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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: Tue, 11 May 1999 00:57:57 -0400
From: Elizabeth S Kent <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: H-NET Urban History Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: REVIEW: Powers _Faces Along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman's Saloon, 1870-1920_.
Reviewed for H-Urban by Perry Duis <[log in to unmask]), University of
Illinois at Chicago)
Madelon Powers. _Faces Along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman's
Saloon, 1870-1920_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. xii+323
pp. Notes, illustrations, index. $25 (Cloth), ISBN 0-226-67768-0
On December 10, 1893, during one of the flamboyant British editor William
T. Stead's famous visits to Chicago, he proclaimed from the stage of the
Central Music Hall that, "For what the saloonkeeper has done to supply
humanity with the fundamental necessities of life I say God bless the
saloonkeeper." The comments evoked scattered cheers and hisses, and one
man shouted from the gallery, "Does the saloonkeeper do this because he
loves his fellow man or because he loves his money?" Without missing a
beat, Stead replied, "If he did it because of his love of the man, he
would deserved to be called, not a saloonkeeper, but a saint." (Chicago
Tribune, Dec. 11, 1893).
In many respects, that exchange of quips is what Madelon Powers' new book
is all about. The saloon was an institution that could get no respect.
Scorned and feared by many when it was alive, it suffered the indignity of
being virtually neglected by academic historians until the 1970's, when a
few began to venture behind the swinging doors. Jon Kingsdale's _American
Quarterly_ article in broke the ice in 1975, followed in the next few
years by books on Western saloons by Elliot West (1979) and Thomas Noel
(1982) and by W.J. Rorabaugh's 1979 volume on alcohol consumption in
general. [1] Roy Rosenzweig integrated the bar into Worcester's
working-class culture (1983), the same year my 1975 dissertation on the
saloon in Chicago and Boston was published. [2] Now comes the newest
addition to the literature, Madelon Powers' delightfully written book,
which expands on earlier works in one phase of the barroom's storied
history, the places that catered to the working-class. If the works done
so far, this is the most generalized, the most anthropological in its
approach, and the most successful at dealing with the thick layer of
folklore surrounding the saloon.
The central theme of the book is community, or "clubbing," as the author's
calls it, and her goal is to present the saloon from the demand, or
drinkers' side of the marketplace equation. The first chapter begins by
placing "regulars" in the interpretive forefront, noting that the drinking
place was not a refuge from the changes of the world, but thoroughly a
part of it. It established the male status of the place. Chapter 2
begins with a discussion of the idea of manliness, then links it to
connections with adolescent gangs and with family structure. The next
chapter deals with he daily routine of the barroom, especially its role as
a hiring center, and its connection with politics. Chapter 4 explains the
folkways of the barroom, especially treating, Americans' choices in
beverages, and other drinking customs that reenforced the sense of
comradeship. The author then makes a nice segue from treating to
political bribery. Chapter 6, "Clubbing by Collection," deals with
growler-rushing, the back room, and voluntary associations. This is
followed by a nice categorization of the types of games and gambling found
in barrooms. Chapters 8 and 9 provide an excellent overview of saloon
folklore, while the concluding chapter assesses the institution of the
free lunch.
Alas, _Faces Along the Bar_ is a Jekyll and Hyde for this reviewer. On
one hand, it is a well written account with many interesting interpretive
ideas that attempt to place the working-class swinging doors in the
general context of American history. It does a marvelous job of relating
the many literary references to the barroom and makes a number of
thought-provoking points. Its footnotes are a compendium of the best
secondary sources in parallel fields that place the story of the saloon in
some of its larger contexts. It is also by far the most generalized book
to be done on the subject. But it is in that level of generalization that
the first of several flaws arise.
The initial clue to these problems can be found in the Introduction, which
claims that, "The tenacity of tradition makes it possible to study fifty
years of salooning as a reasonably coherent and continuous whole, as well
as to speak of saloongoers in the aggregate even while acknowledging their
regional and ethnic differences. (P. 4) In other words, nothing of
significance really changed over half a century. As a result of this
interpretive fixedness, the book promises and delivers more of a composite
stereotype than a study of the complexity of barrooms and their habitues.
