The Great American Saloon Series/Dionysian Denver
Ertel, George
such straws in the wind as its concentration on terrorism as a Communist monopoly and its highly equivocal attitude toward the nuclear freeze movement." The result: "Publishers who specialize in...
...He states that the "social agenda" of the New Right, including abortion, is a matter for "symbolic" rather than "practical" politics...
...The piano plays on...
...To stay open, a saloon required a crafty operator, one capable of making the most of the system such as he found it...
...Most pastors settled for an upstairs room, worshipping above while the revelry continued below...
...it asked...
...But they would not urge the President to do or not to do anything...
...Given all the misgivings in Washington about the program championed by the Old Fool in 1981 for a deep tax cut coupled with a boost in military spending, how could it have been passed...
...For instance, Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis was credited with adroit use of "the Reagan argument" by calling the 5-cent hike in the gasoline tax a "user fee...
...Jn Ie You to real the next I=e of Chrordcln of Cultur* frit...
...The result: "Publishers who specialize in books critical of the social and political status quo are beginning to worry...
...I am referring to his discussion of Andrew Young and Joseph Califano, dismissed by President Carter...
...Walter Hickel, the illfated Secretary of the Interior under President Nixon, once made the mistake of trying to transfer a bureau chief to another position...
...Ambassador to the United Nations...
...Missionary pastors in the Colorado territory were few during the middle 1800s...
...by the turn of the century, she was married...
...The elimination of an entire generation of American children is not, as Asahina suggests, the inevitable outcome of "social change," but rather the result of a specific decision written by a specific justice on a specific set of facts...
...The most universal offerings were amusements to accompany the quaffing of rotgut...
...That did not sit well with everyone, but we don't learn much about this opposition from Noel...
...When churches began to be established in Denver, many were ethnic Lutheran which catered only to German- and Norwegian-speaking settlers...
...Western saloons originally sprang up along established trails, often where routes crossed each other or intersected rivers...
...So let him drink white wine...
...Dowd...
...Prospectors came to saloons to sell their gold, deposit savings, borrow grubstakes...
...Or they are afraid to tell him their real views at all...
...In actual fact, men like Cali fano and Young are, like the President, trying to keep the government over which they preside from being run for and in the interests of the bureaucracy...
...Irish Nelson Dowd tended bar, and his family cooked meals...
...When a ruffian known as Tiger Bill became obstreperous, `there came...
...Reagan thus was willing to endorse that tax increase...
...The free alternatives in cluded stretching out in a barn or curling up under the boardwalk along the street...
...The saloons of Denver, Noel explains, proved their importance to Denver beyond being a place to paint your nose red...
...As a consequence, America's frontier was overlooked...
...University of Nebraska Press, $16.50...
...The shaken advisers decided on a different strategy for this year's budget go-around: they would lay out the figures on expected spending and revenues in all their starkness, add much economic advice about the dire consequences of huge deficits, and report numerous warnings from Reagan's own Republican followers about the rebellious mood in Congress," Time wrote in its story on Reagan's decision-making...
...Robert M. Parke Coral Gables, Florida Professor Maurice Cranston's brilliant article ("Whatever Happened to Liberalism...
...This was the burden of a long, somewhat breathless article in the New York Times Magazine on October 24...
...So Auraria entertained the travelers, and Denver served primarily as a corral for their livestock...
...A poker game ending with an upturned table and blazing sixguns...
...The Bureau Chief has tenureand power...
...The Apollo housed the first session of the People's Government of the City of Denver and many more thereafter...
...Robert Asahina's comments in the symposium feature of your Fifteenth Anniversary issue were truly amazing...
...Their strategies were to intimidate and control saloon operators and to promote the opening of new saloons...
...Many saloons featured libraries, parks, menageries, or crude museums to attract and entertain their patrons...
...No longer did the average Denverite feel natural bellied up to the bar...
...Too bad Reagan's staff wasn't elected President...
...The White House has changed Reagan less than any other occupant in recent memory," *The City and the Saloon: Denver, 1858-1916...
