families. we talked about where women feel they have an obligation to keep virtue to their children. well, it's pretty hard to teach virtue in a household with a primary male example.

so women would say, our responsibilities as republican mothers means that we ought to be heard in the political spear on issues that affect our household. and the number one negative issue affecting our households is a high level of alcohol consumption. there are really kind of two strands of culture which are coming together. you could say three strarngsdz one is this idea of republican motherhood. another strand is evangelical religion. the united states is primarily a protestant country at that time and the most dominant form of the protestant faith was evangelical. and evangelical churches during this period of time from 1,800 essentially to 1850, are increasingly coming to the

belief that drinking any alcohol is a sin. it leads people to other sins and so if you are to perfect your moral behavior, then the convert to your faith must stop drinkening. now, earlier in the colonial period, churches had tried to reduce drinking a little bit but they hasn't really pushed on it. now you get churches pushing very hard, especially in the period after 1830. so you got republican motherhood is one strand of influence, we've got evangelical churches as another strand and the third is industrial capitalism. and we talked about how employers were in a more competitive marketplace, they wanted more productivity from their workers, they didn't want to be spending their own money buying drimplnks for their work when that is just complicateing and reducing productivity. yes. >> would you say that this heavy

alcohol consumption dopene deepened the divide between the public spear? >> well, it's deepened it that women are feeling the public is there, particularly the militia monsters or an elections is causing a problem for them in their households. so they say if we're going to protect our spear, this domestic spear, we need to have a whole lot less drinking in the public spear. now if they succeed in this temperance movement and the public fear becomes one that's much more temper ate, then the argument is that the domestic spear and the public spear will be in more harmony than they are when you have this high level of drinking, both public and private. yes. >> [ inaudible question ] if it goes against the rest of them

because they would promote things like protests among the workers? >> well, it might. but workers like to have their jobs. and this is a time in which the union movement was very weak. so not all employers can get away with this. but most employers can get away with it. because there are even where people are unionized, there are other issues that are more important to them. such as having better pay. so sometimes employers are improving pay a little bit at the same time that they're taking away the provision of this alcohol in the work place. now, i say sometime. often the employer is just taking away the alcohol provision and not improving the pay, but workers have to take it because they're not unionized. this is a time in the country when the government, state and national, do not recognize unions. that's a development of the 20th

s century okay. so the work place is changing. i got to remind you, most american state farmers and a lot of farmers are still providing alcohol. so it's not so much it's a work place is changing for farmers, it's that a lot of farmers are becoming evangelical contradictions and they want to reduce alcohol consumption because it's in their conviction the moral thing to do. some employers are not only eliminating the alcohol they provide in the work place, they're also telling their workers, don't you bring your own flavg in here, no more drinking on the job. some employers go eastern farther where they can get away wit. they say, if you want to keep your job here, i'd like to you go to the local evangelical church and i'd like you to take a pledge of temperance and

preferably one of abstinence, now this means of alcohol. now, a lot of workers would just say no way, but workers who are concerned about keeping their jobs might say okay i'll see you in church on sunday. so this is developing a tension. not all workers want to go along with what their employers want them to do in terms of changing their behavior, not simply in the work place but also on their leisure time. some workers go along with it him some don't. it also becomes a class divide. now which social class do you think is going to be pushing hardest for temperance? well, yeah, the people who will be owning these workshops or owning farms, so what class did we call that, middle class and

wealthier people would be pushing for temperance and the people most resistant to it would be the people who feel they most need alcohol to cope with their harder lives. and that would be more working people. now again, i'm just talking about a general pattern. you will find plenty of working men who join temperance groups because they wanted to get better control of their lives. i don't want you to go away from this thinking that all workers just wanted to get drunk. that's not true. there were many workers who cared about temperance but the people who cared most deeply about temperance were middle class people. any questions so far? now, there's also, so i talked about, there is something of a gender divide, women care very deeply about temperance, most resistance will be male. it's a class divide, much stronger among middle class people than among working class

people. there is also an ethnic divide. people who are already born in the united states were more prone to embrace the temperance movement than were immigrants. and immigrants often felt that this was a form of cultural warfare. it's also a religious divide. many of the immigrants to america were catholics and they didn't quite see the same problem with alcohol that protestants were identifying. and they get that attempts to reduce their alcohol consumption was a way of attacking their ethnicity and their faith. so if you wanted to find the setting where you would find probably the greatest commitment to preserving traditional customs of drinking, it would be a neighborhood that would have a large number of immigrants, relatively poor, often catholic.

