Urban Ethnography's “Saloon Problem” and Its Challenge to Public Sociology

The “Saloon Problem” and Sociology's Progressive Roots: 1895

Society is confronted with many social problems. None, however, challenges the attention of the thoughtful and patriotic citizen more than the modern un–American saloon. A brief statement of the economic, political, social, and criminal aspects of the problem cannot fail to deepen and strengthen the conviction that we are face to face with one of the most formidable foes of social progress recorded in the history of civilization.

—The Saloon Problem and Social Reform, 1905

Michael Burawoy's recent ASA Presidential address calling for sociologists to engage in “public sociology” sits uneasily with the history of urban ethnography (UE) (Burawoy, 2005). Urban ethnographers have a long history of civic engagement on behalf of the urban poor. Yet they have proven relatively impotent to defend them from malign politics, economic transformations, and social isolation. Three interrelated events of 1895 mark the beginning of the UE research paradigm and its pitfalls.

The 1895 publication of the Hull House Maps and Papers marked the debut of empirical sociological investigations in America. Jane Addams was the nominal leader of sociology outside the academy and a research pioneer. Though Burawoy cites Addams as an exemplar for her anti–war activism, the settlement work she began in Hull House more closely fits his model of sociologists nurturing a civil sphere to buffer individuals from political and economic forces (Burawoy, 2005, pp 4–5). This civil sphere was designed to bolster homes at the expense of saloons.

In 1895 the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) began publication as the public face of the “the sociological movement.” It was edited by Albion Small, an armchair theorist recognized for building the University of Chicago department. Small's campaign for empiricism in sociology fostered a discipline that was itself a new public sphere uniting researchers, theorists, and activists. Notable was his creation of the AJS as the discipline's public forum in the United States. In those heady days of Progressive hopes, Addams and Small were both reformers distinguished by their commitment to empirical examinations of social life. Early investigations focused on such topics of Progressive concern as sweat shops, tenement housing conditions, and saloons.

1895 also saw the emergence of the National Anti–Saloon league, one of the most successful Progressive organizations and the architect of constitutional Prohibition. Few contemporary social issues aroused more mass action than alcohol reform (Gusfield, 1963; Szymanski, 2003), and saloons were a central concern to America's industrialists whose drive for rational efficiency was stymied by immigrant and working–class lifeways (Boyer, 1978; Peiss, 1986; Rosenzwieg, 1983). ¹ These made the saloon an ideal research site for a discipline seeking to define its purpose and demonstrate its usefulness. Saloons distilled Progressive concerns to a single site of unassimilated immigrants, a recalcitrant working class, new political movements, sexual deviants, wayward youth subcultures, and the demoralizing impact of commercialized leisure. “The Social Uses of the Saloon” was the first of several ethnographies featuring the saloon in the AJS (Moore, 1897) and the basis of lively sociological discussions: alcohol, commerce, and citizenship.

Also during the Progressive Era (1885–1920), middle–class social movements reacted to rapid urbanization, industrialization, and immigration by bolstering and transforming the role of the state (Ehrenreich, 1985; Luker, 1998; Skocpol, 1995). Sociology itself was one of these movements, an oft–forgotten point that holds important insights into the American trajectory of the science. Sociology was born as one social movement amongst many, competing with other emerging social sciences, Social Gospel moralism, Populist politics, and muckraking journalism. These many hands grasping at the wheel of a larger and newly armed ship of state created a “crisis of authority” in 19th–century America that social science arose to address (Haskell, 1977).

Empiricism distinguished sociology from its competitors and marked the basis of sociology's professionalization as it competed for jurisdiction over social problems. ² Though academic sociologists like Small and settlement–house sociologists like Addams disagreed on whether the university or the community was the best place to practice the new discipline, early sociologists of both traditions agreed that empirical diagnoses of social problems could help guide citizen, state, and civil society in the new era. Small explained his insistence that the American Sociological Society (ASS) be independent from the other social sciences by claiming those “represented humanitarian sentiment more distinctly than a desire for critical methodology” (AJS, 1916, 21:6 p. 729).

Today's urban ethnography (UE) is heir to the methods by which sociologists first intervened in public problems. What distinguishes it from the community study that originated in Europe is its opposition to the United States’ peculiarly anti–urban culture (Bender, 1978; White and White, 1962). So–called only since its revitalization in the late 1960s, ³ the saloon investigations launched from 1895 bear all the hallmarks of this indigenous American research paradigm. ⁴ UE is a mélange of the participant–observation method, urbanophilia in opposition to anti–urbanism, and theoretical extrapolations about modern social life. The fin de siècle Chicago wedding between the principals of sociology—empiricism and theoretical generalization—trailed public concern to the urban core well before the sacrament of The Chicago School.

The flip side of the anti–urbanism in American intellectual life was its emphasis on domesticity (Fishman, 1987; Hayden, 1984; Marsh, 1990). Despite their differences, reform and academic sociologists agreed that the “saloon question” was best answered by a companionate domestic that would draw fathers out of the saloon and into the home. Ethnographers shared a suspicion of public amusements and turned their observations to assessing ways to promote healthy, egalitarian households.

