Thomas Pegram, Battling Demon Rum, page 75.
"By 1900 nearly every state had enacted measures requiring public schools to teach children that alcohol was a poison, using textbooks screened by the WCTU."
The Women's Christian Temperance Union.
In 1881 they had committed to what their propaganda referred to as "the home-protection ballot" to empower women to protect home and family - to prevent their men drinking - through Prohibition, local, state, and national.
In angry opposition to the evil influence of "foreign infidels" - Catholic immigrants - they had proposed, in 1876, to defend the Sabbath and The Bible in public schools.
Pegram, page 70.
The religion of the public schools at the time was rather generically Protestant, using The King James Bible and the Protestant versions of The Lord's Prayer and The Ten Commandments, to the great distress of Catholic immigrants and their clergy.
The WCTU meant to keep and strengthen Protestant control.
America's German families commonly visited beer gardens of a Sunday afternoon, to the profound moral outrage of the good American women of the WCTU.
They meant to put a stop to that.
WCTU propaganda for the home-protection ballot also prominently featured the need for much more serious action, everywhere, to suppress prostitution.
The drive for women's suffrage was in every respect both a libertarian nightmare and a war on men.
By the way, Google the Thurber cartoon, "Home."
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