DISSOLUTE MANHOOD AND THE RITUALS OF INTEMPERANCE

In 1913 at age thirty-six, the novelist Jack London published his autobiographical novel John Barleycorn. Centering on his encounters with alcohol and his fellow drinkers, London offered a personal chronicle of excessive drinking and a vivid account of the saloon culture that defined recreational life for working-class men of his day. London situated alcohol consumption in the context of the work and leisure of laboring men, especially in the saloons, or ‘‘poorman’s clubs,’’ of an urbanizing nation. For London, drinking was a profoundly social act. As a youth he drank not because he liked the taste or intoxicating effects of alcohol, but to share in the conviviality that seemed magically to swirl around liquor. The desire for alcohol, London wrote, ‘‘is cultivated in social soil.’’ ‘‘All drinkers begin socially. . . . When I thought of alcohol, the connotation was fellowship. When I thought of fellowship, the connotation was alcohol. Fellowship and alcohol were Siamese twins. They always occurred linked together.’’¹

Indeed, the saloon was the quintessential site where men encountered the camaraderie of drink, and historians have long relied on London’s evocative descriptions to reimagine saloon-goers’ rituals of intemperance. The subculture of the saloon was central to the formation of gender identity for its male patrons. It helped forge a definition of manliness predicated on a rejection of familial obligations and the creation of strong social bonds among men. The saloon was a major site of a working-class ‘‘bachelor subculture’’ in which men of various ethnic backgrounds (including married men who were not literally bachelors) spent their leisure time in the company of other men. Scorning the domesticating influence of women, the bachelor subculture celebrated an ethic of male solidarity and reciprocity.² The avid saloon-goer epitomized ‘‘dissolute manhood,’’ one of two opposing constructions of manhood that vied for allegiance in the early twentieth century. Dissolute masculinity defined the untrammeled, pleasure-seeking male as the epitome of manliness. Even among those who renounced dissipated manhood for its alternative, the ‘‘respectable’’ manhood of the married breadwinner, ‘‘the grown man’s jealously guarded right to drink with his mates was the most common and most contested adult holdover from the youthful masculinist ethos.’’³ London’s John Barleycorn was a testament to both the pleasures and the pitfalls of dissolute manhood.

London was among the first modern writers to idealize intoxication as a mode of cultural iconoclasm and to glorify alcohol as a preservative of virility.⁴ Paradoxically, however, his narrative also included a passionate— if unlikely—plea for the passage of Prohibition. For even while he depicted the saloon as a robustly masculine arena, London expressed his desire that alcohol be rendered illegal. Personifying spirituous beverages with a reference to the grain used in brewing beer, London portrayed ‘‘John Barleycorn’’ as a deceptive seducer of ‘‘healthy, normal boys,’’ a beguiling yet harmful inveigler who eroded the healthy vitality of those he ensnared. Ultimately London concluded that alcohol ‘‘poisons’’ the ‘‘social man-impulses’’ of unwitting youth, yet men would continue to drink as long as saloons existed to lure them.

London’s skepticism toward alcohol developed relatively late in his short life, deepening as his dependence on drink exacerbated his suffering from depression. In John Barleycorn London dramatized the ill effects of alcoholic excess on mind and body.⁵ Yet throughout the narrative London depicted liquor as an animating source of virility, an irony that rendered John Barleycorn all the more insidious yet did not diminish the author’s nostalgia for his youthful debauchery. ‘‘Drink was the badge of manhood,’’ he exclaimed. ‘‘Wherever life ran free and great, there men drank. Romance and adventure seemed always to go down the street locked arm in arm with John Barleycorn.’’ Drinkers were ‘‘the livest, keenest men . . . the more comradely men, the more venturous, the more individual.’’ In the saloons, he recalled, ‘‘men talked with great voices, laughed great laughs, and there was an atmosphere of greatness.’’⁶ The underlying logic of John Barleycorn figured the habitual drinker as the manliest of men, one who enjoyed ‘‘a homosocial intimacy with other men that exists nowhere outside the world of the bottle.’’⁷

The saloon was a predominantly masculine domain; most customers were males seeking the fellowship of other men of similar age and economic standing. Many were immigrants, and most were skilled or unskilled laborers loyal to the working-class districts in which they lived and toiled. In addition to bonding in the workplace, workers forged a sense of class identity during their leisure hours, which were often passed in the familiar surroundings of the neighborhood saloon. Replacing the ‘‘kitchen trade’’ of older domestic grog shops (where women congregated with men as sellers and consumers of liquor), saloons emerged as leisure spaces clearly distinct from the home. Although female customers were sometimes welcome in saloons, until 1920 most watering holes were committed to male exclusivity.⁸

