A fascinating, not to say spirited, study of the play of alcohol in
Gilded Age history, focusing on the neighborhood bar. At the outset
of her book, Powers (History/Univ. of New Orleans) defends her
choice of subject, arguing that in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries American saloons were the focal points for local
politics, union organizing, and community-building. But, she
continues, she is more interested in the way that those who
frequented the saloon built a community around drink, a community
with its own lore, music, jargon, and customs. The saloon, which
began as a somewhat high-toned alternative to the usual tavern,
drew in large crowds of workingmen (and some women, and even some
children), who found inside the swinging doors a place to escape
from daily hardships - and to cash paychecks and find a proverbial
free lunch, that powerful and now long bygone enticement to spend
one's lunch hour or evening wrapped around a mug and a shot glass.
Powers studies the changing drinking habits of Americans through
several waves of immigrants, with Anglo-Saxon hard cider giving way
to German beer, Italian wine, and upper-crust French cocktails. She
unearths wonderful, sometimes improbably sentimental drinking
songs. She details the subjects of conversation in the saloon -
religion, of course, and politics, and sports. And she examines the
people gathered around the bar; the Irish were, of course,
notorious for their hard-drinking ways, she writes, but were never
so badly demonized as were rural, southern African-Americans, whose
escape into drink has not been much studied. At each turn she has
much to say about the changing face of American culture in a
momentous time, and she says it with uncommon clarity. Social
history with a hard edge, highly recommended. (Kirkus Reviews)
This text recreates the daily life of the bar room from 1870 to
1920, exploring what it was like to be a "regular" in the old-time
saloon of pre-prohibition industrial America. It examines
saloon-goers across America, including New York, Chicago, New
Orleans and San Francisco, as well as smaller cities such as Sioux
City, Shoshone and Oakland. The book takes a look at the rich lore
of the bar room - its games, stories, songs, free lunch customs and
elaborate system of drinking rituals. It shows how urban workers
used saloons as a place to promote their political, social and
economic objectives; saloons where union leaders first organized
their members, politicians cultivated the working man's vote, and
immigrants sought the assistance of their countrymen. It also
discusses how gender, ethnicity and class played roles in
determining club membership. The author concludes that an
underlying code of reciprocity and peer group honour in saloon life
unified the regulars and transformed them into a voluntary
association. Thus, amid the fumes of beer and cigars, the regulars
were able to cultivate the dual benefits of communal companionship
and marketplace clout, making the old-time saloon one of the most
versatile, ubiquitous and controversial institution in American
history.
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