THE NEW TEMPERANCE: THE AMERICAN OBSESSION WITH SIN AND VICE

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© 1997 David Wagner. All rights reserved.

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Published by Gotham Books (date published Sep 1, 2021)

ISBN: 978-1-956349-02-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-956349-03-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021917712

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To the millions of Americans in jail, prison, or under correctional surveillance, a large number of them victims of the bipartisan war on drugs

Contents

Acknowledgments

1 The New Temperance

The Coercive Consensus

Defining the New Temperance

Questioning the Behavior Wars

Organization of the Book

2 Déjà Vu All Over Again

Remembering When

Declaring Temperance Dead

Back to the Past: The Old Temperance Movements

The Old Substance Wars

The Old Sex, Censorship, and Health Wars

Censorship Wars: The Vice Societies

Sex Wars: The Social Purity Movement

Sex and Health Wars: The Social Hygiene Movement

Themes: Hyperbole, Social Control, Class, and Political Power

3 Temperance and the Social Construction of Risk

Constructing Social Problems

Limitations of Social Constructionism

Medicalization and Moral Panics

Toward a Theory of Temperance

The Tendency for Political and Social Elites to Support Temperance

The Tendency Toward a Populist Temperance

Historical Change

4 The Slippery Slope, or Scaring Them Straight

Dry Logic

Blurring Boundaries: Drugs, Fear, and Trembling

False Concreteness: The Smoking Death

Reversing Cause and Effect? The Teen Pregnancy Problem

Science as Morality: The Multiple-Partner Risk

The Judgmental Dupe: For They Know Not What They Do

5 Gretting Lean and Mean: The Middle-Class Return to Respectability

The Dilemmas of Being Middle Class

The Achievement of Respectability in America: 1830-1920

The Partial Democratization of Deviance: 1920s-1960s

The Radical Attack on Respectability: 1960s-1970s

The New Temperance and Economic Decline: 1970s-1990s

The New Middle-Class Imperatives

Social Class, Behavioral Norms, and Temperance

6 Manufacturing Consensus: The Politics of Puritanism

American Electoral Conservatism and the Politics of Puritanism

The Personal Is Political

Sin and the Republican Strategy

The Left and Puritanism

The Construction of Anti-Corporate Healthism

Sex, Violence, and Feminism

De-Sexualizing the Gay Movement

Convergence in the Politics of Danger

7 From Loyalty Oaths to Urine Tests

Demonizing the 1960s

The Limits of the Totally Administered Society

Notes

About the Author

Index

Acknowledgments

Writing affords me the chance to reflect on continuities and changes over the course of my life. Although I alone must accept any blame for this work, I would like to thank some people who have been crucial to me in the writing process.

The first continuity is the aid of Marcia B. Cohen of the University of New England, my wife and colleague. Although this is my first book in which she is not actually a direct participant in the events of the text, the book bears her influence as my first reader and editor. Moreover, she continues to be a strong source of support at a time when having radical ideas is not very common or easy to maintain.

A second continuity for me is the wonderful staff of Westview Press. Dean Birkenkamp was my editor for my last book, Checkerboard Square, and steered this project through its early and middle stages. I was sorry to lose him as an editor last year, but Jill Rothenberg has done an exceptional job at bringing this project to fruition. Melanie Stafford, the project editor, has done a great job of putting together the book and Christine Arden, the copy editor, also did excellent work.

A third continuity for me is the environment of the University of Southern Maine, where I teach. The university not only helped me complete this book by providing a sabbatical leave but also provides a tolerant and open atmosphere in which to be a faculty member. This is something to appreciate because environment so shapes our ability to think and raise critical questions.

There are four people I would like to thank whose aid was invaluable to me, who I either did not know when I started this project or did not know how important they would be. First, Jenn MacAuley, a former student at my university, did a great job as research assistant, not only checking facts and getting library material but positively enjoying the process of thinking about and talking about social issues. Two Swedish colleagues, Thomas Knoll of Halmstad University and Ingrid Sahlin of Lunds University, thoroughly read several drafts of this manuscript and provided a wonderful cross-cultural viewpoint. Although this book focuses primarily on the United States, it has benefited greatly from their comments and views. Dennis Must, my brother-in-law and partner in crime in the new literary journal for poor and other disenfranchised people, Flying Horse, has not only been an important reader but a great source of support about the actual process of writing. Although we have known each other for years, our recent collaboration has come as a strong positive surprise that has influenced my thinking and writing.

