In the Valley of the Moon:

Enclosure, Temperance, and the American War

 on John Barleycorn

by
Zita M. Worley
Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in History
University of California, Riverside, June 2015
Dr. Molly McGarry, Chairperson

https://escholarship.org/content/qt3tn7q346/qt3tn7q346.pdf

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

The history of temperance and prohibition has long been constructed as either a rural
backlash against modernity or a defining feature of middle-class culture. Early
scholarship inaccurately denounced prohibition as a consequence of rural discontent in an
increasingly urban immigrant America. More recent scholarship has relocated
temperance in middle-class culture and politics, often to the neglect of the agrarian
sector. Using an exploration of the production of space, this dissertation reexamines the
place of temperance in the transition of the North American colonies from a largely
subsistence-oriented society to a modern market-centric nation-state. I contend that as a
middle-class movement, temperance emerged out of the enclosure and improvement
movements and trace the movement’s history as a cultural arm of enclosure through to
the passage of national prohibition. As shown herein, dry crusaders of the early republic
were antagonistic to the subsistence farmers who were viewed as a threat to the national
project. This antagonism was extended to new stock immigrant farmers who arrived in
waves through much of the 1800s. In an attempt to redefine American farms and fields, 
across the nineteenth and early twentieth century, temperance advocates pushed farm
commercialization and the transformation of farming and food systems to meet the needs
of an industrial society. But because temperance ideology failed to address the very real
economic concerns of farmers in their struggles with the transition to commercial
production, agrarian America remained ambivalent to temperance up to and following the
passage of the Eighteenth Amendment.