RISKY BUSINESS: THE UNCERTAIN BOUNDARIES OF MANHOOD IN THE MIDWESTERN SALOON.

Two images of nineteenth-century saloongoers coexist uneasily within our historical imaginations. One is of a strong, swaggering, whiskey-tossing gunslinger; the other, of a red-nosed, unshaven, flabby fellow in a misshapen hat slumped against a lamppost. Those images competed with one another as much a century ago as they do today. Their coexistence points to an internal conflict in perceptions of saloongoing: many late-nineteenth-century Americans saw the saloon as both confirming and threatening manhood. The very qualities that marked the saloon as a quintessentially manly space--the rawness of the exchanges among its patrons and its homosociality--simultaneously threatened manhood. The tension between these two images resonated not only with the saloon's critics, but also, even more significantly, with male saloongoers themselves. As he swaggered about the saloon's sawdust floors, the saloongoer cast an anxious glance over his shoulder, always fearing that his manly pretense would be exposed. [1] Througho ut the late nineteenth century, midwestern saloongoers attempted, and failed, to reconcile saloongoing with their own notions of manhood, which centered on the maintenance of a sphere of autonomous action, or "business".

It is impossible to pin down standards of male behavior in the late nineteenth century. Such ideals are always contested and variable, and this period was a particularly volatile one for gender prescriptions. [2] The social chaos brought about by the Civil War and Reconstruction destabilized gender relations, often making it impossible for men and women to fulfill pre-war gender expectations. [3] The nineteenth century also saw a dramatic change in the nature of men's work; by the end of the century, a much smaller percentage of men could claim either the independence of self-employment or the prospect of upward mobility. [4] In the face of these changes, Anthony Rotundo, Gail Bederman, Kim Townsend, Elliott Gorn, and others have shown that many late-nineteenth-century men turned from grounding their manhood in their economic lives to grounding it in their leisure, bodies and desires. Though middle-class, urban, Eastern men formed the backbone of support for this "passionate manhood" or "masculinity," the ma sculine exemplars they celebrated were often quite different from themselves. In particular, those sympathetic to the cult of masculinity often found themselves uncomfortably admiring, even emulating, uncivilized "savages," unrefined workingmen, and coarse Westerners. The midwestern saloongoers in this study, most of whom were farmers or self-employed tradesmen like barbers, tailors, day-laborers, blacksmiths, or plasterers, did not face with the same intensity the challenges that undermined traditional notions of manhood for so many others in this period. The saloon, with its culture of rough male competition and camaraderie, played an important role in the construction of masculinity. [5] Saloongoers, however, were far from realizing the stable ideal of male behavior their contemporaries sought. [6]

In the past decade, historians of manhood have given more attention to how eastern and urban Americans imagined the saloon than to how saloongoers constructed their own male identities. A cluster of important social histories published in the early 1980s did touch on this question. Thomas Noel's The City and the Saloon, for instance, argued that "[t]he obsession with virility, potence, bodybuilding and the sports that characterized turn-of-the-century America permeated saloons." These monographs preceded the emergence of "Men's Studies," however, and lacked extensive analysis of the ways in which gender ideas shaped the saloon experience. [7] Elliott Gain often turned to saloon culture in his explorations of manhood and boxing. Only with Madelon Powers' recent Faces Along the Bar and, to a lesser extent, Catherine Gilbert Murdock's Domesticating Drink, though, have historians of the saloon drawn on the new scholarship on the development of nineteenth-century manhood. Powers follows Gorn in seeing the saloon as a space in which urban laborers, lacking manly autonomy in the workplace, regrounded their manhood in "display[ing] an unflinching sense of personal and group honor" in their leisure time. Murdock has generally agreed with Gorn and Powers about the relocation of manly identity into the leisured male sphere, while also pointing out alcohol's potential to "destroy ... masculinity" by preventing men from fulfilling expectations of "financial success, emotional stability, and restraint." Both Murdock and Powers base their arguments about manhood on a small body of published sources, and both focus particularly on urban saloons. This article extends and deepens this new focus by turning to a large body of primary texts in which midwestern, largely rural, saloongoers discussed saloon culture and expectations of male behavior within it. [8]

