Ernie, Ernie, Ernie.  I was not correcting you.  Nosireebob.  I was merely
elaborating on a lovely juxtaposition you picked out -- between a seeming
implication of "Bowman's Compromise" and Anderson's slightly pained
acknowledgement of the irrelevance of the RCPA science gang.  I merely tried
to link your point A with a seemingly inconsistent point B.  Glad you're
home.  Hope and trust you had a good time.  Wish I coulda' been there.  More
tomorrow maybe.  RR

-----Original Message-----
From: Alcohol and Drugs History Society [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Ernest Kurtz
Sent: Friday, February 11, 2005 6:50 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: senior seminar on alcohol and drugs in world history

Hi Ron,

Old friend:  you are so brilliant that it scares me.  I surely accept
your clarifying explanation.  Thank you: I really wish more people would
do this with more of my work.  We must go forwards, with some respect
for past scholars, but not with excessive deferrence to them.  You set a
fine example, old friend, and I hope to continue learning from you.  The
field, the knowledge, are the important things, not our pitiful egos.
And you have long helped me on that score, so I again am in your debt
and thank you with all my heart and mind (whatever is left of the latter).

ernie


Ron Roizen wrote:

>Ernie Kurtz offered up some historical notes under this thread title in a
>Jan. 28, '05 post.  Toward the bottom was the following item:
>
>'Roizen (1991):  "Bowman's Compromise":  decision of RCPA to devote all
>future research energies to alcoholism;  Roizen sees as from "RCPA's
>leadership urgently trying to reason through how they might ethically
>justify accepting alcohol-beverage industry funds for support of their
>alcohol-related research."  [But note Dw. Anderson 1950:  "We ex-alcoholics
>watched the work of the Council with enthusiasm not unmixed with awe.  We
>regretted that it focused its attention on alcohol rather than on
alcoholism
>and that it seems perhaps more interested in measures of liquor control and
>the curbing of drunken driving than in attacking the fundamental problem of
>what causes alcoholism.  But with all these eminent men interested, we felt
>that sooner of later the emphasis would change."  And goes on to detail how
>it did.'
>
>There is the slightest hint therein, I thought, that Dwight Anderson's
>comment was inconsistent with -- or at least a caveat in relation to -- my
>assertion about "Bowman's Compromise."  Let me try to clarify the
historical
>situatin of my assertion, and Anderson's, a little.  "Bowman's Compromise"
>-- which was the particular focus of about half of my 1991 dissertation's
>Chapter 8 -- was struck in the context of the "old" Research Council on
>Problems of Alcohol.  Moreover, Bowman suggested his compromise, and the
>RCPA's membership ratified it, in the Autumn of 1939, only months before
the
>main locus of the new alcohol science movement shifted from the RCPA's
>headquarters in New York to Howard W. Haggard's Laboratory of Applied
>Physiology at Yale.  From the vantage point of the late 1940s -- most
likely
>when Anderson was writing THE OTHER SIDE OF THE BOTTLE (1950) -- Anderson
>probably had the Yale group's experience and focuses in mind when he made
>the slightly rueful remark that Ernie quoted.
>
>As I elaborated in my paper titled "Paradigm Sidetracked: Explaining Early
>Resistance to the Alcoholism Paradigm at Yale's Laboratory of Applied
>Physiology, 1940-1944," Yale was at best a reluctant party to the RCPA's
>1939 let's-focus-on-alcoholism policy decision.  The "alcohol problems"
>paradigm reigned at Yale's group in the early '40s and it was elaborated in
>loving detail in for example Haggard and Jellinek's ALCOHOL EXPLORED
(1942),
>in numerous commentaries by Jellinek, and at the Yale Summer School of
>Alcohol Studies (as memorialized in ALCOHOL, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY [1945].)
>The RCPA hired Anderson in '41 or '42 to advise that group how to improve
>the packaging and salability of alcohol science to an American public still
>wary of any discussion of alcohol because of the malaise regarding the
>subject that set in after Repeal.  Anderson's suggestion, and the 1942 QJSA
>paper it spawned, was that the alcohol science movement needed a new
>conceptual centerpiece -- and that "the disease conception of alcoholism"
>fit that desideratum perfectly.  Anderson relates in BOTTLE, incidentally,
>that Haggard loved his paper and wanted him (Anderson) to publish it as a
>booklet.
>
>But Anderson's ideas did not materialize in any determined effort in the
>Yale context until Marty Mann's National Committee on Alcohol Education was
>launched in Oct., '44, with Jellinek's and Haggard's assistance.  Even
then,
>however, the Yale's group's intentions regarding Mann's NCAE had more to do
>with developing a stream of lay funding for alcohol research than with
>buying, whole-hog into  alcoholism as the new top research priority.
>Jellinek did not publish his famous symptomatology for disease alcoholism,
>it will be recalled, until 1952, two years after Anderson's book was
>published.  Jellinek, moreover, showed his ambivalence about the whole
>disease concept enthusiasm in his 1960 book and, thereafter, in the work he
>did in providing a conceptual framework for the Cooperative Commission's
>book (Plaut, 1967), Jellinek's final project on alcohol, when he was at
>Stanford.
>
>So!  All of which offers ample reason, I think, for Anderson to have seen
>only iffy support for the alcoholism paradigm as he reflected on the
>prestigious RCPA and its relation to the lay-driven modern alcoholism
>movement.  Moreover, Anderson's rueful comment, which Ernie chose to add to
>his item, may alert us to the fact that "Bowman's Compromise" was by no
>means the end of the story of the alcoholism paradigm's ascendance in
>post-Repeal America.  The paradigm had set-backs (as it did in the Yale
>group's hands), reassertions (as Anderson's 1942 paper offered), and
>followed as crooked a road as any other new social invention.  I wrote the
>"Paradigm Sidetracked" paper partly as a continuation of the alcoholism
>story told in my diss., which took the story only to 1939.  But I also
wrote
>"Paradigm" as a cautionary tale conveying just how tentative and context
>dependent was the alcoholism paradigm's ascendancy in the alcohol science
>context.  In this early period the alcoholism paradigm was by no means an
>ineluctable social change but was instead driven by little more than the
>breaths of wind from butterfly wings.
>
>Ron
>
>
>
>
>