Untitled

Robert Goodrich
differ. 9 Within the urban environment, workers, often recent rural immigrants,
continued pre-industrial patterns and drank in public, consumed more than
average, and drank despite poverty, leading observers to mistake concurrency of
alcohol consumption and poverty for causality.
Yet other social groups consumed more alcohol than workers but generally
escaped public censure. Alcohol consumption remained highest in rural areas, led
by the East Elbian provinces. 10 Rural immigrants easily transformed their patterns
of drinking to Cologne’s pub-centered social life. In any case, the presumptive link
between alcoholism and urbanization has not been established historically
although contemporary reports lumped alcoholism and the living conditions of
the urban working classes into one pot. Meanwhile, aristocratic circles, especially
in the officer corps, ritualized excessive drinking. Certain middle-class subcommunities,
most notoriously students, made it a central socializing experience,
and the middle classes in general drank heavily, though in private. Clearly, if
attitudes towards drinking were context dependent, the central issue to alcohol
consumption is not what was consumed but how it was consumed. 11
But if alcohol consumption is historically and contextually structured, quantitative
data fail to illuminate the meanings of this consumption, especially relevant
in the radically different context of the nineteenth century. 12 Alcohol played a
central role in most social groups, not just the working classes, and emphasizing
quantity of consumption falsely presumes conclusions related to the social role of
alcohol, most significantly the presumptive link between consumption levels and
alcoholism and poverty. In short, while the socioeconomic conditions of the
working classes surely influenced proletarian drinking patterns, other highly
variable factors such as political restrictions, commercialization, and pre-industrial
drinking habits based on gender, work, and festival patterns shaped the contours
of leisure consumption of alcohol. For example, workers did not necessarily see
their leisure time, especially Sundays, as an excuse for drunkenness but for
recovery. Alcohol abuse would have undermined the restorative intent, though its
acceptable moderate use was regarded as a source of nutrition and socialization.
Indeed, in one union survey from 1910, the overwhelming majority of respondents
listed walks outdoors as their favorite leisure activity, not drunken revelry. 13
A central component of virtually every society, alcohol exists as a medium of
cultural exchange. As such, alcohol consumption alters in meaning and occasionally
in form as cultures and values change. Since industrialization altered
drinking customs, alcohol consumption belongs in the category of culturally
variable mediated experience along with all leisure consumption. One such change
brought by industrialization was the reification by reformists of drunkenness as a
social problem. Yet, alcohol as popular culture contained meanings rooted in social
practices and contexts independent from the middle classes. Reducing alcohol to
its inebriating effects ignores three fundamental points: alcohol served a ritual and
236