RE: liquor as white privilegeFollowing a massive tea party in Glasgow's City Hall, Feb 18, 1846, Douglass spoke in series with a number of other temperance advocates and said at the end of his turn...
[ Glasgow Saturday Post, February 21, 1846]
"I used to love the crittur. (Laughter.) I used to love drink-That's a fact. (Renewed laughter.) I found in me all those characteristics leading to drunkenness-and it would be an interesting experience if I should tell you how I was cured of intemperance, but I will not go into that matter now. One of my principal inducements was the independent and lofty character which I seemed to possess when I got a little drop. (Laughter.) I felt like a president. (Renewed laughter.) By the way, let me tell you of an illustration of my own feelings of a man who had similar feelings under similar circumstances. When he got a drop he felt as if he was the moderator, or judge, or chairman of a society-or as one who had the responsibility of keeping good order. He happened one night to be going home across a field a little top heavy, and he fell near to a pig sty. After laying there for a time he got very cold and he crawled into the sty, and the old occupant being out he laid himself down in her bed, and made himself quite comfortable (laughter) until the return of the old creature with her company of young. A gentleman chancing to pass that way had his ears saluted with the old cry of "order, gentlemen, order"-(laughter)-on which he went into the sty and there he found the old occupant of the sty with all her young, trying to get the fellow out of the bed. (Shouts of laughter.) I also used to feel something like the president of a pig stye. However, I was cured of that. Here Mr. Douglas[s] related an amusing anecdote about a colony of rats from which he drew a very appropriate moral bearing on the question of moderation, and drunkenness, and after a few further remarks concluded an able address amid loud and protracted cheering."
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Here's a link http://www.yale.edu/glc/archive/1068.htm to the Douglass speech that also covers a number of issues significant to the race/temperance topic other than how bad were the troubles he experienced while drinking. On the latter issue, the key may be that he states he became "cured" as if it were a small chapter in his life and he then got on with making what is now history.
Dave
----- Original Message -----
From: Crowley, John
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Wednesday, June 14, 2006 11:45 AM
Subject: Re: liquor as white privilege
A few years ago in THE SERPENT IN THE BOTTLE, a collection of essays on American temperance from UMass Press, I published a possibly relevant article: "Slaves to the Bottle": John Gough and Frederick Douglass." Their autobiographies appeared the very same year, 1845. This piece, mainly on John Gough, also took the race issue insofar as I noted the surprising absence of slavery rhetoric in Gough and, by extension, in Northern temperance literature, for fear of alienating the Southern wing. I also noted literature, cited first in Rorabaugh, which argued that intemperance was worse than slavery. This temperance "silence' is particularly notable because the contemporaneous women's movement borrowed the slavery trope liberally.
In general, American reformers in the nineteenth century seem to have belonged to the women's movement and the abolition movement AND the temperance movement. Because of the very odd "repression" of the last by the vast majority of the hip scholarly community in our time, the full meaning of these interconnections has never, to my knowledge, been studied. Until academe derepresses temperance, the situation will not change until our work makes bigger and bigger dents. Why this "repression"? I will save my theory for another time.
In my essay, I reconsidered the references to drinking in Douglass and then tracked his tour to Ireland, Scotland, and England in 1846, reading all his lectures. I found that Douglass subtly leaked the fact that he himself had been an inebriate during slavery, indeed during the mildest time in slavery under Mr. Freeman. He never says it all in one place; it's as if he was confessing serially to something he did not want to say straight out. I've never seen my essay cited anywhere, and I heard it shouted down by a vested-interest (white) Douglass scholar when I first presented it at a conference. Contrarily, I heard from a friend in the rehab business that his suggesting to African American alcoholics that Douglass too had had a drinking problem often gave them additional hope. If you are interested, please read the essay and make up your own mind.
I am quite confident, however, about my findings, however politically incorrect or inconvenient they may be; and at the very least I have raised an biographical issue about Douglass that needs to be resolved by more specialized scholars. Meanwhile, I would love to see more scholarly action on the boundaries of the women's, abolition, and temperance movements.
