I want to congratulate The Post’s staff for doing a three-day series on drinking alcoholic beverages, Jan. 23 through Jan 25. One story on the 24th made me smile.
The headline reads, “Drinking age a result of Reagan era politics.” “The ages” went back to 1982. Every young journalist has to begin thinking about a wider history sooner or later. I hope this series could be continued in new articles in The Post next year. Drinking rules, including standards about when a teenager reaches maturity in the United States, did not begin with Ronald Reagan.
Rules about temperance began about 1300 B.C. in the Book of Leviticus. Jews and Christians amplified those rules for centuries in the Old and New Testaments. Pope Gregory I (about 560 A.D.) cited “gluttony” as one of the seven deadly sins. The Bible cited drunkenness and excessive drinking as the sin — not the mere consumption of a cup of wine as a food or in a religious ritual.
The Muslims inherited some of their ideas about sin from Jews and Christians. They named “alcohol” distilled wine (brandy) and were more severe in opposing strong drinks and alcohol than medieval Christians and Jews. Some literal-minded people focus on the substances as poison rather that the motives of the drinker.
John Calvin, in the city of Geneva (about 1540) and after reading a Bible printed in French, passed new rules, fines, age limits and drinking hours for taverns. Calvinism and laws in practically all the United States promoted temperance. In 1840, Maine became the first state to prohibit the sale of alcoholic beverages. More and more states ratified the draft, National Prohibition — the 18th Amendment — down to the U.S.’s entry in World War I.
Congress in 1917, using the ammunition shortage and need for alcohol in the artillery, pressured hard-drinking states like New York and Wisconsin to become part of the three-quarters of the necessary states that finally ratified National Prohibition.
But in 1933, the 18th Amendment was repealed because 40 percent of the population was so fond of drinking that the 60 percent of non-drinkers could not enforce the strict laws in Chicago, New York City and other cities where bootlegging was widespread. The Prohibitionists tried to do too much, but the idea of temperance and sobriety continues to this day on a state and local level.
Meanwhile, medial science has discovered new evidence for the destructiveness of alcoholism to the human body. So I congratulate The Post. Binge drinking can and should be cut down in all American colleges and universities.
I’m not voting for Mitt Romney for president, but one virtue of both Mormonism and Islam is their opposition to heavy drinking. In the long run, Mormons improved the health of Utah.
Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter were both trying to get back to normalcy after the demoralization of the Vietnam War in the U.S. Sobriety on college campuses was more popular from 1933 to the 1960s. Then, the hedonism of the “new left” expanded drug and alcohol consumption to new heights, thereby weakening the health of subsequent naive generations.
Robert Whealey is a professor emeritus of history.