In hindsight, we know that the saloon itself was a doomed institution that would collapse within the lifetimes of many late nineteenth-century saloongoers. Though the forces that brought down the saloon were largely external, launched by non-saloongoing men and women, they were so devastating largely because of what Powers, following Perry Duis, has called the saloon's "decay from within." In coining this phrase to explain the surprising lack of effort saloongoers exerted to resist prohibition, Powers argued that the saloon had so effectively organized its customers that they had taken over many of its social functions themselves. But midwestern saloongoers' own descriptions of saloon life suggest that this "decay" was as much discursive as it was functional. Many patrons found it impossible to reconcile saloon culture with their own standards of proper manhood. The attacks on the saloon that began in earnest in the years immediately following the Civil War exposed and exploited existing contradictions withi n saloongoers' own customs and gender identities. [9]

"[M]aleness," according to Elliot Gorn, "seemed most emphatically confirmed in the company not of women, but of other men." [10] To appreciate what many nineteenth-century midwestern men thought it meant to act like a man, it is essential to investigate not only how they behaved when they gathered together in the saloon, but the language they used to explain and justify their behavior. Such an investigation is difficult, largely because saloongoers left few written records of their experiences. One rich resource that has been little exploited until now, however, is the thousands of transcripts from saloon-related trials in which saloon-going witnesses testified about saloon culture and interactions. This article is based on transcripts from cases brought under dramshop or civil damage acts, state legislation that formed an important part of the early onslaught against the saloon. The dramshop acts, which most Northeastern and midwestern states passed between the 1840s and 1880s, enabled third parties harmed by individuals' drinking to recover damages from whomever had sold alcohol to them. Today, these statutes are most commonly used by people injured by drunken drivers, but in the nineteenth century they were mainly used by drinkers' wives (and, to a lesser degree, drinkers' dependent children, siblings and parents) who claimed that their breadwinners' drinking deprived them of support. It is possible to get a sense of the acts' cultural importance by noting Perry Duis's statistics that Chicagoans in 1884 brought more than two dramshop suits for every three saloons in business. Whether in cities or smaller towns, midwesterners came to associate the saloon with litigation. As the sheriff of Aurora, Illinois, testified in an 1877 dramshop case, "There have been law suits about liquor since I have been sheriff." [11] Saloongoing witnesses' testimony in these trials revealed how midwestern men talked about the line between acceptable and unacceptable male saloon behavior. [12]

In many respects, the saloon was a place where "men could be men". Townsmen stopped by for a quick drink, sometimes looking for work or workers, or doing some other business, and met up with their neighbors and with farmers in for the day, joining them not only in a glass of beer and perhaps some bologna and boiled eggs, but also in plain talk and other amusements. It was unquestionably a male space: Powers' recent revelation that the bars of some saloons were lined with "urination troughs" for customer convenience is certainly jarring but not really surprising. In rural areas, the homosociality of the saloon was, if possible, even more pronounced than in more anonymous urban areas. Male camaraderie in spaces like saloons helped working men to maintain their sense of manhood. As they drank, swore, smoked, gambled, told bawdy and exaggerated stories to one another, and sang maudlin tunes together, they confirmed one another's identities as men. Dramshop act trial testimony gives us a window into the substance of these identities. [13]

When midwestern saloongoers talked about male norms and behavior, they did not use the language many historians have used to describe them. They rarely talked about "honor," for instance, or "autonomy," "self-discipline," "independence" or "courage." Rather, the phrase they used most often by far to distinguish proper from improper male behavior was "minding your own business." Midwestern saloongoers described their norms of male behavior in terms of male control over a fairly well defined social and physical sphere. To be a man was to exercise authority over a certain space, which they referred to as a man's "business." This space at the very least included the man's own body, and usually encompassed his family, household, property, and interests. The ability to "mind ones own business" was the central pillar of manhood. To fail to do so was to be like a slave, a woman, or a child--to lose one's claim to manhood.

