ABSTRACT
The Washington Temperance Society was inaugurated in 1840 when six men in a Baltimore tavern thought it might be interesting to check out the temperance lecture across the street. As the story goes, two of them left the meeting having taken a pledge of abstinence. They decided to form a temperance group made up of laborers and artisans like themselves-workers who were reeling from the aftermath of the financial panic of 1837 and looking to secure social and economic stability and respectability (Blocker 37). During this period, many working-class men and women turned to temperance as a strategy for enfranchisement into public spheres of business and civil society when their attempts to establish unions and “benevolent societies” largely failed against the relentless power of burgeoning industrial corporations.1 In hopes of accommodating to the new constraints placed upon their labor, they created a public sphere that was a “hybrid” of proletarian interests and universalized bourgeois norms (Negt and Kluge 59). By 1841, the Washingtonians had 100 thousand members enrolled; two years later they were half a million (Reynolds 26). It became the largest and most diverse reform movement of the antebellum period; it was one in which such societies, and the associations they facilitated, were crucial access routes to public life and personal ascendancy.2
