In my opinion, it is a mistake to visualize the alcohol debate in the  
late 19th and early 20th centuries as one between prohibitionists and  
drinkers.  The definition of the alcohol problem and remedies for it  
varied enormously, but in many countries much of the political class  
agreed that there was an alcohol problem.  This underlying consensus  
made state prohibition and other restrictions on the sale of  
alcoholic drink possible.


On Dec 23, 2006, at 11:14 PM, Robin G W Room wrote:

> Carolyn and David --
>    There was prohibition also in Finland, Iceland, Norway, Canada.   
> Briefly at
> the national level in Canada, and modified shortly after adoption  
> in Icleand
> and Norway -- the Spanish and Portuguese threatened to embargo  
> their fish if
> they cut off the port etc. market.  Sweden came close, voting  
> 49%-51% agaiunst
> national prohibition in 1922.
>    But the high-water mark of prohibitionism was these years  
> immediately after
> WWI.
>    Meanwhile, the cultural politics of alcohol varied with where  
> you were.
> Temperance had been a leftish or at least progressive impulse in  
> most English-
> speaking countries before WWI and in Russia, and long remained so  
> in Nordic
> countries.  In the US, by the time of national prohibition the  
> impulse had
> already well embarked on its long march to the right and to  
> identification with
> the racist side of the South (cf. Hofstadter's characterization, as  
> quoted by
> Gusfield).  In France, drinking had become established as a leftist  
> personal
> challenge to the authoritarian state ever since the MacMahon regime  
> of the
> 1870s, a link that was not broken until Mendes-France's famous  
> glass of milk in
> 1954(?).  Fascist strong-nation ideologies in the interwar period  
> often
> favoured temperance -- both Hitler and Mussolini were abstinence- 
> inclined,
> although neither of them did much politically about it.
>    In the British Empire, alcohol was a convenient stick to beat the
> colonialists with, since it was an important source of revenue to  
> finance the
> imperial regime, and the British authorities often had a bad  
> conscience about
> it.  Gandhi's call for prohibition owed as much to the tactical  
> value of
> cutting off the regime's revenue source as to his genuine beliefs  
> that India
> would be better off without alcohol.
>    Robin
>
>
> On 2006-12-24, at 04:13, David Fahey wrote:
>> In the early 1920s both the USA and the Soviets had forms of state
>> prohibition while Gandhi called for prohibition in India.  A few of
>> the leaders in Mexico's revolutionary government favored prohibition
>> too.  In other countries less drastic restrictions on the sale of
>> alcohol became law or at least were discussed.
>>
>> On Dec 23, 2006, at 8:54 PM, Robin G W Room wrote:
>>
>>> Carolyn --
>>>    It sounds like a good paper to me.
>>>    It was the period when alcohol and drugs were being pushed apart
>>> again
>>> conceptually.  See David Courtwright's "Mr. ATOD's wild ride",
>>> http://historyofalcoholanddrugs.typepad.com/ 
>>> SHADv20n1xCourtwright.pdf
>>>    Since you are in Geneva ...
>>>    You might think of doing something about what the League of
>>> Nations did
>>> about alcohol in Africa. The Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye
>>> committed the
>>> signatories further to a ban on selling spirits to indigenous
>>> people in much of
>>> Africa, first adopted under the Brussles General Act of 1889.  To
>>> my knowledge
>>> no historian has ever looked at this beyond the work Lynn Pan did
>>> for her
>>> little monograph on Alcohol in Colonial Africa and a chapter in
>>> Bruun, Rexed &
>>> Pan, The Gentlemen's Club.  Yet there would have been actions for
>>> the League to
>>> supervise, at least in the newly mandated territories, and perhaps
>>> they looked
>>> beyond them, too.  There must be stuff in the League of Nsations
>>> archives about
>>> this.  (Justin Willis, in his book on alcohol in East Africa, notes
>>> that the
>>> British colonial authorities wree still worrying about complying
>>> with the anti-
>>> spirits treaties in the 1950s.)
>>>    Another resource not far from you is the International Council
>>> on Alcohol &
>>> Addictions, which has its office in Lausanne. ([log in to unmask];
>>> Rupert
>>> Schildboeck)  ICAA was the secretariat of the old temperance
>>> congresses.
>>> However, I believe all their library has now gone to a German
>>> library, and I'm
>>> not sure what the situation is on archives.
>>>      Robin
>>>
>>> On 2006-12-23, at 16:12, David Fahey wrote:
>>>> With the permission of Carolyn N Biltoft, I post a query originally
>>>> sent to me.
>>>>
>>>> The title of my paper is "Conspicuous Abstention: alcohol in the
>>>> inter-war global economy."   Essentially my thesis is that as  
>>>> much as
>>>> the inter-war period is often defined as a moment in which the
>>>> tendency towards "conspicuous consumption" crystallizes on a mass
>>>> scale, we might understand the movements to limit, prohibit, or
>>>> "abstain" from the consumption of alcohol equally as as a
>>>> political/cultural symbol as well as an economic strategy in the
>>>> inter-war world order. I mostly work from published sources now,
>>>> but i
>>>> am in Geneva Switzerland on a Gallatin Fellowship and in  
>>>> addition to
>>>> doing my dissertation research [on a different topic] in the
>>>> League of
>>>> Nations Archives, I am also taking notes on anything related to
>>>> international economic conferences, anti-alcohol campaigns, and
>>>> liquor
>>>> traffic more generally.  So my questions are A.) do you think  
>>>> this is
>>>> a viable article and B.) do you know of any other archival sources
>>>> which i must look at...for instance do you know where the papers of
>>>> the world prohibition federation etc. are located?   I hope you  
>>>> don't
>>>> mind me asking you!  I so admire your work and your wisdom on H- 
>>>> world
>>>> more generally.  I would be so greatful for any advice/insight you
>>>> could give me. Thank you.
>>>>
>>>> Carolyn N. Biltoft
>>>> <[log in to unmask]>