In response to the posting about nativism in temperance literature, I was
similarly surprised when researching temperance fiction of the 1830s-1850s to
find very little nativist sentiment expressed in the novels, stories, and plays
I looked at.  Scholars have documented how temperance reformers formed strategic
political alliances with nativist and Know-Nothing parties (see, e.g.
Dannenbaum's study of Cincinnati, _Drink and Disorder_), and certainly many of
the temperance reformers' central obsessions, both before and after the Civil
War, led them to selectively target immigrant working-class institutions (the
Anti-Saloon League is a typical example), but the picture you find in temperance
fiction is mostly of middle-class Anglo families and their drunken
fathers/husbands/sons.
 
I suspect this is largely because early temperance writers looked to the obvious
literary models at hand, the domestic novel and the sentimental tale, and then
themselves set the contours of the genre for most later temperance authors.  I
think it also has to do with the way temperance fiction functioned as an
internal educative discourse for the middle-class, what Foucault would call a
"discursive orthopedics" designed to keep the middle-class temperance faithful
on the straight and narrow.
 
I can, however, think of a few exceptions.  A good novel to check out in the
1890s period is George Kohler's _Nick Putzel; Or, Arthur Gurney's Ruin_.  This
novel bills itself as an expos  of "the resistless power of the Bar-Room and
Beer-Saloon, that great invisible power behind the political throne," and it
fairly reeks with nativist disgust for the immigrant scum who are secretly
controlling the big city's Democratic politics through Nick Putzel's saloon.
It's worth reading just for the lovingly detailed attempts to reproduce the
sounds of the immigrants' un-American English.  Interestingly enough, the second
half of the novel drops the nativist expos  and becomes just another sentimental
temperance novel about the middle-class Anglo hero, a striking example of the
gravitational pull of literary genres.
 
In the pre-Civil War period, I can only think of Solon Robinson's series of
urban sketches (in the Foster and Lippard mode) called _Hot Corn_.  Toward the
end there's some stuff about the superstitious ignorance of a Catholic ghetto,
but it's tempered by Robinson's genuine outrage at their exploited position in
society.  In the second half of T.S. Arthur's _Ten Nights in a Bar-Room_ there's
a passing reference to a couple of "greasy Irish serving-maids" in Simon Slade's
tavern, which is supposed to demonstrate that the establishment is going to the
dogs.  That's about it as far as I know.
 
I'd be interested in anyone else's take on this apparent disjunction between the
political rhetoric and the literary mythology of the temperance movement.  I
think there may be a similar disjunction between the cultural mythology of Nancy
Reagan's "Just Say No!" campaign and the actual institutional drug policies of
the Reagan administration.
 
 
 
David Hall
Program in American Studies
University of Minnesota
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