Imagine that you have a friend with a really good sound system who invites you to his house. He plays a record that you have heard a billion times—say, “I Want You Back,” by the Jackson 5—and suggests that you pay close attention to the bass line. So you do. This time, the guitars still strum, the Jacksons still harmonize, but now you really hear how catchy, how playful, how irresistible, how instrumental Wilton Felder’s bouncy riffs are to the booty-shakingness of that brilliant bit of pop.
An experience on the same order is in store for those who read America Walks Into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops. In this booze-soaked, saloon-o-scopic dose of American history, Christine Sismondo tells a lot of the same stories we have heard so many times, but brings the background into the foreground. The book is a revelation.
Sismondo’s earlier book, Mondo Cocktail, is a history of spirits, and here she turns from what people drank to where and how they drank it. The Sons of Liberty in Boston and New York organized in taverns. Boston revolutionaries Samuel Adams and James Otis voiced their royal disgruntlement in taverns. The idea behind the Boston Tea Party was hatched in a tavern. When the Virginia governor shut down a disputatious House of Burgesses, the delegates reconvened in a tavern. When the Continental Congress met in Philadelphia, the delegates spent their evenings hashing things over in a tavern (conveniently located near racy Race Street). At Lexington and Concord, the minutemen assembled in taverns. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in a tavern. Patrick Henry was a barkeeper, John Hancock was a tax-evading wine importer, and Jefferson made wine and beer at Monticello. Ben Franklin was the author of The Drinker’s Dictionary. John Quincy Adams once correctly identified 11 out of 14 Madeiras in a blind taste test, and the Father of our Country began his career in politics by winning a seat in the House of Burgesses, which he accomplished while lubricating the district’s 794 voters with 47 gallons of beer, 34 gallons of wine, 2 gallons of cider, 3.5 pints of brandy, and 70 gallons of run punch.
No wonder America felt comfortable declaring its independence from the world’s preeminent military and commercial power. Evidently, we were half in the bag. E Pluribus Unum? We’re lucky our motto isn’t “Here’s mud in your eye.” No taxation without representation? We’re fortunate the British only sent troops over, and didn’t counteroffer half-price drinks during Happy Hour.
We jest, we jest. Perhaps those rebels weren’t drunk at all. Americans back then drank more heavily than their comparatively abstemious descendants, and probably held it better. Colonists imbibed an average of 34 gallons of beer and cider, five gallons of distilled spirits, and one gallon of wine per person per year in 1790, compared to the 2.31 gallons per year the average person consumed in 2007. Colonists started young and they started early, with beer at breakfast, and kept themselves well lubricated until bedtime with grogs, ales, beers, wines and brandies, as well assorted mixed drinks and punches that had names like Rattle-Skull, Stonewall, Bogus, Blackstrap, Bombo, Mimbo, Whistle Belly, Syllabub, Sling, Toddy, and Flip. Many drank alcohol for the same reason we drink celery smoothies: they thought it was healthy. Whiskey, they believed, addressed colic and laryngitis, hot brandy punch took care of cholera, and rum-soaked cherries mitigated the effects of a cold. Certainly almost any kind of alcohol was better than drinking colonial water, which again and again proved salty, slimy, brackish, filthy and lethal.
However healthful the alcoholic beverages may have been, Sismondo argues, the far more important function taverns provided in colonial times was to offer a place, an hospitable environment, in which the fundamentally democratic American political character could be formed. Taverns and inns that were set at some distance from one another on America’s primitive roads accepted travelers openly and without regard for religion or national origin, just so long as they could pay for food, drink, and shelter. In cities and towns, the local tavern became one of the few places where people regularly assembled. Lively argument, especially about political issues, was part of the entertainment. People of many stations were welcome, and many views were tolerated. A visitor from Maryland noted that in Philadelphia he sat in a tavern with “Scots, English, Dutch, Germans, and Irish; there were Roman Catholics, Church men, Presbyterians, New Lightmen, Methodists, Seven Day men, Moravians, Anabaptists and one Jew.” He noted that they sat at one table, discussed the price of flour and the prospects of war with France, and swatted flies. Of course, he didn’t seem to see any blacks; and, of course, during periods of greater tension, people tended to prefer to associate with those who agreed with them and to distance themselves from fly-swatters who held different views. Still, the point was clear: Here was diversity!
Sismondo contrasts the political life spawned in the American colonies with the one that emerged from British coffeehouses, where the clientele was bourgeois and delineated by profession and politics. “In London,” she writes, “Tory financiers frequented Lloyd’s coffee house; political radicals hung out at Will’s.” In America, location tended to encourage a more natural kind of segregation; a tavern located near a shipyard drew more than its fair share of sailors, but shipowners and shopkeepers and artisans would be in the room as well. Price-fixing laws prevented the emergence of too many establishments that catered to the well-to-do. A man’s money spent as well in one place as the next, and the grog would get you just as groggy. Why go uptown?
