Summary
The 1887 California Scientific Temperance Instruction Law mandated every public school in California to introduce a mandatory daily lesson on “scientific temperance” that explained the harms of narcotics and alcohol.
Context
The American Civil War officially ended in 1866. The moral issues surrounding slavery and racial discrimination had taken the steam out of temperance advocacy as a moral and cultural movement. Between tax revenues and coping methods for the stresses of war, restrictions on drinking fell off the radar of political coalitions. For women who had been hoping to address issues like domestic violence and habitually drunk husbands who failed to provide for the family, this was a major setback.
From the 1870s to 1880s, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) set about building chapters throughout the country to keep the movement going. They were too small to have noticeable influence on the San Francisco Opium-Smoking Ordinance of 1875 or the Section 307 statewide law in 1881, but they were able to observe that these efforts failed to meaningfully stop drug efforts. After all, they were driven primarily by anti-Chinese and anti-immigration hysteria that grew amidst the Long Depression of 1873 when Chinese workers were scapegoated for wage cuts and luring the youth into drug dependencies to fund Chinatown businesses. Scientific evidence about opium as a public health issue was scarcely presented or discussed. The success of the policy was measured in terms of the disruption to Chinese communities and families.
Mary H. Hunt headed the WCTU’s Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction, and she operated a very tactical organization that distributed field manuals to chapters to lobby local elected officials. They coordinated single-issue pressure campaigns that asked politicians bluntly if they would mandate temperance instruction. Petitions, letters, pamphlets, and other forms of media were widely distributed by activists. Because women couldn’t vote, the WCTU framed their activism as a maternal duty to preserve social and moral purity in a society that gave men the privilege of navigating the corrupt spaces of business, politics, and war. It argued that the very gender roles that segregated women into private domestic spaces also engendered authority over that space. They argued women were better equipped to raise children with moral standards, so they mobilized husbands, brothers, and men of the church to only vote for politicians who supported temperance instruction.
There’s a very compelling argument that temperance was America’s first proper culture war - at least if we take a definition of “culture war” that isn’t rooted in explicit racial and ethnic tensions or labor relations. Emphasis on solely there, as racism and xenophobia were unquestionably still a driving factor for major swathes of the population.
Before aiming for state legislation, WCTU chapters began lobbying local school board meetings and individual principals to adopt temperance texts.