Drinking In Early America

John Michael Handrop
12 November, 2010

Drinking In Early America

         There was once a time when workmen and employers sat down and enjoyed drinks with there workers, but those times changed. This process may have been important to the workers thought process because it helped legitimate inequality1. However, as they separated themselves more and more from the working class. The middle-class family began to turn into a refuge from the immoral or low-life society, and the middle-class began to lock themselves up in there homes2. Eventually, the business owners were completely separated from the working men but more importantly from work it self. As Women began to obtain more power in the world of Men, they first had a commanding voice in the house, and probably bed room, were there first largely effective rule was no drinking in the house. It had become an inappropriate place to drink and drunkenness and and sociability were forbidden3. The home had become a place of privacy and sobriety in which the new life of the middle-class family drove businessmen away from the bottle4. Business men began to separate them selves from the workshop and concentrated more on out-of-workshop business such as: purchase of labor, materials, and distribution of finished goods5. As this separation of working and middle class became apparent in the work place, so did it in the neighborhoods. Social drift began to take place as the working-family neighborhoods became infested with crime. Household economy had all but passed out of existence: “The band found them selves too drunk to play” so “they reduced consumption at rehearsals” but not in life6.

Footnotes
1  “Society: Sociability: The Case of Drinking,” in A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837, by Paul E. Johnson (New York: Hill and Wang Publishing, 2004), 55-61.
2  Ibide
3  Ibide
4  Ibide
5  Ibide
6  Ibide.