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Jack Blocker
History, Huron College, University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario N6G 1H3 Canada
(519) 438-7224, ext. 249 /Fax (519) 438-3938

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 08:18:58 -0500
From: Wendy Plotkin <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: H-NET Urban History Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: REVIEW: Thompson, _Rum Punch and Revolution_

Posted by Judith Ridner <[log in to unmask]>

Peter Thompson.  _Rum Punch and Revolution: Taverngoing and Public
Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia_.  [Early American Studies]
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.  265
pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index.  $18.50 (paper),
ISBN 0-8122-1664-4.

Reviewed for H-Urban by Judith Ridner, [log in to unmask],
Department of History, Muhlenberg College

Why were taverns so appealing to so many Philadelphians?  Was
Philadelphia's tavern culture different from that found in other
cities of colonial America?  Finally, how did tavern culture shape the
larger workings of society and politics in eighteenth-century
Philadelphia?  In his work, _Rum Punch and Revolution_, historian
Peter Thompson, Sydney Mayer Lecturer in Early American History at
University of Oxford and Fellow of St. Cross College, sets out to
answer these and other related questions in a generally engaging and
sometimes provocative new book.

Using the concept of "sociability" as the framework for his analysis,
Thompson sets out to explain what he sees as "Philadelphians'
passionate attachment to the tavern," a simultaneously private-public
space "where they could express and, if necessary, defend their
complicated and contested notions of community and society in a new
world environment" (p.4).  Taverns, in other words, were places where
identities were both asserted and contested.  Analyzing Philadelphia's
taverns, tavernkeepers, tavern patrons, and tavern culture[s],
therefore, allows one a microcosmic glimpse into the broader and more
complex social, economic, and political worlds of eighteenth-century
Philadelphia.  In the first three chapters, all strong in terms of
evidence and analysis, Thompson first paints a general portrait of
Philadelphia's tavern trade.  Analyzing licensing laws and tavern
license petitions, Thompson argues that Philadelphia's tavern trade
was in certain respects unique.  Unlike Boston, where, as David Conroy
has shown, Puritan elders waged a series of battles against alcohol
consumption and the public houses that promoted it, in Philadelphia,
the idealistic but also pragmatic William Penn and his Quaker
compatriots, eager to see their new city develop both rapidly and
profitably, quickly reconciled themselves to taverns being permanent
features of the cityscape.[1] If Philadelphians wanted to patronize
taverns, they would be allowed to do so.  City magistrates did not
seek to eliminate the trade.  Instead, they simply set out to regulate
it and keep it respectable.

Thompson next moves readers inside the tavern, arguing that
Philadelphia's public houses were more alike than different.  Liberal
licensing policies, intense competition, and price controls on liquor
fostered a uniformity in the city's tavern trade.  Taverns, he
suggests, were inclusive, and not exclusive spaces.  They were places
where people of all ranks met and mingled, sometimes eagerly, other
times more reluctantly.

Thompson is really at his best in these chapters.  His evidence is
solid, his analysis interesting.  Indeed, he does an especially
effective job capturing the complexities and contradictions of early
Philadelphia (the 1680s to roughly the 1740s), a paradoxical world
where the introspective individualism of Quakers like William Penn was
adjusted to coexist with the kind of active, public sociability of
non-Quakers like Benjamin Franklin.  Taverns and tavern culture, of
course, played key roles in this process of adaptation.

In the final two chapters and epilogue, Thompson shifts interpretive
gears and focuses more specifically on the connection between tavern
culture and politics.  He begins this section with a discussion of the
"small politics" of Philadelphia's tavern culture and its links to
city and colony politics before mid-century.  In a city and colony
where politics was highly personalized and reputation mattered, tavern
talk and tavern confrontations often translated into heated political
contests.  Tavern sociability, in other words, had larger political
implications.

