Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.2 | The History Cooperative

Faces along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman's Saloon, 1870-1920. By Madelon Powers. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. xii, 323 pp. $25.00, isbn 0-226-67768-0.)

"Whatever else the saloon may be or may fail to be, it is, at any rate, the poor man's club." So the reform-oriented "Committee of Fifty" declared in 1901—a view that Madelon Powers strongly endorses almost a century later in her valuable historical study of the workingman's saloon. Unlike the Progressive reformers who sought to find "Substitutes for the Saloon" and thereby eradicate it, however, Powers writes about the saloon in a "largely positive light." "The fact is," Powers insists, "saloongoers liked the life, and this book attempts to show why. . . . it is the saloongoers' turn to tell their side of their story." 1

While Powers seeks to rescue the saloongoers from the condescension of reformers and the contempt of prohibitionists, she also differs from some recent historians (myself included) who, she thinks, have stressed too much the "communal qualities of barlife" and the degree to which it "represented an alternative to, and a refuge from, the competitive urban marketplace." My own (hardly unbiased) view is that she overemphasizes the differences between her perspective and that of previous historians. But there is no doubt that in a market-oriented, capitalist society, the saloon, in part, reflects market and capitalist values. . . .

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