...Regular readers of this journal will sense instinctively what brought this to pass...
...In 1862 President Lincoln appointed John Evans to be the territorial governor...
...Asahina's "mental test" left me gaping-if the conservative agenda on abortion could be implemented, but only at the cost of more government regulation or cutbacks in defense spending, would it be "worth it...
...Guests might intimidate the Irishman, but not his wife...
...The Time story, billed as "How Reagan Decides," detailed the extremes to which White House aides are forced to go in order to sway the President...
...This shifted the urban trade to their side of the settlement...
...Some went along with Reagan out of loyalty, some hoped for a compromise along the way, some were merely meek, Weisman wrote...
...By the following Christmas, most of the celebrations took place in Denver...
...The golden age of saloonery strangled in the grip of dat ole debbil Big Government...
...Top bureaucrats in Washington do hold tenure and they do not serve, as do Cabinet members, at the pleasure of the Chief Executive...
...If y LL like w.'hit You read, we welcome you as one of our regular sktbscribers• SW you deserve a free sampling before your final dedsion...
...darted into the bar with a feminine screech and set her ten commandments in his face, dragging her nails down each cheek...
...Connoisseurs-they were: men who had developed refined tastes for particular liquors, men who preferred to order by name: Red Dynamite, Dust-Cutter, Blue Ruin, Popskull, Coffin Varnish, Red Dog, Apache Tears, White Mare's Milk, Bumblebee, Widowmaker, Panther Piss...
...A history of "the city and the saloon" ought to include greater insight into the development of the countervailing institutions that eventually closed the saloons...
...If that were all that they became, perhaps the saloons could have been tolerated, even if contemptuously, by the better folk of Denver...
...Hotel accommodations were provided: "men might pay a quarter to sleep on sawdust floors or a dollar for the privilege of sleeping in a chair...
...Irnagirlel A jourrrel -at opinion that begins wit h that fresh persp ive, end then goes about I he bulsLries3 01 reviewing, criticiii ng, essayrireeach month-Ln little dim per of fraterniiir g with Other nMga:ir , Ill exh Issue of ChronklK we Lnvite our readers to think .song with us as we pox • tune the p wnpous Ideas-and old-Wea repeaters-of our time, EvEr 'wherm arre trims...
...ILbtrat writers, Pw~''rrgts, revie rs, ecdtors aid arch we gushLinig over tie most medlocrt of t *mes-arid each other...
...The townspeople turned to the saloons because other institutions were slow to become established on the frontier...
...Their vitality was spent...
...He didn't deserve saloons...
...Oh, well...
...Next came national brewers and distillers-Big Business...
...As the decades passed, the population changed: more people, more women, more families, more churches...
...The original saloonkeeper was a hale and hearty fellow, a man seeking wealth and good standing in the community, a man not necessarily scrupulously honest but at least possessing notions of fair play and charity...
...But there is a "danger," Time said, in this kind of decision-making...
...The outcry against the crass excesses of Denver's saloons reflected the sense of the country...
...President Kennedy was once heard to say, in response to whether or not he liked a given legislative proposal, "I like it but I'm not sure the government would...
...Several entrepreneurs saw more opportunity in opening saloons than in building another ferry-raft...
...After the law was passed, Mr...
...Nearly everybodynot Reagan, though-knew better, they told Steven Weisman, the New York Times White House correspondent...
...He had become respectable...
...The real saloons had been gone for years, anyway...
...Y...
...This saloon-predominant community was, as you would imagine, a rip-roaring town...
...Civic involvement degenerated into machine politics...
...Noel relates that "a gunshot victim was laid out on the bar counter under a smoky petroleum lamp and surgery was performed with a razor...
...El C O R R E S P O N D E N C E : Fifteenth Anniversary Celebrations I have received my first issue, which happens to be the Fifteenth Anniversary issue (December 1982...
...Iibere!Lsrn's bating product is the gaseaw r"xygerLatlon of old, trite, tned...