This approach appears to grow at least in part from the book's terribly
narrow research base. While the author does a fine job of integrating
literary sources--so well that it is sometimes hard to separate actuality
from fiction--the endnotes reveal that the character of the hard base of
research facts almost predetermine the book's interpretive framework.
First, the book depends heavily in secondary sources. George Ade's brief
1931 volume, _The Old- Time Saloon_, is cited 50 times. [3] The
oft-reprinted article by Kingsdale and the books by Rosenzweig, Noel, and
West appear in the notes with similar frequency. My book, _The Saloon:
Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston, 1890-1920_ is cited 47 times, and
even them my ideas about the importance of the saloon's ubiquity, its
daily temporal routine, and the information-exchange role of the bartender
appear in _Faces_ without proper attribution.
While the strength of the book is in interpreting image and language, the
disappointingly thin level of primary source work yields little new
information about what actually happened in working-class bars. There are
only a handful of newspaper sources, several more from contemporary
magazines, but only one endnote makes any reference to a manuscript
collection. Granted that saloonkeepers were hardly literary talents who
left behind personal papers, but reformers who worked in their
neighborhoods most certainly did. It is particularly disturbing that the
author completely ignored the untapped wealth of information in such
liquor trade journals as _Mida's Criterion_, _New England Trader_, and
_Bonfort's Wine and Spirit Gazette_. Instead, when the book need factual
information, it heavily depends on either the aforementioned secondary
works, or on four turn-of-the-century anti-saloon sources. Three of the
latter are articles in the _American Journal of Sociology_ and deal with
Chicago, one by E.C. Moore of Hull-House, and a two-part study by Royal
Melendy who was affiliated with Chicago Commons. [4] The text of _Faces_
contains so many quotes from these three articles which are cited 57
times, that the reader might almost reconstruct their texts. Melendy's
articles were written as a factual contribution to Raymond Calkins,
_Substitutes for the Saloon_, the single book cited most repeatedly (65
times) in the footnotes and praised in the Introduction (p. 5). This
volume, which contained fairly brief descriptions submitted from seventeen
cities, was produced by the Committee of Fifty, a national temperance
organization that struggled unsuccessfully to find institutional
replacements for barrooms. While the sketches of individual cities in
_Substitutes_ provide an interesting overview, none of them is really an
adequate description of what went on in any one town. [5]
What is also significant about the most heavily used primary sources is
that they are nearly all form the years 1897 to 1901, perhaps explaining
why Faces could make the claim that its generalizations held true over a
fifty year period, when the facts demonstrate that to be untrue. In my
book I tried to point out that saloons constantly evolved in response to
the changing economic structure of their wet-goods suppliers, local
licensing laws, real estate and transportation trends, legislative attacks
from temperance interests, ethnic transitions, competing diversions, rival
dealers, and a host of other factors. The ability of the saloons to
adjust and reinvent themselves when necessary was one of their virtues.
Many observers noted that the barrooms of 1880, which tended to be owned
by their proprietors, were different from the brewery-owned outlets that
in many way reflected the growth of chain retailing in grocery stores and
lunch counters. The dozens of Schlitz-owned bars near the steel mills of
South Chicago and the German workingman's neighborhoods of the North Side
operated in a very different manner than mom-and-pop operations. The
dependence on the 1897-1901 sources also deprives the reader of a
description of the full impact of the anti-prostitution and post-1901 high
license campaigns, let alone World War I. _Faces at the Bar_ occasionally
hints at change, but its topical structure promotes an incorrect
compression of time that allows examples drawn from half a century apart
to appear in a single paragraph and gives the illusion of timelessness.
Although the endnotes would indicate that study draws very heavily on the
Chicago experience, the author gives the incorrect impression that the
saloon was geographically homogenized. Various cities are mentioned in
passing, but their names do not even appear in the index. Most
importantly, there is not systematic attempt in _Faces_ to make the
necessary link with the urban context of the saloon. This results in an
almost complete disregard of the importance of location, even though
saloons were unique mirrors of their surroundings. Control over each
barroom grew out of highly localized laws, and my reading of primary
sources indicated that the resulting drinking practices were not really
the same in any two places. Obviously, brewery chain-ownership and
perhaps the inter-city migration of drinkers and discussion of fads in the
media promoted some small degree of uniformity, but there were contrasts.