Catering to the various ethnic subcultures that comprised the working-class population, saloons provided facilities and services seldom available anywhere else. More than simply a place to drink, the saloon supplied visitors with food, water, toilet facilities, newspapers, and even banking services. At the saloon men could catch up on neighborhood gossip, hear the latest political news, or exchange information about job prospects. As a ‘‘workingman’s club’’ it offered companionship and diversion.⁹ According to one observer saloon-goers ‘‘found relaxation of various kinds, such as billiards and pool, cards and gambling, music and dancing.’’ They ‘‘found respite and refreshment from the taxing toil of the day. . . . There was an aching need, a real demand for the rest and change of thought found in the saloon.’’ In short, saloons catered ‘‘in a hundred ways to the social and political needs of men.’’¹⁰

How did the saloon become a bastion of maleness? More than simply a place where men congregated free from the constraints and demands of wives or mothers, the saloon allowed men to forge an alternative set of social relationships, creating a ‘‘sympathetic company of peers.’’ And rather than simply relaxing inhibitions or promoting conviviality, alcohol served as an agent of social bonds, tangibly (if evanescently) forging links among men who drank together.¹¹

Saloon culture revolved around the custom of treating. Reciprocal treating rituals, rooted in an ethic of mutuality and solidarity, create a democratic gift economy among drinkers at a bar. According to custom each drinker must treat other saloon patrons to a ‘‘round’’ of drinks; after consuming drinks purchased by others, one must pay a collective debt to the group. As the drinking continues, the group coheres as long as enough men agree to pay the bill in turn. Treating rituals exemplify what anthropologists call a circular system of gift giving. In such a system goods are circulated within specific ‘‘gift communities,’’ where they leave a trail of interconnected relationships in their path. Treating is defined by obligation: the obligation to give, the obligation to receive, and the obligation to treat in return.¹² Thus alcohol’s connection to manly camaraderie stemmed not merely from its intoxicating effects but from its status as a digestible gift. By allowing men to declare solidarity with kin, neighbors, and passers-by, treating rituals turned the saloon into an internal democracy in which ‘‘all who could safely enter received equal treatment and respect.’’¹³ Although saloon-going was a solitary experience for some, for most it was a group activity, a symbol of egalitarianism, a way to participate in local community life.¹⁴

Jack London recalled his own emerging awareness of drinking rituals, and his account suggests that the acts of purchasing and exchanging drinks were as significant as consumption itself. While London’s first drinking companions were fellow sailors aboard a whaling schooner, in saloons he refined his knowledge of treating behavior. As he wrote, ‘‘It was not until I . . . got ashore in the congregating places of men, where drink flowed, that the buying of drinks for other men, and the accepting of drinks from other men, devolved upon me as a social duty and a manhood rite.’’ For London winning ‘‘manhood’s spurs’’ meant submitting to a gift economy in which money was subordinate to the treating system. Earlier London had been a ‘‘thrifty, close-fisted boy’’ who stretched his meager earnings by ‘‘pinching and saving’’ every nickel. But his new friends ‘‘were magnificently careless of money, calling up eight men to drink whisky at ten cents a glass.’’ Before he learned the tacit rules of exchange, he allowed a fellow seaman to treat several times before reciprocating. His initiation into the culture of drink thus entailed humiliation: ‘‘I had let him buy six drinks and never once offered to treat,’’ he recalled. ‘‘I could feel myself blushing with shame . . . and buried my face in my hands. And the heat of my shame burned up my neck and into my cheeks and forehead.’’ He soon realized that if he wanted to enjoy manly camaraderie, he had to part ways with thrift: ‘‘Which was it to be? I was aware that I was making a grave decision. I was deciding between money and men, between niggardliness and romance. Either I must throw overboard all my old values of money and look upon it as something to be flung about wastefully, or I must throw overboard my companionship with those men whose peculiar quirks made them care for strong drink.’’ Faced with this dilemma, he decided that ‘‘money no longer counted. It was comradeship that counted.’’¹⁵ In his conversion from an economy of scarcity to an economy of excess, London repudiated a sturdy work ethic as much as he embraced the alcohol-laced realm of leisure.¹⁶ In ‘‘deciding between money and men,’’ countless saloon regulars chose the latter.

