Drink

...What roused the eighteenth-century revolutionary rabble was not the liquor, Barr writes, but the opportunity for unmonitored fellowship, as embodied in the institution of the tavern...

...One contemporary observer commented: "No longer is drinking an art with Americans...

...Inside them they had organised the formation of militia...

...As any schoolchild knows (if not from history class, certainly from reruns of "The Untouchables"), Prohibition did not work out quite as planned...

...The restaurant trade all but died...

...That said, and apart from an overreaching all-inclusiveness that at times crosses the line into digression, Barr's book largely fulfills its ambitious goals, taking a deep and well-researched look at U.S...

...Of course, at the time, wine (even a wine that packed Madeira's 50-proof fortified wallop) was popularly believed to contain no alcohol...

...If AA works for them, one wonders in what sense they can be said to be wrong: Nowhere in the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions does Alcoholics Anonymous claim to understand the etiology of the disease—only that alcoholics have had their lives turned upsideAdvertiser Index By patronizing the companies and products posted in this issue, your positive response rewards them for advertising in one of the gems of American publishing, The American Spectator...

...In any case, "people did not go to speakeasies in order to socialize with the bartender or their fellow customers, but to get drunk...

...Alcohol —as anyone who has ever taken drink will attest, and as he himself admits—is most certainly a drug...

...Only in New Jersey and Illinois was beer still widely drunk: in "the former through tradition and the latter through the organizational efficiency of Al Capone...

...Box 549, Arlington, VA 22216-0549...

...The wretched refuse would lose its right to swill beer, wine, and —particularly—demon whiskey, and the United States would be cleaner, safer, and more sober as a result...

...If the book questions one belief more emphatically than any other (and it does question a lot of beliefs), it is the idea of alcohol as a seriously addictive drug...

...Whether or not Jefferson was the first alcoholic American writer, the rest of Barr's JOHN LILLY is co-owner of Liberia Vertice, a bookstore in Seville, Spain...

...Five years after the law's passage, that number had risen by 15 points—a bo percent increase in the number of undergraduate male drunks...

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...The passage ends: A young woman of strong temperance views exclaimed, after spending an hour in this garden for the first time, "Isn't it beautiful...

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...As for the population of heavy-drinking coeds, their proportion had zoomed from ro to 34 percent, for a numerical increase of 240 percent in twelve years...

...We are reminded—more than once, as with so many points in this repetitious book —that Jefferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence while sipping a pint (!) of Madeira in a Philadelphia tavern...

...Pursuit of Happiness," indeed...

...Toward the end of his conclusion, he quotes at length a report on America's "liquor problem" by the Committee of Fifty, a group of nineteenth-century sociologists...

...story is a nearly unmitigated litany of greed, squalor, class warfare, ethnic suspicion, dangerously high-minded campaigning, and intermittent state suppression with all its foreseeably unforeseen consequences...

...70 June 1999 The American Spectator down by an addiction, and that the following things have been found to bring the benefits of sobriety to those who adhere to them...

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...Of course, with 1984's passage of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act (a piece of Reagan-era federal legislation that, as Barr points out, betrayed an uncharacteristic hostility toward states' rights), the students in question do inhabit a speakeasy culture: They have become the latter-day subjects of a sort of mini-Prohibition...

...While the proportion of alcohol-related traffic accidents among teenagers has dropped faster than it arrie Nation Intemperate C The American Spectator • June 1999 69 has among the whole population, in 1996 it still stood at 36.6 percent, down from 63.2 percent in 1982...

...In contrast to the fiasco of American alcohol policy, Barr offers concrete examples of how people handle their drink inother societies, and what drinking could be like in an America freer of meddlesome state supervision...

...As it will, the market took over in a more ruthless way once supply and demand were driven underground, and Americans ended up downing more hard spirits —the most easily transported form of alcohol —than ever before...

...Manhattan's speakeasies became the only places in town where one could get a decent meal, washed down with bathtub "gin...

...Vineyards were reduced to a meager output for the ecclesiastical market, and the production of something called the "wine brick" —a package of pressed grapes "sold to home winemakers, along with a yeast pill and a printed warning not to use it, `because if you do, this will turn into wine, which would be illegal.'" Bootleggers proclaimed themselves clerics to take advantage of the legal exceptionfor sacramental wine, then hijacked their own deliveries...

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...About the only good to have come out of the whole mess, it would seem, has been the creation of some excellent products (bourbon whiskey, California wine), and the birth of the Republic itself...

