Alcohol

Throughout American history, alcohol consumption has been an important element in defining male identity and establishing standards of male public behavior. Since colonial times, the pressure to drink could be so strong in some all-male spaces that liquor consumption came to be considered a badge of honor. Paradoxically, while male culture has typically required drinking to establish one's social standing, excess consumption has generally been viewed as a sign of weakness.

From the outset, public consumption of alcohol in America was a male prerogative. This practice originated in Europe, where the alehouse served as a place for males to share camaraderie over drinks, and the early settlers brought these traditions with them. Authorities in Puritan New England sought to regulate alcohol consumption by limiting both the number of taverns and their hours of operation, but the Puritans themselves practiced temperance or moderation rather than abstinence, and the growing population and increasing diversity frustrated attempts at regulation. Taverns became important throughout colonial America as gathering places for men to transmit news concerning politics and, during the 1760s and 1770s, deteriorating relations with Great Britain. They also functioned as meeting sites where political activists organized resistance to crown policies and articulated republican concepts of manhood.

The importance of alcohol in relation to manliness also affected relations between white colonists and Native Americans. White frontiersmen, who often drank regularly, undoubtedly influenced Native American's drinking habits by presenting alcohol consumption as an accepted behavior. Whites also encouraged Indians to drink to create demand for liquor as a trade good. Ironically, white advocates of western expansion ultimately pointed to the apparent inability of Native Americans to handle liquor consumption as a sign of weakness, and thus as a justification for conquest. As a result, Native American men increasingly viewed alcohol as a threat to their manhood and their ability to resist white encroachment.

In the household economy of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, liquor consumption bonded master craftsmen with their employees in artisan workshops controlled by the master. The easy mixing of work and leisure softened the conflicts inherent in master–apprentice relations. During the nineteenth century, as industrialization and urbanization spread and transformed men's work patterns, the relationship of alcohol consumption to male identity shifted among white Americans. With the rise of the factory system, drinking became a focus of class tensions. Many factory owners sought to control their employees and improve productivity by defining a standard of manhood that emphasized sobriety, self-control, and the man's role as a family provider. As alcohol disappeared from the workplace, its centrality to working-class leisure and working-class manhood increased. Symbolizing artisan independence and resistance to emerging bourgeois standards of manhood, social drinking fostered class consciousness, as well as solidarity among factory workers and immigrants (such as the Irish) who poured into the cities of the Northeast and Midwest beginning in the mid–nineteenth century. The homosocial setting of the urban neighborhood saloon was a hub for machine politics, labor-union activity, and immigrant bonding.

Even in the supportive environment of the saloon, however, there was an element of risk to male public drinking. The very qualities that made the saloon a male place—the conviviality and comradeship of the regulars—could also threaten manhood. Male saloon patrons knew that excessive alcohol consumption or a failure to meet challenges to their virility, physical strength, or athletic prowess were perceived as signs of weakness. Any threat to one's manhood could result in a fistfight [Page 23]or worse, particularly if the protagonists were drunk. During the Victorian era, as excessive drinking became associated with irresponsibility and loss of self-control, many men had trouble maintaining accepted standards of male behavior while consuming alcohol. Advice literature repeatedly emphasized that alcohol dependency could impair a man's capacity as a bread-winner by crippling his work performance, threatening his job security, destroying his health, diverting his earnings from household expenses to the saloon, and possibly causing him to abuse his wife and children.

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