[pfannkuchen]

Is German or English beer culture new? They may be culturally less prone to skirting the law than Irish or Italians (want to stress the word culturally here), but I don’t really see how we can attribute it to a cultural difference in the acceptance of alcohol.

[rayiner]

Temperance was an outgrowth of religious movements that occurred within American Protestantism in the late 1700s and through the 1800s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperance_movement. The seeds of this were sown back in Europe (John Wellesley for example) but those groups like Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers who opposed alcohol (and still do) had a lot more influence in America than they did back in Europe. And since the country was new they had a greater ability to reshape the culture.

So the relevant cultural difference is between these American Protestants, who had been diverging from Europe for 100+ years, and immigrants from continental Europe, who hadn’t experienced that cultural change.