The Empire Club Strikes Back

A key flaw in the standard, culturalist interpretation is that prohibitionism was a “whitelash” of conservative, rural, nativists “disciplining” of immigrants and blacks. The reality of 1840s New York was completely different: not only were Irish immigrants more likely to be temperate than their nativist, American counterparts (Chapter 5), but the focus of temperance activism—the money-making liquor traffic—was actually in the hands of established white nativists like “Captain” Isaiah Rynders, “Boss” Tweed, and the corrupt Tammany Hall machine. In upstate New York, temperance-abolitionist-suffragist reformers--including Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, and Susan B. Anthony--began a movement for women’s equality born of their temperance activism. Concurrent with the 1853 World’s Fair in New York, Rynders and his Know-Nothings clashed, physically, with the equal-rights reformers from upstate, whose temperance threatened the financial foundations of the Tammany Hall political machine.