The Great American Saloon Series
Grant, James
"The Great American Saloon Series" say the least, in our time, and was even regarded as anachronistic in his own. It does, however, show how indispensible "republican virtue" was once thought to be for maintaining political...
...After the game, all my friends had gone down to the Block (the place in Baltimore for drinking, gaming, and whoring), but I figured I'd play it safe, so I went to the Peabody instead...
...second-hand, PBS greeting cards (5 cents each...
...and Servicing Receivers by Means of Resistance Measurement, by Rider...
...He disliked, among other things, members of the city vice squad who worked with their hats on inside his premises...
...Perhaps the most important consequence of the current dispute over pornography will be the revelation of how much confidence we have in our values and our judgment...
...And there it was--at 42nd Street, between 8th and 9th Avenues---a magic shop with tricks all over the place...
...Two years after Hugo's death in 1931 in the old garage back of the book shop Siegfried began serving bibliophiles what Roosevelt had proclaimed to be legal...
...He wrote back by return mail, thanking me and asking if I would come to see him . . . . " It was Siegfried, bookman and friend, whom Mencken asked to appraise his books before he turned them over to the Enoch Pratt Free Library...
...I predict very dark days for America . . . . Everyone in the cities used to look up to the doctor, the lawyer, the professor...
...I am the voice of the new politics," Sonator-elect Buckley announced in November 1970 as the votes poured in...
...THE PUBLIC INTEREST Box 542 Old Chelsea Post Office New York, N.Y...
...Finally he turned around and I said: 'Are you the man I've seen in the movies?' He said 'Yes, you've seen me in the movies.' It was the Great Houdini...
...In the fall of 1952, a year and a half before Siegfried's decision to retire, police had arrested a 20-year-old Yale student at the Peabody for drinking as a minor...
...Mencken, manual labor in moderate doses, and drugstores that sold banana splits...
...That pornography is base and dehumanizing is an assumption well justified by all of the contributors to Holbrook's book...
...Today he reads, listens to music, writes, and deplores the condition of contemporary publishing...
...As Chief Justice Burger pointed out recently: ~The state statute books are replete with constitutionally unchallenged laws against prostitution, suicide, voluntary self-mutilation, brutalizing bare-fist' prize fights, and duels, although the crime may only directly involve 'consenting adults.'" It may be true that legal sanction does not necessarily imply public approval...
...Defiant language, yes, but not the language of victory...
...The student continued with journalism after leaving Yale and h a s become something of a star on NBC news...
...For all its achievements, the American Right has as yet only earned the chance to govern...
...Yet both our political tradition and common sense point to the need to extend the concept beyond the protection of our physical well-being...
...I arrived at night...
...There were no decent places in town then," Siegfried remembers emphatically...
...Thanks to vigorous criticism of the media's objectivity and balance, conservative commentators have begun to appear more frequently on television and even on the Op-Ed page of the New edited by David Brudnoy W'mston $3.95 York Times...
...A picture of Mencken still hangs over the piano...
...Charlie Lancaster, a former seaman and occasional poet, helps Rose take care of her real estate and meets with a group in the upstairs bar for wine and cheese...
...Sketches, beer steins, plates, trophies, musical instruments, antlered heads, and photographs line the walls...
...I have nothing to do with it any more," he said...
...The student, who was sports editor of the Yale Daily News, was in town to cover a YaleNavy football game...
...It was really filthy...
...He plays when Rose shows old movies in the beer stube...
...That made ,me a criminal...
...The age of the boob is upon us," he told the Sun in a going away interview...
...Mencken, the newspaperman...
...One sign of its maturity is the appearance in recent years of several anthologies of conservative writings, including, now, Brudnoy's contribution---an excellent collection of twenty-nine provocative essays, all published since 1970...
...It is a hash house...
...I wanted to start a place where respectable people could come for a sandwich and a glass of beer...
...Mencken...
...No longer political pariahs, conservatives have finally found themselves in a position to compete genuinely for national leadership...
...I browsed through the books awhile, then went into the beer stube and ordered...
...antini was dressed in a threadbare red turban, a dusty gray business suit, a crumpled white shirt and sneakers...
...Finally, one can argue that pornography should be censored not because it causes corruption, but because it is corruptior...
