Notes from my Knapsack 11-21-19

Notes from my Knapsack 11-21-19

Jeff Gill

Two or so cheers for temperance

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One hundred years ago . . . that's the opening of more than a few columns or news stories, marking the centenary of this or that important event.

The end of World War I last year around this time, other such anniversaries get marked, but you'll hear little about how on Oct. 28, 1919, the Volstead Act was finally enacted, and took effect January 17, 1920.

Prohibition is the general term, but the enabling legislation was the Volstead Act, and in terms of national regret and forgetting it's up there with the Dred Scott Decision and Plessy v. Ferguson with legal precedents we'd like to sweep under the historical carpet.

Unlike our long struggle with slavery and civil rights, Prohibition only took twelve years for us to reverse, but the impact of that period had lasting effects, some would say right down to the present. And it began before 1919, with the Anti-Saloon League and its head, Wayne Wheeler, setting up shop just west of here in Westerville, Ohio in 1909. Their influence led Granville to interfere in Newark politics around saloon enforcement in 1910, resulting in mob violence and the lynching of an Anti-Saloon League deputy officer on Courthouse Square, and hard feelings that echo in county relations to this day.

Prohibition is generally considered by folks on the left and the right to have been a classic "bridge too far," an extension of state power into personal behavior that was ultimately unenforceable and unmanageable, undermining civic authority in other areas by looking foolish in the decade-plus of Prohibition failures. It's cited today around drug policy, and most immediately around cannabis regulation and legalization. "How did Prohibition work out, huh?"

And it's true, managing people's bad habits through passing laws and promoting enforcement as a tool of social control has limits. Smoking was not made entirely illegal, but I'm still impressed with the changes we've made over the last quarter-century; likewise drinking and driving, which was largely shrugged off in my youth, and now is much less common and generally frowned upon by drinkers and non-drinkers alike. All without making alcohol illegal.

On the other hand, I'm somewhat concerned to see the boozification of almost everything, from lemonades to ciders to seltzer water. Beer is sold in a variety of places I never would have expected to run into it, or step in it; wine is the genteel beverage of choice on TV and by even the most moderate of celebrities. Does everyone need to spend most of the day buzzed, or is this just alcohol marketing run wild?

So I'd like to offer two cheers for a quaint subject: temperance. Sadly it's become associated with Prohibition, but that's not what the word really means at root. 2020 might be a good year for The New Temperance to become popular.

Temperance just means restraint, or more importantly, self-restraint. Making your own choices, and not those of the marketing department. To be temperate might mean having one drink, not five; in other cases, it might be choosing the beverage that isn't "with added alcohol!"

Temperance doesn't have to be abstinence. It could just be moderation. But in 2020, that might be revolutionary.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's temperate in most things. Tell him what you think of the New Temperance at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.