The Great American Saloon Series

...Professor Weaver, on this Saturday night, was alone, and The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1975 15 stared about him at the merrymakers with his myopic eyes...

...I argue that a proper understanding of man and the publicly controllable forces to which he will respond, coupled with only moderate expectations about what can be accomplished under even the best of circumstances, is the essential place to begin any discussion of crime and its control...

...The cost of removing an additional unit of pollutant rises rapidly as the zero pollution level is approached...

...I came to the University in 1952 and lasted until 1957...

...There was a lot of the Anna Christie mood there in the afternoons, before the college mob took over...

...Its plusses were the excellent hamburgers served and the astounding selection of beers for sale (including Beamish Irish Porter...

...An excessively high value is assigned to safety or purity seemingly without regard to the cost...

...It had experimented with improvisation, and its small theater company boasted such youngsters as Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Shelley Berman, and others who went on to Second City...

...And that is most likely my problem...

...In truth, one hated Jimmy's...

...But the Compass had quickly passed into oblivion, and Freddy was forced to move into lower quarters on 55th Street and to abandon theatricals...

...But after UT and Freddy's passed into history,- there was no other place...

...if they had anything in common it was their dinginess, the surliness of the barkeeps, and- the melancholy of their drunks...

...Jimmy's was really, in the fifties and sixties, the University of Chicago bar...

...First, many if not most regulations ignore a basic principle relating to benefits and costs...

...A sober view of man requires a modest definition of progress...

...I have two memories of the place: meeting a writer, formerly a student, who was on the brink of suicide (and took the leap a month or so later...

...Sponsors have revived the bill, and this issue continues to be a lively topic of legislative debate in 1975...

...I too longed, to address the great man and "connect" with this fine educator and finer philosopher...

...Still, a 15% reduction in crime would mean 60,000 fewer robberies and 375,000 fewer burglaries, and in absolute terms these are not trivial changes...

...Jimmy's...

...Remember the Twenties in Paris...

...Whether these prescriptions are right or wrong is less important than the evidence that these two offenses are quite different in circumstance and thus probably not amenable to identical responses, even though both are called "burglaries" and both are "crimes...

...But when I recall UT, or Freddy's, or Jimmy's, it is not with nostalgia but with curiosity...

...In addition to devising strategies tailored to check specific crimes, it is clear we must devote more of the time and resources of prosecutors, courts, and correctional agencies to identifying and incapacitating these 6...

...Pasour, Jr...

...Writers, artists, and failures could be heard boasting about their works in progress...

...It was not uncommon to see abartender drinking himself into oblivion after finishing his shift...

...Protection: Let the Consumer Beware • • In the fall of 1974 a proposal to establish an agency to intervene as a consumer advocate in the affairs of other federal agencies was narrowly defeated in the Senate...

...Jimmy's was a slum of a bar, its dusty board floors occasionally improved with sawdust...

...Thus, in American college saloons are found the ubiquitous chess boards, the little five-foot shelves (usually containing Tynan, Mailer, and Dante cheek by jowl), and the eternal booming of the stereo speakers above one's head...

...The firm had to spend an additional four million dollars to attain a new standard of 99%removal...

...Like Freddy, Jimmy had his run-in with the Mob and the Cop...

...Yet the gulf between us, student and professor, was as wide as the Royal Gorge, and I happened to be a terribly shy young man, always somewhat in awe of the faculty (with one exception, the genial and sympathetic David Riesman...

...The cops too harassed the "landlords" for payoffs...

...Given the fact that we cannot in the short run alter many of the demographic causes of rising crime (such as the increased youthfulness of the population), and that even in the long run we will not want to alter other causes (such as our commitment to a secular, consumerist society with greater personal freedoms), I would be surprised if policies informed by such ways of thinkingas I have suggested could reduce crime by more than 15 or 20...

...This principle, though elementary, is frequently ignored in public policy...

...The barclosed in the early sixties and Fredcy went into the classroom, expounding from the texts of the Chicago Board of Education...

...and sitting beside my old rhetoric professor, Richard Weaver (Ideas Have Consequences...

