The Saloon, America’s Forgotten Democratic Institution
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Version 0 of 1. Frothy lager on tap. A communal “mustache towel” hanging by the bar. Partisan debate rattling the glassware. America’s saloons once served as boisterous “poor man’s clubs,” where 19th-century laborers could make their political voices heard. In the wake of the 2016 election, with both parties struggling to connect with a disaffected working class, and just about everyone in need of a drink, Americans might want to belly up to the once-maligned saloon. Saloons were once everywhere in America, from urban alleys to rural crossroads. They were about more than drinking; from the 1860s through 1920, they dominated social life for the laboring majority building a new industrial nation. By 1897 there were roughly a quarter of a million saloons, or 23 for every Starbucks franchise today. Some saloons proclaimed middle-class respectability, packed with pianos and chandeliers; others were more honest, serving beer in old tomato cans. A few special establishments had “urination troughs” at the foot of the bar, for full-bladdered drinkers to relieve themselves without abandoning their steins or conversations. Women, not surprisingly, avoided the bar save for prostitutes and some very tough barmaids. Almost everyone drank beer. Colonial Americans preferred cider and rum, while the early 19th-century boom of grain-producing states meant a glut of whiskey, unleashing an epidemic of alcoholism. Over the second half of the 19th century, many Americans switched to low-alcohol German lager. By the Gilded Age, saloons were places for slow, social imbibing, a beer drinker’s republic blending immigrant and American cultures. Like today’s coffee shops offering free Wi-Fi, saloons provided drinkers with a free lunch: cheese, crackers and bologna, but also pigs’ feet and pretzels, liverwurst and sardines, more raw onion than any man would want. In a nation with no social safety net and chronic recessions, these snacks kept many laborers alive. Their hunger exposes what today’s retro-saloons, packed with faded photographs and old-timey cocktails, get wrong. Saloons were not manly haunts for mutton-chopped gods; rather they were havens for economic refugees, coming from Ireland or Poland, North Carolina or South Dakota, harried men fleeing the enormous social disruptions of the Gilded Age. Saloons became salons, where survivors of the Industrial Revolution could drink and debate, politick and speechify. The new American proletariat took full advantage of their relatively open political system, voting at higher rates than rich men. More than the beer, saloons provided a gathering place in a nation with little public space for working-class men to argue the issues or meet the candidates. Parties set up headquarters in saloons, and saloonkeepers often ran political machines, trading on their intimate knowledge of the drinkers in their districts. Many politicians got their start as boys eavesdropping in partisan barrooms. One humorist joked that, to get a political movement going, all it took was “20 barls uv beer, and 300 yards of bolony.” Gilded Age Americans had limited expectations for what the government could do for them, so saloon-politics rarely inspired policies that assisted needy people. Instead, politicos offered free drinks, or found jobs for unemployed bar-goers, while the institutions themselves allowed workers to feel connected to their political system. Yet during the heyday of saloon politics, in the 1870s and 1880s, the well to do began to question the entire logic of voting rights for all. They worried that they were being outvoted by the working classes, whom they dismissed as “the stupid, the lazy, the drunken — the whole mass of scum and dregs of society.” So reformers moved to crush saloons, knowing that when “removed from the beer keg and the tap, local political clubs die young.” Though they blamed saloons for Gilded Age corruption, the small-scale graft of America’s barrooms paled in comparison with what went on in its boardrooms or drawingrooms. And reformers’ claim to fight immoral drunkenness was equally weak: Alcohol consumption was falling across the country. What was on the rise was the number of poor laborers, and their mounting political consciousness. Between 1890 and 1920, Prohibitionists closed saloons on Election Day, then in whole counties, then states, and finally across the nation. By shuttering saloons, they suppressed poor people’s votes. Many of us are (finally) familiar with the atrocious Jim Crow voting laws used to kill Southern black politics. But this is the lesser-known story of Jim Crow’s white, Northern cousin, the forgotten movement to snatch democracy from the working classes. For their part, many upwardly mobile laborers joined in a historic bargain, trading saloons for the promise of the middle class. As one union man wrote during Prohibition, “there is neither profit nor pleasure in getting drunk,” instead, laborers get “more ‘kick’ out of an auto or a decent home than out of the corner saloon.” For nearly a century, this was a very good trade. But in 2016, we see what was lost. Neither work nor unions nor “decent homes” seem stable anymore. And older social institutions like saloons, constructed to cope with such instability, are long gone. In the gap between the two, poorer communities tend to have weaker civic institutions, higher levels of social isolation, and far lower rates of voting. Bringing back the saloon will not solve America’s problems. And there are, of course, major substance abuse concerns today. But the point of the saloon was never the lager. It was the shared institution. Today it often feels as if the only shared spaces are big-box checkout lines and fast-food parking lots. What we need, more than tweets or memes, is the kind of civic life that transpires when men and women gather face to face and, as a fan of old saloons put it, “political matters ebb and flow free as froth on the beer.” |