Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

In the first sentence of his book, John Frick makes a claim that might seem hyperbolic, even to historians and aficionados of nineteenth-century culture; he states that "[i]n the first half of the nineteenth century, no single issue—not even the abolition of slavery—had a greater capacity for arousing the American passion than did the cause of temperance" (1). Throughout his five-chapter study of nineteenth-century temperance drama, Frick convincingly proves this point. For while politicians in Washington were arguably more consumed with wars (past, present, and future), territorial acquisition, and the eradication/expansion/containment of slavery, average citizens regularly fixed their thoughts on more immediate albeit pedestrian concerns. And the story of this American preoccupation with the bottle—both on- and offstage—unfolds in this expertly researched and thorough history.

In his introduction, Frick gives a detailed justification for his work on temperance theatre. He explains that regardless of the fact that antebellum intellectuals and various architects of nineteenth-century culture were saturated with this issue, twentieth-century academics have been far less intoxicated with scholarship on either temperance reform or its theatrical/performative manifestations. Both first-wave feminism and abolition, Frick argues, have received more attention within academia than has temperance reform, although American studies scholarship in the last twenty years has increasingly "documented the significant role of temperance reform in the rise of the American middle-class, the protection of the nuclear family, the reinforcement of traditional family values and nineteenth-century reform" (2). Thus, Frick's study is both an attempt to fill in a historical blank and also to show how temperance drama/theatre reflected the movements' specific goals and strategies, its middle-class values, and the ubiquitous spirit of reform at work in antebellum America.

Frick establishes the context for his study by giving a very measured discussion of melodrama (its defenders, critics, and second-class citizenship) as a vehicle for progressive social change, by outlining American drinking habits from the Revolution to the Civil War, and by chronicling shifts in temperance ideology and activism. In addition to his careful class-based analysis of temperance reform, Frick also discusses the presence of women, European immigrants, and people of color in the movement. While he should be applauded for including these actors in his overview, his treatment of these participants might have been expanded. For example, female reformers, who Frick argues were largely inactive during the later half of the nineteenth century, engaged in numerous performative acts at polling sites and taverns (some events occurring decades before Carrie Nation's exploits), and palatable feminism emanated from the pages of female authored and edited temperance newspapers such as The Lily, The Una, The Genius of Liberty,and The Sibyl. Nevertheless, Frick's contextualizing is compelling in the early chapters of the book and provides necessary information. His discussion of early republican alcohol consumption—condoned by the clergy—is fascinating.

Chapter 2 gives an overview of the temperance melodrama, its themes and structure, and argues that such entertainment proved an effective arm of temperance reform in America. "[P]ractically every issue of importance to the temperance cause" (75) was introduced in the melodrama and presented in melodramatic form: the iniquitous city was vilified, along with tavern owners and liquor distributors, while women and children were victimized by the ravaging effects of alcoholism. Significantly, the melodramatic hero is absent from these plays in a doctrinal sense, as the male head of the family—often the inebriate—required salvation as desperately as did the heroine and her offspring. Often in sensational temperance melodramas prior to the Civil War, the hero is depicted as more of an anti-hero, an exonerated sinner reformed by the redemptive measures of temperance activists and their societies, who welcomed him back to middle-class respectability.

In chapters 2, 3, and 4, Frick successfully explains how reform ideology was expressed by, or mirrored...