...One Nation Under the Table Drink: A Social History of America Andrew Barr Carroll & Graf 384 pages / $27.95 REVIEWED BY John Lilly I f Drink: A Social History of America can be said to have a central argument, it is as sprawling and disjoint as its subject: that in every sense, the American people have enjoyed a grotesquely abusive relationship with booze, from colonial times to the present day...

...From the first European settlers' attempts to euchre the Indians out of their land by plying them with strong drink, to the Whiskey Rebellion, to latter-day criminal charges of "fetal abuse" leveled against alcoholic mothers, Barr paints an unruly and often unpleasant picture...

...His evident hostility toward Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, would seem to have no other source...

...Certainly other factors are at work in the staggering numbers of staggering students, but Barr is right in his conviction that the drinking age has almost undeniably taken its toll: Seven years before the imposition of a minimum age of 21, only 25 percent of male students had said they normally drank to get drunk...

...Neither, as Barr implies, do the Twelve Steps absolve their adherents of responsibility for their actions...

...If, for example, the old-line Anglo-Saxons did not like the drinking habits of their newer and poorer Irish and German neighbors—not to mention even more recent immigrants from eastern and southern Europe the clear solution was to ban the manufacture, transport, and sale of booze altogether...

...Barr mistrusts AA's insistence on total abstinence, and indeed, some reformed alcoholics do seem to be able to live a sober life through moderation coupled with counseling...

...To anyone from, say, Latin Europe, where people live with alcohol as a normal part of daily life, where beer and wine are taken in moderation with meals and where the vast majority almost never drink to get drunk, it must seem like madness...

...And as Barr points out, a large chunk of that drop can he attributed to "more strict law enforcement, an increased emphasis on the liability of bartenders, and the introduction of designated driver schemes," as well as the conciousness raising of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and the elimination of so-called "blood borders" between states with different drinking ages...

...As for this last factor, Barr reasonably speculates that it "may have nothing to do with the imposition of a minimum drinking age of twenty-one but may simply be explained by the fact that the drinking age has been standardized across the country...

...If the results of a 1989 survey are anything to go by, the 40 percent of male college students and 34 percent of university women who admitted to drinking habitually in order to get drunk would probably say that not much has changed...

...The lights, the trees, the starry heavens above, the moon gliding now and then behind the clouds, soul-stirring music...

...It's all there in Andrew Barr's book: the first drunken infatuation with spirits, the oft-regretted decision to play the field with wine and beer when things just weren't working out, the trial separations of the temperance movement, the stormy estrangement of Prohibition, the edgy rapprochement of Repeal...

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...And here are entire families, and young lovers, and old men nursing their beer forhours as they philosophize and reminisce...

...Having reached their legal majority in every other sense, Americans between 18 and 21 years of age are all unwilling participants in a bit of experimental history...

...it certainly does not proceed from a sincere interest in understanding the tenets of a group which has provided miraculously life-giving results for millions of suffering people...

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...A food and wine writer for the London Times, Barr admits in his book's introduction to being a polemicist as well, and Drink: A Social History of America is, among other things, a polemic...

...The garden is brilliantly lighted with Japanese lanterns hanging from the trees...

...But if "it is true that drinkers who persist in AA remain abstinent," as he admits, then is this not a good thing...

...in fact, they explicitly enjoin members to take full responsibility for the evil they did in their drinking days, and to make amends where possible...

...They describe in achingly idyllic terms the scene in a Chicago beer garden of the time: The waiters, most of them fine-appearing elderly gentlemen, dressed in black, serve beer, wines, and soft drinks to the people out in the open...

...Barr's misapprehension on this point metastasizes throughout the book, as he directs his bile toward even those campaigners whose work has had an undeniably salutary influence and few side-effects...

...And the bingeing flings throughout, the consequent self-hating hypocrisy, and the violence — bar-smash, car-crash, gangland slaughter...

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...And its addictive potential is clear to anyone who has ever truly been in its thrall, or who has ever been close to anyone truly in its thrall, however briefly...

...social history through rosé-tinted glasses...

...It probably is...

...He feels these people are duping themselves, but they were unquestionably duping themselves when they were drinking, and with catastrophic consequences for themselves and those around them...

...Can it be, is it possible, that after all our ideas are wrong and these people are right...

...Here Barr is mistaken...

...The more quick and fatal the liquor, the better they like it...

...outside they had planted liberty poles," he intones...