Empiricism was not just a disinterested preference for objectivity, but a rhetorical move that distinguished sociology from competing professions in the competition to harness mass action and state resources. The AJS treatment of the saloon stood in contrast to the freewheeling accounts in national magazines like The Century, Scribner's, The North American Review, and The Atlantic Monthly (the appendix discusses the methods by which I analyzed these sources). Popular accounts featured hyperbolic exchanges between Prohibitionists, advocates of individual temperance pledges, civil libertarians, and assorted charges linking alcohol to social ills ranging from anarchism to zealotry. These were based on theological rhetoric, political theory, and fictionalized tales of woe. Though sociologists could commit these sins against objectivity as well, they introduced “social facts” to justify the saloon's replacement, a position that distinguished them from other social science journals. ⁵

Despite their Progressive credentials, advocates of saloon replacement had little influence on the anti–saloon debate. As sociologists debunked saloon misconceptions, other Progressives increasingly consolidated under the National Anti–Saloon League and its simple slogan “the saloon must go.” ⁶ This nonpartisan, nondenominational Progressive movement successfully radicalized sympathetic moderates by pushing them into conflict with their local saloons. As Ann–Marie Szymanski persuasively demonstrates, “the Anti–Saloon League first sought to engage Americans in local prohibition skirmishes which barely dented the profits of the liquor industry, but which socialized them into the militancy of the broader movement” (Szymanski, 2003).

With Progressives mobilizing mass support against the saloon, key to their failure was sociologists’ unwillingness to challenge the debate's framing around the saloon. The first generation of ethnographers largely ignored private consumption, studying only in its public manifestations—in the saloons amongst low–class urban misfits. The “poor man's social club” was deeply wounded by manufacturing restrictions during World War I and finished off by the waves of local anti–alcohol activism that succeeded in passing Volstead Act in 1919, amending the Constitution to prohibit sale or consumption of alcohol. (Duis, 1983, pp. 274–303). Yet the saloon work by the early Progressive sociologists has lasting resonance for understanding sociology today. It anticipated much of the Chicago School research program conventionally dated to after the split between academic and community sociology, and it highlights many of “the pitfalls of urban ethnography” that continue to characterize its research program (Wacquant, 2002).

For sociology, urban ethnography's saloon problem challenges the new public sociology. UE has consistently been engaged with public issues, primarily by debunking popular stereotypes of marginal urbanites. Research engaged with public concerns faces the difficult task of challenging the public's construction of social problems (Bourdieu et al., 1991). Refuting misconceptions mires sociological action in the stigmatizing frames it tries to combat. This essay is a cautionary tale that saloon problems cannot be investigated only in the saloon.

“The Saloon Problem”, Ethnography, and Empirical Sociology

“There is not a place of public assembly except some saloon and the dance–hall connected with it. There the young men and women go; there the families go. There these people meet; but oh, the cost of it! Lost virtue, debauched mind, body, and heart, defeated ambition, sickening and failing sensibilities, impoverished and often wrecked homes; companionship with vice in the natural effort to gratify a worthy instinct of fellowship… all that is mean and ugly and hateful, when all that is good & beautiful and happy should be their constant delight!”

—AJS, 1906, 11:5, p. 660.

During the first 20 years of sociology, Progressivism united a diverse group of sociological practitioners. At the University of Chicago department, lines were blurred between male sociology students, who often worked at Hull House before taking positions in academia, professional male settlement workers, and the female settlement workers who were sometimes appointed to lesser positions in the Department of Sociology (Bulmer, 1984; Deegan, 1988). Politics also divided the genders between the liberalism of the academic men and the more socialist–minded women (Sibley, 1995). After World War I, the gendered and unequal division of labor was institutionalized when the female cadre formed the University of Chicago's Department of Social Services. Despite these reinforcing cleavages of politics and gender, early sociologists had remarkable agreement about the value of the saloon and the necessity of its replacement (citations are from the AJS unless otherwise noted).

The AJS regularly featured the struggle “against the saloon, both as a drinking institution and as a moral, social, and political evil” (AJS, 1908, 13:4 p. 480). Likewise, the first sociology courses explicitly included “alcohol problem” politics on their syllabi (AJS, 1902, 8:1 pp. 85–121; 1903, 8:3 pp. 531–558). During the height of “local option” referenda where cities decided their own alcohol policies (Barker, 1905; AJS, 1930 36:2), the AJS ran annual summaries of the results penned by C.R. Woodruff, Secretary of the National Municipal League (1906, 12:2; 1908, 13:4; 1909, 14:4; 1910, 15:4; 1911, 16:4). Sociologists added their analyses to alcohol's detrimental effects, alleging divorce, mental illness, race degeneracy, divorce, poverty, and crimogenic properties.

From the beginning sociologists, like most Americans, believed the city was a disorganizing influence on social life. The city's demoralizing effects, as a site of anonymity, mobility, and nervous excitement, was only exacerbated by alcohol's disinhibiting effects (AJS, 1912, 18:1 pp. 21–32). Saloons were especially suspicious because they represented the most widespread example of the perceived corrosive influence of commerce on leisure time (AJS, 1910, 16:3 p. 289–308; Cressey, 1969[1932]; Steiner, 1933). Plagiarizing Simmel, one author explored the “urban habit of mind” cultivated by saloons’ flashy interiors that “stimulate a jaded attention” in laborers used to dreary, repetitive work (AJS, 1912, 17:5 pp. 602–614). ⁷ Urbanites who sought relief from this overstimulation often succumbed to entrepreneurs who promoted “the low ideals of a cheap social life, the craving for excitement born of their childish privations and stimulated by the daily life of monotonous toil—too early thrust upon them—these lay them open to the temptations of the saloon, the dance–hall, and the low vaudeville ‘show’” (AJS, 1903, 8:6 p. 850). Of these new urban leisure activities, Ernest Moore observed, “the favorite form of artificial stimulus is not to be found in gambling, nor in the theater, nor in books. It is found in the saloon” (AJS, 1900, 6:1 p. 11).

