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.
Tags: drinking, feminism, hannah notess, history, humor, music
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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.
I keep putting these to the tune of the Irish Catholic hymns we sing in Mass.
Then I realized how hypocritical that is.
I’m heading to the bar, anyone need a ride?
Shotgun!
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?
Uncle Alec in Eight Cousins threw Rose’s cup of coffee out the window!
Is it me, or does every good character in a Louisa May Alcott book seem to hate fun?
(Meg is SIXTEEN, y’all. Let her air the tits and have a good time. And Bhaer, SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT PULP SERIALS GOD HATE.)
I’m still bitter about Rose giving up her earrings in Eight Cousins. Genuinely bitter.
I thought it might be a metaphor for Jesus, the “Living Water.”
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.”
There’s a brilliant Karen Joy Fowler short story about zombie Carry Nation in her collection Black Glass.
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.
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!
In case you want to hear a temperance hymn sung, here’s a really nice version of The Drunkard’s Doom
nothing like some soulful temperance activists. 😛
“I am Pirate Prince of Hell / and my name is Al-co-hol”
!!!!
Pretty good halloween costume idea right there tbh.
I know! That one may have turned out to have unexpected appeal.
I am out of old rye right now. Looks like I’ll be stopping by the store this evening. Hope I don’t die!
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
“Shun All Liquid Fire”–come ON, you absolutely cannot have a temperance song specifically about how gorgeous booze is. I’m so thirsty now.
Right?! These are also full of great names for bars or drinks.
“Bye hon, I’m going to the Adder’s Sting for a pint.”
“What’ll it be, buddy?” “The Fatal Sip, on the rocks, please.”
“Liquid Twinkle: The beer that cheers you with hearty huz-zas!”
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.
The Temperance Unions were aware of this problem and they constructed “temperance fountains” across the country to provide drinking water. Here’s a bit about the push to create drinking fountains -http://www.wctu.org/fountains.html and here is an article on two famous fountains in New York City- http://thevillager.com/2012/09/20/history-lessons….
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.
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
High five! You beat me to an explanation of the social context of the temperance movement!
But yeah, really REALLY sucks to imagine your HR rep spending your paycheck at the bar and then beating you when you bring up you kinda wanted food.
I’ve seen statistics that say that the average American in the 19th century was drinking well over 7 gallons of liquor a year, and most of that was hard liquor like rum or whiskey. It was a fairly established tradition that instead of a tea/coffee break, they would have a liquor break (usually whiskey) at 11am and at 4pm, children included. And there was no real regulation on the content or production of alcohol, so that was often far more corrosive stuff than today’s liquor. By comparison, the average American drinks about 2.5 gallons a year today.
Yep. The role of liquor in the early Republic can’t be overstated: much of the early slave trade was centered around the so-called triangle trade, the end product of which was rum (created from the sugar which was grown by the slaves); many of the early American farmers turned their crops into whiskey, which led to the first protest against the American government, the Whiskey Rebellion; etc.
Having worked in places where it’s not uncommon for workers to operate heavy machinery while drunk, and having seen how dangerous that is even with modern safety measures, I can 100% see where they’d reasonably get the idea that alcohol kills people.
This might be a dumb question but were people just as affected by alcohol then as now? Was everyone just drunk all the time?
All the drinking probably did built up a tolerance to alcohol so it may have taken more to get them drunk; but one visitor to the US described everyone as being “seasoned” to a certain degree, in other words, mildly to moderately buzzed all the time. But while such moderate drinking was the norm, excessive drinking to the point of being obviously and overtly drunk was still frowned upon.
Exactly what I came to say. Plenty of husbands would drink away their pay and their wives could legally do nothing about it. Prohibition makes much more sense in context.
Also now I’m thirsty!
# 9 also makes good points about the rich profiting off the misery of the poor, while deliberately encouraging them to get addicted to a substance that will perpetuate that misery.
THANK YOU. Every time someone brings up prohibition as an example of our extreme stupidity, it makes me angry. Carry Nation is so often talked about as a hysterical, raving woman. Instead of a victim of domestic violence who was willing to radically put her body on the line to save other women from domestic abuse. Look, I like my bourbon, but that is some bad ass feminism right there.
Not to mention, I think there’s such a real love of people there. It places alcoholics as victims of alcohol, or wealthy saloon owners. (Yeah, I recognize the condescension there, which is problematic.) There’s something in that which is recognizable to loved ones of addicts. Seeing an addict as beautiful and capable of so much, but having some of that stolen by addiction. We know that just smashing their bottles won’t cure an alcoholic now. But I imagine most everyone in the world has wanted to go into the liquor cabinet of someone they love and just get rid of all the alcohol, because it’s heart breaking to watch someone partake in something that is harming them.
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.
I’ve been trying to figure that out! The key signatures are on the correct lines for treble clef, but that doesn’t look like any treble clef I’ve ever seen.
I think it’s just a weird/alternate treble clef– all the sharps are in the right place & the little square is right on the C5 space
I’ve never seen that particular notation before, but I wonder if it’s an earlier version of an alto clef? If so, the middle line would be middle C.
It’s a movable clef. The open rhombus is C. You can put it anywhere in the staff and in this case it’s the same as treble.
It’s a clef invented for tenor choral singers during the 19th century, because amateur singers couldn’t be expected read C-clefs (but could read treble clef and sing an octave down). It tells you to read treble clef, but an octave down. The clef itself is a version of a C-clef, but normally a C clef (or any other clef– G clef or F clef) can only be placed on a line. It’s more common now to write a treble clef with an 8 hanging below it; or else just use a treble clef when it’s clear from context (4-part choral music tenor part) that the line is to be sung an octave down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clef#Octave_clefs
So is this 4-part men’s, then? Fascinating.
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.
Deborah Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook is really good too on the push-pull response of the government purposefully making all alcohol-containing products 1000x more lethal if people tried to distill them or just straight up drank them, and the coroner of New York was like, please look at the 1000s of people in my morgue and accept that some part of this brilliant plan is not working.
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!
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!
My mother sings this song sometimes- but as the “song of the Temperance Union”. Right now she can’t remember who taught her but I’ve always assumed it came down somehow from her father’s family who were those hated German brewers and saloon owners.
I learned it a “the song of the Temperance Union,” too, and that verse being about cookies (never had yeast cookies, but that’s neither here nor there.”
“We never eat fruitcake, because it has rum
and one little bite turns a man to a bum.
Can you imagine a sorrier sight
than a man eating fruitcake until he get’s tight?”
Google it, there are a LOT more verses. It’s a parody of temperance arguments. At least I hope it is.
I always heard “the song of the temperance Un-ion”
We never eat fruitcake because it has yeast. And one little bite turns a man to a beast. Can you imagine the sorry dis-grace…..
Of a man in the gutter with crumbs on his face!!!
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
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.
#1 is to the tune of Dixie. Hurray!
It’s the Decemberists concept album I didn’t know I needed!
Oh god, yes. They need to record all of these, especially the Pirate Prince one.
Someone create a choir I can join just to sing these. Please?
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.
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?
“That’s not what we meant by aroused. Keep out of the gutter!”
–Taken from “Things Heard on the Trump Campaign Trail”
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.
So true, I love the badass social justice warrior undertones. And of course they were dismissed as "shrill" &etc &etc.
In a way I feel disappointed for them that it didn't work out the way they hoped it would, even though I'm glad prohibition didn't stick around…
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.
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.
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.
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.