...Those who argue than we can eliminate crime if only we have the "will" to do so, whether by ending poverty (as the Left argues) or by putting more police on the street and more gallows in our jails (as the Right believes), therefore seriously mistake what we are capable of under even the best of circumstances...

...But I do not believe that, were we to have taken a correct view and as a consequence adopted the most feasible policies, crime would have been eliminated or even dramatically reduced...

...The University Tap attracted a more genteel crowd, and it was there one was likely to find one's professor drowning his sorrows...

...For a time he served Fox Head 400, the Mob's brew (for a time, Tony Accardo served as its chief salesman...

...Chess was frequently played, but never did I ever see a single plebeian game of cards...

...As the years passed, Jimmy made some additions to the bar, adding a University Room for the college clientele, where, supposedly, one was supposed to show an ID to gain entrance...

...An analysis of the potential effects of "consumer-oriented" legislation shows that the effects are often quite different from those envisaged by its proponents...

...It was gloomy, its bartenders sullen, it was of a piece...

...In reality, however, the issue of consumer protection is not so simple...

...Then Jimmy switched to Budweiser, and the famous quarrel with Bud came about...

...Another step is to recognize that most serious crime is committed by repeaters...

...but members of the University did well to avoid them...

...In my days of residence at the University, there were three college bars, all along the motley length of 55th Street: the University Tap, Freddy's, and Jimmy's...

...The atmosphere was one of ruined glory...

...So he switched to Schlitz, and the name of Anheuser-Busch became anathema...

...I recall none of this: though I met a few of the monuments of Chicago culture, they were chiefly forgettable in their conversations...

...What is left today is but a few memories of a neighborhood famous for its muggings and saloons...

...But in today's atmosphere of manslaughter and muggings, these rooms seem an afterthought...

...Any proposed change is beneficial to society only if the benefits exceed the costs...

...As I have said, the atmosphere of Jimmy's was not genteel, save in the more "friendly confines" of the University Room...

...In pollution problems of this kind, where acts by one individual involve spillover effects adversely affecting other individuals, there is often a strong case for government intervention...

...in America, they have a cloying air of pomposity...

...Thus, pollution should be reduced but only as long as the expected benefits exceed the costs...

...The aim of government- intervention in such cases should be to achieve an optimal level of pollution...

...A topical example is the movement to abolish pollution by numerous individuals purporting to protect consumers...

...Thus, a ban on pollution will seldom be the most appropriate remedy...

...The Great American Saloon Series by Philip Kirantingham Jimmy's and All That The University Saloon University bars were never as good as we remember them to be, and it does no good to go back again...

...Like all tavern owners on 55th Street—and much of Chicago, for that matter—Freddy had to contend with the Mafia...

...Eventually, he went to night school and got his teaching certificate...

...For example, a power company is Pennsylvania spent two million dollars on a facility to remove 98% of the pollutants...

...For example, the Senate originally passed by a vote of 86 to 0 the Muskie Bill which requires a zero level of discharge of pollutants into the nation's waterways by 1985...

...The cost of attaining a standard of 100% removal (zero pollution), even if technically possible, would typically be astronomical...

...And he grew unhappy...

...In a study of nearly ten thousand Philadelphia boys born in 1945, Marvin Wolfgang and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania found that a few chronic offenders-6%—accounted for over half of all the recorded delinquencies and about two-thirds of all the violent crimes committed by the entire cohort...

...I have no intention of leaving the taste of sour grapes in the mouth...

...Birds of a feather, I suppose, is the last word on this phenomenon...

...He had a visible longing for human contact...

...Only a local historian will care about the family names of these innkeepers, and I do not repeat them for the reader's sake...

...Taverns were not included in urban renewal, and most of the fabled places have been razed...

...Jimmy's atmosphere was of unimproved property put to highly profitable use, like a saloon in the Klondike...

...We pretend that, while sitting and drinking, we are all "being geniuses together...

...The cries of aesthetic arguments often rose shrilly above the thundering of Beethoven's Ninth (an evergreen in university bars...

...To avoid bombings he agreed to take in a jukebox (though he had a hi-fi setup), but he kept the plug pulled on the box and glared angrily at anyone who asked to play it...