John W. Crowley, Professor of English, University of Alabama
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From: Alcohol and Drugs History Society [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ambler, Charles
Sent: Thursday, June 01, 2006 12:52 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: liquor as white privilege
We're straying slightly from the question here, but I think one has to be careful about how widely we generalize from sources like Douglass's autobiography, the first part of which was after all conceived as an anti-slavery statement. It is also entirely possible to place Christmas drinking in a long tradition that would reach into English traditions (here we're touching on the debate especially in the 1980s in English social history on the tension between "popular expression" and "social control". It certainly stretches forward into other highly racialized contexts like southern Africa. There in the 19th and 20th century there was an on-going tension between those (typically employers) who saw drinking on weekends and holidays as an opportunity to workers to relax, take a break, etc. (possibly be further tied to the employer through debt) and those (typically officials, some missionaries, white settlers) who saw drinking as dangerously volatile--as places where the rituals of obeiscance might be overturned, as the source of dangerous sexuality and criminality and where mob action might be fomented.
Regarding the whiteness question, an earlier posting mentioned Jon Crush and my book, Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa, and the introductory essay which does consider the question at least indirectly. As do a couple of essays on Zimbabwe by Michael West (and my individual chapter in Liquor and Labor. Where it really surfaces is in the long effort to reserve certain kinds of drinks as exclusively "white". In Africa as a whole this meant all spirits with a long effort made to argue that these were unsuitable for African consumption. But in british east, central and southern Africa, Africans were forbidden to consume "European" type beer and wine. This had less to do, I would argue, with Africans being forbidden these products (which were no stronger than the "traditional" drinks they were permitted) and everything to do with defining them as "white" and reserving them for white consumption. The fights about relaxing these bans in the 1940s and 1950s--1960s in South Africa are quite illustrative of this.
Chuck Ambler
Univ. of Texas at El Paso
-----Original Message-----
From: Alcohol and Drugs History Society on behalf of Padma Manian
Sent: Wed 5/31/2006 2:28 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: liquor as white privilege
Frederick Douglass in his autobiography noted that slaves were given a week's holiday from the day after Christmas until the New Year's Day. During this time, masters induced slaves to drink, in fact, encouraged them to abuse it and frowned upon slaves who preferred to work and earn a little bit of money, and on those who were preferred to be sober. Masters placed bets on which slave could drink more than any other and encouraged rivalry among slaves. Douglass noted that sobriety and useful work were thought to awaken rebelliousness. On the other hand, masters believed that giving slaves a false sense of liberty by indulging them to excessively drink would by the end of the week disgust slaves that they would gladly return to "arms of slavery".
Padma Manian
San Jose City College, San Jose, CA
----- Original Message -----
From: S Powell
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Wednesday, May 31, 2006 9:39 AM
Subject: Re: liquor as white privilege
For what it is worth, I am of the impression that during the period of American Slavery in the deep south, the slaves were not "permitted" or at least given alcohol because the slave masters worried about their behavior when intoxicated. I seem to remember there were exceptions to this on the plantations but for the most part it was generally desirable to keep alcohol away from them.
This would certainly lend to a sense of "whiteness" and privilege in Antebellum Southern American White Culture. I cannot speak to the Canadian culture...
As for sources, I am on the road and do not have access to sources...
Regards,
Steve Powell
Odessa Pictures, Inc.
View our Demo Reel Online at:
http://odessapictures.com/
Tel: +1.716.316.6710
On May 28, 2006, at 12:48 PM, Robert Campbell wrote:
Hello,
A colleague of mine has asked about secondary literature on liquor as a white privilege, particularly in the Canadian context. My work certainly has assumed that privilege, but it does not discuss how access to alcohol can be part of the process of creating "whiteness."
Regards,
Robert Campbell
Robert A. Campbell, Ph.D.
Department of History
Capilano College
2055 Purcell Way
North Vancouver, BC
Canada V7J 3H5
604.986.1911 x2477
FAX 604.990.7838
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