...But in his introduction he does not allow himself the luxury of self-satisfaction or unguarded optimism...
...They look up to the businessman...
...Since the Progressive era, Americans have become increasingly aware of the fact that the pursuit of private economic interests does not necessarily enhance the public welfare...
...This subscription will begin with the next issue...
...But it is not true that to be democrats or even liberals we must deny t h a t it is possible to distinguish human excellence from human degradation...
...So it is that in this series we intend to come to the aid of one of the most admirable of American institutions, the Great American Saloon...
...The spirit of H.L...
...Any movement that can produce twenty-nine articles of such high quality in three years cannot be moribund...
...According to the Sun, Siegfried ran the shop with financial abandon: '~Po his farm, after a day in his shop, Siegfried repairs to rest and work on the earth...
...Vhen I got home I wrote to him saying that his book had no business being among that trash...
...But the anthology does not stop here...
...Many conservatives have now unabashedljr embraced the once seemingly forbidden and unreachable "silent majority...
...At the station they took off my shoe laces and belt . . . . I don't know whether you've ever been in a Baltimore jail cell, but it was just unbelievable...
...Nevertheless, old attitudes and apprehensions die hard...
...Such a view is anathema to many of today's liberals...
...Rose says that the 20 regular customers can get on her nerves: '~ney're always complaining it's too hot, too cold, too this too that...
...Robert McTiernan The G r e a t American Saloon Series Baltimore's Peabody Book Shop It has become chic in recent years to disparage American institutions, to give them the Bronx hurrah so to speak, and thus to drain from them their validity and cast them aside...
...On the mantle piece, above a cavernous fireplace, sit busts of Shakespeare and Mendelssohn...
...There was a handkerchief sticking from his coat pocket and his fly was open...
...Siegfried was so enraged---as he tells it now--that he decided to say the hell with everything...
...The rhetoric of conservatism has long reflected its forlorn, minority status..In the 1940s and 1950s many conservatives sought solace in Albert Jay Neck's concept of the Remnant: a scattering of reflective and civilized individuals surrounded by mass men...
...A local pediatrician, Dr...
...The question of the degree to which pornography contributes to crime is debatable...
...Emerging from the wilderness, they have suddenly tasted victories: James Buek]ey's election to the Senate, new and congenial appointments to the Supreme Court, and the emphatic repudiation of McGovernism in 1972, to name a few...
...Instead of an aristocratic revolt against the masses, there has appeared a frankly "populist" conservatism, extolling Middle America and berating a decadent liberal elite...
...They were idols...
...And this belief, that self-government rests on something as unscientific as the good character of its citizens, is a recurrent theme in the writings and speeches of our greatest statesmen...
...First, there are the obligatory selections which strive to define the nature of conservatism...
...In the very first issue of National Review in 1955, William F. Buckley admitted that his magazine was "out of place": "It stands athwart History, yelling Stop . . . . " These were years in which Buckley challenged the Wisdom of universal suffrage, when conservatives praised Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses and helped to popularize de Tocqueville's idea of "the tyranny of the majority...
...He still uses the same by-line: Richard Valeriani...
...The United States is no longer %he American experiment" to us...
...But in the trade journals--I read a lot of trade journals they say that's a good sign...
...The next morning I went out to look for a magic shop...
...10011 Please open the following subscription to THE PUBLIC INTEREST and bill me...
...Men as different as Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Macaulay warned of the dangers of trying to legislate sanctity...
...And now," he continued, "some fancy shuffles...
...He came in, sat down and ordered a beer," Siegfried remembered...
...The old magician, half h i s face hidden by a mat of white beard, had spirited a golf ball from his empty right hand...
...Cut off from decisive political power, isolated from influence in the universities and the media, accused of not belonging to the nation's supposedly liberal "mainstream," denounced for extremism and "authoritarian" personalities, the Right has generally lacked intellectual prestige and broad public confidence...
...Weisberger had arrived in the UnitThe Alternative March 1974 19 ed States in 1912, an emigrant from Austrian Silesia...
...Brudnoy goes on to include several articles which probe the profoundly spiritual and intellectual sources of America's discontents...
...I left with a polish, if I might say so, that no university could provide...
...Disgusted with both the single-mindedness of the police and the overall state of the Republic, Siegfried looked around for someone to take over the shop as a going book business...
