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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Robert Campbell, Sit Down and Drink Your Beer: Regulating Vancouver's Beer Parlours (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2001)
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| THE FIELD OF ALCOHOL STUDIES has expanded considerably over the past few decades. In an area of research that is dominated by amateur histories of a particular favourite beverage, popular books on rum-running and prohibition, and baffled amusement at those crazy temperance reformers, academic historians have slowly built a solid foundation of excellent, multifaceted studies. Unlike Britain and the United States, Canada is not as well served in this area, but changes are coming. One of the researchers whose work has been in the forefront of this growing field is Robert Campbell, from Capilano University College in British Columbia. With his Demon Rum or Easy Money, Campbell shed light on an oft-neglected area of liquor history: government regulation. With Sit Down and Drink your Beer: Regulating Vancouver's Beer Parlours, 1925–1954, Campbell continues his examination of regulation, this time at the level of consumption. As with any good work that fills a much-neglected area of history, the book answers some questions, and encourages the exploration of many more. |
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Campbell's main contention is that government regulation of beer parlours developed in an uneven manner along lines of class, race, gender, and sexuality, but blurred those lines in the process. Moreover, government regulation does not fit a simple social control model. It suits more adequately a theoretical framework of moral regulation, an internalization and negotiation of rules governing moral activities. His argument is complex, and I do not want to do a disservice to the complexity of the themes he presents. Instead, I will pick up on a few of the key issues Campbell presents, and then discuss some of the areas that he opens up for further examination. |
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After a chapter of historiography, in which Campbell demonstrates his adept use of the theory, the book turns to the complex nature of class and regulation in beer parlours. This second chapter is one of the strongest. Beer parlours were created with an eye to expunging the memory and the stigma of the working-class saloon, complete with its perceived attendant vices of gambling, prostitution, rowdiness, and other improper behaviour. While the Liquor Control Board (LCB) aimed to construct the parlours based upon middle-class values, it relied upon the workers and operators (managers) to enforce these rules. Enforcement, therefore, was not simply a top-down affair. Workers and operators had to negotiate between the viability of the rules and the survival of the business and their jobs. Within the structure of the beer parlour, the lines between worker and manager were blurred: sometimes tapmen (who poured the beer) worked as managers, with the power to hire and fire; waiters had to sell beer and monitor behaviour. Moreover, staff and owners were linked by their need to enforce the LCB regulations to keep the business running. So the waiters who sold the beer and had opportunity for sociability with patrons also had to enforce strict rules involving comportment and morality. It is a tension that remains in the bar business to this day: selling drinks makes money, but selling to drunks may get you in trouble. |
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Campbell's work explores well the issue of the negotiation of moral regulations. While the regulations were imposed by the LCB, they were both encouraged and shaped by owners, staff, patrons, and the general public. The LCB determined that parlours were intended only as places for beer consumption — people could not listen to music or other entertainments, no food or other drinks (soft or hard) were permitted, and patrons had to remain seated while they drank (hence the book's title). Convention and public pressure led to other rules. For example, in the case of mixed-race couples, the LCB had no specific rule, but the patrons and owners appear to have determined that "mixed race"meant a White woman with a man of colour, and mixed-race couples would not be tolerated. The gender of each person was significant: a White man with a woman of colour was not considered such a problem. Concerns of miscegenation did not run both ways. Similarly, the rules regarding the segregation of men and women were negotiated between various parties. A great deal of debate raged around whether or not women should be permitted to drink in parlours. The traditional association of women in bars with prostitution drove much of this debate. As a result, to keep single men from single women, parlours were divided into "men only" and "women and escorts" sections. As men and women continued to cross those boundaries, some businesses began to devise different ways of keeping the two groups apart. Low partitions between the sections emerged and soon the LCB insisted upon full walls dividing the sections. These rules were reinforced by ideas of heterosexual decency and more notably by concerns over the spread of venereal diseases, an issue that Campbell explores in some depth. Campbell also considers what these rules meant for the homosexual community, and how First Nations people were treated under the law. |
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The negotiations of rules and extent of regulation are the key themes of the book, and while explored well, these discussions must be considered in light of some challenges. Notably, Campbell is working from a relatively small collection of material, and the silence of the sources on some of the themes is obvious. Some examples appear to be unique, and it is difficult to draw conclusions from one or two cases. Hence, Campbell fleshes out the themes with the work of others. For example, when discussing mixed-race couples, Campbell discusses two examples of mixed-race couples being discriminated against. There is little indication of whether or not this was a frequent occurrence. When discussing Aboriginal drinking, Campbell tends to focus beyond Vancouver for his evidence. While demonstrating a strong command of the literature, this tactic makes the conclusions more tentative than would be possible if the material yielded more information. That challenge from the sources leads to a second, equally moderating factor. Since he is dealing with regulation, and since liquor inspectors, newspapers, and others generally only took notice of cases of deviation from the norm, what we have here is a picture of deviation, not of compliance. Campbell acknowledges that the numerous compliant parlours do not come into the picture. It does not diminish the strength of the discussion on the negotiation of regulations in institutions in which the middle-class values of the LCB were challenged, but it does make it difficult to draw conclusions about the nature of working-class compliance when any compliant working class-institution does not register on the radar of deviation. |
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The result is a book that answers some questions, and encourages more work to be done. This is a case study of regulation. It confirms some assumptions, notably about the attitudes towards women in parlours, and the demonization of women with regards to the spread of venereal disease. It conversely presents some valuable new perspectives, most notably in the discussion of the relationship between workers in the parlours, their employers, and their working-class patrons. The complexity of this relationship is worth exploring for other centres, as is the under-examined issue of provincial regulation. In the end, Sit Down and Drink Your Beer is a valuable contribution to a growing field which offers some important perspectives on the nature of class and the negotiation of moral regulations, and encourages further work from others in the field. |
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Dan Malleck
Brock University |
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