Temperance
Wisconsin Citizen Petition Exhibit
Long before Wisconsin became America's Dairyland, Wisconsin was a brewing state. Brewing began in Wisconsin in the 1830s, and by the 1890s, nearly every community had at least one operating brewery. However, the brewing industry faced a longstanding opponent in the temperance movement.
Many of Wisconsin's first white settlers came from Protestant New England, which was a stronghold of temperance. Temperance societies quickly formed around the territory as the population swelled, and even Milwaukee, the center of Wisconsin brewing, had one (the Sons of Temperance Grand Division) by 1848. From 1839 on, widely-circulated petitions to modify territorial liquor laws joined those of citizens concerned with infrastructure, immigration, and personal life.
Petition of the Walworth County Temperance Society
Petition of the Walworth County Temperance Society for requesting a tax on the distilling of alcohol
Temperance activists demanded the adoption of rigorous liquor license laws, praising the laws passed by several other states totally prohibiting sale and consumption of alcohol. Petitioners emphasized alcohol's negative effects on people's health, personalities and family lives, and strove to promote temperance with bills regulating civil conduct. Attempts were made to prevent public officials from using intoxicating drinks while in office and even attempts to prevent those who sold liquor from service as a Justice of the Peace.
Procession of children and adults at the second convention of the Wisconsin Loyal Temperance League
View the original source document: WHI 56326
Many of the pro-temperance petitions were penned and signed exclusively by women. Though the temperance movement primarily strove to curtail the distribution and consumption of alcoholic beverages, temperance was tied in with both religious renewal and progressive politics— particularly white women’s suffrage. Furthermore, Wisconsin women’s wide-ranging experiences as temperance activists further honed the community organizing skills that fueled the suffrage movement of the twentieth century. The Women's Christian Temperance Union was active in Wisconsin, working of course for temprance, but also to prohibit the sale of tobacco to minors.
The fight over liquor laws continued through the century. Although the state of Wisconsin would not legalizing total prohibition, an 1849 law made tavern owners responsible for any costs associated with supporting drunkards. Wisconsin's German population bitterly opposed the law, arguing that it undermined individual responsibility and imposed too harsh a penalty on tavern owners. In 1851, the Legislature replaced the law with a milder version.
Temperance represented something far more complicated in Wisconsin than a simple battle between those who drank and those who did not. German immigrants often remained strongly attached to their historical and cultural roots, frequently taking uniform stands on political and social issues such as alcohol and German-language education in schools, and resisting efforts at assimilation. One German language petition supported repealing all restrictive intoxicating liquor laws. Moreover, saloons were increasingly seen as urban institutions and came under attack by rural people who sought to resist the problems associated with them.
German language temperance petition
Petitioners request to repeal all the restrictive "spiritous liquor" laws, including the blue laws and the Maine liquor law.
Temperance, therefore, became symbolic of battles between Yankees and Germans, urban and rural residents, and teetotaling Protestants and seemingly more broad-minded Catholics. All of these forces grew in intensity, particularly during World War I when anti-German sentiment was especially strong, and contributed to the passage of national prohibition, the Volsted Act, in 1919. In 1929, voters repealed Wisconsin's prohibition enforcement law, the Severson Act. Pledging loyalty to the "will of the people" as expressed in these referendums on alcohol, Wisconsin Senator John J. Blaine proposed a constitutional amendment for the repeal of prohibition. The U.S. Senate modified Blaine's resolution to satisfy anti-prohibitionists and passed the measure without delay. On December 5, 1933, the Twenty-first Amendment was ratified and national prohibition ended.