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M
r. Langdon, the principal narrator of “The Beacon! Rhode Island Temperance Tale,” a work of temperance fiction publishedin Rhode Island in 1839, cautions the children of the family whoseresidence he visits against two unfathomable evils. He relates the sadtale of William Smith, whom he had accompanied out to the middleof a pond in a boat without first consulting his parents to obtain theirpermission. William surprised Langdon when he produced a bottle of rum and proceeded to get drunk. Langdon abstained from the alcohol,yet when the inebriated William tipped the boat over, the narratorbarely escaped the clutches of death. The drunkard, however, couldsummon neither the coordination nor the strength to make it to shore,and drowned. Langdon, speaking to his captivated audience, concludes,“That event, still fresh on my mind, as of yesterday, warned me againstdisobedience to parents; and it showed me how dangerous it is to drink rum, or even to associate with those who drink it.”
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This exhortationto the young recalls a long history of parental moralizing—Langdoncites the fifth commandment to support his argument; its pairing of obedience and implicit subordination with abstention from alcohol alsoreflects the vertical class structure of the antebellum economy from which the American temperance movement, and with it, the middleclass, emerged in Rhode Island in the 1830s and 1840s. The industrialization that began to take hold of the state in theinitial years of the nineteenth century forged new social relations
1
Number Two. The Beacon! Rhode-Island Temperance Tale. By a Gentleman of Providence. Founded on Fact
(Providence: B. T. Albro, 1839), 14-15. I would liketo thank Christopher Hudgens, Brenna Carmody, and Seth Rockman for theircomments on an earlier version of this paper.
The Scourge of the Poor: Rhode Island Temperance and Middle-Class Legitimation,1829-1843
J
EFFREY
M
ARTIN
and destroyed old ones. It resulted in vibrant industry and economicprosperity for many, giving birth to a middle-class striving for economicfulfillment between the ranks of the rich and poor. Nevertheless, many viewed the dissolution of traditional social bonds that accompaniedthese economic processes as a sign of disorder. The ascendant middleclass, ambitious to assert its power in society and anxious about theprecarious position it occupied, sought relief in reform programs. Temperance proved to be the most galvanizing cause that thesereformers could advance. In their efforts to dissuade the Rhode Islandpopulation from imbibing alcohol, the middle-class reformers reliedon notions of hierarchy as the organizing principle that would not only banish “demon rum” from the lives of their fellow countrymen but alsoreverse the impersonality of the industrial marketplace, reconstituting the social order that they felt their contemporary situation lacked. The middle class’ polymorphism often frustrates scholars seeking to ground it in wealth or occupation. Its consolidation occurredaround cultural values whose wide dissemination complicates theidea of economic unity within the boundaries of a class. JenniferGoloboy’s recent rejection of “head work” as the sole basis for middle-class identity has done much to resolve the arbitrariness that any imposition of sociological categories onto the past harbors. However,by privileging “a cultural definition of ‘middle class,’ centering on a setof self-perceived ‘middle-class values,’ which became detached, in thenineteenth century, from their original utilitarian purpose”, she stopsshort of exploring the social and economic contexts that informedthose values. Additionally, she understates the functionality those values offered to an incipient class navigating uncertain economicstraits.
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Richard Bushman, on the other hand, has noted the intimateties between the birth of the middle class and the economic process of industrialization: “The stable, hierarchical colonial order, anchored by afew leading families, gave way after the Revolution under the onslaughtof new arrivals who derived their wealth from new sources of profitavailable in industrializing America.”
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This class drew upon its particularrelationship to the means of production in order to establish its identity.
2
Jennifer Goloboy, “The Early American Middle Class,”
Journal of the Early Republic
25, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 538.
3
Richard L. Bushman,
The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities
(New York: Knopf, 1992), 209.
2
COLUMBIA UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL OF HISTORY
Yet Bushman, too, ultimately privileges a shared material culture of refinement and respectability as the basis for middle-class identity without fully exploring the class interests that culture served. Stuart M.Blumin’s “experiential hypothesis of middle-class formation,” on theother hand, accounts for a plethora of cultural, social, and economiccomponents that would come to define middle-class life as thenineteenth century rolled onwards. Blumin offers “work, consumption,residential location, formal and informal voluntary association, andfamily organization and strategy,” all located firmly within the largersocial contexts in which they evolved, as the areas in which themiddle class coalesced and defined itself.
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Konstantin Dierks has alsoprovided a promising model, albeit one derived from experiences acentury earlier. Investigating both the consumer culture to which theeighteenth century colonial American middle class adhered as well asthe economic purposes that those values served, he finds “more thanone cultural route to modernity in the eighteenth-century anglophone Atlantic world. Beyond the modernity of the refined consumer, there was also the modernity of an extractive and productive empire andthe modernity of utilitarian function.”
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Though the nineteenth century saw a shift in emphasis from empire to domestic industry, in both casesthe values of “middling folk” operated simultaneously as a standard of refinement and as a legitimating force for the economic processes thatpropelled the middle class to their position in society.Scholarship on the nineteenth century American temperancemovement has likewise concerned itself with the ideological constructsthat the middle class erected for its own support. Scott C. Martinexamines the intersection of the temperance movement and the cultof domesticity in antebellum America, concluding:
In seeking to define and justify itself in relation to those aboveand below in the American socioeconomic order, this nascentmiddle class emphasized the moral advantages of middling status,
4
Stuart M. Blumin, “The Hypothesis of Middle-Class Formation inNineteenth-Century America: A Critique and Some Proposals,”
American Historical Review
90, no. 2 (April 1985): 312.
5
Konstantin Dierks, “Letter Writing, Stationary Supplies, and ConsumerModernity in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,”
Early American Literature
41, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 485.SCOURGE OF THE POOR
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