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
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
Regarding the whiteness question, an earlier posting mentioned Jon Crush and my
book, Liquor and Labor in
Chuck Ambler
-----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
----- 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
604.986.1911 x2477
FAX 604.990.7838
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