What’s fascinating is that, after taverns had served as the nurturing greenhouses of American democracy, the growth and suppression of drinking establishments became a surrogate issue for participation in, or exclusion from, the government that had been born on the tavern floor. The immigrant groups brought their own drinking traditions with them, and the bias against them extended to the raucous, rowdy Irish saloons and the sedate, family-friendly German beer gardens alike. In the south, newspapers campaigned against bars in African American neighborhoods as breeding grounds for rapists bent on violating white women. As towns and cities grew larger, taverns and bars became less a home for democratic intercourse and more a headquarters for political or class interests. The mainstay of most big city machines was the saloon, and no wonder: a man could get a beer, a free lunch, a friendly word, an occasional loan, and general solace from a harsh and bigoted world, all for a nickel a glass and a measly vote once or twice a year. The habitués of the exclusive clubs looked with disdain on the drunkenness that was endemic in those saloons, while overlooking the considerable inebriation present in their own establishments.
The most extreme effort to control liquor was the Temperance movement and its crowning achievement, the short, frantic era of Prohibition. The 18th amendment, also known as the Volstead Act, was passed in January 1919 and went into effect a year later. Prior to that point, the Methodists and other Protestant sects, the Anti-Saloon League, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and health organizations had persuaded some states and a number of counties to go dry. Complete victory, however, proved to be too much of a good thing. During Prohibition, Americans drank more than ever, particularly American women. Among those who profited were Canadian distillers, enterprising speakeasy operators, hard-working gangsters, and, later on, Hollywood, which churned out pulpy flicks about their exploits.
Eventually, some supporters of prohibition came to realize that the ban only encouraged cynicism, hypocrisy and a general disdain for authority, and in 1933, the Volstead Act was repealed. Today, there are a lot of regulations governing access to alcohol, but no longer are there efforts to push the tavern out of American life, or to push people out of the tavern. We may not have the most enlightened policies governing alcohol, but at least there’s no more drama. This is more than we can say about drugs. Sismondi’s perceptive, engagingly written history is not only informative about the past, but also provokes the question about the present: How much is our war on drugs a product of culture wars long since forgotten, of attitudes about race that we refuse to confront?
Among those who sought to profit from prohibition, the most celebrated are those who turned to globalization, who mobilized fleets of boats and trucks, smuggled booze into the States from Canada or Cuba or Europe, and shipped it around the country and sold it through networks of nightclubs and small-time distributors. Not to be forgotten, however, are the industrious rural dwellers who would open a still and make moonshine for local consumption. In her book Moonshine: A Cultural History of America’s Infamous Liquor, Jaime Joyce, an editor at Time Inc., spells out the three defining characteristics of this notorioius beverage: It can be made by fermenting any grain, although corn is preferred; its distillers actively avoid paying tax on the product, so it is usually made surreptitiously (by the light of the moon, you might say); and it is not aged at all and hence is as clear as, well, mountain dew.
One might think that with such a renegade pedigree, moonshining might have produced its share of criminal icons, but that doesn’t seem to have been the case. There are no moonshiners who rank in the outlaw pantheon alongside the James Gang, Al Capone and John Dillinger; nor are there revenuers who resemble relentless, monomaniacal lawmen like J. Edgar Hoover or Eliot Ness. And with souped-up cars and trucks outracing pursuing police along backwoods passes and narrow mountain roads, the enterprise feels less like The Untouchables and more like the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. Of course, it was a little more lethal than that. Still, it’s no wonder some moonshiners turned into the founding fathers of NASCAR; after outrunning Johnny Law, Darlington Raceway couldn’t seem more daunting.
Among the subjects that Joyce takes up is the legendary moonshine graduate and race car driver Junior Johnson. It is her misfortune that Johnson was the also the subject of one of the most famous pieces of journalism of the 20th century, Tom Wolfe’s brilliant March 1965 Esquire cover story called “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson—Yes!” This article was written at a point when Wolfe was just discovering his power as a writer, and thus does not feature quite as many explanation points as his pieces soon would. It does, however, boast sentences like “Ggghhzzzzzzzhhhhhggggggzzzzzzzeeeeeong!—gawdam! there he goes again, it was him, Junior Johnson!, with a gawdam agent’s si-reen and a red light in his grille!”
Joyce is a talented writer, but she has nothing as vivid or vigorous as “Ggghhzzzzzzzhhhhhggggggzzzzzzzeeeeeong!” in her repertoire, which is a shame, since Wolfe seems to have settled once and for all that this is one of the mots justes to be used when discussing liquor so intoxicating and cars so disequilibriating that they both deserve the name White Lightning. Joyce seems far more comfortable teasing out its connection to the small-batch distillers who are making modern moonshine for hipsters and gastronomes, a fine new edition to the heritage industry. She even includes recipes. This new breed, however, pays taxes, making them, like Joyce’s book, a little less outlaw than the product, or subject, deserves.