...Freddy however remained contentious and never joined the $100-a-month club...

...16 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1975...

...Had I been in Paris in the Twenties, and entered Lipp's to find Ernest Hemingway busily scribbling in his notebook, I probably would have gone to the other side of the room...

...It was a dark, dirty little room, the home of problem drinkers...

...University bars, like writers' bars, are possibly the worst places in the world to enjoy a beer...

...A more appropriate remedy is some measure (such as a tax) to cause polluters to take into account the cost of the undesirable side effects in making production or consumption decisions...

...And one bar, Jimmy's, which somehow had clout with Chicago's engineers (and ward committeemen), survives...

...Socialists, anarchists, and Swedenborgians gathered to enjoy jimmy's lager...

...They were rough and tough...

...In Europe, most university saloons are resorted to for pure drinking and fun...

...There were others of course: ina slum neighborhood, which was what Hyde Park amounted to, before the wrecker's ball leveled the tenements, bars predominate...

...Others may remember hobnobbing with university scholars, swapping aphorisms with pedants...

...The cost of removing all pollution to meet a zero tolerance level would almost always far exceed the benefits accruing to society...

...Freddy's had at one time been located on Lake Park Avenue, and known as the Compass...

...I have saved for the last the most famous saloon of the era, still functioning, albeit in the midst of urban terror and unsafe streets (how things have not changed...

...The vote was a setback for a coalition of labor unions and consumer organizations seeking a new voice for consumers in proceedings before existing regulatory agencies...

...Around the University of Chicago neighborhood, these days, drinking has gone to the dogs...

...That is not an encouraging sight...

...Others have nothing but raves about Jimmy's, recalling immemorable arguments over Hobbes or intricate investigations of Joyce's Wake...

...Bud gave no kickbacks on quantity, and Jimmy sold a hell of a lot of beer...

...Proponents of such legislation often contend that quality improvements can be achieved without any increase in cost...

...UT, as it was known, had not the glamor of Jimmy's (to which we'll come, shortly) nor the raffishness of Freddy's, and it was rather too sedate for most of the student body...

...The Compass became a legend in Chicago, but Freddy could not pay the bills with legendary coin...

...and customers who disagreed with Freddy's often eccentric notions were asked ne'er to return...

...Freddy dispensed Ballantine Ale to students and local characters...

...Only his arguments with customers were dramatic...

...However, there are sound reasons for expecting that legislation concernedwith information and regulatory aspects of consumer goods and services will increase costs and restrict the choices available to individual consumers...

...It also attracted citizens of the vie boheme...

...And you see, those are not my feathers...

...Perhaps Jimmy's was (or is) greater than I think...

...Expending vast energies on"helping" the one-time delinquent is not only likely to be futile, it can produce far fewer benefits for society than promptly isolating the recidivist...

...when Freddy refused to offer the usual bribe one month, the lads in blue waited until they caught him drinking after hours with his bartenders and arrested him...

...Shortly after, Weaver died, to everyone's loss...

...But I, on the whole, am not impressed with saloons as great cultural centers...

...So, oppressed by this dilemma, I drank up and left...

...So much for urban planning...

...I grow old, of course, and solitary...

...In that period, the college bars were in their shabby glory, profiting from the sternness of Chicago's curriculum and the cheapness of liquor...

...Many observers viewed the defeat of the consumer agency bill last year as a setback for consumers and a victory for such groups as the U.S...

...And I rather think that the profundities of students and assistant professors do not bear repeating, especially after ten years...

...Mory's, The White Horse, or the Sepp'1, the world over, university taverns have an air about them, of childish indulgence, of self-importance, of hokey tradition...

...E.C...

...Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers...

...There are now two University Rooms,both somewhat a step above the older bar...

...The cost of removing an additional unit of pollutant, as the above example illustrates, becomes more and more costly as the environment becomes cleaner and cleaner...

...Their only appeal is to snobs and certified alcoholics...

...I believe that our society has not done as well as it could have in controlling crime because of erroneous but persistent views about the nature of man and the capacities of his institutions...