Unconvincing Hymns of the Temperance Army -The Toast

Unconvincing Hymns of the Temperance Army

ByHannah Notess

on August 13, 2015 in Feminism

I first got sucked into the weird vortex of Temperance Hymns while checking some facts in a book about the history of the university where I work. The book mentioned that “the program in the closing day exercises of the first term featured children singing, ‘Saloons Must Go’ as they marched determinedly around the room for the benefit of the spectators.”

“Is that a real song?” I wondered. (Yes.)

It’s hard to imagine now, but the temperance movement was a hotbed of feminist and other progressive causes, especially tied to women’s rights and abolishing slavery, with lots of women leaders. Forward-looking in some ways, regressive in others, temperance crusaders had what they thought was, in many ways, the one weird trick that would cure all our societal ills. Get rid of the demon drink, and domestic abuse, poverty, corruption, and all the other sins would just go along with it.

Still, it’s hard for me not to admire their enthusiasm — particularly when I see the great lengths to which their songs go to make the case that you should only drink water for the rest of your life for the following reasons:

1. Alcoholic drinks will turn you into a demon.

2. Greek deities are putting roofies in your drink (Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, & etc.)

3. Alcohol is a pirate prince that will fill our land with … guile.

4. You live in a hovel (small notes for organ).

5. You’ll get aroused when you take the temperance pledge.

6. That’s not what we meant by aroused. Keep out of the gutter!

7. It’s just better to drink water because the “fairy people” like it.

8. An obscure, mythical German king is secretly controlling your voting habits.

9. The saloon owner’s wife has clothes from PARIS.

10. We still know how to have fun and can prove it with the length of our tralalalala-ing (can be used as a kindergarten or motion song).

11. And we can prove we are fun with a tune about some types of drinks we are not even looking at!

12. Just one more verse about the things we aren’t drinking anymore, just one each for each kind of drink.

*

All images are from Hymnary.org.

Hannah Faith Notess is managing editor of Seattle Pacific University's Response magazine and the editor of Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical, a collection of personal essays. Her first book of poetry, The Multitude, is now available from Southern Indiana Review Press.

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+161 Vote up Vote down

Frumiosa 141p · 503 weeks ago

Little did they know that you can't get rid of domestic abuse, poverty, and corruption by banning what the men are drinking, only the men themselves.

This is why I find misandrist songs so convincing.

+43 Vote up Vote down

daisymerolling 120p · 503 weeks ago

I keep putting these to the tune of the Irish Catholic hymns we sing in Mass.
Then I realized how hypocritical that is.

+46 Vote up Vote down

Ethylbenzene 119p · 503 weeks ago

I'm heading to the bar, anyone need a ride?

1 reply · active 503 weeks ago

+12 Vote up Vote down

RudyRed 124p · 503 weeks ago

I'm really wondering what the songwriters' opinions are on non-alcoholic drinks besides water. Was caffeine also verboten to them? Do I still get my coffee and tea?

4 replies · active 503 weeks ago

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cosetthetable 121p · 503 weeks ago

Toast people who enjoy these may also enjoy Rachel Maddow's Smith Commencement Address- text here, video here.-- a lot of it focuses on Carry Nation, a temperance activist:

"Carry sold these tiny pewter hatchet pins and fundraising souvenirs. You can buy them on eBay. I have one. It looks like a labrys though. It's a nice idea but different."

1 reply · active 503 weeks ago

+17 Vote up Vote down

wickedtongue · 503 weeks ago

This reminds me of the summer I spent in my undergraduate library, processing 19th century hymnbooks (many of which were written with shape notes, for the music history geeks among us). Among the many interesting things I came across (bookmarks! Declarations of love!), my favorite were the temperance hymns, which often managed to combine anti-drinking sentiments with anti-Catholic sentiments! (I was raised Catholic and went to a Baptist university, so I found them hilariously disturbing.)

Now I wish it had been the age of the iPhone. I had only my fellow student workers to share the riches with.

+36 Vote up Vote down

merrite 129p · 503 weeks ago

Temperance Week was my fav unit in the "American culture wars" class I took back in undergrad. Such organizing power! So many women entering the public sphere as they never had before! Yet such a hotbed of violent racism and anti-immigrant nativism!

+16 Vote up Vote down

Thujaplicata 105p · 503 weeks ago

In case you want to hear a temperance hymn sung, here's a really nice version of The Drunkard's Doom

1 reply · active 503 weeks ago

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irishbreakfasttime 128p · 503 weeks ago

"I am Pirate Prince of Hell / and my name is Al-co-hol"

!!!!

Pretty good halloween costume idea right there tbh.

1 reply · active 503 weeks ago

+13 Vote up Vote down

rolotomassi5 103p · 503 weeks ago

I am out of old rye right now. Looks like I'll be stopping by the store this evening. Hope I don't die!

+8 Vote up Vote down

houblonchouffe 123p · 503 weeks ago

I am trying really hard to find a specific etching from "Ten Nights in a Bar-Room (and What I Saw There)" and Google is failing me

+48 Vote up Vote down

urspostrophe 122p · 503 weeks ago

"Shun All Liquid Fire"--come ON, you absolutely cannot have a temperance song specifically about how gorgeous booze is. I'm so thirsty now.

1 reply · active 503 weeks ago

+46 Vote up Vote down

saralibrary 98p · 503 weeks ago

This was delightful! I wrote a term paper on Temperance dramas in undergrad and it was one wacky adventure. I always loved their weird insistence on everyone drinking "pure clear water" when most people living in poverty couldn't find an uncontaminated source.