The saloon was a place for men to establish and defend, through both words and actions, the boundaries of their business. By spending his leisure time doing this, the saloongoer marked himself as a member of a dynamic manly community. Nineteenth-century saloongoers used the term "business" both in a newer sense of commercial interests and in an older, broader sense encompassing all of the activities and affairs in which an individual had an interest or responsibility. As one nineteenth-century court defined the legal meaning of the term, "In its broadest sense, the term business includes nearly all the affairs in which either an individual or a corporation can be actors." When they evoked "minding one's business" normatively, saloongoers intended something closer to the older, second meaning. As such, they sometimes applied it (negatively) to women who were looking into the conduct of others instead of working to maintain their own households as well as to men who were interfering in others' affairs instead of supporting their families. In the usage of saloongoers, however, "business" continually slipped into commerce, and (as we shall see) into a wide variety of other highly male-gendered activities such as gambling, violence, and of course drinking. Thus, "minding one's own business" could become the governing norm of the all-male saloon. [14]

If being a man meant "minding your own business," however, the saloon was also a space of threatened manhood. To begin with, popular explanations of the effects of alcohol suggested that alcohol brought saloongoers' primal bellicosity to the surface only by incapacitating certain aspects of their minds, wills, and bodies. Writers often described alcohol as "an intruder." It was an "enemy ... seductive in its advances ... insidious in its influence, and ... terrible in its triumph." Any man might unknowingly harbor an inherent weakness for alcohol, "lurking in [his] blood, ready to master [him] when opportunity invites." Once consumed, alcohol disabled or subverted the drinker's "controlling power," releasing the "brutish part of human nature." One early temperance short story, John B. Gough's "Risky Business," personified alcohol, suggesting that it threatened to take over a drinker's business. [15]

According to one contemporary popular theory, then, alcohol itself could "mind the business" of a drinker and cast his manhood into doubt. More concretely, the physiological and psychological effects of drinking opened up men s business to interference by others, both inside and outside the world of the saloon. With his "controlling power" disabled, the drinker risked falling out of the norms of independent social control altogether. To drink was to risk becoming drunk, and thus incompetent to mind one's business. Such incompetence invited, even required one's fellow saloongoers, wives, and other interested parties outside the saloon to intervene in ones affairs. This might take the form of individual and personal interference with a single drinker, or it might take the form of a massive social movement aimed at restricting the freedom of all drinkers and at destroying the saloon as an institution. While jostling with one another over position and authority, then, saloongoers risked losing mastery over their "business." [16]

When saloongoers talked about "minding your business," which they did incessantly, they meant it in both a positive and a negative sense. Not only did each individual have an obligation to attend to his own responsibilities and defend their boundaries; he was to avoid becoming involved in those things that were rightly the responsibilities of others. Saloongoers were quite sensitive to perceived intrusions on their autonomy or that of their neighbors. The man who violated another's business not only faced the possibility that his target would defend himself by force, but also that his fellow saloon-goers would take the part of the would-be victim, restraining, criticizing or ostracizing the aggressor, or even mobilizing forces outside the saloon to punish him.

The saloon was, to adopt Lee Edelman's phrase, a location of the "enactment" of manhood. Men in midwestern saloons saw one another not only as comrades but also as competitors for power, status, and money. They not only joked, sang, and relieved themselves together, but measured themselves against one another, attempting both to define and defend their own areas of control and to challenge those of others. A saloon could be, as brickmason George King put it, "a place to get drunk and kick up a row. That is what they usually did there." [17] Some of this competition and violence served to exclude outsiders like those of different racial, ethnic or political identities, or those who were considered habitual drunkards. Most of it, however, worked to shape and foster relationships rather than to end them. Saloongoers challenged, clarified, and ultimately strengthened the boundaries of each individual's business. Except in the rare cases where things went too far, the "friendly scuffle[s]," or competitive jockeyi ng for position among saloongoers encouraged camaraderie by assuring that each man knew the relationship in which he stood to the others. [18]

