| |
| author |
Erin Feith
| | title |
Nursing the Hangover: The Response of the Methodist Church to the Repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment (1934-1950)
| | abstract |
The rapidity with which the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed affected the way that
historical studies have treated the temperance movement in the years after 1933. Often, narratives
present the post-repeal period as insignificant and lingering supporters of Prohibition as delusional
groups who quickly splintered and dissolved upon the Amendment's revocation. As a staunch
supporter of temperance and well-established religious institution, the Methodist Church is not
accounted for in these repeal narratives. This paper examines the response of the Methodist Church
to the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment between 1934, the year after the constitutional end of
Prohibition, and 1950, when the Cold War began to take shape. Through a content analysis of
articles related to alcohol and other like terms in the New York edition of the popular Methodist
newspaper, The Christian Advocate, I determined that Methodists tested a variety of tactics to
achieve temperance. The types of tactics discussed correlated to contemporary historical events.
While the initial shock of repeal led to a scattershot approach to temperance in the years
immediately after 1933, the Church began to narrow its efforts around approaches that related
alcohol to patriotic themes, as the United States entered the Second World War. As the Cold War
began to take shape in the late 1940s, church members again shifted their tactics to fit the historical
context, associating liquor with the need to strengthen the morality of the country. Transcending
these years after repeal, the Methodist Church constantly endorsed education as the most effective
solution to attaining temperance. Along with this, I found that temperance lessons evolved over
this period and that the Church increasingly emphasized temperance's relationship to religious
themes, such as morals and character-development. At the same time, I observed that Methodists
identified a growing secularism in American society and expressed a concern for its role in the
lives of the public. Searching for a way to secure its influence in this environment, church
members and leaders found an answer in education and the public-school system. However, the
Church's plans to implement Christian teachings into public-school curriculum proved challenging
as debates over the separation of church and state revived. At this juncture, I concluded that
temperance education provided Methodists with a solution. Being a part of public-school
curriculum and associated with religious themes, temperance lessons provided the Church with an
indirect way to bring Christian teachings into public schools. In their overlapping of concerns
regarding temperance and secularism, the interests of the Methodist Church came to the forefront
and pointed to the nuances of the involvement of religious institutions in social issues, both then
and now.
| | school |
The College of Liberal Arts, Drew University
| | degree |
B.A. (2021)
|
| advisor |
James Carter
|
| committee |
Brian Shetler
Shakti Jaising
|
| full text | EFeith.pdf |
| |