That was my entire purpose in choosing wide-open Chicago and
tightly-regulated Boston for my own dissertation and book. Don't look in
_Face along the Bar_ for the famous Raines Law Sandwich in New York (The
Raines Law Hotel is relegated to a brief footnote), Boston's Common
Victualer Law, or Philadelphia's quirky court-based application process.
While Powers was aiming at the very creditable goal of attempting to write
a national study, she should not have plucked the facts and examples from
their contexts and treated these city-to-city differences so lightly. A
reading of the trade journals would have made it obvious that
saloonkeepers were indeed very census of these localized traditions,
constantly asking themselves whether a business-boosting gimmick or new
temperance tactic or organized labor problems in another city or state was
relevant to their own situations. Their organizations were locally-based
and seldom grew into anything beyond the citywide level. The major trade
journals had regular correspondents in cities scattered across the country
who reported local news and trends.
Finally, there is the matter of over-all definition. The subtitle of the
book refines the focus to the "workingman's" saloon, but we are never
quite sure what that term means. The effort to emphasize the
sense-of-community theme causes the author to downplay the important
factor of the workers' daily geographical mobility, which is a main point
of my book and one of the central interpretive facts of urban history.
The commuting patterns of factory workers and tradesmen who had to travel
across the city brought them into saloons what were miles from home.
Workers were also at the center of the Sabbatarian conflict that
especially involved beer gardens that were often located far from home.
Where did the definition of "workingman" begin and end on the social
scale? The lowly-paid among those with white collars were also workers,
but are omitted. The very large number of men who survived neat the
bottom of society are similarly absent. Every city had some sort of a
transient Areas; Chicago's West Madison St. Main Stem was the largest.
These rundown districts adjacent to downtown contained many
seasonally-idle workingmen, not just hard-core non-working tramps; these
down-at-the-heel drinking places are absent from the study. These drinkers
were actually the main clientele of Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna's famous
"Workingman's Exchange," which is mentioned in the book.
The "workingman" is therefore more of an author's construct than a factual
description. Anselm Strauss' fine old book _Images of the American City _
taught us how we make stereotypes of cities as well as categories of
people as a way of dealing with complexity. [6] To some extent, I think
that this book suffers from a similar process of stereotype formation.
Some social historians might not object to this homogenization. And one
can even argue that urban history should emphasize similarities rather
than differences. But at the risk of appearing to be a troglodyte, this
reviewer can only conclude that there needs to be a step that reaches
beyond the basis of obvious similarities and stereotypes and confronts
differences and contrasts among cities and their institutions.
The saloonkeeper deserves that kind of respect, even if he was no saint.
[1] Jon Kingsdale, "The 'Poor Man's Club': Social Functions of the Urban
Working-Class Saloon" _American Quarterly_ 25 (October, 1973): 472-89;
(Elliot West, _The Saloon on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier _Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1979; Thomas J. Noel, _The City and the
Saloon: Denver, 1858-1916_). (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1982); W.J. Rorabaugh, _The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition_ (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
[2] Roy Rosenzweig, _Eight Hours For What We Will: Workers and Leisure in
an Industrial City, 1870-1920_. (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1983); Perry R. Duis, "The Saloon and the Public City: Chicago and Boston
1880-1920" (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1975), published as _The Saloon:
Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston, 1880-1920_ (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1893)
[3] George Ade, _The Old-Time Saloon: Not Wet--Not Dry_ (New York: Long
and Smith, 1931)
[4] Royal L. Melendy, "The Saloon in Chicago (Part 1)" _American Journal of
Sociology _ 6 (Nov. 1900): 289-306; "The Saloon (Part 2)" Ibid. 6 (Jan.
1901); 443-64; E.C. Moore, "The Social Value of the Saloon," _American
Journal of Sociology_ 3 (July 1897): 1-12.
[5] Raymond Calkins, _Substitutes For the Saloon_ (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1901)
[6] Aselm Strauss, _Images of the American City_ (Glencoe, IL: The Free
Press, 1961).
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