...O N A SATURDAY night not long ago, The Great Dantini stood before a hushed crowd in the beer stube at Baltimore's Peabody Book Shop...
...Gee," marvelled a young girl: who was sitting near Dantini, one hand on her beer and the other on her boyfriend...
...In addition to beer (customers tend to nurse beer, Rose says), cocktails, hot drinks, sandWiches, steaks, knockwurst, and pizza, you can buy a Peabody Book Shop ashtray (50 cents...
...Mencken, that scornful critic of the "booboisie," noticeably affected the early issues of National Review...
...a PBS 12-oz...
...We are the "mainstream" now...
...It only served beer and wine," she said, 't)ut we saw the potential right away...
...It offers ample evidence of how permissiveness can, among other things, corrupt the arts or destroy a neighborhood...
...Yale lost that day, 31-0, but that was only the beginning of a miserable weekend for the thirsty reporter...
...And yet, cautious as Brudnoy rightly is, there is something to celebrate...
...And even if pornography does not contribute to "republican virtue," the fate of a country with as much individual liberty as ours does not rest on the legalization or prohibition of pornography alone...
...It was as irrevocable as Sherwood Anderson walking out of the paint factory...
...a PBS ballpoint pen (75 cents...
...First the accordian shuffle . . . Now the one-handed s h u f f l e . . . And now the Russian shuffe...
...There was a violinist playing and a candle was burning in the corner...
...Whether he made a profit that day doesn't .- t blic Interest Shouldn't you be reading this intelligent quarterly edited by Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer...
...I'm sad...
...but it does imply, or at least leads to, public acceptance...
...Customers are young and often shaggy...
...Despite the tonic of recent successes, conservatism in 1973 is not yet securely entrenched as the uncontested voice of the people...
...A lot of this is junk, if you want to know the truth," Rose told a visitor...
...I went inside and stood there for 3, 4~ 5 minutes---about that time--looking at a man..He had his back to me...
...shouted a man, smirking over his drink at a side table...
...Conservatives were intellectual untouchables, and they knew it...
...Six well-chosen pieces by Buckley, Kirk, Meyer, Peter Witonski, M. Stanton Evans, and Tiber Szamuely introduce the reader to the fascinating corn: plexities of this perennial problem...
...Whatever the (mis)fortunes of conservatism may eventually be, the indisputable fact is that as an intellectual movement conservatism has arrived...
...I wish I didn't have to say it...
...Paralleling this enormous change in status has been an intriguing shift in rhetoric...
...Weisberger, the son of a butcher, had six years formal education...
...Success hasn't spoiled him though...
...He said he has not been to the bookshop since he left it in 1954...
...Fifteen years passed before he settled in Baltimore to join his brother Hugo's book business...
...Siegfried Weisbergor, a six-footer who wore thick glasses, tweedy clothes, a ferocious mustache, and a droopy bow tie, had amassed an exacting set of preferences by the time of his retirement...
...Tyrtell, we shall puSlish gently preceptive essays discussing the great American saloons of the past and those that have survived into the very present...
...Rose Boyajin Pettus had $8 to her name when Siegfried was scouting around for a successor in January 1954...
...It does, however, show how indispensible "republican virtue" was once thought to be for maintaining political freedom...
...But my main occupation was books...
...William Klump of the city vice squad and an unnamed police magistrate had finished their work, the student was poorer by $35.40 and court costs...
...It is implicit in Burger's statement that certain behavior , though not a direct threat to public safety, is depraved behavior and therefore unacceptable, even in a free society...
...Each essay will suggest the practices and values of truly great American saloons, while elucidating the philosophies of the saloon keepers and mixologists that made their establishments esteemed...
...Patrons still lay their elbows on the old wooden tables, riddled with the initials of unnumbered students...
...As a college professor, film critic, and frequent contributor to right-wing journals, Brudnoy has helped to effect the conservative renaissance of recent years...
...Among the Baltimoreans Siegfried called his friends were Gerald W. Johnson, the writer, Dr...
...Would you mind repeating that...
...Tyrrell at P.D.'s Globe Saloon, 929 South Jordan, Bloomington, Indiana, 47401, and as Siegfried Weisberger would say, Happy Days...
...They said all they wanted was to get Weisberger...
...I can barely shuffle with two hands...