Recent saloon scholarship, perhaps in reaction to the "Wild West" image of the saloon as a site of violence, has so emphasized saloon fellowship and camaraderie that it has downplayed this vital element of competition. Saloongoers' accounts of midwestern saloon life, however, include stories of manly competition so blatant that they make cinematic depictions of machismo-run-amok seem almost subtle. G. H. Crawford, a butcher, described one such episode in a Illinois saloon in the 1890s. "There was a good many in the [saloon], the house was nearly a third full. They were talking and [Thomas] Webber [a thresher] was going about measuring arms and saying he could reach further than anyone else, telling what a man he was and asking the boys up to drink." Later, according to another man present, "they went to [measuring] pool sticks." Another saloon-going man showed off his muscles and lifted heavy saloon furniture to prove his strength. Still others bragged about how much alcohol they could drink without effect. In this atmosphere of competition, men who perceived that others were encroaching on the boundaries of their "business" often moved beyond playful competition to initiate violence to defend their interests. Midwestern saloongoers threatened and insulted one another, got into fistfights, broke each other's bones with their bare hands, hit one another with metal bars and pieces of lumber, threw stones at one another, and even occasionally drew knives or shot one another. Often, the perpetrators of these incidents later explained that they had been provoked by their opponents' encroachment into their affairs. Sometimes, they later regretted the violence, blaming it on their use of alcohol. After he "violently seized ... Frank Thomas and jerked him about in a rough and violent manner, and by so doing, broke the right leg of him ... and beat, bruised and injured him in his side, back and hips," for instance, A. A. Free apparently sobbed that it was the third time he had broken someone's leg while drinking. [19]

One 1899 Weldon, Illinois fight serves as an extreme example of this sensitivity to defending the boundaries of one's business. It began when C. C. Murdock accused Harry Summers (a builder and bricklayer), of cheating at cards. Summers denied it. Doc Marcum, a day laborer from out of town, had been watching the game, and encouraged Murdock to stand his ground. So far, it sounds like the script for a classic saloon gunfight. Summers and Murdock, however, resolved their dispute peacefully. The fight that did break out was between Summers and Marcum. Summers was more willing to overlook Murdock's insult to his honor than Marcum's interference in his business. He "spoke up and asked [Marcum] what was his business, and [Marcum] says 'It is some of my business' or something." Summers attacked Marcum, charging straight into the gun Marcum pointed at him when he rose; and Marcum shot and killed Summers. Observers of the conflict testified to their sense that Marcum, by interfering in the dispute over cheating, had s eriously violated saloon norms and invited Summers' attack. [20]

Many other barroom quarrels emerged out of a similar perception that one saloongoer was interfering with another's "business" or "boundaries." A drinker named Dewey became angry with a man named Ropp, because he "thought Ropp was interfering with his business." [21] Douglas Reneer, who shot and killed two men at a keg party outside an Atchison, Kansas, brewery, complained that the men had been threatening him about his failure to join a union. [22] The fight that may have led to the deaths of two young Norwegian immigrants, Ole Hobbet and Andrew Larson, appears to have begun with a barroom shoving match over the affections of Hobbet's wife, Tarjer. [23] A group of saloon-goers precipitated one dispute by failing to yield the sidewalk to another group. Observers often described not only the causes of saloon violence but the violence itself in terms of violations of space: a witness recounted Jacob Woodring's (a farmer and notorious bully) threats to Pete Grosjean, a younger man with whom he was quarreling in the street outside of the saloon. Woodring moved closer and closer to him as Grosjean backed up again and again. On a previous occasion, Grosjean had run away in the face of Woodring's threats. He had even fruitlessly asked the justice of the peace to intervene. This time, in front of the many townspeople who had assembled to watch the confrontation, he decided to defend his ground, picked up a two-by-four, and sliced it across Woodring's face, killing him. [24]

Both the camaraderie and competition of saloon life could serve to affirm saloongoers' status as men. But the other image of the saloongoer as unmanned was never far away. In the eyes of many contemporaries, saloongoing endangered manhood. Of course, temperance reformers were happy to embrace this view. They regularly referred to saloon-goers as having lost their manhood. A temperance newspaper proclaimed, typically, that "[n]o man can drink intoxicating liquors ... without doing violence to his manhood." One author of temperance fiction wrote of a drinker, "[h]is strong desire to be a man was overcome by an unquenchable thirst." Another quoted a drunkard despairing: "My manhood ... it is a thing of the past." A third had a promising young man take a drink and in so doing forget "his manhood." As he proceeds down the drunkard's path, he cries "As long as Christian men vote to protect the places whose only and sole object is to despoil manhood, what hope is there for me?" [25]

