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
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