Though the saloon was identified as a special site of investigation by academic sociologists (AJS, 1897, 2:6, pp 106, 109; AJS, 1901, 6:4 pp. 482–486), including Small (1897 3:2 p.153; 1902 8:2 pp. 211–215), the actual research came from settlement sociologists. These neighborhood institutions were organized in reaction to popular fears over the swelling ranks of the immigrant poor. Integral to American sociology before World War I, they occupied a “separate sphere” headed by Jane Addams, the nominal head of Chicago's Hull House (Deegan, 1988; Grant, Stalp et al., 2002; Lengermann and Niebrugge–Brantly, 2002; Sibley, 1995). As she proudly noted, “the settlements antedated by three years the first sociology departments in universities and by ten years the establishment of the first foundations for social research” (Addams, 1930). ⁸ More than their male colleagues, these upper– and middle–class Progressive women had a positive view of the services and opportunities that city life afforded, actively working to make the city “home–like” (Hayden, 1981; Stansell, 1986).

In the same year the AJS was founded, the residents of Hull House published their Maps and Papers, a landmark work that pioneered many of the hallmarks of the Chicago School. The settlement movement's focus on the neighborhood unit of analysis was acknowledged as the model for the Chicago School's concept of the “natural area” (Burgess, 1930; Eubank, 1928; Palmer, 1928, pp. 47–56). The Maps and Papers included first–hand observations of sweatshops and interviews with workers—the first scientific ethnographic work. This survey was subsequently extended citywide by Hull House residents and published serially in the AJS. These described Chicago's ethnic neighborhoods, their housing conditions, and the threat of the saloon, 81 of which were clustered around Hull House (Residents of Hull–House, 1895, p. 4).

The settlement worker sociologists developed a pragmatic attitude toward the saloons based on their experiences as neighborhood residents. ⁹ Jane Addams blamed a distant, wealthy liquor industry, not community disorder, for the proliferation of saloons in the Hull House neighborhood:

Our ward contains two hundred and fifty–five saloons; our own precinct boasts of eight, and the one directly north of us twenty. This allows one saloon to every twenty–eight voters, and there is no doubt that the saloon is the centre of the liveliest political and social life of the ward. The leases and fixtures of these saloons are, in the majority of cases, owned by the wholesale liquor houses, and the saloon–keeper himself is often a bankrupt (Addams, 1965[1892], p. 47).

In an AJS article titled “The Scientific Value of the Social Settlements”, a resident of the Chicago Commons wrote about the insight gained from first–hand experience:

We found two kinds of saloons, the neighborhood and the concert type. Most of the keepers of these neighborhood saloons were foreigners who respected their families and business, and looked upon themselves as good citizens. They allowed no immorality or disorder in their saloons. Many of these men were loud in denouncing corrupt politics, and wanted honest aldermen elected. The concert saloons were centers of immorality and crime. Lewdness, profanity, and drunkenness were here opened up to the public (AJS, 1897, 3:2, pp. 171–182).

By living in tenement neighborhoods, settlement workers could distinguish between good saloons that provided islands of gemeinschaft relations in the city and bad ones that took advantage of its impersonality. This appreciation of the positive institutional roles saloons might fill also colored the first ethnography published in the AJS. ¹⁰

Ernest Moore's “The Social Value of the Saloon” must have seemed provocative to the reformist audience of the early AJS (AJS, 1897 3:1). A resident of Hull House, he was professor of sociology at Harvard, Yale, and UC Berkeley before becoming the first Chancellor of what would become UCLA. Moore described saloons as more “absolutely free,”“transforming,” and “wise” than the Temperance clubs established to replace them. Prohibitionists fared badly versus the saloonkeeper as well, of whom Moore praised: “his democracy is one element of his strength. His place is the common meeting ground of his neighbors—and he supplies the stimulus which renders social life possible” (ibid., p. 8). Moore illustrated the urban ethnographic method with six saloon photographs and language that anticipated Robert Park's description of the city as a social laboratory: ¹¹

The laboratory method was employed. The saloons were visited, an attempt was made to escape that bane of social investigation—the psychologist's fallacy. In so far as possible, conditions were exchanged. Purse and scrip were left behind. The saloon became an integral feature of life. It was a loafing place, news center, and basis of food supply in its free lunch counter; a complete orientation was made into its life. Trammeled neither by an abstinence pledge nor by a predisposition for its wares, it is believed that the freedom necessary to unbiased judgment was obtained (ibid., p. 2–3).

Despite his litany of the positive aspects of saloon life, Moore concluded that the saloon's evils “are many and grave, and cry out to society for proper consideration” (ibid., p. 12). Though they observed the saloon's positive functions, sociologists shared the Progressives’ faith that alcohol amongst the urban poor demanded state intervention.