Finally, since this book is about controversial subjects-the repression of pleasure in America and the constant mantra of danger-! feel I should say a word or two about the text. I find that having an author’s personal likes and dislikes, memories and wishes, sins and virtues cast throughout a text is boring and annoying. So, for the most part, I have not discussed my own habits or vices. (Of course, those who are friends either know them or are welcome to ask me.) Moreover, I find contemporary Americans’ obsession with the personal to be a sort of Catch 22: If one pleads guilty to sin, of course, one is discounted or stigmatized; but curiously these days, if one has not sinned enough, he or she is disregarded as a person with no experience of the particular issue or problem. The best stance, I suppose, is that of recovered: To admit to a long-ago, far-off vice now repudiated (perhaps one never really inhaled anyway).

I will say that the book is in some ways ironic for me. In the late 1960s, when I was a student radical at Columbia passing out flyers, I looked over at some of the hippies smoking dope and tried to figure out how to lure them into political demonstrations. In other words, I was not one of those baby boomers in the 1960s and early 1970s who thought sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll were actually going to do much to liberate America. I held quite the reverse position and sought to politicize the cultural rebellion. Yet now, decades later, a funny thing has happened: Not only is a defense of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll necessary but it is almost revolutionary because of the repressive climate in America. Only now do I think I realize how radical the 1960s really were, and this in part explains why we have become so intent on repudiating these times since then. I plead guilty to what is perhaps the ultimate crime in the eyes of the establishment: a certain radical nostalgia for the 1960s and early 1970s, since in many ways American society was more alive and vibrant then.

David Wagner

One

The New Temperance

The last decades of the twentieth century may well be remembered as a time when personal behavior and character flaws dominated the American mind. As prominent political figures from Gary Hart to Robert Pack-wood were brought down by personal scandals, even death seemed to provide no respite from examination of behavior and morality The media reported on the deaths of the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia and baseball star Mickey Mantle as exercises in moral diagnosis. Mantle was said to have died from too much partying; and Garcia, from assorted drugs, cigarettes, and food. Constant public service announcements, political speeches, and public health pronouncements urge us to just say no to drugs, cigarette smoking, fatty foods, teen sexuality, non-monogamous sex, and violent TV shows and music lyrics. Typically, the media have applauded such changes as reflecting the new mood of the times:

New Age on Campus: Can the Keg

Campus social life no longer revolves around the keg party…. The whole culture is more wellness-conscious. Certainly our students are. The promotional stuff does sink in after a while about what alcohol does to your body, said Earl Smith, dean of Colby College. We’ve got a fearful generation that’s come of age now between AIDS, dating violence and the much more serious repercussions of driving drunk, said Mike O’Neil, coordinator of a Vanderbilt University program that shelled out $60,000 this year to students who agree to run nonalcoholic parties.¹

New social problems, from eating disorders to codependency, were discovered in the 1970s and 1980s, while older unmentionable problems such as child abuse and domestic violence continued to draw public attention. The 1990s, meanwhile, are witnessing the emergence of still newer problems of the personal:

Is a Waft of Fragrance Poisoning Your Space?

It’s sort of like cigarette smoking, she [Schmidt] complains. They are invading my privacy Whether she realizes it or not, Schmidt is part of what could be the next big nationwide battle that pits individual rights against public health concerns: the push for fragrance-free environments.

Support Group Helps People with Messy Problems

A walk through Judy’s house used to mean stepping over piles—piles of magazines, piles of catalogues, piles of letters…. So Judy started a chapter of a support group—Messies Anonymous for slobs. … After the group was written up in the Miami Herald, I got 12,000 letters saying, ‘Help!’ Felton said.²

The Coercive Consensus

Although the New Temperance is in part a matter of national mood, and of a turning inward since the 1960s away from broader social and political concerns, the focus on personal behavior is not only a matter of style. The new mood in America also reflects a coercive strategy of punishment for those who fail to conform to the new norms.

Beginning in the 1980s, no amount of control, however personal or onerous, was considered excessive to stamp out the ingesting of drugs. By the 1990s, the war on drugs was leading to more than 1 million arrests a year, the majority of them for possession of small amounts of illicit substances. The drug war—complete with mandatory drug testing in many workplaces, mandatory criminal sentencing, and constant surveillance, particularly in ghetto areas—has been the major factor responsible for filling American prisons to record numbers. The drug war almost ensures that African-American males driving in poor neighborhoods will be stopped and searched³ and, in some areas, that white, middle-class high school students will have their lockers and possessions searched. Mothers have been arrested, charged with ingesting drugs into their fetuses; medically ill people have been denied access to drugs for medicinal purposes; and even religious rituals such as the American Indian use of peyote have been halted—all because of the war on drugs.

