Liberals, Socialists, and Sobriety: The Rhetoric of Citizenship in Turn-of-the-Century Sweden

Abstract

Many years have passed since temperance was treated solely as an expression of "status anxiety," "social control," or "internalization of bourgeois norms." 1 In the past decade, historians have documented how temperance functioned as part of liberation and empowerment movements: in Chartism, Irish patriotism, women's suffrage, and Russian socialism. 2 In this article, I will discuss the role of temperance in turn-of-the-century Swedish suffrage movements, with particular attention to its use by the Swedish Social Democratic Workers' party. In 1866, Sweden had a new, two-house parliament. An indirect franchise reserved the Upper House for the rich: aristocrats, industrialists, and government functionaries. The Lower House was comparatively open; its electorate consisted of Swedish males either of substantial property or with an income of over 800 crowns a year (workers usually earned between 400 and 600). About 23 percent of adult males, or 6 percent of the total population, could vote in Lower House elections. 3 Until 1898, the only cohesive parliamentary group was the Farmers' party. The farmers were not illiberal: They opposed state spending and militarism and-at least until the 1880s-were in favor of moderate suffrage reform. A more resolutely democratic opposition also existed in the cities, where progressive notables, academics, and writers, as well as workers' and artisans' associations, maintained traditions of working-class or "small folk" representation. Franchise restrictions and insufficient organization, however, delayed the formation of a liberal political party. That event had to await the creation of a network of national, grassroots liberal political organizations. 4 By the 1890s, such organizations had been formed, primarily through the activities of Sweden's religious dissent and temperance "folk movements." 5 Of these, the free church movement was the oldest. Imported from Britain and the United States in the 1840s and 1860s, by 1890 it had approximately 110,000 members (out of a Swedish population of about five million). 6 In Sweden, as elsewhere, dissenters supported freedom of coalition and expression and opposed the state church, stances which often led them into political alliances with the left. 7

The Rise of Swedish Social Democracy

“…The former, which emerged in the 1870s, gradually changed from emphasizing alcoholism as an individual problem to demanding legislation to restrict the sale of alcoholic beverages. In response to the opposition of beer producers, the Agrarian Association, the Conservative Party and business associations, teetotalism provided Liberal candidates with key organizational resources (Hurd 1994: 48). Over time, the relationship between social democracy and the temperance movement tightened too.…”

“…A total of 85 per cent of Socialist parliamentarians and more than half of the 1908 SAP congress delegates were teetotallers. In Sweden's rapidly emerging factory towns, temperance organizations offered structured forms of leisure that went beyond drinking and card-playing, supplying everyone with both intellectual ‘resources for the self-improving worker’ (Hurd 1994: 40) and organizational skills that would become crucial to develop unions (Sandell 2001).…”