The Committee of Fifty commissioned its own saloon ethnographer. This civic body organized as “The Sociological Group” in New York in 1888 to write reformist articles; they reorganized to specialize on alcohol politics in 1893. They were a heavyweight organization including the president of Harvard, the U.S. Commissioner of Labor, and Ivy League professors (Levine, 1983). As a leading Progressive journal explained: “the Committee of Fifty is not a new movement in temperance agitation or reform; it is simply an organization of research” (The Charities Review, 1897). ¹² The group published widely and was reviewed favorably in the AJS, as when a onetime ASS president commended the group as a practical “illustration of the influence of sociology in modern methods of attacking a problem” (1901, 6:4 p. 483).

On behalf of the Committee, Royal Melendy published a two–part ethnography in the AJS, still the most detailed account of pre–Prohibition saloons. ¹³ Though the relationship between Chicago ethnographers and civic reform bodies was later downplayed (Heap, 2003; Platt, 1996), Melendy was forthright about the promise of empirical research: “to collect and collate impartially all accessible facts which bear upon the [liquor] problem, and it is its hope to secure for the evidence thus accumulated a measure of confidence, on the part of the community, which is not accorded to partisan statements” (AJS, 1900, 6:3).

Melendy's observations, like Moore's, bore little relationship to the saloons in journalistic accounts. “Clean airy drawing–rooms and reading–rooms—the saloons—brilliant with lights reflected many times from glittering mirrors” was how he described a typical example (1901, 6:4, p. 453). His two–part article barely mentions alcohol, he explains, because the “most incredible of the facts which the study of the saloon revealed to me was the relatively small amount of drunkenness” (ibid., p. 462). Instead he found men talking, reading, playing games, sleeping, or eating the meals on offer. The sociability these amenities provoked led Melendy to exclaim that “nothing short of travel could exert so broadening an influence upon these men. It does much to assimilate the heterogeneous crowds that are constantly pouring into our city from foreign shores” (1900, 6:3 p. 294).

That the saloon was not an ideal site did not justify heavy–handed government, averred sociologists. “Differentiation carries with it variation of tastes,” wrote onetime ASS president Charles Henderson, warning that “sumptuary ‘blue laws’ have never been able to suppress these differences” (1895, 1:3 pp. 330–331). Another ASS president, Edward Ross, criticized the elite finger–waggers who “press the needed moralities on the mass before the mass is ripe for them” (1900, 6:1 p. 33). As Lester Ward, first president of the ASS, described the discipline, “I have always maintained that sociology is a science of liberation and not of restraint” (Ward, 1903). To its critics, however, the new discipline was too willing to embrace fads like co–education or premarital cohabitation that disregarded the social laws found in traditions like the Bible (1908, 14:2), heredity (1908, 14:2), or temperance. Attacking “The Pretensions of Sociology,” one critic indicted sociology for its hubristic rejection of time–tested social institutions (1909, 15:1).

Melendy expressed the Committee of Fifty's criticism of coercive reforms for not realizing the “spirit of coöperation and combination” he had observed amongst men in the saloon (AJS, 1901, 6:4 p. 462). He particularly praised the genial relations forged by strangers in the hard city. The liquor traffic, Melendy asserted, “may be robbed to a great extent of its social functions by substitution and of its monopoly in catering to certain necessities by their supply by proper authorities” (ibid., p. 464). Substitution, proposed earlier by a Committee member (Peabody, 1895), was now consecrated by science and endorsed in Committee publications (Billings et al., 1905; Calkins, 1901).

Substitution found wide acceptance amongst academic and settlement sociologists, spawning a lively interdisciplinary subfield. The “sociology of recreation” (AJS, 1914, 19:6; see also the “Public Recreation Facilities” special issue of the AAAPSS, 1910, 35:2) mapped the social function of the saloon and other deleterious sites with the express purpose of eliminating them, endorsed by ASS president E. A. Ross (AJS, 1918, 23:4) and Jane Addams (AJS, 1912, 17:5). The merits of various Progressive substitution projects were explored or promoted in the AJS, including churches (1896, 1:6 p. 682), vacation schools (1898 3:4 pp. 308, 311), playgrounds (1898, 4:2 pp. 155, 170; 1903, 8:5 p. 641), boys’ clubs (1901, 7:2), public schools (1897, 3:3: p. 332; 1906, 11:5 p.660), and cooking schools (1901, 7:2 p. 192). Because some reformers expected milk to replace beer (AJS, 1904, 9:5), they launched campaigns for government enforcement of dairy purity. Sociologists also documented attempts to replace beer with tea, coffee (1895, 2:1, p. 65; Graham, 1892; Howerth, 1895), or nonalcoholic beer (1901, 6:4, p. 460). Melendy discussed all these substitutions and tens more ranging from fraternal lodges and singing societies to urban amusements and the YMCA (1901, 6:4).

Though most of these proposals passed quickly, the substitution movement made durable changes to the American urban landscape. The Committee of Fifty issued a call for city governments to get into the business of providing public toilets, declaring:

This provision, which belongs properly to the municipality, has in America been left to the hotels and the saloons. Many men who never under ordinary circumstances patronize a bar do so because they feel under some obligation to pay for the convenience afforded them (Calkins, 1901, p.19).

