Faces along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman's Saloon, 1870-1920

by Madelon Powers

Overview

In this lively and engaging history, Madelon Powers recreates the daily life of the barroom, exploring what it was like to be a "regular" in the old-time saloon of pre-prohibition industrial America. Through an examination of saloongoers across America, her investigation offers a fascinating look at rich lore of the barroom—its many games, stories, songs, free lunch customs, and especially its elaborate system of drinking rituals that have been passed on for decades.

"A free-pouring blend of astonishing facts, folklore and firsthand period observations. . . . It's the rich details that'll inspire the casual reader to drink deep from this tap of knowledge."—Don Waller, USA Today recommended reading

"A surprise on every page."—Publishers Weekly

"Here we get social history that appreciates the bar talk even while dissecting its marvelous rituals."—Library Journal, starred review

"Careful scholarship with an anecdotal flair to please even the most sober of readers."—Nina C. Ayoub, Chronicle of Higher Education

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226677699
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	06/01/1999
Series:	Historical Studies of Urban America
Edition description:	1
Pages:	331
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Pt. I: The Criteria for Comradeship
1: The Importance of Being Regular
2: Gender, Age, and Marital Status
3: Occupation, Ethnicity, and Neighborhood
Pt. II: The Gentle Art of Clubbing
4: Drinking Folkways
5: Clubbing by Treat
6: Clubbing by Collection
Pt. III: More Lore of the Barroom
7: Games and Gambling
8: Talk and Storytelling
9: Songs and Singing
10: The Free Lunch
Conclusion
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

Lawrence W. Levine

Powers' mastery of history and folklore enable us to experience and understand the workingman's saloon from within: to mingle with its denizens, hear their voices, and decipher their faces along the bar.
— Author of The Opening of the American Mind: Cannons, Culture and History

Editorial Reviews

Focusing on the decades during which rapid industrialization was wrenching and reshaping US society, Powers (history, U. of New Orleans) explores the culture of working-class drinking establishments and the people who frequented them, and how they both reflected and impacted the larger society in which they were embedded and from which they grew. She draws on her background in anthropology to place the informal evidence in context. Some fine old photographs--her inspiration for the study--are included. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Booknews

A fascinating, not to say spirited, study of the play of alcohol in Gilded Age history, focusing on the neighborhood bar. At the outset of her book, Powers (History/Univ. of New Orleans) defends her choice of subject, arguing that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries American saloons were the focal points for local politics, union organizing, and community-building. But, she continues, she is more interested in the way that those who frequented the saloon built a community around drink, a community with its own lore, music, jargon, and customs. The saloon, which began as a somewhat high-toned alternative to the usual tavern, drew in large crowds of workingmen (and some women, and even some children), who found inside the swinging doors a place to escape from daily hardshipsþand to cash paychecks and find a proverbial free lunch, that powerful and now long bygone enticement to spend oneþs lunch hour or evening wrapped around a mug and a shot glass. Powers studies the changing drinking habits of Americans through several waves of immigrants, with Anglo-Saxon hard cider giving way to German beer, Italian wine, and upper-crust French cocktails. She unearths wonderful, sometimes improbably sentimental drinking songs. She details the subjects of conversation in the saloonþreligion, of course, and politics, and sports. And she examines the people gathered around the bar; the Irish were, of course, notorious for their hard-drinking ways, she writes, but were never so badly demonized as were rural, southern African-Americans, whose escape into drink has not been much studied. At each turn she has much to say about the changing face of American culture in a momentous time,and she says it with uncommon clarity. Social history with a hard edge, highly recommended. (16 b&w photos, not seen)

Kirkus Reviews