Reviews of Books

Meeting House and Counting House: a half century ago, Frederick B. Tolles brought two of colonial Pennsylvania's central institutions together to show that wealthy merchants and egalitarian Quakers did not form competing factions in William Penn's "holy experiment" but were, in fact, often the same people. Chasing profits did not require pious Friends to abandon the pursuit of brotherly love. Rum Punch and Revolution brings two equally unlikely institutions together for a similar purpose. Far from being agents of antithetical forces, taverns and councils of state, Peter Thompson argues, worked together. They gave expression to a form of democracy that transcended class, ethnic, and religious differences in a diverse and stratified society. Thus, "tavern talk" created the public conversation, enabling the many who were governed to inform and influence the few who did the governing.	1
Although much of this argument is supported by the application of deductive reasoning to anecdotal evidence, Thompson is persuasive. From its start, Philadelphia had a lot of taverns—twelve in its first decade—and the number kept pace with the population, swelling to 175 on the eve of the Revolution. Until the mid-eighteenth century, most of these enterprises were watering holes for the thirsty more than inns for the hungry and weary. Usually consisting of one or two cramped, crowded rooms, taverns drew customers from all walks of life and forced the multitudinous masses of Philadelphia to jostle against each other physically and, more important, to engage verbally in scrappy, heated conversations made all the more open, honest, and uninhibited by the free flow of alcohol. In a culture acutely aware of social station in the workplace and religious preference in the meetinghouse, the tavern became "the most enduring, most easily identifiable, and most contested body of public space in eighteenth-century America" (p. 16).	2
Pennsylvania's Quaker majority pursued a kinder, gentler version of the social control sought by New England's Puritans. Boston and Philadelphia were intent on upholding public morality; it was thus imperative to prevent taverns from degenerating into dens of debauchery. Municipal authorities used their licensing powers to keep bad apples out of the business; passed laws regulating prices, conduct, and hours; and enjoined the constabulary to inspect premises and maintain order. Philadelphia was more inclined to tolerate illegal taverns if they caused no trouble and to give tavernkeepers more second chances if they misbehaved. Its aldermen avoided the erratic twists of Boston's magistrates, who alternated between throwing up their civic hands in frustration at alleged immorality and instituting draconian crackdowns to suppress it. Philadelphians intuitively grasped that they needed their taverns. To be sure, taverns played a part in Boston's political culture. But early New England had more shared public spaces—the meetinghouse, town meeting, militia training field—than any of the Middle Colonies, and hence, Massachusetts's taverns did not play as singular a role in mixing the voices of the commonweal as did those of Pennsylvania. Thompson never states that Philadelphia's leaders consciously fashioned a tavern world to promote an inclusive political dialogue, but he does argue that taproom democracy became legitimized by cultural norms. Woe to the snob who considered himself too superior to swap opinions with the bumper boys at the bar.	. . .