This reinforced the charges made by tenement reformers that saloons were the only toilets available to civil servants, echoed by NYC Police Chief Theodore Roosevelt (New York Mayor's Committee on Public Baths and Public Comfort Stations, 1897, pp. 174–181). Public conveniences like drinking fountains and public toilets would ensure that honest laborers need not be tempted by calls of nature to enter the saloon (1900, 6:3, p. 299; 1901, 6:4, p. 464), arguments that led industrialists to install facilities to improve the sobriety of their laborers (1901, 7:2, p. 213; 1902, 7:4 p. 436). In the pragmatic tradition, (re)form followed (bodily) function. Though sociologists supported public toilets for their hygienic functions, shared saloon toilets stirred up murky dangers as well.

The Internal Bar: Ethnographers and Domesticity

Of liquors that are vended

‘Tis easy to beware

But statutes do not meddle

With the internal bar

—Emily Dickinson ¹⁴

The primary replacement sociologists championed to replace the saloon was an improved domestic sphere that would draw wayward men home to their families (1898, 3:5 p. 660; 1918, 23:6, p. 805). Housing reform would not only improve physical conditions, but moral changes would proceed from “a more intimate home influence” and reduce “drunkenness and crime” (1901, 7:3 p. 339; 1903, 8:4, p. 455). As one sociologist asked, “how can we expect any reform in the matter of intemperance so long as the cheerless, unhealthy home of many a laboring man compels him to seek the relaxation and companionship which are always centered about the saloon?” (1901, 7:3, p. 339). A promoter of women's trade schools claimed they “would enable the mothers of the working class so to order their households that neglected homes would not, as they now do, beget intemperance” (1896, 2:2, p. 199). The education of the working classes, not government mandate, would result in a more durable, enforceable Prohibition, because citizens who “have advanced in civilization enough to find their places among those who rule the world and direct its enterprises, will not tolerate saloons near their homes” (1901, 7:3, p. 305). One settlement worker enthused that after daughters finished cooking courses, “fathers testify that the home has been transformed and made more attractive than the saloon!” (1901, 7:2, p. 194).

Housing reform for domestic tranquility underlay not only the abolition of the saloon, but the creation of a stronger, more cohesive America. Academic sociologists concurred that improving the family space would result in a more democratic family and nation (1901, 6:4; 1909, 14:6). As Albion Small opined, “a nation in which the obligations of the domestic unit sit lightly upon the citizens, a nation in which such observance of domestic obligations as exists is secured only by virtue of a large degree of intervention by law, is a nation either not yet civilized or already decadent” (1915, 20:5, p. 651). A model ethnographic schedule declared “nations are composed not of individuals, but of families” and provided a laundry list of specific observations necessary to study this “principal trait of nationality” (1897, 2:5, p. 664).

Though the saloon was widely implicated in immigrant “machine” politics, the social decay alleged by other Progressives was refuted by Addams's nuanced portrait of relations between municipal administration and everyday vice (AJS, 1905, 10:4). As Melendy concurred, the saloon “is in a small number of cases, many times smaller than is usually believed, a rendezvous for criminals” (1900, p. 300). The social worker's pragmatism emerges in Melendy's prediction that even if the saloon was successfully replaced, beer would “always be more or less common among the masses of the laboring people” (1901, 6:4, p. 464). Another presciently griped, “People do not want a place to be ‘improved.’ They want a place for self–expression, a place to be bad if they choose.” ¹⁵

John Marshall Barker's The Saloon Problem and Social Reform (1905) demurred from the substitution framework but was snubbed by the AJS. A professor of sociology in Boston University's School of Theology, he represented the social gospel wing of the sociological movement that was especially strong amongst Catholic practitioners. Where AJS accounts praised the Committee of Fifty, the brief notice of Barker's book sniffed:

The author's argument is in the form of a direct plea for local–option legislation… For purposes of persuasion the arrangement of the discussion is effective, but the absence of references makes it impossible for the critical reader to verify many very important statements (1905, p. 706).

Though other sociologists no doubt demurred from the AJS editorial line, none produced empirical works that had to be taken seriously by sociologists at the core of the discipline.

Though these sociologists endorsed all manner of substitutes to replace the saloon, their descriptions are silent about specific observations of disorderly conduct. As a rule, the settlement house workers and ethnographers report little drunkenness, fights, or discord within families about alcohol use. This is strange. Settlement workers were in a unique position to record bruises, broken furniture, or sanctuary offered to family members. Reformers in the new family and juvenile courts gave the most intimate details of cases (1910, 16:1; 1915, 20:6), but rarely implicated the saloon. ¹⁶

By never mentioning the wine and spirits enjoyed by the upper classes, ethnographers—like other Progressives—gave the impression that vendors of beer and whiskey, not alcohol in general or problem drinking, were the source of social problems. Distilleries, breweries, suppliers, the role of middlemen, or their marketing tactics in relation to saloons, alcohol licensing, or consumers were rarely mentioned in the AJS much less researched. Settlement and reformist sociologists who were in the best position to see and record the after–effects of private drinking did not do so.

