Of, course. I am having senior moments, alas, having turned sixty.
It's THE SERPENT IN THE CUP. I could not even remember the title of my
own essay correctly, although I got enough of it right to put anyone
interested on the right scent. Thanks. John
________________________________
From: Alcohol and Drugs History Society
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dave Trippel
Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2006 9:26 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: liquor as white privilege
John,
I think you mean The Serpent in the Cup, not Bottle
Dave
http://www.umass.edu/umpress/spr_97/reynolds.html
----- Original Message -----
From: Crowley, John <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
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
________________________________
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
[log in to unmask]
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