I am still trying to understand at what point alcohol was demonized in our culture
Pretty near the beginning is a good bet, and of course it was banned at the highest level at one point, too, so this is nothing new.
Actually, no. Our Puritan and Separatist early founders in New England, and certainly the English planters in the Virginia colony (not to mention the various Spanish, French, Dutch, Norse, Italian, Portugese, and other travellers who established temporary settlements on these shores) had a great fondness of alcoholic beverages -- and it can very truthfully be said that beer and wine were much safer to drink than water in many of the towns and cities they had come from or founded when they arrived.
History indicates that their attitudes about a great many activities were more "liberal" than at any point since, up until perhaps the middle of the 20th century.
The quantities of hard liquor alone that our founding fathers bought and consumed in a year would be staggering. George Washington produced ELEVEN THOUSAND gallons of rye whiskey at Mount Vernon in the year 1799 alone. Thomas Jefferson was an avid consumer and connoisseur of the best French wines and made sure the President's mansion was always well stocked.
The "Temperance" movement of the late 19th Century can be thanked more than anything else for our slow recovery from reactionary attitudes toward "demon rum." During what we now think of as the "Victorian" period, America developed a level of prudity that was, in itself, shocking to folks from other countries. From the stripping from common speech of many very descriptive terms (many of which are still considered unacceptable even today), to the founding of various pseudo-religious mystic health cults, to crippling social censure of any discussion of "biological" matters, to hyper-pious abstention from any substance or activity that was thought to give corporal pleasure -- we went just plain loony for "propriety."
Prohibition was certainly the high water mark for such things, but the effects still can be felt throughout our society -- in the sort of de-facto social stigma against certain substances, to our destructive fascination and counter-culture over-indulgances in them, and the vast hypocrisy that binds those elements together.
Just like today, folks like to find easy answers to social problems by blaming substances or items.
I could never tell if these ladies were making a threat, or a promise.
-Sam