A possible solution to this puzzle may lie in the vague but unsubstantiated accounts they did make. Tenement ethnographers frequently linked the saloon's public toilets to child sexual abuse. Concern was directed to the small but significant number of apartment dwellers whose only toilet facilities were “promiscuously” shared with single male lodgers and saloon patrons. This, ethnographers agreed, was a “grave moral danger” (1911, 17:2, p. 160–162; 1913, 18:4, p. 534; 1914, 20:3, p. 308; 1915, 21:3, p. 301). Yet tenements with saloons often had better public toilet facilities than apartment buildings that did not, for saloons were more likely to be connected to sewer systems. Indeed, one report cited the percentage of families in houses or tenements without toilets at 88% in Baltimore, 74% in Chicago, 53% in New York, and 70% in Philadelphia (New York Mayor's Committee on Public Baths and Public Comfort Stations, 1897, p. 16). Buildings without sewers made do with shared outhouses in a common yard that drained into “privy vaults,” open septic pits that had to be emptied by hand. Ethnographers shared the concerns of their contemporaries in the sanitary hygiene movement that privy vaults exposed residents to odor and disease (Ogle, 1996; Tomes, 1998). They added a “moral menace” to shared toilets caused by their use by single men: “several little girls, taking us out to see the toilet, have opened the door to find a man inside. This is very likely to occur where a family uses a saloon toilet” (1914, 20:2, p. 165).

The saloon toilet as a magnet for dangerous single men equalled the public health threats of the urban outhouse. “The large number of lodgers in this district is of serious moral import” (1913, 20:3, p. 305), claimed ethnographers, because they “become a demoralizing influence on family life” (1911, 17:2, p. 176). As another explained, “the presence in the community of these men, restrained by no family ties, and with little conception of the elementary principles of hygienic living, constitutes a problem worthy of separate study” (1915, 21:3, p. 290). “Considerations of decency” prompted frequent calls for stricter toilet regulations on houses containing more than one family (1911, 16:3, p. 299–300; 1911, 16:4, p. 444; 1911, 17:1, 19–20; 1911 17:2, 161–162, 1913, 18:4, p. 534; 1914, 20:3, pp. 303–304). In disbelief, one report chastised a Hungarian saloon–keeper who lived above his business and “thought his wife and children could just as well use the closet provided for the patrons of the saloon” (1911 17:2, 161). Melendy too deplored the presence of girls amongst the amusements of men—the saloon's prostitutes and nude photographs—and equivocated that they “are not all directly evil places, but the temptation is tremendous. How can a child, brought up in such a locality, forced to receive from the saloon even the common necessities and conveniences of life, grow up into noble and beautiful womanhood?” (1900, 6:3, p. 300).

The insinuations of damaged daughters reflect a shift in feminist politics of the day toward a sanctified domestic sphere. Child sexual abuse was first articulated as a social problem by temperance social workers who found it in about 10% of cases, 98% of it between fathers and daughters (Gordon and O'Keefe, 1984). Temperance fiction, however, frequently portrayed incestuous encounters as innocent love that would steel the willpower of drunken fathers to go teetotal. Over one quarter of these popular and successful marketing tools feature a scene where a male drunk crawls into bed with a child and is converted to sobriety by loving kisses or embraces (Sanchez–Eppler, 1995).

Discovering child sexual abuse was made easier, writes Linda Gordon, because the middle– and upper–class reformers located it solely within Catholic, immigrant, and working class families. Once established as a legitimate problem in the public sphere, however, it threatened to taint the domestic sphere in general and invite scrutiny of upper–class homes as well. Between the turn of the century and the 1920s, Gordon detects a shift in the way upper class women framed the problem they previously called “incest”: “the locus of the problem was moved from home to streets, the culprit transformed from father or other authoritative male family member to perverted stranger, the victim transformed from innocent betrayed to sex delinquent… this reinterpretation of child sexual abuse removed scrutiny from family and home” (Gordon, 1988 pp. 57–58).

Soon after child abuse was discovered in immigrant homes, it was relocated to the public sphere where problem girls and unattached migrant men threatened the bourgeois private sphere as well. Just as the saloon was blamed for alcohol problems that were most visible and provocative amongst the urban underclass, so this underclass now became vilified for sexual danger despite evidence that fathers posed the greatest danger to families of whatever class.

Temperance fiction, notes Sanchez–Eppler, promoted women's “moral suasion” in reform, the belief that “the reform of individual sinners would precede and produce the salvific purification of society as a whole” (1995, p.3). She argues that the loving scenes of child–adult kissing and physical contact in the redemptive child trope represent reformers’ ambivalence about whether the incorporation of men into the “loving domestic scene” is a truly safer substitute for their absence in the saloon.

The ethnographic record of dangerous saloon bathrooms reflects unease amongst settlement workers about combining men and children. As one bluntly queried:

The real question seems to be whether it is better for men to drink at home or in the saloon. If the saloons are closed on Sunday the men in one house together buy a keg of beer, which must be consumed by Monday morning or it will spoil. The result is a grand debauch, in which the women and children are participants. If the men could go to the saloon the women and children would probably get no beer and the men less because it would cost them more (1908, 14:3, p. 337).

Actions against the saloon thus threatened to taint the domestic sphere not only with more alcohol, but by exposing children to sexual harm as well.

As the threat of child abuse shifted from home to streets and the redemptive power of children was promoted as an antidote to drunkards, the admixture of girls and saloons full of single men presented a “veritable ambush of moral danger” (1914, 19:5, p. 585). ¹⁷ The sanitary progress a saloon's modern toilet offered tenement dwellers was outweighed by the threat it posed to the self–contained, egalitarian domestic sphere that justified women's entry into public life.

