sign of the conferences serving more and broader objectives than just meeting the needs of the temperance and prohibition movement.

The presentations and discussions focused on alcohol from a great many different perspectives. One could also argue that alcohol was the framework for debates ranging from the condition of women to the state's role in the modern society. This is why my emphasis is not so much on alcohol as on the overarching themes which were characteristic of the period and made themselves felt when one of the big contemporary problems was to be explained and solved. However, to understand the alcohol problem which served as a sort of catalyst for these overall themes, I will first elaborate on some frequently discussed methods for solving the problem.

Introduction

The alcohol problem was of the most serious kind; this the conferences never contested. The answers were necessarily comprehensive and drastic and entailed variations of still recognisable alcohol policies: Ever since its organization in the s, the temperance movement had found moral suasion a plausible method of combating the alcohol problem.

I argue that Schrad's conclusions need to be qualified in two respects. My own examination of the source material shows, first, that the conferences still kept flying the moral, educating and individually-minded colours.

And second, the division or antagonism between moral education and state-issued control is not made entirely clear. Governments can, with or without popular consent, act more or less morally—and government legislation can therefore manifest a moral will. Where the significant division lies perhaps is whether governments can be persuaded to act on moral, scientific or other grounds or whether this action should be delegated to individuals, associations and the civil society.

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Also, in many instances action was taken by both entities, as Sulkunen and Warpenius aptly put it: In temperance discourse the modern individual unfolding in nascent industrial culture was therefore divided into two parts: The enlightened nation-state, imbued with aspiration and commitment to moral and social progress, was thought to be the external instrument for constructing the inner Self of citizens, capable of self-control and competent to act as sovereign members of society.

In the fight for temperance, many conference contributions talked about the role of the press, confidence in non-governmental action and freedom of the press in general. This partly justified their political rights and partly gave them a special role in pro-temperance work. It was heard on repeated occasions at the conferences that the fight against drunkenness hinged on women's ability to organise around the problem. The consequences of the misuse of alcohol were often felt at home, and in accordance with the familistic ideology common among the middle class, the home was seen as the woman's domain.

Women's increased visibility in the public space also contributed to concerns being voiced about their drinking. The moral uplift that some in the temperance movement advocated can mostly be likened to some of today's efforts in preventive measures in the drug abuse field. But we can also find that the treatment of individual misusers was given increasing attention during the years that the first anti-alcohol conferences were held. Medically-oriented alcohol treatment was justified in Great Britain at the end of the nineteenth century as a humane and scientifically based alternative to condemning moralism.

Coercive treatment, too, was increasingly considered in the early twentieth century as a means of incapacitating difficult misusers of alcohol. In the early s in English-speaking countries and Germany, alcohol treatment institutions were at the height of their popularity. The inmates' care consisted of abstemiousness and restoration of physical strength through physical labour and exposure to fresh air. The soul would gain its moral strength through Christian discipline and rigorous drill. Treatment at Turva was subject to a charge, and the appropriately exclusive clientele were expected to view their stay as relatively pleasant in a home-like environment.

When it came to poor drinkers, coercive measures were rather more prominent on the wish list. Coercion was advanced as a protection of sorts against contagion, as a means of controlling the misusers' bad influence on the environment but also as an opportunity to keep them from procreating.

This aspect became more important once the racial hygienic arguments spread in the early part of the twentieth century see below. The treatment of alcohol misusers touched on the larger question of government right and duty to solve the alcohol problem. In Great Britain, for example, one discussed whether the state and the physicians should unite to solve the question. This development was recognised in other countries, too. According to the speaker, a French priest, it was equally self-evident for the state to act against alcohol misuse as against private nuisance or vagrancy.

The foremost question was the sale of alcohol and whether it should be restricted or even forbidden. The alcohol industry was depicted as a notable enemy in this fight. The industry was not content with producing the poison, but also organised—as early as the s—to lobby against the temperance cause.

The question of a total ban long remained relatively abstract, as no country had even tested this measure until prohibition was introduced in Russia in as part of the war mobilization campaign. At the end of the nineteenth century one rather preferred to pursue the question of sales restrictions, in many cases as a conscious strategy to counter demands for a total ban, which was advocated by some factions of the temperance movement.

Reference was also made on many occasions to the so-called Gothenburg system, which had been introduced in Sweden in and aimed to remove the interest of profit from the alcohol trade. The system was later adopted in Norway and Finland, too. Hohner argues, the anti-alcohol conferences played a significant part.

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But it would be a mistake to treat the conferences—or the heterogeneous temperance movement—as a unified whole. The debates on alcohol restrictions are a case in point. Several conference presentations discussed the pros and cons of controls and an all-out ban. Branthwaite accused the organised teetotallers of not being pragmatic enough to care for the unfortunate alcohol misusers: However, whether one championed sales restrictions or total prohibition, moral education or treatment, the alcohol problem was part of a bigger picture.

Out of mainly epistemological necessity, causes were sought, for example, in regularities and principles of a medical or social nature. The answers were often a match for the causes, also when they were brought from the general to the individual level, while the objectives would aim at a collectively binding solidarity. Alcohol misuse was part of a complicated social problem, a formidable catalogue of all sorts of evils which in the social historical studies on the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century have been called the labour question, the poverty question, pauperism or the social question depending on what was to be examined and for which ends.

