| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 54

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Craig Heron, Booze: A Distilled History (Toronto: Between the Lines 2003)

DO NOT BE FOOLED by the ambiguous title. Booze is a Canadian tour de force, a social history of alcohol from New France to the new millennium. It is deftly written, beautifully illustrated, and provocatively argued. While Craig Heron treats the drys, opponents of alcohol, with respect, this book is indeed a wet history of drinking in Canada. As he concludes, with some exceptions, most Canadians have enjoyed alcohol in moderation, more so than "the outcries of shocked moralists might suggest." (380)

For many readers of this journal Craig Heron's name is no doubt familiar, but one linked to more traditional working-class history. And this project began as an exhibition on workers and alcohol for the Ontario Workers' Arts and Heritage Centre in 1998. Class plays a central role in this book, but that is understandable since class is crucial to understanding the battles over booze in Canada, especially prohibition.

As Heron and many others have noted, temperance began as a movement in the early 19th century to persuade people to drink less, particularly less hard liquor or spirits. By the 1830s the movement was becoming more anti-alcohol in general, more bourgeois, and more evangelically Protestant. Temperance became part of a larger agenda "to construct a 'moral dominion' in which all parts of society would learn to self-regulate, ideally in the image of the earnest middle classes." (12) When the drys met resistance, which they did, they turned to the state and demanded the legal prohibition of alcohol.

Resistance to the drys was understandable, especially when one considers the importance of taverns or saloons to working-class life. For wage earners taverns became the "cornerstones of working-class bachelor cultures." (374) By the late 19th century saloons had become the main target of the drys. For them the saloon was anything but a "poor man's club"; it was a centre of working-class excess and debauchery. Yet, as anyone familiar with the Knights of Labor knows, temperance did have some support within the working class, especially among the leadership.

In addition to class, concepts of gender, especially the construction of masculinities, permeate this book. As in other societies, in Canada drinking has been preponderantly a male activity. Men not only drink more than women, but they usually have defined the time and space when it has been acceptable for women to drink. In that sense alcohol reinforced patriarchy, and many women (and many female and some male social historians) have railed against "the damage inflicted on families by male drunkards." (14) Still, for many men, drinking, especially public drinking, was less about consumption than sociability. How men drank and meanings given to drinking have varied by class, ethnicity, and race: there "has never been a single Canadian drinking experience or drinking pattern." (382)

As for the drys, they had some success in restricting public drinking, but their cause only gathered steam once they linked it to progressive reform in the early 20th century and, even more important, to World War I. Patriotism and prohibition became enmeshed, and during the war all provinces (except Quebec) banned the retail sale of alcohol. They were supported by a somewhat reluctant federal government in 1918. With the end of the war support for prohibition waned, as it had always faced stiff opposition from many Canadians. Moreover, according to Heron, the law did not work. Any decline in consumption was more attributable to a poor economy than prohibition. The law was also easy to evade. Beginning in Quebec and British Columbia in 1921, prohibition was replaced with government control of liquor, the most familiar face of which was the government liquor store.

As Heron notes, the drys may have lost the war, but they continued to win battles long after prohibition ended. Many of their assumptions were woven into public policy, especially on public drinking and its regulation. The saloon was a casualty of prohibition, and legal public drinking returned slowly. Most provinces allowed it by the 1930s, but New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island held out until 1961 and 1964 respectively. While public drinking regulations varied, some form of the beer parlour became the norm across the country. These stark facilities, often linked to hotels, offered little else than beer, and often banned women or separated unattached women from unattached men via sections for men only and those for "Ladies and Escorts." Heron wryly comments that public drinking regulations in English Canada contributed to our reputation as a "coldly austere, culturally repressed country whose public cultural life matched its often forbidding climate." (379) Fortunately, Montréal's nightclubs helped saved us from complete cultural doom.

Yet prohibition had another legacy. It helped to reinforce the ambiguity that Canadians have toward liquor until today. On the one hand, drinking took off after World War II, influenced by higher disposable incomes, falling real liquor prices, an economy more oriented to consumption, and a savvy, increasingly consolidated liquor industry that promoted "national" brands across the country. In a fascinating chapter on "Rediscovering the Alcoholic," Heron shows how, until the 1970s, trends in dealing with alcohol abuse reinforced what was now called social drinking. For 19th-century drys the problem was liquor itself; demon rum could ruin anyone. Yet dealing with problem drinkers went in two related directions in the 20th century. First, the mutual support movement, the best example of which is Alcoholics Anonymous, tended not to blame alcohol itself but the inability of some people to cope with it. Those people had to accept that they were powerless before liquor and needed the support of other former heavy drinkers and God. Second, the medical profession also got involved in treating excessive drinking. Particularly because of the work of E.M. Jellinek, the heavy drinker was diagnosed with the disease of alcoholism. The problem was not the drink but what drove the problem drinker to consume excessively. The rest of us, though, could enjoy our martinis.

On the other hand, though, beginning in the 1970s liquor life became more complex. The disease concept of alcoholism lost favour since little empirical evidence existed to support it. The illness of alcoholism "lacked the clearly identifiable source of other diseases: a germ, or a virus, perhaps." (365) Some researchers shifted "the focus back, onto the alcohol rather than the alcoholic." (366) By the end of the decade some considered heavy drinking the result of "a complex amalgam of socio-cultural and psychological forces in particular individuals' lives." (10) This shift occurred as people, except for single, young males, began to drink less — even as the number of retail outlets and licensed public places dramatically increased. Many explanations have been offered: aging baby boomers, poor economic conditions, a neo-temperance movement that targeted the social costs of heavy drinking, and, of course, the state's crackdown on drinking and driving. To make matters even more confusing, by the turn of the millennium the scientific evidence increasingly demonstrated that alcohol consumption had a beneficial effect on health, but Heron claims that "public-health officials are still reluctant to proclaim loudly the health benefits of moderate drinking." (387)

Booze is an excellent book, written in engaging, accessible prose. Most of my reservations are quibbles, but Heron is a little too dismissive of the positive impact of prohibition, While respectful to the drys, he tends to be a bit impatient with them. Moreover, for a book that places much emphasis on gender and sexuality, I was disappointed that he had little to say about gays and lesbians, especially in light of the growing literature on homosexuality and public life. Still these concerns do not fundamentally detract from a fine piece of social history. So, pour yourself a drink — or not — and enjoy Booze.


Robert A. Campbell Capilano College, North Vancouver

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