Domesticity paved over the potential taints of alcohol, violence, and sexual abuse by referencing America's historic anti–urban fears of strangers. Progressive feminists endowed the family home with sacred qualities at a time when their public actions called their patriotism into question (Baker, 1990). The discovery of threats to the American home gave women a mandate to participate in politics, which Jane Addams famously described as merely “housekeeping on a grand scale,” while Frances Willard of the Women's Christian Temperance Union promoted the creation of a “homelike world.” Valorizing the domestic sphere put women on equal footing with men within marital intimacy, giving wives publicly sanctioned influence over their husbands within the new, companionate marriage (Giddens, 1992; Leach, 1980).

Sociologists thus endorsed not coercive government, but housing standards; not moral suasion of the public drinker, but moral suasion within egalitarian heterosexuality: “the modern family is becoming democratic in many ways. Coercive power is giving way to control by persuasion. It is generally admitted that children are under better control when persuasive instead of coercive methods are used. When given privileges and responsibilities this method of control trains them for efficient citizens in a democracy” (1909, 14:6, p. 804, see also 1898, 4:3 p. 335).

Though reformers noted the convivial family atmosphere in many immigrant saloons, there were never any calls for feminine reform in the saloon as there were for politics in general. Indeed, the descriptions of saloons where children fetched pails of beer for home consumption or where immigrant families socialized together were only disapproving.

Sociologists shared a perspective on the saloon, but despite the influence of the Committee of Fifty the call for national Prohibition only grew louder. Calls for substitution did appear in the popular press, but only when sociologists authored them. Given the growing disjunction between the mainly female settlement work and the predominantly male field of academic sociology, it is remarkable that the sociologists prescribed egalitarian cohabitation for working–class immigrants that they could not manage amongst themselves. Although Albion Small offered Jane Addams a professorship of sociology in 1913, she turned him down. In the same year, Robert Park joined the department. The year marked a turning point, with Addams increasingly pursuing activities outside Chicago while Park quickly became the department's staunchest advocate of professional distance from “damn do–gooders” and “women reformers” (Bulmer, 1984, p.68). The mismatch between politically and community–targeted research done by more socialist feminists and the objective science pursued by liberal men was solved by the schism between sociological practice and academia.

Unsolved was the lack of influence of the sociological position. The nuances of the empiricist position on alcohol—love the institution that serves it, hate the undeveloped domestic sphere that drives men to drink it—was lost on other Progressives and voters who increasingly rallied around the cry “the saloon must go.” The cause was not helped, presumably, by saloon replacement's endorsement in the Brewers’ Association official statement on “The Saloon Problem” (Fox, 1908). ¹⁸ This co–optation of the substitution framework raises the possibility that it further stigmatized the saloon. Though the Committee of Fifty and sociologists represented a decidedly moderate, technocratic view of social change and urban social control (Goldberg, 1985; Levine, 1983), their views did not resonate with the public.

After the 19th Amendment came into force, saloons were simply another illegal vice in the urban underworld captured in the Chicago School monographs that began in 1923. Prohibition's repeal killed the Anti–Saloon League, which was unable to broaden its focus beyond the single–issue message that had—temporarily—won the day (Donovan, 1995). The UE paradigm survived periods of relative neglect yet continued to suffer from its birth defect: a voyeuristic attention to social problems of the urban core.

Urban Ethnography's Saloon Problem and Public Sociology

It is the movement of the common heart to realize the undying hope of social justice and human brotherhood. It is the movement of the common will to find and apply some adjustment of the disturbed relationships and dislodged classes, caused by the most revolutionary force ever introduced into human affairs, except the gospel, viz., the modern industrial system. The present sociological movement stands for all this and more.

—Albion Small, 1895

I envision myriads of nodes, each forging collaborations of sociologists with their publics, flowing together into a single current. They will draw on a century of extensive research, elaborate theories, practical interventions, and critical thinking, reaching common understandings across multiple boundaries, and in so doing shedding insularities of old. Our angel of history will then spread her wings and soar above the storm.

—Michael Burawoy, 2005

Michael Burawoy's call for public sociology invokes Jane Addams and, by extension, the Progressive tradition in which our discipline was born. The research program developed by early sociologists to discover the truth of the saloon reflected many of the civil society–supporting activities promoted by Burawoy in his ASA presidential address. Public debates, community involvement in science, policy prescriptions, and publishing for the public–at–large were integral to the early sociological movement. Though the saloon ethnographers tried to debunk popular misconceptions, their nuanced position may actually have contributed to the saloon's stigmatization. Though sociologists were allied with powerful Progressive reformers for saloon substitution, Prohibition carried the day and the saloon was outlawed.

The saloon problem and the subsequent engagements of urban ethnography pose a cautionary tale. UE carried on the early sociological tradition, debunking stereotypes of marginal urbanites, organizing them for political action, and taking their views to political elites. Yet urban ethnographers have proved relatively impotent to protect the urban poor from the political, economic, and social forces that have ravaged American cities since the 1960s, forces that sparked UE's resurgence as part of a “second Chicago School” (Fine, 1995).

