Try to Control Yourself

Book excerpt: Countless authors, historians, journalists, and screenwriters have written about the prohibition era, an age of jazz and speakeasies, gangsters and bootleggers. But only a few have explored what happened when governments turned the taps back on. Dan Malleck shifts the focus to Ontario following repeal of the Ontario Temperance Act, an age when the government struggled to please both the “wets” and the “drys,” the latter a powerful lobby that continued to believe that alcohol consumption posed a terrible social danger. Malleck’s investigation of regulation in six diverse communities reveals that rather than only pandering to temperance forces, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario sought to define and promote manageable drinking spaces in which citizens would learn to follow the rules of proper drinking and foster self-control. The regulation of liquor consumption was a remarkable bureaucratic balancing act between temperance and its detractors but equally between governance and its ideal drinker.