The drug war now includes among its targets legal drugs such as alcohol and tobacco. The charge of hypocrisy by public health and liberal critics of the drug war has spawned an almost equally virulent war against these substances. As a result of recent legislation, many people with alcoholism or drug addiction are being cut from the Social Security disability rolls as a punitive measure. Youths unlucky enough to be caught with alcohol at a sports event or behind the school building incur charges tantamount to treason, leading at times to suspension or expulsion from school. In many New England towns, police are ticketing and even arresting youthful cigarette smokers. And some companies and public employers are refusing to hire cigarette smokers, whether their smoking is on or off the job.

Yet such repression never seems quite enough, as new calls for surveillance and punishment continue to appear. Consider this recent report from my local paper:

Plan Enlists Community in Drug War

Police would conduct searches of school lockers at a moment’s notice. Store owners would routinely call police when they suspect a customer of buying alcohol for minors. Residents whose homes are used for teen parties with drugs and alcohol would be warned of the legal consequences. Clergymen would speak about substance abuse during church services. Those deterrents were part of a Community Wide Substance Abuse Policy being proposed.⁴

Rivaling the alarm over substances is the panic over sex and sexual displays. Beginning with the rise of the New Right in the 1970s, wars have been waged against promiscuity, pornography, and teen pregnancy. Democrats soon joined Republican enthusiasts in promoting family values and condemning out-of-wedlock births and teen sex.⁵ A key ingredient of conservative attacks on welfare benefits has been the pathologization of the single mother and teen parents. But not to be outdone, President Clinton fired his first Surgeon General for talking about masturbation, while his secretary of Health and Human Services called out-of-wedlock births morally just wrong.⁶ By the 1990s, the consensus against sexuality had reached the point where politicians were competing with one another to support measures to control movies and TV; approving v-chips for parents to control children’s television, advocating censorship on the Internet, and pressuring advertisers (such as Calvin Klein) to withdraw sexy ads.

Conservatives are sometimes outperformed by putative liberals on the New Temperance issues. Washington Mayor Marion Barry, a Democrat, only recently released from prison for his conviction for crack use, has called for mandatory Norplant implants for young women who are sexually active.⁷ And liberal columnist Ellen Goodman has suggested that government fight the war against teen pregnancy by tracking down older male teens who are having sex with younger teens: A substantial number of the men are what can only be called sexual predators. A substantial number of teen-age mothers are what we once called jailbait. … Maybe statutory rape is an idea whose time should return.⁸

The line between health warnings and moral suasion, on the one hand, and force, on the other, is a thin one. Even the new food moral-ism—touting the avoidance of fat or meat, promoting correct eating—sometimes turns into social control. For instance, my local alternative paper recently featured an article about a welfare recipient who was followed around and charged with (among other things) spending her money on junk food.⁹ Conservatives who criticize any pleasurable use of taxpayer money are joined by liberals who disapprove of such dietary excess: In a letter to the same paper, a person complained that a meat market is soon to move into… [name of] Street. What kind of message will this send to the neighborhood, including the kids across the street at [name of] School?¹⁰

The present book explores how the America of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll of the 1960s and early 1970s became so consumed with personal behavior and social control by the 1980s and 1990s. Elements of the Left as well as the Right now vie with each other to stamp out drugs, nonmarital sex, and unhealthy habits, differing only, it seems, on the question of which groups to punish more.¹¹ As politicians no longer rail against communism but emphasize their toughness on crime, drugs, sexual abuse, and violence in the media, this book asks Why? What some have called the new sobriety, others have termed the new puritanism, and still others have praised as the new health consciousness or healthism, I will define here as the New Temperance.¹²

Defining the New Temperance

For most Americans and certainly the majority of the educated public, a large percentage of daily human behavior has become pathologized in the last two decades. Whether the topic is cigarette smoking or fatty foods, teen pregnancy or excessive television viewing, we have been constantly bombarded with messages about health and morality. My intent is not to argue that any or all of these behaviors are healthy or wise, nor do I advocate that the reader smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol to excess, take illegal drugs, or engage in violent behavior. Of course, health messages contain some friendly advice.

