“One's Total World View Comes Into Play”: America's Culture War Over Alcohol Education, 1945-1964

Author:

Zimmerman Jonathan

Abstract

In 1948, fundamentalist theologian Edward John Carnell launched a spirited attack upon the “disease concept” of alcoholism. The Bible stated in no uncertain terms that drunkenness was a sin, Carnell wrote. By deeming alcoholism a sickness, clergymen and educators threatened to erode the “sense of guilt” that had once surrounded it. “The drinker takes the first glass as a free agent,” Carnell intoned. “He knows in advance the risks of his act, yet he proceeds…. As a moral, rational being, then, the drunkard is guilty and stands under God's severe wrath.” Yet in public schools and even in churches, Carnell complained, too many Americans learned to regard alcoholism as a medical affliction rather than as an ethical lapse. “The crux of the problem is whether man is made in the image of God, and thus is a responsible moral being, or whether he is just a product of naturalistic forces and is responsible to none,” Carnell concluded. “In judging drunkards, then, one's total world view comes into play.”

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Subject

History,Education

Reference99 articles.

1. See, e.g., Hunter Culture Wars, 85–86; Wuthnow Robert The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War Two (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 185. For an account that accords more closely to my own, stressing “public conflict” as well as “private dissatisfaction” in the early postwar years, see Ribuffo Leo “God and Contemporary Politics,” Journal of American History 79 (May 1993): 1518.

2. Murdock Domesticating Drink, 156; Stacey Dora S. “Alcohol Education,“ White Ribbon Review, March 1940, p. 196, Scrapbook 1, Palmer Papers; “President's Report. Oberlin WCTU” (typescript, Sept. 1957), “Oberlin WCTU” folder, box 2, series 1, Esther Bliss Taylor Papers, Oberlin College Archives, Oberlin, Ohio; “High School Highlights,” Palm Springs Desert Sun, 10 March 1956, “1956” folder, box 9, Mann Papers; Parish Ernest C. to Dailey E. H. 8 Dec. 1955, “Wisconsin” folder”; Hill H. H. to Dailey 22 Nov. 1955, “Washington” folder; Dailey to Nelson A. P. 28 Aug. 1952, “South Dakota” folder, all in box 103, TEF Papers; “One Million Five Hundred Thousand Rule-Bookmarks For Free Distribution,” Scientific Temperance Journal 72 (October 1964): 3.

3. For differing views on the rise of the alcoholism concept during these years, see Beauchamp Daniel E. Beyond Alcoholism: Alcohol and Public Health Policy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 3–21; Burnham Bad Habits, 80-84; Martin Lender and Drinking in America, 182-91; Levine Harry Gene “The Discovery of Addiction: Changing Conceptions of Habitual Drunkenness in America,” Journal of Studies on Alcohol 39 (January 1978): 143-74; Page Penny Booth “E. M. Jellinek and the Evolution of Alcohol Studies: A Critical Essay,” Addiction 92 (Dec. 1997): 1619-37; Rubin Jay L. “Shifting Perspectives on the Alcoholism Treatment Movement, 1940-1955,” Journal of Studies on Alcohol 40 (May 1979): 376-86.

4. McCarthy Teen-Agers and Alcohol, 48–49. See also Linden Arthur V. “Some Random Thoughts on Alcohol Education,“ Journal of School Health 29 (January 1959): 4.

5. McCarthy “Activities of State Departments of Education,“ 507; McCarthy, Teen-Agers and Alcohol, 54, 48-49, 4-6; North Dakota Commission on Alcoholism, What Shall We Teach?; Ishee Vashti “A Program of Education on the Alcohol Problem,“ Scientific Temperance Journal 59 (Summer 1951): 48–49.

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