The idea of the "unmanned" drinker was in fact something of a commonplace even outside of temperance circles. Even that decidedly drink-friendly venue, the vaudeville stage, insinuated a conflict between alcohol and virility. Drinking songs, in vaudeville performances, were often performed by cross-dressed women. Miss Betty Bonehill, in the persona of a young drinking man, asserted in an 1894 tune that "Boys will be Boys." Her fond caricature was similar to cross-dressed impersonations of drinkers that had been given by Elsie Holt, Ella Wesner, and Emma Grattan, among many others, at least since the end of the Civil War. Many of these and other drinking songs suggested that the drinker in question preferred alcohol and male companionship to his wife. [26] Throughout the country, in these years, advice-manual writers, political leaders, reformers, and pundits of all kinds asserted that true men did not spend their evenings together, particularly in saloons, but rather spent time within their family circles. M any nineteenth-century Americans saw a connection between drink, saloongoing, and the loss of manhood. Midwestern saloongoers themselves appreciated and feared this connection. [27]

Just as the image of the saloon as manly related to its usefulness as a space where men could make visible, define, and seek to enlarge the boundaries of their "business," the image of the saloon as unmanning was tied to the issue of "minding one's business." To many midwestern saloongoers, the very definition of intoxication or drunkenness was the inability to "mind one's business." Illinois resident William Ferman, asked by an attorney whether he had ever been drunk, replied, "No sir but what I knew what I was doing and could attend to business." [28] W. H. Parker, a tinsmith from Illinois, said of another man, "I don't know as you could call him drunk, he knew enough to tend to his business." [29] Charles McRoberts, who seems to have been a rather feckless drifter, testified,

I claimed, sir, that I was under the influence of liquor, but wasn't drunk. Could attend to my own business; knew what I was doing ... I might not have seen Mr. Bell as others might have seen him. Others might have seen him and called him drunk; but I called him a man that was able to attend to his business. [30]

Sometimes lawyers made the same equation saloongoing witnesses did between drunkenness and the inability to mind one's business. One Michigan lawyer, for instance, asked a witness "[have you seen him] what we call drunk--staggering, or so that he couldn't do business?" [31]

If an individual did drink so much as to prevent him from "minding his business" properly, not only saloon norms, but also wider cultural norms called upon his acquaintances to assist him. This was particularly true when it came to his getting home after a night out. Managing a horse, team, buggy, or cart while intoxicated could have fatal consequences to the driver and to others. Midwestern roads were sometimes difficult to navigate even for the sober, with mud, ditches, narrow bridges, and unexpected obstacles. Horses proverbially disdained to be controlled by drunken men. Men who opted to walk home often had to go miles through sparsely populated countryside, over railroad tracks and bridges, sometimes in bitterly cold and icy conditions. Either way, for a drunken man to leave a saloon for home was potentially disastrous.

Saloongoers were expected to intervene on the behalf of a drunken man in other ways as well. If he did assist a belligerent drunken man home, a saloongoer sometimes felt called upon to remain to protect his family from him. Though Italian immigrant Frank Dasso insisted that "As long as [my neighbor, John Sankey] minded his own business I didn't care" about his behavior, Dasso punched Sankey after he learned that he had drunkenly assaulted his wife, Rose Anne Sankey. [32] Many men also felt compelled to protect drunken friends from making bad business deals. "He wasn't so drunk but what you were willing to do business with him?" one defense attorney asked. "I done business with him" the witness consented. [33] Villains in temperance fiction frequently got men drunk in order to trick them into ruinous business deals. [34] When a man was drunk, unable to "mind his own business," it was not only socially acceptable, but socially expected, for others to intervene benevolently in his business. [35]

But men who seemed to be incapable of minding their business often resisted offered assistance, manfully maintaining their boundaries and insisting that they could take care of their own affairs. So, for instance, when a policeman "saw ... [Andrew Faivre (a tailor) and another man] hanging onto one another" on a bitterly cold night, and "told them to get off the street and go home" they responded that "they were capable of taking care of themselves." When William Blakesley offered to aid a seemingly intoxicated Frank Huff, Huff replied, "I ain't drunk. I can take care of myself. I don't need any help." To Warren Harris, another would-be well-doer who suggested that Huff had drunk enough and ought to go home, Huff responded, "[g]o to hell! I will go home when I get ready." When W. W. Buell saw 28-year old laborer Michael Judge collapsed on the street on a cold night and sought to bring him indoors, Judge grabbed him and tried to wrestle with him. Harvey, Blakesley, Harris, and Buell immediately backed off whe n the drinkers rejected their advice or assistance. Huff soon after fell off a bridge to his death. Both Andrew Faivre and Michael Judge stayed out in the street all night and got frostbite. Faivre had his fingers and toes amputated, while Judge lost a leg. [36]

