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Father Mathew's Disciples: American Catholic Support for Temperance, 1840–1920

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

John F. Quinn
John F. Quinn
Affiliation:
Mr. Quinn is assistant professor of history at Salve Regina University, Newport, Rhode Island.
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Extract

Scholars have frequently noted that the American temperance movement had close ties with Protestantism throughout its long history. The Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher, generally viewed as the founding father of temperance, helped spark the establishment of the American Temperance Society in 1826 with his Six Sermons on drunkenness. Later in the century devout Protestant laypersons, such as Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) leader Frances Willard and Nebraska congressman and perennial presidential hopeful William Jennings Bryan, took up leadership of the cause. In the early years of this century, as Protestants began to divide into warring liberal and evangelical camps, Prohibition was one—and perhaps the only—issue which could unite most Protestants, from the firebreathing revivalist Billy Sunday on the one hand to the scholarly, liberal Walter Rauschenbusch on the other.1

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 65 , Issue 4 , December 1996 , pp. 624 - 640
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1996

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References

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