Then Philadelphia's tavern culture changed.  The free speech and
"small politics" of the pre-1760 era gave way to the "big" politics of
the revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods.  The result was a
separation of social ranks, an increasingly moral tone to debates, the
pursuit of consensus, and, most of all, the desire on the part of
Philadelphia's elites to separate politics from sociability.  As a
result, with the city's wealth gap widening and price controls on
liquor ending, taverns became increasingly exclusive spaces serving
socially homogeneous clienteles.  Establishments like City Tavern were
built to serve the genteel, and not the coarse.  Thus, while the
city's patricians enjoyed more refined, though not always peaceful,
leisure in their own, exclusive spaces by the 1780s, the face-to-face
interactions among different ranks once characteristic of all taverns
declined.  Philadelphia's middling and lower sorts, finding themselves
excluded from channels of power in the city, were left to drink in
more rustic settings and when angered they rioted in the streets.

Thompson's class-based analysis in this second section of the book is
valuable and well grounded in the historical literature of
eighteenth-century Philadelphia.  He echoes and expands on arguments
offered by scholars like Gary Nash and Billy Smith.  Indeed, he does a
fine job suggesting the many ways that structural changes in
Philadelphia's economy could and did impact class and cultural
transformations.  Yet, while he makes the connections between
economics and culture clear, the links between politics, revolution,
and cultural change are much less so.  In particular, Thompson's
discussions of the rising preoccupation with morality during the
revolutionary and post-revolutionary eras and its connections to
Philadelphia's waning tavern culture are not as clearly argued.  To
this reader at least, these discussions also seemed less directly
connected to the rest of the work.  How exactly the ideals of the
American Revolution alienated the city's masses from politics could
use some more explanation.  Was it politics or concepts of leisure
that had changed?

In _Rum Punch and Revolution_, Peter Thompson offers readers a
valuable (and nicely illustrated) look at one of the more contested
social, cultural, and political "spaces" of eighteenth-century urban
America.  He also adds another scholarly study to the still
surprisingly limited historiography of early Philadelphia.  Finally,
his work leaves readers with some intriguing questions for further
consideration (perhaps by other scholars in other studies).  First,
what role did ethnicity and religion play in shaping Philadelphia's
tavern culture?  Thompson argues convincingly that Philadelphia's
taverns were settings for a kind of sociability that united people of
different classes, albeit at times reluctantly.  Yet, after he notes
how "Quakers, like Lutherans, generally stood aloof from the rituals
of tavern fellowship," (p. 98), and how they were often made to feel
like outsiders when toasting, dancing, and singing took place, one is
left to wonder exactly how often ethno-religious tensions fractured
sociability.  Were Philadelphia's taverns ethnically inclusive, or
were they largely the domains of Philadelphia's growing Anglican and
Presbyterian communities?  Was tavern culture a way for these groups
to claim power in a city long-dominated by what Thompson characterizes
as a Quaker oligarchy?  As Thompson suggests, and as any student of
Pennsylvania history knows, power shifted dramatically in the colony
during the eighteenth century as Quakers found themselves forced to
share power first with Anglicans and later with Presbyterians.  Was
Philadelphia's thriving tavern culture, especially before say the
1730s or 1740s, really an exclusive way for these non-Quaker groups to
claim power in the city?

Second, in chapter three, Thompson suggests that the tavern was a
shared space where private and public intersected.  As he notes,
taverns served multiple functions.  They offered drink, food, and
lodging to guests (and their horses).  Most were private residences as
well.  They were spaces where business and family life intersected.
Thompson makes a strong case for the myriad ways taverns became public
spaces.  He does a generally thorough job of explaining how the
microcosmic world of tavern sociability translated out into the larger
workings of city, colony, and state.  But what about the private side
of these spaces?  How exactly did work and family life intersect,
especially for those poor and often desperate women who operated some
25% of the city's taverns?

In his opening chapters, Thompson paints an interesting portrait of
tavernkeeping as a female as well as a male profession.  Yet, as
chapters progress and his focus shifts increasingly to the political,
these women tavernkeepers disappear.  If "small politics" was indeed
the heart of tavern sociability, then where did all these women fit
in?  Were early Philadelphia's "small political" intrigues exclusively
male?  Or, did these women tavernkeepers influence the style and
substance of this culture in ways that had broader implications on the
city's interconnected social and political worlds?

Endnotes

1. David Conroy, -_In Public Houses:  Drink and the Revolution of Authority
in Colonial Massachusetts_,  (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina
Press, 1995).


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