The importance of the Chicago school is somewhat controversial (Abbott, 1997; Harvey, 1987; Nock, 2004), especially regarding any exclusivity of Chicago's connection to sociology's ethnographic method (Platt, 1983). For urban sociology it takes a special meaning, a time when the entire discipline was engaged with the urban questions now addressed by interdisciplinary urban studies. Yet the pre–1915 sociologists inaugurated the paradigm later urban ethnographers continued. Depictions of the saloon as a haven for cultural ties that also socialized immigrants into American norms were later paralleled by the “urban village” (Gans, 1962b). The early accounts of the saloon as a business opportunity for ethnic enterprise and mobility were an early take on ethnic enclaves and immigrant economies (Wilson and Martin, 1982). Where the early sociologists defended saloon patrons from attributions of depravity, so later ethnographers defended the morality of poor urbanites. Sociological explanations of the saloon as an unfortunate but rational institution with many redeeming features were recapitulated by the “culture of poverty” (Lewis, 1959) or the “ghetto specific subculture” (Hannerz, 1969).

As urban ethnography experienced its resurgence, bars continued to provide entrée to a cast of usual suspects who had changed little since their institutionalization by the Chicago School: white working–class ethnics (Applebaum, 1981; Kornblum, 1974; LeMasters, 1975), African–American ghetto dwellers (Anderson, 1978; Hannerz, 1969; Liebow, 1967; Suttles, 1968), the homeless (Bahr, 1973; Spradley, 1970), prostitutes (Milner and Milner, 1972; Prus and Syllianoss, 1980), criminals (Polsky, 1967), and homosexuals (Achilles, 1967; Newton, 1972; Read, 1980). As Gerald Suttles explained:

Urban ethnographers, then, are apt to look for the unusual, the exceptional, and the exotic—as if exceptions to conventional sociology could be most readily found in unconventional groups and in unconventional ways. Studies of deviants, outcast groups, and minorities dominate their attention. Pool hustlers, organized crime, street corner gangs, pimps, policemen, and whores are frequent, though not exclusive, objects of study (Suttles, 1976, p. 1).

After its early days in the saloon, UE broadened its focus—but primarily to the disadvantaged residents of the urban core (Gans, 1962a).

As the benefits of state action went unquestioned by early sociologists, so UE has been silent about the characteristics of the American public that has consistently been afraid of urban residents. As the urban cores decayed from the late 1960s onwards, the resurgence of urban ethnography bridged the gap between urban inmates and escaped suburbanites whose private spheres of leisure realized the domestic idyll prescribed by the early sociologists. Yet these bourgeois utopias were achieved at costs unimagined by the Progressives: a gendered segregation of the workplace (Kanter, 1993; Milkman, 1987), the hypersegregation of African–Americans (Massey and Denton, 1993; Wilson, 1996), and the purification of cities by social class (Hannigan, 1998; Jacobs, 1961; Whyte, 1980). Though ethnography flourished as a method, the city and its supporters lost what Lyn Lofland calls the “representational war” in American culture (Lofland, 1998).

Acclaimed UE monographs are increasingly frequent and their publishing outlets broadened by new journals like City & Community and Ethnography, but contemporary critical assessments of the UE legacy are rare. ¹⁹ The exception is Loïc Wacquant's indictment of the “perennial pitfalls of urban ethnography” (Wacquant, 2002, p. 1520). His critique could easily describe the failed saloon–substitution paradigm of a century ago when he notes that American ethnographers “are inclined to limit their agenda to the debunking of negative stereotypes of marginal groups” (ibid., 1522). This “domestication of the poor,” as he calls it, splits these groups into good and bad based on stereotypes held by the public–at–large, merely offering up a “positive version of the same misshapen social figure” (ibid., 1520). The American moralism to which Wacquant objects began its sociological career by domesticating the saloon. Though insightful, the credibility of his analysis of UE is hobbled by evidence drawn from three recent books and their authors’ charges that Wacquant misquoted them and misrepresented their arguments (Anderson, 2002; Duneier, 2002; Newman, 2002). Mired in charge and counter–charge, none addresses the ways the UE gaze is structured.

Unlike anthropological ethnography, urban ethnography has not problematized its “will to know” (Foucault, 1978), the way a research paradigm prioritizes certain research objects over others. The failure of UE to generate ethnographies of white collar crime, government mismanagement, or suburban pathology reveals the paradigm's limitations. Urban ethnographers have followed suburban America's pity, fear, and concern to the urban core but left undisturbed the respectability that allows these emotions to carry public weight. The scientific truths uncovered by UE are as revealing of American social psychology as they are of conditions in urban centers. Though calls for ethnographies of elites have been issued periodically over the past 50 years, what continues to distinguish UE from other qualitative methods is its almost romantic attachment to the downtrodden and resistance to researching up the social hierarchy (Nader, 1974).

The saloon problem raises the question of how sociologists can engage with the public's voyeuristic concerns and yet challenge the way it frames social problems. Privacy is power, and the domestic curtain our predecessors helped to establish continues to be drawn ever tighter while urban ethnographers avert their gaze. Public sociology demands ethnographies of suburban common sense, anti–urban public opinion, or civic elites. These seem fruitful locations to understand the process by which elites construct social problems and deflect them from their own milieux. If we agree with Goethe that “there is nothing more frightening than active ignorance,” then our challenge is to understand the logic that sustains misconceptions as viable, rational worldviews immune to our inoculations of empirical truth. If public sociology does not penetrate these parallel lifeworlds, its empiricism will be for naught amongst a growing public for whom it carries little weight. Without a solution to the saloon problem, public sociology risks becoming subordinated to the public's fitful interest in the redemption of the strange.