We Are What We Drink

In her interesting and well-documented book Sabine N. Meyer describes the nineteenth-century civic environment of St. Paul, Minnesota, focusing on the temperance movement and the citizens who debated it. St. Paul warrants such special scrutiny because the city had a long history of economic entanglement with alcohol production and of enthusiastic alcohol consumption; by virtue of remaining consistent over time, St. Paul became an outlier. Two options were open to St. Paulites looking to position themselves as influential citizens. On the one hand, hitching identity-group agendas to the flourishing temperance cause could connect St. Paulites to valuable political allies among the state's and the nation's white, middle-class reformers. This strategy was pursued by women and sometimes by Irish Americans. On the other hand, resistance to the temperance movement could demarcate and stabilize ethnic identities—sometimes even advocating these identities' superiority, as was the case for German Americans. Meyer argues that responding to temperance ultimately encouraged St. Paul's citizens to draw and redraw lines within and between various identity groups, assembling and disassembling coalitions. Shifting alliances, in turn, had implications for how temperance and then prohibition worked in St. Paul, influencing the trajectory of restrictive laws and law enforcement. Ultimately, temperance underwrote identity formation, and identity formation shaped temperance

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