David and others --
   U.S. college drinking in the 1920s is one of the topics in Paula Fass's "The Damned and the Beautiful".  Her main raw material, as I remember, was college newspapers.
   Robin
   

-----Original Message-----
From: Alcohol and Temperance History Group
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of David Fahey
Sent: Friday, February 13, 2004 6:40 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: history of drinking at college -- rusty memory


A few comments.  Although there is a fair amount of material for historical
studies of college drinking, historians and historically minded social
scientists don't do them. This is odd since so many scholars are
campus-based.  Also we should consider changes in drinking laws (and
institutional policies), even as we recognize that formal rules don't tell
us all that we want to know about behavior.  For instance, when I went to
college in New York State in the 1950s, 18-year-olds could buy alcohol
legally.  At a college-sponsored party for the staff of the campus
newspaper on which I worked there was an open bar.  It was there, at age
18, that I had my first drink of hard liquor.  And my second.  And my third
....  It is the only time in my life that I got sick as the result of
drinking alcohol (and, probably unfortunately, didn't suffer a
hangover).  I hadn't known the practical difference between a Manhattan
(yes, that was a student drink in 1955) and a Coke.  Another topic, faculty
drinking.  When I arrived at my present job in the late 1960s, cocktail
parties that served hard liquor were common.  Not now.  Today I know very
few people who drink Scotch or bourbon (or my father's favorite, rye
whiskey).  It is like the disappearance of tobacco smoke.  Finally, my
university has a reputation, deserved or not, for undergraduate
boozing.  Beer is the preferred drink, whether at keg parties, or with six
packs, or at the uptown bars.  With March just around the corner, I should
refer to the local tradition of Green Beer Day, when student-oriented
taverns open (very) early to serve green-dyed beer.


At 08:26 AM 2/13/2004 -0800, you wrote:
>Dick,
>
>Yes, I did a little participant observation of watering holes in my salad
>years.  Also, my folks built a house in Portola Valley in the late 1950s
>and I used to drive by Rosotti's now and then.  But I suspect that there
>was a big cultural divide between the college culture of the 1930s and
>1940s, which may explain some of the foreignness you may see in the
>passages I posted from the 1936 FORTUNE article.  The 1930s, I suspect, saw
>the undergrad population winnowed by the Great Depression, so that the
>elitist tradition of PRE-post-WWII mass higher education became further
>distilled down to an even more privileged few.  The 1940s -- or at least
>the post-WWII '40s -- on the other hand, saw the burgeoning effect of the
>GI Bill and the breakdown of a long tradition of class privilege.  One of
>the most interesting articles in my FORTUNE file, BTW, is titled "The
>Servant Problem" (March, 1938).  Good help, the article laments, was
>getting almost impossible to find.  Like many FORTUNE articles, this one is
>laced with statistics drawn from a subscriber social survey of the domestic
>service topic.  Tantalizing assertions are sprinkled throughout, including,
>e.g., "...<more than half> of the persons who have no servants today had at
>least one in 1929" (p. 114, col. 1).  (FORTUNE is a treasure trove for
>social history in part because of its commitment to survey studies, even
>when the sampling approach was not all it might have been.)  Also, I think
>the college life article I quoted from had its focus on eastern campuses,
>which may have differed from Cal and Stanfurd.  Anyhow, I'd say let's cut
>the article a little more slack, Dick!
>
>Ron
>
>----------
>From: Dick B <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: history of drinking at college -- rusty memory
>Date: Thursday, February 12, 2004 4:46 PM
>
>Yes, Ron. It is delightful but not factual. I can speak from my pre-Army
>fraternity experience at Berzerkely in 1943, my post army experience at the
>same watering hole 1946-1948, and my law experience at Stanford where my
>law
>review gang (and that included Sandra Day and Bill Rehnquist) were working
>too hard to fit the pattern. However, the legendary Rosotti's and other
>Stanford drinking holes more than sufficed for Stanford. In other words,
>the
>academic arena writes good poetry and bad history. By the way, I think you
>must have stumbled on some of the drinking spots, the fraternities, and the
>campus excitement of the 1940's. I don't imagine you are that old, but I do
>believe anyone around Berkeley knows the legends and the facts - both. Dick
>B.
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Alcohol and Temperance History Group
>[mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>On Behalf Of Ron Roizen
>Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2004 1:12 PM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: history of drinking at college -- rusty memory
>
>Beth -- Are you still there?
>
>My file of alcohol-related FORTUNE articles turned up, and I'm afraid my
>memory was less than trustworthy.
>
>The article I was vaguely remembering, "Youth in College," appeared in the
>June, 1936 (v. 13, starts at p. 99) issue of FORTUNE.  It provides an
>engaging mini-ethnography of contemporary undergrad life, but offers,
>unfortunately, not very much on drinking practices per se.
>
>Still, what is offered is delightful.
>
>Regarding male students:
>
>p. 101:  "<Liquor and sex> used to be part of the great triumvirate of
>campus topics that included religion.  Today economics is to the fore as
>bull-session pabulum, with religion playing a minor role.  Liquor as a
>conventional topic is passe.  Less flamboyant drinking is the present day
>rule; there is no prohibition law to defy, hence one can drink in peace.
>As for sex, it is, of course, still with us.  But the campus takes it more
>casually that it did ten years ago.  Sex is no longer news.  And the fact
>that it is no longer news is news."
>
>p. 102, col. 1:  "At six o'clock an infinitesimal number of undergraduates
>may serve cocktails (gin and lemon juice) in their rooms.  But the typical
>student will go from his sports straight to dinner."
>
>p. 102, col. 2:  "Between ten-thirty and twelve-thirty the campus subsides
>into sleep.  A few independent drunks, who care little for the Friday or
>Saturday night tradition, come roaring in at three, but the average
>undergraduate doesn't get tight until classes and study are over for the
>week.  Weekends are not so frequent as they used to be, the obvious reason
>being that money has not been plentiful.  But one does not have to go far
>away from college to drink.  The stages of college inebriation are ranked
>as follows:  high, tight, looping, stinking, plastered, out.  Some would
>put tight after looping.  But regardless of the grading of intermediate
>philological degrees of drunkenness, most of the drinking undergraduates
>think high is the desirable state of glow for a weekday night and even for
>the ordinary weekend.  At spring house parties and at the football games
>the student can proceed to the tight and looping (or looping and tight)
>stages without causing any particular commotion."
>
>There's more, on females, but nothing specifically on drinking -- unless I
>missed it.
>
>Ron