Yet London was only partly right when he asserted that ‘‘money no longer counted’’ in the saloon. Although he renounced acquisitiveness, he still needed hard currency to put drinks into circulation. While the treating system was not reducible to the logic of market exchange, the saloon was a commercial institution, and liquor was a commodity to be bought and sold. Although men transformed their cash earnings into intoxicating, liquid gifts for themselves and others, their money had a different meaning for the saloon-keepers who profited thereby. As London noted, saloons were ‘‘always warm and comfortable,’’ but they ‘‘were not charitable institutions. A man could not make a lounging place of a saloon without occasionally buying something over the bar.’’¹⁷ Economist Thorstein Veblen even described treating as a working-class form of ‘‘conspicuous consumption,’’ in which participants gained status by demonstrating their ability to spend freely.¹⁸

So as much as treating finessed the commercialized aspects of saloon patronage, workingmen had limited funds, and their expenditure on drink bore implications for spending outside the saloon. Indeed, spending money on drink could limit men’s participation in the realm of commercialized, heterosocial leisure. As a young man London also sought the company of women, a desire that conflicted with his commitment to saloon life. London described how he once spent a whole week’s wages in one ‘‘short evening’’ and had to survive the rest of the week without so much as a dime for carfare. Such a predicament, he explained, forced him and a friend ‘‘to break an engagement with two girls from West Oakland with whom [they] were attempting to be in love. . . . Like many others financially embarrassed, [they] had to disappear for a time from the gay whirl—at least until Saturday night pay-day.’’¹⁹ London found that the masculine culture of drink could compete with a concurrent desire to date women. As courtship rituals increasingly required men to pay for refreshments and entertainment, saloon prerogatives often kept men from treating women to a night on the town. Thus the bachelor subculture could delay a heterosexual man’s transition to marriage; for men who planned eventually to marry, balancing male-centered and heterosocial leisure could prove a difficult task indeed.²⁰

Moreover, alcohol bestowed on London a badge of manliness that male-female sociability simply could not confer. As historian George Chauncey convincingly argues, men of the bachelor subculture achieved a ‘‘manly’’ identity primarily through their interactions with other men. Sexual prowess with women was an important sign of manliness; it mattered, however, not simply because it proved a man’s ability to dominate women but because it reflected one’s relative masculinity compared to other men. Saloons, poolrooms, boxing rings, and gambling dens provided sites in which men performed their gendered identity as manly men, engaging in rituals and contests through which they enacted their virility. ‘‘Even as they celebrated their masculine camaraderie and commitment to fraternity,’’ Chauncey writes, men ‘‘constantly had to prove their manhood.’’ Heavy drinking, then, was one way in which working-class men could ‘‘perform’’ their manhood in the company of other men. The ability to treat and to hold one’s liquor signaled that a man could compete successfully with his peers; paradoxically, out of such leisurely competition emerged feelings of manly solidarity.²¹

Of course Jack London was not the only commentator to link alcohol and masculinity. In 1931 author Travis Hoke exclaimed that the tavern’s shiny brass rail ‘‘was more than a footrest; it was a symbol of masculinity emancipate, or manhood free to put its feet on something.’’ Others noted that treating served as a ‘‘ritual of masculine renewal’’ similar to body building and competitive sports.²² Excessive drinking especially was seen as a hallmark of manhood. Thorstein Veblen, expounding on his theory of conspicuous consumption, remarked that ‘‘infirmities induced by overindulgence are among some peoples freely recognised [sic] as manly attributes.’’²³ Another observer noted that drinking large amounts of straight liquor could help one ‘‘uphold a reputation as a he-man, no matter what happened to the lining of the stomach.’’ The idea of competitive yet companionable drinking was ‘‘to stay even with one’s drinking partners in terms of quantity, monetary outlay, and degree of intoxication.’’²⁴ Even psychiatrists charged with treating chronic drunkards were loath to condemn their patients’ behavior outright because they believed that drinking was often central to a man’s gender identity. Mental health practitioners respected the manly prerogatives of saloon culture and realized ‘‘that a touch of dissipation might figure among the qualities that made a man’s reputation.’’ While they recognized habitual drunkenness as a problem, they did not believe that drinking always indicated serious pathology, because it blended so seamlessly into workingmen’s daily lives.²⁵

Saloons thus epitomized working-class masculinity in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but this does not mean that drinking was accepted only within the working class. While the majority of saloon-goers were laborers and modest wage earners, London claimed that well-known ‘‘reporters, editors, lawyers, and judges’’ frequented local bars, putting a ‘‘seal of social approval on the saloon.’’²⁶ Middle-class and affluent men who drank generally imbibed at home, in expensive hotels, at upscale restaurants, or in private clubs. While the saloon was often described as the ‘‘poor man’s club,’’ it also makes sense to regard the upper-class private men’s club as a ‘‘rich man’s saloon.’’ Well-heeled businessmen and professionals regaled themselves at posh hotel bars and other elegant establishments that featured original artwork, fancy carpets, and elaborate furnishings. London, for his part, recalled his first evening at a men’s club in San Francisco, a place he entered only after he achieved literary success. Seated in a leather chair, London was bewildered by...