1 reply · active 503 weeks ago

+28 Vote up Vote down

tragicallyludicrous 115p · 503 weeks ago

I'm fascinated by the way progressivism shifts and changes through the years - how something can be progressive in one era and the exact opposite later. Or how a movement can contain what we today would think of as completely mismatched ideals. Temperance is one of those.

+147 Vote up Vote down

queenofbithynia 137p · 503 weeks ago

I think a lot of people who find the temperance movement either obviously wrong or intrinsically hilarious haven't really thought much about what it was like to have the person with absolute legal control over you and your finances and de facto physical control over your body falling-down and/or wife-beating drunk on the regular and unable to provide your only source of income or what have you. plus it is all well and good to say that booze doesn't beat women, men beat women, but the association was very real at the time whether causative or no and banning drink was, as has been noted above, the practical if imperfect alternative to banning men. I say this as noted fan of the demon rum, sometime belligerent (though nonviolent) drunk and prohibition opponent. but it wasn't a bunch of ridiculous middle-class women (implied: with no real problems) who didn't want men to have any fun, as is frequently implied here and there. well, not here, but there. you know. there.

also, men of Yore, if you didn't want women banning liquor you shouldn't have made it a societally-enforced male-only pleasure or taverns a male-only gathering space in the first place, SHOULD YOU. quod severis metes

9 replies · active 503 weeks ago

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extrayarn 111p · 503 weeks ago

Can someone please tell me what clef that is on the top staff of the first one? My music minor is failing me. Is it marking high c? If so that's an awfully high soprano line. If middle c, then the whole thing is really low. I'd try it on the piano but heaven forbid I interrupt the child's TV show.

6 replies · active 503 weeks ago

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blueblazes11 110p · 503 weeks ago

Ken Burns' Prohibition is on the flix and well worth your time. It really gets into the tension around What the Government's Job Is and What If No One Is Right On This Issue and Why Not Indoctrinate Public School Children? Which, you know, certain modern day parallels.

1 reply · active 503 weeks ago

+42 Vote up Vote down

bluewindgirl 111p · 503 weeks ago

Wait, why would calling alcohol a "Pirate Prince" make it LESS appealing? That sounds like the title of a wildly popular movie starring someone like Tyrone Power or Errol Flynn!

+15 Vote up Vote down

Teka Lynn · 503 weeks ago

Away, away with rum, by gum!
With rum, by gum, with rum, by gum!
Away, away with rum, by gum!
That's the song of the Salvation Ar-my!

3 replies · active 503 weeks ago

+22 Vote up Vote down

thelaureno · 503 weeks ago

one of my choirs sang some Temperance hymns in college choir, just for laughs, including everyone's favorite:
THE LIPS THAT TOUCH LIQUOR SHALL NEVER TOUCH MINE

+29 Vote up Vote down

alula_auburn 106p · 503 weeks ago

I would watch the musical adventures of Bacchus, Cambrinus and the Pirate Prince.

I was always kind of partial to the super melodramatic and idealistic bits about temperance pledges when they popped up in Louisa May Alcott/LM Montgomery type books.

+3 Vote up Vote down

hdraper 0p · 503 weeks ago

#1 is to the tune of Dixie. Hurray!

+56 Vote up Vote down

innocent_smith 101p · 503 weeks ago

It's the Decemberists concept album I didn't know I needed!

1 reply · active 503 weeks ago

+6 Vote up Vote down

apple_pi 110p · 503 weeks ago

Someone create a choir I can join just to sing these. Please?

+13 Vote up Vote down

typewriterandgramophone 124p · 503 weeks ago

This post is a wonderful thing. Also, I feel Rev. A. W. Orwig was on to something with "The drink I'll use will not be ale, for even that may bring the woe, the *bitter* sorrows, wound and tear" but could have made more beer-related puns in that verse.

And a plug for my favorite bad pre-Code film, 1932's "The Wet Parade", which is a sad and serious picture about the evils of both drink and Prohibition for the first two-thirds and then throws it all away by casting Jimmy Durante as a Prohibition agent.

+7 Vote up Vote down

Glen H · 503 weeks ago

I grew up in a town with some serious alcohol issues, so I can sort of see where this movement was coming from.I wonder if the Prohibition acted like a bit of a circuit breaker on the more distructive drinking cultures in the U.S?

+8 Vote up Vote down

VioletandIrises 120p · 503 weeks ago

"That’s not what we meant by aroused. Keep out of the gutter!"

--Taken from "Things Heard on the Trump Campaign Trail"

+25 Vote up Vote down

popelizbet 109p · 503 weeks ago

I love this post not least because Terry Pratchett definitely used some of these in making up the songs for his Black Ribboner Society and now I know the tunes.

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cleoreads 105p · 503 weeks ago

I'm curently designing the website for the house museum of one of the temperance leaders and it is fascinating! I'm doing the design, not the research but just going through images from the archives for graphics is fascinating - such a interesting mix of issues and attitudes - some hilarious and some still really relevant.

+8 Vote up Vote down

geeksgrimoire 85p · 502 weeks ago

I have such a love/hate relationship with the temperance movement. Love their flair and love (most of) the underlying reasons for their anti-alcohol stance. Hate their blatant classism, the focus on the drinking itself rather than the causes for (excessive) drinking.

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