Speakeasies, rum runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink are just one small part of the global story of prohibition. The full story of prohibition—one you’ve probably never been told—is perhaps one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. The call for temperance motivated and aligned activists within progressive, social justice, labor rights, women’s rights, and indigenous rights movements advocating for communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory “liquor machine” that had become rich off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world.
From the slums of South Asia, to the beerhalls of Central Europe, to the Native American reservations of the United States, discover 20 key figures from history that you didn’t know were prohibitionists.
Frederick Douglass
Full name: Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey
Lived: c. February 1817-20 February 1895
Nationality: United States
Occupation: abolitionist orator, author, activist
Born into slavery in Maryland, Frederick Douglass became the foremost abolitionist, women’s rights, and temperance activist of the nineteenth century. Following the 1845 publication of his bestselling Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, he fled to Britain, where he delivered speeches on the twin evils of slavery and the liquor traffic, both of which were antithetical to human equality by subordinating one person to another for profit. “I am a temperance man because I am an anti-slavery man,” he told the British, “and I am an anti-slavery man because I love my fellow men.” Following the passing of state-level “Maine Law” prohibition in 1851, Douglass vowed “to go the whole length for prohibition” as necessary to ensure that the chains of black bondage weren’t simply handed from the white slaveowner to the white saloonkeeper.
Recent Comments
There are currently no comments.