The Temperance Monument and Fountain in Washington, D.C. is right next to the Grand Army of the Republic Monument on Pennsylvania Avenue. The monument was dedicated in 1882, soon after Reconstruction had ended in much of the South. Other social issues were coming to the fore besides disunion, slavery, and Black citizenship.
Issues like ending prostitution, eliminating alcoholic drinking, and ending state support for religious schools gained new adherents in the 1870s and 1880s.
For those under a certain age and may be unfamiliar with the term, Temperance was the movement to encourage people to abstain from alcohol. Drinking alcohol was widespread at the time and it was associated with many social ills including disease, compromised worker safety, vehicle accidents, and domestic violence.
The Temperance Movement began as a relatively benign effort to help people leave behind dependance on alcohol, but in the 1850s it became associated with anti-immigrant Know Nothingism. Temperance militants often claimed that immigrants, particularly Irish and German, were importing European-style drunkenness into the United States, even though the evidence is that Americans loved to drink even before the beginning of mass immigration in 1848. By the second-half of the 19th Century, Temperance was used as a rationale for immigration restrictions, and groups that the mainstream of American society were suspicious about, like newly freed slaves, were derided as “drunks.”
The Temperance Monument itself has no manifestations of this bigotry. It was in its early days an icewater fountain. There were several of these fountains erected elsewhere, all on the theory that offering drinkers an alternative to alcohol would lead them to abstain from harming themselves. The water came out of the snouts of the odd looking dolphins that are at the center of the monument. Ice was put inside the base of the monument to keep the water cold! There is today no water flowing from the fountain and the restocking of ice ended long before the fountain went dry.
On top of the monument’s canopy is a life sized heron. On the canopy itself are four words inscribed as TEMPERANCE, FAITH, HOPE, and CHARITY.
The odd sculpture inside the monument are the dolphins that once had water spouting from their snouts.
This monument is located on Indiana Plaza in Washington at the intersection of 7th Street and Indiana Avenue. If you are walking from the White House to Capitol Hill on Pennsylvania Avenue, you will pass it. It may not have been effective at deterring alcohol consumption. In the 20th Century a liquor store opened next to it and did a brisk business.
