John James McCook was a clergyman-turned-reformer who wrote and lectured extensively on alcohol, poverty, and kindred social problems during 1890–1924. He sought to show, statistically, photographically, and anecdotally, that alcohol generated massive social costs, and was therefore a fit object for strict regulation—but not necessarily prohibition. McCook thought drunkenness reprehensible, although he occasionally borrowed concepts and terminology from the inebriety movement, which held that alcoholism was a manifestation of mental disease.
This article describes McCook's investigations, his developing thought on alcohol and alcoholism, and his views on alcohol policy, and relates them to the larger intellectual currents of Progressivism, as well as his individual circumstances. A representative thinker in a transitional age, McCook mirrors the many and often contradictory ideas Americans have entertained about alcohol during the last hundred years.
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