...Furthermore, the 460 contained a significantly greater proportion of (nondrinking) women and children than did the earlier 1,150...
...The first were no more than tents or wagons stationed r camaraderie, a warm, dry room, and perhaps advice about the road ahead...
...a flash of petticoats, and Mrs...
...At last, there exists d magaalne worth reading for Its oriina]Lty, its zest, 1(s w1IILngne'S to examine baale9- filrn, inx2, theater, p+alitics, the pass and .)ther institutions with no concern lof ormertsus of ConventdonaL Wisdom...
...Budget Director David Stockman was "but one among many...
...As Thomas J. Noel describes in a masterful study of Denver's early years,* there was more to saloons than macho thrills...
...Real estate was bought and traded at the bar...
...Twenty Mile House got its name from the distance up Cherry Creek where the stream flowed into the Platte River...
...When needs presented themselves, accommodative spirit coupled with competition for trade encouraged the saloonists to extend a wide range of services...
...Evans was a temperate Methodist who had founded Evanston, Illinois, the home of the Women's Christian Temperance Union...
...Nobody better demonstrated the truth of that finding than Andrew Young during his term as U.S...
...Noel mentions these men in passing but neglects substantive discussion of the early popular support they enjoyed...
...But the mission, the nature of the saloon, changed also...
...Other watering holes served as court houses and post offices...
...During the year, Denver's town fathers had attracted a stagecoach station...
...In their quests for market domination, they focused on the retail level...
...The campus of Brooklyn College is a wasteland of "Third World" studies and radical feminist dykes...
...Under this, Reagan is portrayed as an unadaptable, out-of-touch, hopelessly ideological fellow who is impeding his crack, pragmatic staff from doing what's right for America...
...failed to alert the President," he wrote...
...Basically, they must throw false arguments at the Old Fool...
...Old Towse, as the mountain men called their wheat-based Taos Lightning, was the first whiskey to reach Auraria in commercial quantity, having been THE C RTr1T 'i ME'RICAN SA 1 x3N SF'91kS DIONYSIAN DENVER Frontier saloons of the Old West...
...The public found it much more agreeable to finance public services through liquor receipts than through taxes...
...Christian witness initially took a small role in shaping Denver's development...
...Although it's not yet as bad as the larger schools, the professorial lunatics are hard at work...
...But do it today, so we may send you our Ireshest issue Immedately...
...Noel tells a story about a place called Twenty Mile House...
...The President often gets a slightly skewed view of the world from his advisers, who present to him not the arguments they really believe but those that can be fitted into Reagan's cosmology...
...in 1900 Denver had about one per 460...
...Then, we wouldn't have all this trouble with the Old Fool and his insistence on getting in the way...
...Simply iwward the erhciosed 5ubscrlptloil Request arrd Free Issue Offer touparn...
...said Time in its December 13 cover story...
...along the roadside...
...I mostly liked what I read and am pleased with my discovery...
...Picture the long ma- prospectors, mountain men, and hogany bar, backed by a mustachioed other such itinerants looking for some bartender, platoons of whiskey bot tles, and a resplendent mirror...
...Let us not presume, however, that customers would simply order whiskey the way today's sophisticates call for white wine...
...The strategy, so far, has failed resoundingly...
...has one flaw, minor of course, yet one which needs comment...
...In time these men lost out to other, ruthless men interested primarily in easy profits and political clout...
...Within another year Auraria merged into Denver...
...Their hope was that Reagan would see the necessity for military spending cuts or tax increases and bring those subjects up himself...
...Also, intensive regulation by the municipal authorities created grand opportunities-quickly exploited-for graft...
...By default the inner-city saloons became hangouts for the poor and the shiftless...
...The references to school busing, affirmative action, women's lib, gay rights, point out that the social scientists in the Democratic party have spawned and developed some highly counterproductive schemes...
...It is no exaggeration to call them community centers...
...William Newton Byers, first editor of the Rocky Mountain News, arrived in Denver during the town's first year...
