- [Voiceover] Hi, this is
Becca from Khan Academy, and today I'm going to be
talking about temperance. So, what was the temperance movement? In this video, I'll talk a little bit about what temperance
was, what its causes were, and how it started to
develop in the early-1800s. Temperance was the idea
that Americans drank way too much alcohol and needed
to temper their consumption. It started as kind of this idea that people should just
drink a little bit less, they should drink less whiskey,
less rum, less hard alcohol. And then, slowly, it started to take on this kind of prohibitory character. So, again, it was the
idea that we just needed to temper our alcohol consumption. And so, how did the
temperance movement take root? The temperance movement
kinda has three main causes that I like to think about. So, the three main causes were
the Second Great Awakening, the Industrial Revolution, and growing nativism and, frankly, racism that
started as new immigrants were coming to America in the early-1800s. So, this was all kinda
happening right around here, and so I'll talk a little bit more about each of these causes
for the temperance movement and how it began. So, I'll start by talking about
the Second Great Awakening. So, the Second Great
Awakening was this time period in the early-1800s that
focused a lot of social reforms around capturing moral
good or Christian ideals so Christian ideals,
here's the little cross, within our social institutions. So, this happened in
education, in prisons, in the first women's rights movement. And so, this was all going on in the 1800s and it was about this idea that we needed to be
good and moral people, and we needed our social
institutions to reflect that. So, temperance can be seen as a part of the Second Great Awakening. And so, down here, you can kind of see the Second Great Awakening image here. This is the idea that the family was also intimately affected
by people being too drunk. Here's the father and he's really drunk and things are kind of going to mayhem. People were just too drunk, and this was tearing apart
lots of different institutions, including the family, including education, including the workplace. And so, that's a good transition to talking about the
Industrial Revolution. So, the Industrial
Revolution was also going on at this time period and people could no longer
be drunk on the job, right? So, people used to be artisans. They used to just kind
of sit in their home, make their shoes or sew something by hand, and they could be drunk while doing that. But now, if you're kind
of in a factory setting, people were getting their fingers cut off by these new machines that were promoted in the Industrial Revolution
because they were drunk while trying to operate the machinery. So, with this new industry, workers could no longer
be drunk on the job. And so, the final cause is this nativism that people were seeing with
new Catholic immigrants. So, there were Catholic immigrants
coming into the country. And lots of Protestants
were very anti-Catholic and anti-immigration. They decided that the
Catholics were drunks. They did drink a lot, but it was definitely this
kind of racist sentiment that was percolating within
the Protestant community, and this kind of aligned
itself with the Whig Party. So, the Whigs became more Protestant; they were really big temperance people. And the Catholics more aligned themselves with the Democrats. The sentiment towards
these immigrant populations had this kind of political effect. So, at this time, temperance
was starting to become more of a political movement and different social groups
were taking this more seriously. There were some state-level organizations. It was just becoming more
of a social phenomenon. In 1825, right over here,
this really famous preacher, Lyman Beecher, did his six
sermons on the sins of alcohol. And so, these sermons in 1825 solidified this idea in the American mind that it was anti-Christian
to be a huge drinker, and this idea really took root. This is becoming kind of
this larger social phenomenon and there start to be
not just more state-level or community-level
societies against drinking, you see the first ever
national organization. So, the first national
temperance society was in 1826, down here, with the American
Temperance Society, so the ATS. And I'll talk more about the ATS and the kind of nationalization of the temperance movement
in the next video.