But to acknowledge risks, is, from a sociological perspective, not to explain very much about the American obsession with personal behavior. This book argues the constant focus on personal behavior in America serves as a tool of political power as well as a popular social movement. Temperance is a national ideology. That is, Americans of the last two decades seem to have become rigidly focused on problems of personal behavior, as if such issues explain all of life and provide meaning to all events. To say something is an ideology is not to argue that all of its observations and ramifications are negative or undesirable. Temperance ideology has much basis in real life; indeed, life has many risks and dangers, and it is good to be warned of them. But ideologies are highly culturally and politically contextual. What one culture sees as risky, others would not. Many Indian tribes saw tobacco as a god, whereas for some Americans today it evokes only concerns about secondary smoke and death. The members of most indigenous cultures are shocked upon first observing Westerners driving around in huge steel boxes that frequently crash (and always spew off smoke). They regard cars as bizarre and quite dangerous. Even in the industrialized world, though, temperance is an especially American ideology.¹³ For example, when I visited Hungary, I couldn’t explain to my hosts why many Americans would be surprised at their high-fat diet, their heavy smoking, and the easy availability of drink and pornography at virtually each corner. I found similar opinions in Sweden, where people laughed at these American obsessions, along with our new taste for decaffeinated coffee and our dismay over teen sexuality. Nor is temperance only a matter of national or cultural boundaries. America has not always been consumed by temperance ideologies, as anyone who grew up in the 1950s, 1960s, or 1970s can affirm.

America has long witnessed moralistic popular movements against citizens’ sins and vices (see Chapter 2). Because the most famous was the Temperance Movement, lasting from the 1820s to the passage of National Prohibition (against alcoholic beverages) in 1919, I draw upon this name. Although I mean to define temperance as being far more than a movement against alcohol, there are persuasive reasons to recall this earlier movement. First, as we shall see, although American temperance activists saved their sharpest denunciations for the demon rum, temperance organizations and activists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had close links with many long-forgotten movements including the Vice and Vigilance Movement and the Social Purity Movement, which campaigned against prostitution, promiscuity, pornography, and white slavery; the Anti-Cigarette Movement; the Social Hygiene Movement aimed at preventing venereal diseases; and a variety of popular health movements stressing proper diet, sexual rectitude, and proper exercise, such as that typified by cereal inventor Dr. Harvey Kellogg (whose popular health movement joined water cures, vegetarianism, and exercise with temperance and sexual chastity).¹⁴

Second, it makes sense to discuss today’s behavioral control movements in terms of temperance because, like the old (anti-alcohol) Temperance Movement, they produce similar political alignments. As in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rural fundamentalists and conservative traditionalists have become allied with urban middle-class progressives, uniting some elements of the Right and Left.¹⁵ Such movements focus not on broad economic, social structural, or cultural failings of American society but, rather, on individual behavior (though liberal temperance activists criticize a few sectors of corporate power such as the liquor and tobacco industries). And as with the Temperance Movement of old, today’s universalist claims about the harms of immoral behavior hide major subtexts of anxieties about social class, race, and ethnicity. Temperance activists of the past saw rum as corrupting immigrants and other poor people, whereas today the ghetto underclass is the locus of American fears. The writers of old temperance tracts warned their middle-class readers against the evils of whisky, whereas today’s middle class seems to have an almost bottomless pit of anxiety, focusing on everything from street crime to secondary smoke to teen and child sexuality. Although I would not reduce all of these anxieties solely to economic causes, Barbara Ehrenreich’s imputation of a fear of falling in the American middle class, leading this class to constantly examine behavior as status cues, does explain some of the paradoxes of middle-class angst.¹⁶ For example, how do we reconcile the rising middle-class fear of drugs and cigarettes with evidence of sharp declines in these behaviors over the past many years? One possible answer is that temperance ideology helps distinguish the anxious respectable classes from grungy lowlifes who may still smoke cigarettes or marijuana, much less use crack cocaine, and that such boundary markers have salience only when the middle class is able to differentiate itself from other classes based on behavioral norms.

My approach differs somewhat from other sociological treatments of these concerns (see Chapter 3). I understand temperance to be an ideology, but also an elite strategy, on the one hand, and a popular social movement, on the other. Most social science treatments stress only one part of the equation. For example, some social scientists—especially proponents of the medicalization of social problems thesis—tend to focus exclusively on professionals and related experts as shapers of social problem definitions. Others stress only the media’s influence or the popular appeal (moral panics) of certain problem formulations. These are certainly aspects of the New Temperance, but they don’t completely explain it. Accordingly, the present book builds on social constructionist theory while also integrating this approach with other theories. The work of French philosopher and social critic Michel Foucault is particularly helpful toward this end, as his understanding of power strategies and their diffusion throughout society helps us to comprehend how elites develop strategies that are then used by a variety of other forces in society and how power mechanisms may originate at the bottom but become useful for elites.¹⁷

With this introduction, I can now define today’s temperance ideology, movement, and strategy as reflecting a belief in the responsibility of the state and private powers (e.g., corporations) to regulate and restrain personal behavior. Although public health and public education workers hope to instill successful individual efforts at self-control, the failures of self-regulation justify society’s more coercive role for the presumed own good of the individual. Of course, activists involved in one aspect of behavioral concern do not always support suppression of other behaviors. Nevertheless, the New Temperance can generally be seen as focusing on the following four areas:

Substance Abuse: I refer here to the movements to villainize and repress or punish drug users. These movements take many forms today, from campaigns to prohibit the use of tobacco in public to those punishing and preventing drunk driving, from campaigns telling kids to just say no to drugs to those requiring drinking-free zones in sports arenas.