...In addition to potables, saloons sold the other goods and services necessary for reasonably civilized life: groceries, clothing, tobacco, hardware, patent medicine, even surgery...
...The combined effect of big government and big business meant higher costs, tighter competition, and _ much smaller profits...
...Roe v. Wade was a "practical political act by a runaway judiciary, and the only recourse for conservatives who wish to stop the horror lies in practical politics...
...The saloons, as Noel discusses at length, filled numerous sociological needs within the frontier town...
...Occasionally a Cowboys and cardsharks, stagecoach farmer would open his home as a drivers and dance-hall girls, sheriffs roadhouse to accommodate pioneers, and outlaws...
...Colorado was the second state to enfranchise women...
...Reagan's men set about a series of sometimes desperate efforts to undo what had been done...
...It will take decades to recover from some of them...
...The number of churches jumped to 149 from two...
...The state voted to go dry on January 1, 1916, four years before the nation did so as a whole...
...Denver's city hall learned that tax assessments against saloons, unlike cowboys, were readily enforceable...
...But never about things like Communist influence...
...Please surf eny sub serfPUM now...
...And the business of saloons was booze, period...
...Unfortunately, Noel regards the opposition much the same as the saloonkeepers did: a joke, until the reformers grew too strong to be thwarted...
...6111 me fee %16.CI 412 mOulr:1L1y ktuei4 I! I `m rash saEL$$ A .d with my first ittue 113 write 'EJnce1-cn th 1: Fni ewe and r5eurn n unpaid No further otl gpm n on my part...
...Travelers from the east had no trouble fording Cherry Creek to pass from Denver into Auraria, but getting out of Auraria meant ferrying 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1983 brought by Uncle Dick Wootten in ox carts to celebrate the Christmas of 1858...
...J dreck for i1Li.CIM Ls errdosed...
...In 1859 they thought only about pouring whiskey...
...Since when does returning to the -Jason Maoz status quo ante 1973 and Roe v. Brooklyn, New York (continued on page 36) 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1983...
...id,c,Qmpromlsed ideas...
...Civic functions were similarly attended to in saloons...
...By the close of the century it covered the nation and had become synonymous with abstinence...
...However, men like Califano and Young exemplify the truth of a famous axiom by Vice President Charles Dawes-"A President's natural enemies are the members of his Cabinet...
...Arising from spiritual beliefs, the crusade drew substantial support from religious legalists, industrialists seeking greater productivity from labor, and political reformers...
...When the 1800s began, a temperance movement was building in the eastern states...
...Where the saloons had once been havens, they now were businesses...
...Customers could play poker, of course, as well as billiards and bowling...
...The Colorado territorial legislature also met in the Apollo before reconvening serially in several other Denver sa loons...
...The American Spectator helps me maintain a vestige of sanity...
...In 1859 thousands of people made the passage, and a significant bottleneck developed...
...Whiskey served as the anesthetic for both patient and surgeon...
...Men decked out in ten-gallon hats, red bandanas, and boots with tinkling spurs, throwing down shots of rotgut, picking up fancy ladies...
...The most dramatic revelation, however, concerns those White House aides who, one by one, as the economic news worsened, began to fear that the tax-cut program would not work-and...
...They are still at it, according to Time...
...Our examination of what pMe!S today for liberal We late each issue al Chronklery with vignettes culled from the self.mportmt falls s atOrs of our t irrre...
...In 1860 the average Denverite was a young man passing through...
...On Sunday mornings a few saloon owners would turn over their main rooms for religious services: the bar an altar, the piano played hymns...
...The American Spectator has been a refuge for me in this city of welfare patrons and high society liberals...
...The site of Denver was originally the home of a continually drunk mountain man called William McGaa, but other, more enterprising settlers chose to dismiss him and his territorial claims on both Denver and Auraria...
...NAME 5 C111'_._ SUTE _ _ ZJR Chr%1k es (of Culture +Sip 25 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1983 nunciations of saloons, despite the opprobrium and physical abuse they brought him from the local rowdies, were apparently well received by Denver's temperance league...