...James Grant The Conservative Alternative l ~ i c R MOST OF THE past three decades, Ameran couser-Jatism has been, in Clinton Rossiter's words, a "thankless persuasion...
...The political conclusion that can be drawn from their work is that all decent societies must draw the line somewhere when it comes to freedom of activity...
...l--J one year $7.50 two years $14.00 Name Address City State Zip__ matter too much---a newsboy who asked the price of an encyclopedia was told it was $5, a fib that cost the bookseller about $20--but the main thing is that people read...
...The real threat is the attitude that "value judgments" with the force of law are unjustifiable in a free society...
...He preferred, among other things the Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta, toy trains, Mark Twain, high-speed cathartics, H.L...
...But he is wise to raise the question, not because his book is irrelevant (it is not), nor because conservatives are really a "gaggle" of unimportant people (they are not), but because the "prospects" (his word) for conservatism remain so indeterminate...
...I was in New York during the Depression when I saw Mencken's In Defense of Women sitting on a drug store book rack," he recalled...
...In the early 1960s, with the advent of Barry Goldwater and his appeal to the "forgotten Americans," conservatism's minority consciousness started to fade...
...But mark ms words...
...Above one table hangs a group photograph of the 33rd annual meeting of the American Roentgen Ray Society, taken at the Book-Cadillac Hotel, in Detroit, in September, 1932...
...beer mug ($2.50...
...shot back Dantini...
...Nearby are shelved John Hersey, The War Lover, and The Universal Standard Encyclopedia, Volume H (GILB-HANS...
...Later in the twenties, the two brothers moved their books to the shop's present location at 913 North Charles Street...
...He served another love, medicine, by opening a medical bookstore on East Monument Street and reading the Journal of the American Medical Association...
...These essays, drawn principally from National Review, Modern Age, and New Guard exemplify the work of a substantial segment of the conservative Establishrnent...
...The thirty or so people applauded politely...
...The customers applauded louder...
...John Ruhrah, had convinced Siegfried that coffee wouldn't be enough...
...We tend to assume that with any increase in freedom of expression, the "free market place of ideas" will guarantee that regardless of what is being expressed, a better or healthier society will be the result...
...Nothing...
...When I was 16 years old, I ran away from Baltimore and went to New York...
...He dispatched it into thin air, pulled it from his nose and produced it on the end of his tongue...
...I payed $450 in fines (one of many fines during his proprietorship...
...He contrasts, for instance, the new political power of conservatives with their continuing intellectual weakness: conservative scholars, he says, are "generally ignored by the intellectual community," and the conservative movement is still "far more often critical than programmatic...
...In a sense, this is the most "political" argument of all...
...A lot has changed since Siegfried's day...
...Among the few books he refused to sell were Greek and Latin ponies, a genre he said was as stunting to youthful development as cigarette smoke...
...So I said to hell with it...
...It is still "in the middle of the journey," and who, after the scandals of 1973, would dare to read the crystal ball...
...The books now are a sideline, although Charlie Lancaster, who watches over them for Rose, says he get~ a few "good pieces" once in a while...
...In the series that follows, ably edited by the erudite and experienced P.D...
...By the time Sgt...
...But it all blew over...
...Whatever the label we choose, Brudnoy has properly recognized one of the encouraging elements in the intellectual realignments of the seventies...
...or a PBS T-shirt ($1.50...
...If someone starts complaining I usually tell him 'I didn't call up and send for you.'" The Peabody sells nearly everything these days...
...It is our opinion that this chorus of objurgation has accomplished great damage, and we think it is about time to come to the support of the most worthy of our institutions, intoning not what is wrong with these institutions but what is right with them, not what have been their shortcomings but what have been their glories...
...Cards crawled reluctantly up his arm, sputtered through the air and slid through his fingers...
...It was March 1954, and Siegfried Weisberger, owner of the Peabody Book Shop, was calling it quits...
...I'm more mercantile...
...Brudnoy leaves the answer to this question to his readers...
...Libertarians will applaud Henry Hazlitt's concise defense of capitalism and Thomas Szasz's iconoclastic essay, ~The Ethics of Addiction...
...The Case Against Pornography gives us reason to doubt these assumptions...
...As a bookseller, Siegfried specialized in music, literature...