Sexual Behavior: Despite the publicity about culture wars,¹⁸ some broad convergences in American thinking over the last two decades have once again appeared. For example, temperance warriors now pathologize and strategize against teen sex and pregnancy, against promiscuous sex (which was deemed an evil even before the AIDS epidemic), and at times, it seems, against all nonmarital sex.

Food and Fitness Movements: As noted above, not only the current American obsession with diet (particularly as it relates to the dangers of cholesterol and fat) but also current health fads from fitness to running exhibit parallels to the healthist movements that originated as far back as the 1830s.

Improper Speech and Other Portrayals: Adherents of temperance ideology often see speech about or portrayals of violence, hate, or sex as being dangerous or potentially dangerous. At times, the Left and Right have joined forces to rid the nation of pornography, television violence, and lewd or violent music lyrics. To some extent, the Left’s focus on speech and private behavior (political correctness), though somewhat exaggerated by critics, can be seen as an element of the New Temperance.

Owing to the vastness of this subject matter, I will not describe every aspect of temperance. For reasons of space and emphasis, then, I will focus on substance use and sex as examples of the behavior wars. In particular, I hope to provide a sociological interpretation of events in the last two decades based on my reading of recent history, of cultural events and texts, and of secondary sources about various forms of deviance and ill health.

Questioning the Behavior Wars

A reader might ask, Even though there are excesses, aren’t the wars against bad behavior worth fighting? Or, Isn’t it obvious that America has a drinking/drug/smoking/sexual behavior/eating/aggression problem?

Yet these questions raise some interesting issues. First, it is not at all clear that temperance movements follow an increase in the behavior being criticized. Often quite the opposite is true. We know, for example, that cigarette smoking was far more widespread two decades ago than it is now, yet smoking did not arouse public anger in the 1960s or early 1970s. Further, Stanton Peele argues that Americans drank far more alcohol in the eighteenth century than at any time in the twentieth, and Troy Duster notes that more Americans took illicit drugs (primarily morphine) in the late nineteenth century than during the 1960s.¹⁹ These examples raise sociological questions as to when and why issues of behavior have come to be of such great concern to people; and, indeed, this is a subject on which the book focuses.

Second, to view health and moral admonitions as simply benevolent would be to ignore considerable latent functions in both the older and contemporary versions of temperance. One such function, as previously noted, is the development of a social control machinery that, along with detecting personal problems, systematically buttresses the power of corporations and government over Americans’ daily life. Mandatory drug testing in the workplace confirms the ability of employers to control the most basic personal habits of the employee. And government efforts to control smoking, monitor computer communication, register sex offenders, and mandate psychological treatment for a variety of offenses strengthens the state’s control over everyday life. Another major problem with all such measures is that, despite their proclaimed goal of fairness, social control—from criminal sanctions to the educational and social service systems’ identification of high-risk youngsters—seems always to target the behavior of some people and not others. The wars we conduct—whether against drug users, teen parents, or at risk students—are wars against primarily the working class, ethnic and racial minorities, and poor people, usually young.

Finally, I argue that temperance is a diversion from the critical issues facing America, that it is doomed to failure even on its own terms. Rather than insisting that the personal behavior of Americans is out of control, we could understand the fundamental reasons why many people feel alienated and, in turn, why many Americans are anxious about the personal behavior of their young. First, vast economic changes have sharply reduced the standard of living for many Americans. This historic downturn since 1973 has led not only to increased poverty and misery in the lower classes but also to increased anxiety and fear in the middle and working classes. Remedying the economic situation—particularly the endemic poverty for millions—would likely achieve more of a reduction in child abuse or alcoholism than a thousand educational campaigns. Second, many of the presumed solutions to our misbehavior only aggravate the fundamental cultural problem facing our country—namely, the lack of community that has accompanied modernization, technologization, deindustrialization, and geographic mobility. In commenting on Americans’ fears about missing children, Halloween food poisoning, child sexual abuse, and so forth, Peele notes that efforts at social control (increased fingerprinting of children, computerized information networks on suspects, stronger efforts by parents to restrict their children) are misguided because the campaigns and the spirit underlying them directly attack community life.²⁰ In other words, the