...Sales subordinated entertainment, which grew increasingly cheap and tawdry...
...Territorial, state, and federal governments wanted their cuts, too...
...Bartenders scrambled to catch and hold the thirstiest, least discriminating customers...
...George Ertel is a market analyst in Chicago...
...TOO asany yhranih$- fort rv*tafpl: mss, in an era when the starFding O. akiOn Is frequently offered f0i the most desultory peilormarrce -on stage, an film ar on paper-we feel boirrd to cast a somewhat more crttLriar eye t}iarr khe mass rne+dia critics The Liberal FoRIM expo . Another theme that delights our readers in every issue...
...But not always...
...d you: are pdly noel-Yberal in ou4look, woe believe you will find what we have to My-laid hOw we haw to say it in the pages -al Chronicles of Cuk ure` e actiy whet you have been booking fore chmm"M of cu" I 434 r r1h Ma N 5w L,Roddord, IIW'As 6310 I wish tp ]udg Chr rddw of O t we far myself Eniroil rrm rhn ¢ potuural subsaibcr and send me y'IM current hswc free...
...One of the most favored characterizations of Reagan these days is the President as Old Fool...
...He learned quickly what a mistake he had made and canceled the transfer...
...Best wishes for your continued success...
...Live entertainment included girls, acrobats and cockfights, theater starring luminaries like Lotta Crabtree and Edwin Booth, Eastern pointy-headed lecturers such as Horace Greeley and Oscar Wilde...
...Women, who had been discouraged from patronizing saloons, were especially staunch supporters of legally enforced abstinence, prohibition...
...Wilde sometimes addressed Denver miners on the subjects of tasteful household furnishings and the ethics of art...
...Well, it was like that, sometimes...
...p by George Ertel across the Platte...
...These guys are trying to get the country out of the economic mess, and Reagan just won't play along...
...God's Frozen Chosen generally did not provide moral leadership beyond their congregational boundaries...
...To siartd aside virtually guarantees that the most noodous of dull material will be revived try w adoM1ng Liberal Media EEtabllshment, Thus, Our mdsston is clear- Every T ninth, we ~Ml drerrrh these dlssemlnataea of heiy nonsense with unrelenting observa[ions and critique...
...Each supplier sought to move huge volumes of his own product while restraining the sales of competitors' brands...
...His frequently published de AT LAST, A JOURNAL OF OPINION TI-AT'S DECIDEDLY NON-LIBERAL 1 • IT HA HE E N x rtE.&1JRE TO ETCH LE0 4 E T ) A1+ID AND 1ME CHRONICLES Of C XURE COrxRONT-Ak LA C ELL-TT+E $r,1ELLY LITTLE OPTHODOkJES Of OtJ TmE - - TOM +6i+ w1E Here's your opportunity to read a copy-free...
...In terms of Washington bureaucracy, the top bureaucrat is the Bureau Chief, the untouchable, often because of his lateral connections with congressmen and their committees...
...Ti ng Uberils, douched monthly, Alas...
...The saloons did much more than sell whiskey...
...Was he paid for them...
...The number of saloons did increase, and even more dramatically than Noel suggests: in 1860 there was one saloon for each 1,150 permanent residents and transients...
...Over half of the men held white-collar, jobs, and many livedd in saloonless suburbs, sipping cocktails in the parlor before dinner...
...Professor Cranston says that "at the very top the bureaucrat has no tenure...
...Denver neither needed them nor wanted them anymore...
...Back East, churches had been more intent upon internal revival, and the growing trend was to send missionaries to China...
...At first Auraria grew faster than Denver...
...And our editors lake some satlsfac1Jori In comrnersting on the ,!bSurdltles and ir-0nie of liberal atti k .ides...
...Arnold Beichman Visiting Scholar Hoover Institution Stanford, California Heartiest congratulations on your fifteenth anniversary-and fond wishes for continued success in the future...
...At that junction lay Denver on one bank and its rival Auraria on the other...
Vol. 16 • February 1983 • No. 2
