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Robert Goodrich
showing “negligence” while left-Rhenish Cologne brought only “low consideration”
to the alcohol issue. A disinterest and distance from temperance initiatives
emerged even in the admonishments of reports calling for greater anti-alcohol
agitation:
Since other organizations already engage satisfactorily in the promotion of the temperance
movement, the workingmen’s clubs can generally restrict themselves to supporting
these efforts through occasional enlightenment and encouragement of members, when
appropriate by joining the Kreuzbündnis. The development of a corresponding drive for
legislative measures by the Cartel Association of Catholic Workingmen’s Clubs in West-,
South-, and East Germany has not yet occurred due to more pressing concerns. 64
The call to join the Kreuzbündnis, with this caveat, was no longer a goal but merely
a suggestion “when appropriate.” The KAB leaders granted the clubs tacit
permission to “restrict themselves” on this front. Even the clubs’ national leadership
relegated the topic to the back burner as it pursued “more pressing concerns.”
Indeed, the report a year earlier in 1912, which had first adopted the anti-alcohol
resolution of 1909, disclosed that, aside from “several clubs” joining the Men’s
Association for the Struggle Against Public Immorality and the Kreuzbündnis, “no
special events or measures” related to drinking or moral issues in general had been
taken in the year prior to the congress. 65 The temperance rhetoric was empty in
practice.
The reluctance to confront alcohol as an “enemy of the worker,” despite Church
and KAB admonitions, lay in the unwillingness to alienate the working-class
membership. 66 The chaplain-presidents recognized that the leisure consumption
of alcohol by workers, for all the attempts to direct and control it, remained defiantly
immune to quick changes. As a minority religion without full state support,
German Catholicism by the turn of the century no longer was willing to participate
in a test of wills between Church and workers. Alcohol was the social lubricant of
KAB club life which otherwise faced mass defection. Despite a public stance
against alcohol, the leadership had to confront the workers’ willingness selectively
to reject aspects of the movement—in this case, the anti-alcohol message. Quite
simply, socializing required alcohol, and the members demanded socializing. To
deny them their drink pushed them out the door and into a conceivably worse
alternative. Additionally, privileging familial goals over men’s cultural prerogatives
by attacking alcohol consumption risked associating the clubs with femininity.
As a result, the clubs mostly tolerated alcohol consumption in practice while
agreeing with temperance platforms in theory. And the members continued to drink
and insist on alcohol’s presence at virtually every event. The chaplain-presidents
in particular conceded since their personal popularity as well as the success of their
local club required accommodation. Far from the KAB serving as a one-way
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