...Brudnoy is especially to be commended for including outstanding articles by Irving Kristol, editor of the Public Interest, and Professor James Q. Wilson of Harvard--two of the principal spokesmen for what this reviewer likes to call "rightwing liberalism" and what Brudnoy designates "neo-conservatism...
...But I walked out of that shop a rich man," he asserts today, walked out with memories no money could buy...
...In the interim he had worked as a sea cook, a toy importer, a waiter, and a forest-fire fighter...
...Three kinds of essays comprise this anthology...
...I'm sorry...
...The' next thing he knew, the police were sealing his beer bottle and seizing it as evidence...
...When the police came in they found out he was 20...
...Also for sale, among what Rose estimates are 6,000 volumes, are Merchant Vessels of the United States (1972...
...Henry Sigerist, the medical historian, and H.L...
...But within four years, she and her husband were calling the Peabody theirs...
...and Edmund Burke, On Conciliation with America~ To lay your hands on Macfadden's Encyclopedia of Physical Culture, Volume IV, go to the opposite end of the room and look in the shelves marked "drama...
...I f you have suggestions for this series send them to Mr...
...Yale understood and so, after a while, did his parents...
...In the section marked "novels and stories," the browser will find An Introduction to General Chemistry (second edition) by Foster and Alyea...
...Implicit in many of our actions and attitudes is the view that democratic government is the rule and that exceptions to that rule are bound eventually to fail...
...art, and H.L...
...Don't mess me up...
...World Enough and Time Enough, by Robert Penn Warren...
...We tripled or quadrupled--is that the word?--the business here in five or six years . . . . Some people are academic in the way they think...
...And Brudnoy does not shrink from asking a tough, unsettling question about his own anthology: " . . . is the very existence of this book simply an expression of kindly tokenism on the part of its publisher, a sop to the funny little gaggle of conservatives who quack a lot and fancy themselves a force with which other Americans must contend...
...Liberal democracy is rooted in the belief that it is impossible or unwise for a government to dictate the best way of life for each citizen...
...Some are drawn by Dantini's nightly performances or by the piano playing of Eddie Mitnick, who accompanied the silent films i n Baltimore...
...n e cops were real nice to me," he said...
...Quiet," commanded Dantini...
...Notable The Alternative March 1974 21...
...Mr...
...Today...
...It is intriguing that despite our pessimism about many things relating to the _9 future, most of us are sanguine about the future of liberal democracy...
...Judging the student well over 21, Siegfried said he had not bothered to ask him for proof of age...
...Still, its rhetoric remained that of an embattled losing side: '~wenty-seven million Americans can't be wrong," proclaimed bumper stickers after Goldwater's defeat in 1964...
...Hugo opened the bookstore on East Centre Street, near the Peabody Conservatory of Music, in 1922...
...I sort of stood in the middle, afraid to touch anything...
...rd just hit this town then," she said...
...The ex-sports editor remembers the raid without bitterness, though at the time, he said"I was so P.O.'ed that I couldn't believe it...
...They did not, however, say that there is no such thing as sanctity, or that all human pursuits are equally worthwhile...
...In the past five years, however, American conservatism has undergone a fundamental and exhilarating transformation...
...If that's the way they want to do things, I'll have no part in it...
...Such familiar luminaries as William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, Stephen Tonsor, and Ernest van den Haag are all represented, as are such younger writers as R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., George Will, and Brudnoy himself...
...What do you want for free...
...I went through the whole bit...
...America is not "sick," conservatives argue...
...For them the "quality of life" is something that pertains only to the amount of carbon monoxide in the atmosphere...
...liberalism is...
...The Crisis of the Old Order, by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...But little, apparently, has changed in the old beer stube itself...
...Some of the current uncertainty is reflected in David Brudnoy's new anthology, The Conservative Alternative...
...Perhaps it is time to reexamine an older view of democracy that recognized that the tension between the public and the private exists in all areaS of political life...
...It took me four years to do that trick," he said, "six months to learn it and throe-and-a-half years to find a place to perform it...
...He even strikes an old Nockian note when he observes that his mentor Frank Meyer, who should have served on a university faculty, was instead "lmown to the Remnant, but to few others...
...He found no one, so he sold his books---there were 100,0(X)--a~ retired to his farm...
Vol. 7 • March 1974 • No. 6
