Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History.

In this intentionally provocative book, John Burnham tries to argue four inter-connected themes: That there has been a significant inversion in cultural values in the twentieth century so that the morally "bad habits" and disreputable social behaviors of the nineteenth century have become acceptable, indeed fashionable behaviors in the twentieth. That these behaviors had their origin in nonnormative, mostly unsavory red light districts and the underworld, but more significantly among immigrant populations. That the legitimization and popularization of the habits listed in his subtitle--drinking, smoking, drug taking, gambling, sexual misbehavior and swearing--have heavily benefitted selective and highly influential organized commercial interests. And finally, that these interests, initially part of the Victorian vice industry, have subsequently stimulated and supported each other in quasi conspiratorial ways.

The first of these arguments is hardly objectionable, and Burnham has projected himself into and draws upon a substantial and growing literature which charts the cultural transformation of America from the middle class Victorianism of the nineteenth century. Burnham could have strengthened his often arresting observations on this theme by a more exacting discussion of the periods of most conspicuous change like the 1920s and 1960s and a more nuanced analysis of the role of the media in this transformation. Burnham heavily ascribes to the media the power to initiate changes about which other scholars, like Michael Schudson,(1) have been much more circumspect. Still, Burnham's use of advertisements is often compelling and he has certainly found many striking examples of the marked shift in habits which he documents.

Burnham's second objective is trickier. While many historians in the past twenty-five years have tried to locate the origins of modern behaviors and values in marginal groups, especially immigrants and minorities, few historians have been altogether successful in the difficult business of showing this process in action. Recently, multicultural debates have drawn deeply (and often vaguely) on this historical tradition. We are most familiar with it in examinations of cultural styles like music, but historians have also succeeded in suggesting how peripheral groups have affected such deeply political issues as Prohibition and more recently, attitudes toward federal welfare programs(2). Burnham is thus once again engaging an already lively historical debate. But, unlike most previous historians who have tried to show how "outsider" populations have opened up American society and contributed strongly to its transformation, Burnham's tone and language toward these groups is deeply unsympathetic, even hostile. Two examples (of many) must suffice here:

Late in the nineteenth century, the urban population began to change, with an influx of migrants in whose cultures prostitution was far more acceptable and established than in the United States. But these newcomers also often mixed into the lower orders of society, and the double standard took on additional meanings. People, especially young people among the lower orders of society, however much they praised virginity, nevertheless within their parochial groups had no use for purity. In urban areas, it was their pursuits of pleasure and money that especially scandalized and tempted the upholders of respectability.

The consumerism quest for sensational and sensual gratification flourished because the new immigrant groups who increasingly made up the workers, the non-middle classes, and the population in general were particularly susceptible to the new mass media.... Basically, those who had few cultural aspirations beyond looking out for themselves and their immediate social groups--particularly the family--were not successful in resisting or opposing sensational media messages, whether of the yellow press and radio of the first half of the twentieth century or of the television of the second half.

Burnham describes these people as "lower order" and "parochial groups;" they have "low taste" and suffer from lack of self restraint. Burnham thus adopts (fully self-consciously) terms and attitudes very like those used by progressives and the reformers of various stripes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In other words, Burnham adopts their deeply middle-class Victorian point of view and their hegemonic perspective. Thus for him changes in the values espoused by non-middle class groups--the lower orders--are suspect and to be condemned and publicized. Indeed, this kind of moral outrage and condemnation lay firmly behind the muckraking tradition which was so intimately an expression of progressive reform.

And it is that tradition that explains the last of the two items on Burnham's agenda. For Burnham is not content to show how bad habits have been changed to approved habits, or how these habits allowed formerly outsider cultural groups to become part of the mainstream, he needs to demonstrate that a conspiracy of unsavory commercial interests gained significant material advantage from this transformation. This need to expose and uncover the seemy, tainted, money side, and track the conspiratorial is familiar to most people who have read populist-progressive literature and progressive historiography. Burnham seems to believe that if it could be shown that behind-the-scene interests made money from the changes, he has explained those changes. By showing that those who urged the embrace of bad habits had something to gain, he expects to discredit them. "Why believe a witness with commercial interests or a witness defending questionable behavior more than a moralistic witness?" he asks; in effect, urging his readers to identify with the reformist, middle-class perspective. But why should historians believe any of these sources? The historian's role is to appraise, situate, and contextualize, not to identify with her sources. Though Burnham scores some points in these last two themes, it is here that he is least persuasive. So eager is he to show that commercial interests are the real gainers and culprits in this transformation of habits that he practically equates the DuPont fortune (Pierre DuPont was active in the campaign to repeal Prohibition) with the small venture capitalists who made a little killing in the cigarette paper industry that grew up around pot smoking.

Burnham confuses two kinds of causes, or rather he wants the reader to adopt his easy ascription of economic interests as a form of historical cause. It is this confusion that gives the book its vaguely anachronistic quality, despite the very contemporary and fashionable historical questions it addresses. He confuses the long slow cultural transformation that was built into the massive economic and social transformation of the past 150 years, changes that certainly involved commercialization, migration, alterations in work and leisure habits, and the change from neighborhood centered to mass mediated behaviors, with short term economic benefits and the specific economic interests who moved in on the changes and encouraged them. Indeed, Bad Habits hardly notices the larger transformations in economy and society within which the virtuous morality of an older day became old-fashioned. Burnham never acknowledges that by the late nineteenth century even native middle-class groups turned away from older work habits to leisure pursuits as Daniel Rodgers showed us some years ago, or how their sons and daughters respectably helped each other to participate in formerly proscribed behaviors at school.(3) Like the good progressive, Burnham would rather see the evil figures who manipulate and exploit behind the scenes. And he is far more intent to show who gained from our nasty (and often self-destructive) indulgences and to save us from ourselves, especially those of us who have weak minds because we are "vulnerable non-middle class people", than to develop the genuinely important historical analysis offered by the story he tells.

Paula S. Fass University of California, Berkeley 

ENDNOTES

1. Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society (New York, 1984).

2. Lizabeth Cohen, Making A New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge and New York, 1990), especially pp. 251-89.

3. Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (Chicago, 1978); Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York, 1977).