I’ve hung out in a lot of settings where a six-pack is just-getting-started; maybe anecdotal impressions have biased me. But, I have learned that a lot of people drink a lot more than you might expect. Every see construction workers go to work on a house in the morning all dragging? And then after noon they’re just humming along? It’s not because in the morning they were hung over, it’s because in the morning they were still drunk from the night before; it takes them to noon at least to sober up.
As for Prohibition, I’ve seen it credited (no cite) with popularizing hard liquor in America – that sometimes being all one could get during Prohibition; if you’re a bootlegger, you get more profit for the same risk if you ship whisky instead of beer.
No cite to back this up, but increases in other non-alcoholic drinking options may have something to do with it. Soft drinks like coca-cola were billed as “Temperance drinks” in the late 19th century, and as Prohibition did much to eliminate liquor as an option for many people, soft drinks probably filled the void and increased their market share. Prohibition’s end left the alcohol industry to reestablish itself in a depressed economy as well. By that point there were plenty of people who were perfectly happy to stick with soft drinks.
Of course those “Puritans” sure as hell weren’t a bunch of teetotalers. They drank a whole bunch.
Would you mind addressing the statistics posted by Captain Amazing in post #10?
Hard liquor was popular in the United States long before prohibition. Farmers loved to make whiskey because it was much easier to transport gallons of alcohol compared to multiple bushels of corn. Heck, we had the Whiskey Rebellion in 1789 as farmers protested a new tax on the stuff.
But you said “average”. That’s what people are hung up on, and which is definitely not correct.
Oh no, that’s where you’re wrong. Even in Colonial times, they had Flip, Bombo, innumeriable Punches, and a host of other drinks. The period from about 1850-Prohibition is the “Golden Age of Cocktails”, with the vast majority of real cocktails being devised during that period.
Even now, the country’s just coming out of a sort of prolonged post-Prohibition hibernation with respect to cocktails and civilized drinking; the increased availability of various liqueurs and base spirits along with quality wines and craft beers has enabled this to happen and neat cocktails are being devised by mixologists and chefs across the country.
Right. They weren’t all that fond of drunkenness (although the fact that so many Puritan sermons were about the evils of drunkenness suggests that rank and file Puritans weren’t unfond of getting drunk), but they didn’t have any problem with alcohol itself.
I agree. People drank booze (ie, “small beer”, etc.) because the boiling and fermenting cleaned up the water that it was made with. Once clean drinking water became available, the demand for alcoholic beverages as a source of fluids went down.
But alcohol consumption in the United States started going down long before reliably clean drinking water was available to the masses. In fact, it peaked sometime in the 1830s. So there’s probably another reason why consumption went down.
Just so you know, your “average american beer-drinker” that you speak of here drinks 365 6-packs of beer per year.
The ACTUAL average that an American drinks, according to the actual statistics at NAAA is alcohol equivalent to 80 6 packs per year (2.31 gallons of alcohol)
So yes, your experience is unusual, in that the folks you are hanging out with tend to drink 4.5 times more than the average person.
Another WAG: After prohibition ended, most states passed strict controls on the sales and distribution of alcohol. For example, common laws included 3.2 beer only, no liquor by the drink, state package and distribution stores only, daytime business hours, no booze on Sundays, no public drinking, etc.
It seemed that the state said that booze was okay again, but we aren’t going back to the saloon days with 24 hour drinking and gunfights in the street.
I charted Captain Amazing’s per capita data. There are three notable features:
- The switch from corn liquor to beer between 1850 and 1880.
- A deep V corresponding to temperance, prohibition, and a linear recovery that lasted through WWII.
- A bulge in hard liquor consumption corresponding to the baby boomers. Consumption of beer and wine since 1946 is fairly constant.
Present consumption is similar to 1880 in quantity and kind, and has an increasing trend,
I conclude that we did not “avoid reverting to pre-Prohibition levels of drunkeness”.
Not only that, but many areas remained completely dry. The whole state of Mississippi was dry until 1966. Even today, according to one source, 18 million Americans live in dry areas. Surely that figure was much higher in, say, 1940.
Medical science that proved excessive alcohol intake was detrimental to one’s health, independently of religious or political agendas and interests.
However, alcohol use started increasing again due to the sophistication of marketing tools to entice people to drink any time they can, and as much they can.
It took many years, but you can see the results now in the TV landscape of sludge… there are even TV shows that are written around a main character excessively drinking without any health consequences whatsoever.
How about drinking and driving? In the days before car ownership was widespread, and people drank in local bars and pubs, there was significantly less disincentive to drink.
Or another option: many people lived such miserable lives that alcohol was a relief, especially in industrial cities: famously, for example, “The shortest [or quickest] way out of Salford.”
Or yet again: with no television, “down the pub” (with its warmth and conversation) was one of the few options for (often mindless) entertainment.
Cheers,
R.
Off topic, sorry. But damn this place takes its Internet conversations seriously. A little too seriously.
Ah, yes. The Legendary Dope Famine of 1969–as depicted by Gilbert Shelton. Keep scrolling down from the Pyramid with the Eye to see the cartoon; scroll through the cartoon to see the empty liquor bottles & beer cans littering the street!
By now you should know that John takes most everything seriously, but this is GD. OTOH, I take very little seriously. We all have our character flaws. 
I recall many finding it a Hellish time, indeed. But I was working in a liquor store, so we liked it.