| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Madelon Powers. Faces Along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman's Saloon, 1870–1920. (Historical Studies of Urban America.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1998. Pp. xii, 323. $25.00.

Perhaps no American institution has been more misunderstood than the saloon. In its heyday from 1870 to 1920, drys depicted the saloon as the door to Hell, host to every known debauchery, while wets portrayed the saloon as the poor man's club, refuge to the working man in a harsh world. These debates have erected barriers to later generations' understanding of the saloon or even their recognition that it was an important institution. Yet, the saloon was one of the great institutions in the lives of working people in Gilded Age and Progressive-era America. Like other institutions of the time—sporting spectacles, political machines, trades unions, and business corporations—it was ubiquitous. A glance at the maps that Madelon Powers reproduces showing saloon density in 1894 New York and San Francisco demonstrates the prevalence of the saloon in working people's neighborhoods (opposite p. 156). 1

Powers, whose sympathies are with the wets, has not written an after-the-fact apology for the saloon. Rather, she has produced an insightful study of the different dimensions of saloon culture in working-class life. Her book builds on work of previous scholars such as Roy Rosenzweig, Perry Duis, Thomas Noel, and Elliott West, who have explored some of the ways in which the saloon functioned in working people's lives during the era of American industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and commercialization. Unlike earlier scholars, Powers looks at saloons from all across the nation and focuses on the saloongoers themselves. She shifts the focus from the business of saloonkeeping and the saloon's relations with the outer world to focus on what went on inside saloon doors. Drawing on diverse sources, she explores the community that saloongoers built around drinking. . . .

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