What if America’s most persistent cultural obsession isn’t freedom or reinvention, but control? Specifically, other people’s.
That question is a lens for making sense of this country’s bizarre, centuries-long relationship with alcohol. Specifically, the elaborate legal and moral scaffolding we’ve erected around it. Blue laws, dry counties, Sunday restrictions, the economically disruptive Prohibition years — none of it ever really stopped the drinking. But, what it did do was create a durable template.
The truth is that America in the mid-1800s was pretty drunk. The average person was consuming close to three times today’s per capita alcohol intake and whiskey was literally used as currency on the frontier.
Enter the temperance movement, a coalition led by anti-fun Protestant churches, a contingent of proto-Karens in the women’s suffrage movement, and people who had simply watched their husbands drink their families into destitution. Their logic had a kind of internal coherence: Sunday was the Lord’s day, the one day the working man was supposed to be in church renewing his moral fiber instead of at the bar obliterating it. In that sense, restricting Sunday sales wasn’t just piety theater, but a genuine attempt to shoehorn sobriety into the weekly schedule of an already tipsy population.
One of the most notorious figures of the time was Carrie Nation, who aside from the fact that she absolutely loathed alcohol seems like the type of oddball you’d find fun to grab a beer with. She was a member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and absolutely convinced that alcohol was the root of all societal evil. Not poverty. Not inequality. Not the various catastrophes of the Gilded Age. It was booze. To her, the most rational response to a saloon was to walk in and destroy it. Specifically, with a hatchet.
In the end, the teetotalers actually pulled it off. By the time Prohibition arrived in 1920, Sunday alcohol restrictions were already baked into the legal architecture of many states. Now, some states were perfectly happy to ding saloon while letting a winery quietly sell bottles out their front doors. Not all alcohol was created equal, right? These rules differed state-by-state, county-by-county, and even mood, but the logic was consistent: spirits were dangerous, beer was a working-class problem, and wine — especially if framed in the context of agriculture or refinement — could be politely tolerated. It was less a system of alcohol control than a hierarchy of bias masquerading as law. Taken together, the blue laws preceding full-on Prohibition were less a revolution than an escalation of enforcement mechanisms that had been quietly accumulating for years.
And many of those laws survived Prohibition’s repeal in 1933. The temperance crusaders might have gone home, but the legal infrastructure they worked hard to stand up remained. Oddly enough, liquor store owners who discovered that mandatory closing days were actually great for business also supported this infrastructure. Why? There was no overhead, no staff, and customers simply stockpiled on Saturday.
In short, the sacred and the commercial had found their perfect unholy alliance, which is really just the American story in miniature.
What was behind the temperance wave wasn’t so much cogent argument than vibes and anxiety. Sin repackaged as public health emergency. And that was kind of genius, because it required less by way of evidence and more a sense that something must be done. That something just involved other people changing their behavior.
Fast-forward to recent years and finally those “blue laws” are starting to come off the books. Arkansas, Indiana, and Minnesota got rid of their’s between 2015 and 2020. Only about 15 states still have them in effect. Oddly enough, for some businesses that sling alcohol, this retreat from God doesn’t appear to be working in their favor.
Those wineries that were allowed to sell on Sundays? In states abandoning temperance, many of those businesses are actually suffering. And not just a little. Many are seeing huge drops in sales, and some are even closing their doors permanently. When everyone can sell on Sunday, the small producer loses the advantage of being one of the few places that could.
Add to that a broader decline in alcohol consumption — particularly among younger drinkers — and a paradoxical image of America starts to come into sharper relief. Just as the last vestiges of temperance-era control fade, a culture known the world around for insanity-level consumption starts to internalize a modicum of restraint. Only this time it’s less about legislation and more about preference. Something subtler, more aesthetic, and no less powerful.
The low-ABV wellness movement today is temperance with better aesthetics, and with language that’s been updated. Sin is “toxins,” salvation is “self-optimization,” and the moral panic is rebranded as mindful consumption. But the underlying architecture is similar. Carrie Nation reincarnated in the form of modern-day wellness influencers, only they’re wielding celery stalks and smartphones. The key difference is that today’s temperance is selling you a $14 adaptogen mocktail instead of legislation. Whether that’s progress is, perhaps, a matter of taste.
Both movements sell agency in anxious times: the promise that if you just control this one thing, the chaos of existence might become a bit more manageable.
But the truth is that anxiety never actually resolves. It just finds new objects: seed oils, smoking, dopamine fasting, smartphones, Timothée Chalamet. These panics follow the same game-plan in that they identify a thing that used to be fine, reframe it as a slow-motion crisis, and then wait for the backlash to the backlash.
Alcohol just happens to be one of the oldest and most honest versions of this story. It really does cause harm. But that’s almost beside the point. What’s always been interesting isn’t the thing itself but how quickly we reach for it as a container for everything we can’t quite name. The temperance movement wasn’t really about whiskey. The wellness movement isn’t really about alcohol.
What it was about is harder to say. Maybe it boils down to the fact that the Gilded Age robber barons couldn’t be hatcheted. The algorithms can’t be hatcheted. The drink — or the decision not to drink — at least stays where you put it.
That’s a wrap. Thanks for being here. If something in this issue made you think differently about what's in your grocery cart or wine glass, that's exactly what this is about. Forward it to someone who'd appreciate it. See ya next time.