Reply #12: So you dislike it, but can't actually detail any fault with it? [View All]

...Another textbook approved by Mary Hunt asserted that "One of the most destructive agents man has brought into use is alcohol" and explained:

"It has often been observed that children of intemperate parents frequently fail to develop into manhood or womanhood. They may not be deformed, but their growth is arrested, and they remain small in body and infantile in character. . . . Such are examples of a species of degeneracy, and are evidences of the visiting of the sins of the fathers upon the children, which may extend even into the third and fourth generations. "

Under Mary Hunt's direction, the WCTU's Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction promoted as scientifically proved fact that:

•The majority of beer drinkers die from dropsy.
•When it (alcohol) passes down the throat it burns off the skin leaving it bare and burning.
•It causes the heart to beat many unnecessary times and after the first dose the heart is in danger of giving out so that it needs something to keep it up and, therefore, the person to whom the heart belongs has to take drink after drink to keep his heart going.
•It turns the blood to water.
•, a man who never drinks liquor will get well, where a drinking man would surely die.

Mary Hunt promoted compulsory temperance education so as to create "trained haters of alcohol to pour a whole Niagara of ballots upon the saloon." To this end she required that textbooks she approved "teach that alcohol is a dangerous and seductive poison; that fermentation turns beer and wine and cider from a food into poison; that a little liquor creates by its nature the appetite for more; and that degradation and crime result from alcohol."...