SOURCE: Levine, Robert S. “Disturbing Boundaries: Temperance, Black Elevation, and Violence in Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends.” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 19 (1994): 349-74.

In the following essay, Levine considers The Garies and Their Friends in the context of the black temperance movement in Philadelphia during the 1830s and 1840s. Further, the critic documents the hypocritical—and even violent—white response to blacks' attempts to improve themselves and assimilate into the white culture.

At the inaugural 1837 meeting of the American Moral Reform Society, one of Philadelphia's many African American reform groups, William Whipper called for blacks to commit themselves to total abstinence and “temperance in all things.” The group itself offered a resolution that subsumed a number of social desires and reforms under the rubric of temperance: “Resolved, That the successful promotion of all the principles of the Moral Reform Society, viz.: Education, Temperance...