“The most surprising thing about the nineteenth-century temperance movement is that it seems to have worked: in the course of the century, hard-liquor consumption plummeted”

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The most surprising thing about the nineteenth-century temperance movement is that it seems to have worked: in the course of the century, hard-liquor consumption plummeted. But at the same time the older, weaker stuff was making a comeback: new waves of European immigrants were turning up in saloons, where the supposed harmlessness of beer was strenuously tested. The new drinking culture inspired a radical Prohibitionism….

Kelefa Sanneh, “Drunk With Power” The New Yorker (21 & 28 December 2015), 106.

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