Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.4 | The History Cooperative

Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800-1933. By Thomas R. Pegram. (Chicago: Dee, 1998. xvi, 207 pp. $24.95, isbn 1-56663-208-0.) Unorganized Crime: New Orleans in the 1920s. By Louis Vyhnanek. (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1998. viii, 284 pp. $25.00, isbn 1-887366-24-5.)

Concern about vice occupies a surprisingly prominent place in the history of American social reform. While Americans often have been reluctant to address structural inequalities of race, class, and gender, reformers have found—and continue to find—it comparatively easy to blame society's most fundamental problems on moral failings involving drink, drugs, and deviant sexuality. Typically, those reformers have insisted that economic uncertainties, family problems, and unpromising youth have their roots in what John C. Burnham calls "bad habits." 1

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, alcohol was the moral reformers' principal target. A volume in the IvanR. Dee American Ways series, Thomas R. Pegram's Battling Demon Rum offers an overview of the extensive literature—much of it published in recent decades—on the American temperance movement. The book is built around a narrative; its chapters tell the story of temperance reform from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century through the repeal of Prohibition, and each chapter explains how and why reform efforts changed. . . .

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