and they would just say it's none of your business what we do on our own time, leave us alone. there becomes a political divide. by the 1830s and the old federalist gone. the old jeffersonian republicans have evolved. what are the names of the parties we find in the 1830s and 1840s. the democrats and the whigs. now, the whigs drew very heavily upon those social groups that favored temperance. so the whig party made a commitment to pushing temperance because the whig party was strong in the northeast. strong among business owners. strong among evangelical christians. although women couldn't vote. if they could vote, they would have voted overwhelmingly in the

northeast for the whigs. the democratic party on the other hand draws support from those groups that tend to be most skeptical about temperance. immigrants, working class americans, more rural americans. so there's something of a cultural divide that's emerging in the country that has political consequences. now the temperance movement does start to have an impact during the 1830s and 1840s. initially, it's in the form of what we call moral swasion. that's like persuasion. now for example, if you're watching television, you will see ads where there are warnings against the consequences of drunk driving. now there's certainly laws against drunk driving but there's also a publicity campaign that's mounted by

social groups and by the government to try to persuade people to change their behavior. similar efforts to try to persuade people today to stop smoking cigarettes. that's what we call moral swasion. an attempt to persuade people to make the choice themselves to change their behavior. temperance initially focused on moral swation and achieved some gains. it essentially became disrespectable to be a middle class person and to be a heavy drinker. middle class people start to police themselves. they don't like to associate with people who are heavy drinkers. it starts to dissipate in the middle class particularly in the northeast and midwest. it persists in the working class where working class people are reinforcing more traditional behavior.

temperance groups are finding that there's kind of a cap to how far they can go in achieving the reduction of drinking if they just rely on moral swasion. so the alternative is to get localities and states to pass laws that would forbid the sale, the consumption, the production of alcohol. now, you're thinking about the famous prohibition law that congress passed in the 1920s. we're talking about an earlier period when it is not a federal issue. it's a state issue. there are a number of states now that take up this question of should they ban the production, the sale, and the consumption of alcohol? the first state to do this is the state of maine in 1851.

so this first attempt at prohibition in the country was done at the state level. the very first state to try it was maine. now maine is a northeastern state. had a lot of evangelicals. had a lot of middle class entrepreneurs. it was very strong for the whig party. so it's an ideal place to try this for the first time. during the next four years, another 12 states will adopt their own version of the maine law. all of the states were in the north. all of the new england states adopted such laws. new york adopted it and about half of the states in the midwest adopted it. did any southern states adopt such a law? no. so we're seeing that the country is dividing over the issue of

temperance and particularly over the attempt to use political prohibition to force people to change their behavior. >> i have a question. >> go ahead. >> why does the southern part of the united states not go -- not pass prohibition laws? >> this is a very good question. can anybody think of reasons why the south might be particularly reluctant to jump on board with this northern phenomena. yes. >> with the examples of a factory there's not as many in the south. >> there's not as many factories. we talked about industrial capitalism being one of the three sources. that source is particularly weak in the south. >> people in the south work outside. >> they are working outside. it's a very rural part of the country. yes. >> the town hall meetings -- >> okay. it's harder to organize social

groups in the south because the population is so dispeursed yes. >> you don't give alcohol to the slaves. >> so it's all for themselves. so they think of it as an important right of being a free person is to drink all you want. do they want outsiders telling them not to? no. there's also a developing suspicion about the north and any kind of social movement that develops there. it's perceived to be some sort of dangerous fad and that northerners shouldn't be telling southerners what to do so part of it is just trying to defend traditions in the south because they don't want to do anything that's new and comes from the north. traditions of drinking suits their way of living just fine. now that's not to say there weren't southerners who favored temperance. there were. but there weren't enough of them

to pass any laws. in general, southerners do not like an activist government. they don't like governments passing laws making people change their behavior. they just don't like it. they don't like it when their own states do it. they especially don't like it if any outside government tries to do it. now, why do you suppose southerners are so sensitive about an activist government? what kind of activity by a government, that would be especially concerning to them. yes. >> the emancipation of slaves. >> the slaves. they don't want governments to get it into their head that they can do things like mess with people's property. now, messing with tavern keeper's property or distillers

property is not as bad as messing with slavery because so much was invested in that. it's a slippery slope. if a government thinks it has the right to shut down distilleries or shut down taverns, what's to stop them from shutting down slavery? so just to be on the safe side, southerners, meaning white southerners like to say the government that governs best is the government that governs least. so they didn't like what they were seeing in the north. these northerners using state governments to try to change people's behavior. question. >> weren't they also still mad over the protective tariffs and how they had to -- >> they are. who is it that's pushing the protective tariffs. the whigs. the same people pushing temperance. so they just don't trust the messengers who are the whigs.

with live coverage of the house on c-span e. c-span 2 on c-span 3 we compliment that coverage by showing the recent congressional hearings and public apairs events. on the weekends c-span is home to american history with programs that tell our nation's story. civil war's 150th anniversary. visiting battlefields, american artifact, tours museums and historic sites. history book shelf with the best known american history write eshs. the presidency looking at policies and legacies much our commander-in-chief. our new series, real america featuring archival government and films from the 1930s through the '70s. c-span 3 created by the cable tv try and funded by your local cable or satellite provider.

while congress is on break we're showing you some of the programs normally seen each weekend on american history tv here on c-span 3. coming up, holocaust survivor marcell drimer on his efforts to stay together in nazi occupied pop land during world war ii. then voyage of the st. louis. they were denied entrance into the u.s. and scott miller talked about what happened when they returned to europe. that's fold by history prove sore jonathan ray on what it took for jews to assimilate in u.s. culture during the progressive era. here's some of the highlights for this weekend. friday at 8:00 p.m. eastern a history tour looking at the civil war. saturday at 6:30 p.m. eastern the communicators visit a technology fair on capitol hill. sunday on q and a political commentator, author and