As Professor Hanson of SUNY points out, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union was a major player in the push for nationwide Prohibition, and it preached some seriously wild stuff from the street corner soapboxes and in schools. It even approved textbooks for teaching Scientific Temperance Instruction, and these books included "facts" like the idea that alcohol dependence was inherited, or that alcohol stunted growth, turned blood into water, and could turn food in your stomach into poison if you ate and drank at the same time.

And there's so much more. The WCTU claimed alcohol could make someone spontaneously combust, that the only source for it was decaying plant matter, and that it was actually "the excretion of a fungus." If a beer had a nutty flavor, that was a clear sign it had been made with cockroaches. People who drank might randomly drop dead of dropsy (edema), have the linings of their throats burned off with every drink they took, and could even suffer from things like epilepsy, hysteria, gout, and a general sort of insanity. All because of booze!

The WCTU also used classroom demonstrations, including one where the teacher would put a calf's brain in a jar and fill the jar with alcohol. When the color of the brain changed, students were told that the same thing would happen to their brains. Every drinker has had a rough night, but no matter how pickled your brain might feel, at least you know it's not actually pickled.

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