October, 2011 - Mary Hunt - The Devil's Tail

Mary Hunt:

Mary Hunt (1830-1906) became one of the most powerful women in the United States temperance movement promoting Prohibition of alcohol. As Superintendent of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union’s Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction she worked from the grass roots to the national level to ensure passage of laws requiring that textbooks teach every school child a curriculum promoting complete abstinence for everyone and alcohol prohibition.  She achieved the de facto power to veto any such textbook of which she did not approve. For example, the WCTU leader didn’t approve of any book that mentioned the widespread medicinal use of alcohol or any book that even implied that drinking in moderation did not inevitably lead to serious alcohol abuse .

     By the mid-1890s, the WCTU’s program of temperance instruction and the textbooks endorsed by Mary Hunt were increasingly being criticized . The Committee of Fifty, a group formed in 1893 by scholars to study the "liquor problem",  was highly critical of the ideological purity demanded by Mrs. Hunt. It argued that children should not be taught "facts" that they would later find to be incorrect. The group concluded that the WCTU's program of temperance instruction was seriously defective and probably counter-productive .

     Mrs. Hunt prepared a reply in which she charged the Committee of Fifty with being prejudiced against abstinence instruction, criticized it for what she considered gross misrepresentation of facts, and insisted that the endorsed textbooks were completely accurate. She then had the reply entered into the Congressional Record and distributed more than 100,000 copies .

     Although she stirred controversy, it is indisputable that "by the time of her death in 1906, Mary Hunt had shaken and changed the world of education" with her campaign for mandatory temperance instruction (Ohles, 1978, p. 478). In 1901-1902, 22 million school children were required to take Hunt-approved temperance instruction .  Temperance writers viewed the WCTU's program of compulsory temperance education as a major factor leading to the Eighteenth Amendment establishing National Prohibition.   The WCTU "laid the groundwork for the formal drug education programs that remain high on the agendas of today" (Erickson, 1988, p. 333), and some of the laws for which Mrs. Hunt lobbied so persistently still remain .

The Drink:

The Devil's Tale:

1 ½ oz gold rum

¾ oz vodka

½ oz lime juice

¼ oz grenadine

¼ oz apricot brandy

Drinkability: 3.5
Drunkability: 4
Taxic Diversity: 2.5
Accessibility: 4
Priority of Conservation: 2

Comments: "like the first take of a cigarette", "gold rum looks like a urine sample," and "I don't like red things"

From something about Prohibition? - hosted by FluffyRuffle