The collective problem was firmly established in the growing and politically ever more significant working class. The predominant problem formulation was future-oriented and occupied itself with such entities as people, culture and nation. To solve the alcohol problem was to safeguard a better future.

The concern about troublesome youth was evident in both contemporary debates and crime statistics, and the anti-alcohol conferences frequently addressed the import of children's and young people's temperance education. It was nevertheless an important subject, for the youth was the future. If the children of today are taught to grow up sober and intelligent, the manhood and womanhood of the future will be secure. If, on the other hand, they remain unwarned, and thus become intemperate and sensual, the national shame and degradation will grow with the lapse of years, and the thraldom of drink will restrain as with hand of iron, every effort on behalf of social purity and peace.

The conferences made regular reference to the nation as falling prey to the alcohol problem. Health, efficiency, wise economy, brotherliness, morality—these are qualifications which the twentieth century demands of patriotic sons and daughters of the nations in their struggle upward toward the realisation of the ideal state. There was widespread concern at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century over the degenerating impact of the modern society on the population.

Public health, in a wide sense, emerged as an answer to this problem, and physicians were the guarantors for its maintenance. As the consequences on future generations became a key issue, the alcohol problem, too, was placed in a larger context. In the conference in Stockholm a professor Laitinen maintained that this was true at least of an animal population but he was less sure whether this also applied to humans.

At the next conference, in London in , he could confirm that it did.

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This was assumed to be the result of considerably lower levels of alcohol misuse over many generations. We can also with high probability suppose that we are still in the midst of the effects of this conflagration whose devastating consequences we can witness in the accumulated degeneration of many regions. A great many of our poor idiots and incurable madmen are the withering ruins of this great fire.

This life reform movement strove for an improved quality of life that could be backed by large sections of the middle class. One can to a certain extent understand the success of medico-hygienic thinking as a consequence of increased medical knowledge, but the perspective shift also needs to be seen against the backdrop of more overall societal processes where, for instance, the efforts of the temperance movement to ground its battle in scientific thought were one of the reasons why medico-hygienic ideas came to occupy a more prominent place in the hygienic movement at large.

The notion of the people and the nation as a social organism made the collective into a morally compelling entity which mattered more than an individual's welfare. This manifested itself especially clearly in the most radical variety of hygienic thought, racial hygiene. In many countries in Europe, as also in the United States, sections of the temperance movement found an ally in the eugenic movement.

Exhibition plaque from the International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden in the author's ownership. Contemporary eugenic thought had not yet been put to the test; it was relatively inquiring. This is especially true if one compares it to the eugenic thinking of the interwar years.

Some kind of loosely knitted theory of heredity was nevertheless on the agenda when the causes and consequences of alcohol misuse were to be explained in terms of degeneration. Such trains of thought lent scientific legitimacy in the battle against drinking but also more gravity when an individual's alcohol consumption could be linked with the welfare of future generations and national well-being.

But this focus on heredity also challenged an older temperance paradigm which had rather departed from the significance of the social circumstances in the emergence of misuse. Several presentations highlighted that alcohol destroyed not only the drinkers themselves but also their offspring: Inasmuch as the interests of the whole, that is, of the human race, must take precedence over those of the individual, an individual's sexual hygiene must subordinate itself to societal sexual hygiene and all the more so as sexual hygiene is first and foremost identical with racial hygiene.

The link with racial hygiene did not point to an immediately obvious direction. The Lamarckian mode of thought also allowed investment in favourable social conditions as a response to the problem of degeneration. There were debates in Great Britain, for instance, on the possibility of letting alcohol help to eliminate inferior individuals.

In this light, all efforts to curb the misuse of alcohol were seen as disturbing desirable natural selection. This was not true. Alcohol misuse was not confined to the procreating section of the population, either, as it could also announce its presence after childbearing age. It was for these reasons that alcohol misuse could not be used to achieve a favourable natural selection. Instead, alcohol consumption needed to be changed for the good of mankind.

As opposed to interwar years, sterilization—forced or otherwise—was rarely advocated as an answer to the alcohol problem. But the international conferences brought together delegates from many countries with different experiences. In the United States, the first draft law on forced sterilization was introduced as early as in the state of Michigan. It then took ten years for the first law to come into force in Indiana , and eight states had passed some kind of sterilization laws by Largent has convincingly shown that this early wave of sterilizations can be coupled with the influential American Progressivism movement.

The first National Conference on Race Betterment, held in Michigan in , had an entire session to discuss the alcohol and tobacco problem. Extremely long periods at alcoholism treatment institutions could stop unwanted procreation, but it was also deemed to be a costly alternative. The problematic was rooted in a social order that had precluded natural selection: Thanks to medicine, humanity and individual hygiene, this selection has for the most part ceased.

Quite the opposite, a mass of wretched life forms are kept alive, while the sane and sound are used as cannon fodder or as overworked slaves. The alcohol problem that was formulated during the nineteenth century emerged at the intersection of recognisably increased drinking and new expectations being placed on the citizens of the modern society. Allies or Uneasy Bedfellows? Introduction by Hanagan, Michael Back to the Future: The Class Politics of Privatization: Land and Dispossession in Russia's Southwest, ca.

Cambridge University Press, University of Pittsburgh Press, Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius. Duke University Press, University of Mexico Press, Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaraugua. The University of North Carolina Press, Race, Space, and Illegality in Mexican Chicago. The Initial Phase, by Brown, Carolyn in: Contact information of Cambridge University Press Postal: By citations By downloads last 12 months.

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