David Fahey's question is most interesting; it is one which has puzzled me for a few years now. What we have in the colonial era is rational communal and familial commitments along with high levels of alcohol consumption. By the mid 19th century, consumption levels had in fact dropped, and reform movements organized to give us prohibition in the twelve states and two Canadian provinces. There were a few crucial factors, I believe, in the mid nineteenth century which helped to transform alcohol into the source of irrationality in society as understood by certain Anglo Protestants. First, there is an ethnic component here. The Irish had emigrated to all of the New England states, New York, and the two Canadian provinces where alcohol was prohibited. It was the Irish's public consumption of alcohol--their comraderie and preference for going out in groups--that brought the charge of disorderliness or irrationality. Alcohol consumption remained a part of English Americans' lives, but in the private respectable context. Thus we have the conflation of the Irish and irresponsible drinking and the beginning, it seems to me, of a long history of associating drugs with unwanted foreigners. Second, as cities and villages became new sites for textile and other types of early industrial labor, a new spatial dynamic was witnessed near the central parts of cities. The new entrepreneurial elite lived in this central area and their firms were located along the rivers and waterways. The jobs to which the Irish and many working class English gravitatedwere there, close to the elite residences, and close to the emerging central business district. Any public disruption of these two preferred sites could be understood as not going along with what city fathers had chosen for the future of the city. The workers, of course, settled where they could near their jobs. It was family-oriented immigrants like the Germans in Detroit and French-Canadians in many New England cities who found some favor among the English for centering their lives on family and church-- unlike the Irish. Finally, in this early industrial period, we have the beginnings of the increased regimentation which would later dominate society and, according to Roger Lane, contribute to the increasing orderliness of society by 1900, but without much regimentation yet in the nature of work. In other words, workers lives were not yet regimented. They were still essentially operating in a pre-industrial mode by lifting logs, hammering railroad ties, and such. The work was physical and tedious--factors which supposedly existed on farms and among porters in colonial society and justified drinking on the job. In this situation of emerging entrepreneurial elites, trying to make their cities beautiful and wholesome, the continuation of preindustrial work habits were perhaps unacceptable, particularly when equated with the loathsome Irish. These factors, I think--the ethnic, spatial, and nature-of-work aspects--help us to understand why the rationality of drinking became redefined for those trying to industrialize America. In some ways, of course, the public-private distinction had been around in colonial society as well, and there was continuity in what constituted proper drinking. But these underlying social factors are very important. Thanks for the question. Mike Martin Temple University, History