In the last weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump is amping up his anti-immigrant rhetoric, saying in a recent radio interview that migrants had “bad genes” and doubling down on his belief that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the nation.” Such tropes about immigrants can incite violence and can lead to far-reaching consequences that go well beyond immigration restrictions. Nowhere is this clearer than in the history of the temperance movement whose advocacy led to Prohibition. Fears about purportedly dangerous immigrant behavior and the way that outsiders would undermine the Anglo-Saxon family drove the successful push to ban alcohol, which aimed to impose a particular Christian vision of morality and family on America.
In 1785, Dr. Benjamin Rush published An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits Upon the Human Body and Mind. The publication ushered in a new medical understanding of the harm alcohol — especially hard liquor — caused, and it redefined drunkenness as “an odious disease.” Rush’s ideas spurred a decades-long temperance movement, which began gaining steam in the 1830s and continued thriving through the end of the century. While numerous groups embraced the cause, one of the most important and influential was the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.
Established in 1874 in Cleveland, the WCTU grew into one of the most influential religious women’s groups in 19th century America. Under the leadership of Frances E. Willard, who served as president from 1879-1898, the WCTU took up other social causes, including prison reform, child labor laws, sexual age of consent laws, and women’s suffrage. But its most enduring focus was using the 18th century medical model of intoxication as a disease to convince Americans that alcohol was an addicting poison, not an innocuous part of everyday life.
Savvy promoters of abstinence, the WCTU had a broad reach and employed a variety of tactics to circulate their claims about the physical maladies and social harms caused by alcohol.
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They aimed to inculcate the ideas beginning at a young age: the “W.C.T.U. Mother Goose” included didactic rhymes for child readers like “John Cook and his wife are both laid on the shelf (He, haw, hum) / If you ever drink beer, you’ll be laid there yourself (He, haw, hum).” Members spread their ideas in American schools by authoring “scientific temperance instruction” textbooks, such as Julia Colman’s 1880 Alcohol and Hygiene: An Elementary Lesson Book for Schools. By 1901 “Scientific Temperance Instruction” was a mandatory curriculum required by law and overseen by the WCTU in most public schools in the U.S. (something that would last for almost 50 years). Authorized textbooks, like Colman’s, defined alcohol as a liquid poison and those who drank it as “frightfully diseased.”
Temperance ladies also gave speeches, attended saloon pray-ins, wrote political songs like “Saloons Must Go,” signed and circulated petitions, and sometimes went even further. For instance, Carrie Nation, the organizer of a Kansas chapter of the WCTU, gained fame for wielding her ax in taverns to demolish what she and the Union viewed as vice-ridden businesses.
The ax-wielding Nation hardly fit the idealized picture of an angelic woman tending to her household. Even so, the WCTU believed in the cult of domesticity, which held that women should exist in the private space of the home, tending to husbands and children. As Willard put it to her followers in a convention address: “your relationships are… to the home, that of protector; to the nation, that of purifier.” For her, the “crux of reform” happened in the home. But an even more profound conviction underpinned this element of the WCTU platform: that the Anglo-Saxon family was the essential building block of American society.
In the minds of WCTU members, alcohol threatened this ideal family in several ways. First and foremost, “Demon Rum” corrupted young men, husbands, and fathers, turning them from kind men into “wild beasts.” The WCTU resurrected the tactics of anti-alcohol activists from the 1830s and 1840s, who had created graphic road-to-ruin texts that pictured the abuse of women and children by men made mad by alcohol. The WCTU women didn’t pull any punches. In the chapter “Crimes Caused by Alcohol,” in Colman’s textbook for school children, a drunk father greets his overjoyed son by swinging the boy around — inadvertently hitting his temple upon the edge of a marble step, and killing him. The message was clear: drunkenness spurred violence and destroyed the ideal family, and only temperance could restore a healthy Christian family in which the man of the house protected and provided for his wife and children.
Yet, the threat that alcohol posed to the Anglo-Saxon family came from another source as well. The WCTU women argued that the “drinking classes,” which included German and Irish immigrants — and their culture, which involved social drinking in public — would do damage to the Protestant values necessary to safeguard the Anglo-Saxon family. They abhorred how German and Irish immigrants spent the Sabbath drinking despite liquor laws that shuttered public drinking establishments on Sundays. Adding to a growing nativist movement in America, the WCTU cited the intemperance of these immigrant groups as creating a culture of shiftlessness, laziness, and criminality, especially in cities like New York and Chicago.
WCTU reformers also perpetuated racist stereotypes about Black Americans, arguing that their drinking “menaced” the safety of white women and children. They made such claims despite important Black reformers, including Frederick Douglass and Frances E. W. Harper, supporting temperance (though not the WCTU’s race-baiting tactics). Black journalist and Progressive activist Ida B. Wells famously took Willard to task for circulating racist stereotypes about drunken Black men raping innocent white women in a cynical effort to garner support from Southern white women.
Despite Wells’s outrage, spreading fear of intemperate immigrants and Black drunkards threatening the white Protestant family proved successful for the WCTU. As the temperance movement peaked in popularity in the early 20th century, its racist and xenophobic ideas aligned with the growing eugenics movement. At the root of the tie between eugenics and temperance was a panic spurred by fears of “race suicide,” a term coined by sociologist Edward A. Ross in 1900.
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In this eugenicist dystopia, the Anglo-Saxon family was in danger of being outnumbered by the mentally, physically, and morally inferior offspring of “fecund” immigrant laborers who had higher birth rates than did Anglo-Saxon women according to the 1900 census. Covering the census, the New York Times lamented the “numerical loss of native citizens to the nation.”
Declining Anglo-Saxon birth rates made eugenicists obsessed with creating strong, healthy white babies. And temperance advocates claimed that alcohol posed a dire threat to this goal — one that created a new urgency to eliminate its dangers from American society.
Eugenicist physicians argued that alcohol was a “racial poison” because of its purported toxicity in the prenatal environment. Men’s drinking might ruin the white family through violence and poverty. But, according to temperance advocates, that paled in comparison to the danger posed by pregnant white women who drank. They threatened the well-being of the white babies who were essential for the persistence of the Anglo-Saxon race in American society.
Politically shrewd, organized, and savvy about how to circulate their message, the WCTU leaned on nativist and eugenic ideologies in their fight against alcohol to capitalize on the growing nativist sentiment. Their fight, the WCTU asserted, was also a fight for a pure white Anglo-Saxon family and nation.
The WCTU’s activism helped usher in the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, which banned the manufacture, sale, or transport of intoxicating beverages. It also aided in the success of the restrictive 1924 Immigration Act and the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan, which peaked in national popularity in the mid-1920s. Indeed, the WCTU members fighting the moral corruption caused by alcohol helped create the Women’s KKK. Notably, Daisy Douglas Barr both crusaded for temperance and led the Indiana Women’s KKK as its Imperial Empress, exemplifying the ties of nativism and eugenics that bound the two organizations together.
The Trump-Vance campaign has plucked the WCTU’s tools from the dustbin of history to demonize immigrants. Like the WCTU women, Trump and Vance claim to be concerned with protecting Americans from crime and economic harm that results from undocumented immigrants. Yet, the history of the temperance movement exposes the danger of these tactics. Activists and politicians can use moral language and claim to be protecting Americans to cloak a desire to impose their vision of an ideal society on their fellow citizens with a deep negative impact on all Americans.
Elizabeth Marshall is a professor at Simon Fraser University. Her most recent book is The Drinking Curriculum: A Cultural History of Childhood and Alcohol.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
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