One might blame the would-be-assistants for allowing themselves to be so easily rebuffed by their drunken friends. In their testimony, one can sense regret. But they were in a very awkward position. They knew that when a man was drunk, incompetent to conduct his business, failure to assist him could lead to tragedy, but they also knew the consequences of attempting to interfere in a man's business as long as he was competent to conduct it himself. The problem became even more complicated in light of the second meaning of "minding one's own business." The drunkard, in the eyes of midwestern saloongoers, failed to "mind his own business" both in that he was incapable of tending to his person, property, and affairs, and in that he so often seemed inclined to inappropriately intervene in the affairs of his neighbors. Saloongoers, asked to explain why they considered one of their companions to have been drunk, often said that they could tell he was drunk because he interfered in others' business. [37] If a saloon goer, who might well have been drinking heavily himself, involved himself in the business of a man he perceived to be drunk, he ran the risk of being labeled unable to "mind his own business" himself. Even non-saloon-going or non-drinking witness who perhaps came upon drinkers on the street often found that juries looked skeptically at those who had involved themselves in the affairs of intoxicated men, yet claimed sobriety. [38]

Drunken men, and particularly those who drank habitually, were exceptions to the rule that a man's business was inviolable. Some popular theorists took this to an extreme: one prominent physician insisted in 1892 that "[t]he moment a man becomes a drunkard he forfeits all rights to liberty." This was a very slippery slope. In that pre-breath-a-lyzer and blood-test age, determining whether a man who had been drinking was drunk was absolutely subjective; if the most credible people around a man were willing to testify that he was drunk, he was drunk. Determining whether someone was "a drunkard" was, if anything, even more ambiguous. Far from constituting a distinct and recognizable category, drunken men were impossible to accurately identify. The question of whether a man was intoxicated at any given moment, and had thus forfeited his autonomy, was a very difficult one. Simply asking him would not necessarily help, given intoxicated men's well-known tendency to claim sobriety. Any attempt to encroach on his fr eedom would likely be met with an assertion of his rights. Would-be assistants simply had to rely on his appearance and behavior. Ultimately, if a reasonable observer judged that a drinking man was drunk, he had a right and often a responsibility to encroach on that man's business. Because of the extreme subjectivity of drunkenness, any man entering a saloon and taking a drink put himself in a position in which others--not only fellow saloongoers, but also family members, neighbors, and even, in a broader way, the government and temperance activists--could label him 'drunk' and interfere in his business. Saloongoers knew that the subjectivity of "drunkenness" made even moderate drinking potentially perilous. [39]

Despite some judges' hopeful assertions to jurors that the meaning of "intoxication" was so obvious that it need not be defined, saloongoers and other witnesses repeatedly complained that they did not know what it meant to be "intoxicated" or that their definition of "intoxication" differed from what they thought the court or other witnesses meant by it. [40] Some did feel that they could tell accurately when some men were intoxicated: one man apparently peppered his conversation with the word "galvanize" when he was drunk; some forgot to wear their hats; some had a peculiar red or glassy-eyed look; one was unable to use eating utensils when drunk; others became either unusually belligerent or sociable. [41] But these were exceptions. Many more saloongoers insisted categorically that they could not tell if someone else was drunk, or even if they themselves were drunk. As laborer S. L. Meader put it, "I never saw [William Ferman] drunk, that is, what I call drunk, other people might have another construction of it probably." [42] They pointed out that a man could pretend to be drunk when sober, or could seem "duly sober" even while drunk, and that each person behaved differently when drunk. [43] Even if they were sure what it meant to be drunk, they could not with certainty testify whether another person fit into that category.

In this period of the rise of the "expert," it is not surprising that some lawyers tried to get around this problem by setting up certain witnesses as particularly experienced in defining and identifying intoxication. Law-enforcement workers sometimes filled this role, but in most rural communities, this was a part-time job and lacked professional status. The other obvious choice would be either saloonkeepers or heavy drinkers. One attorney asserted in a brief that the testimony of abstainers "upon the question of intoxication is not to be relied upon when opposed by that of others who have been in the habit." Similarly, one drinker said to a non-drinking lawyer interrogating him about intoxication, "If you drank liquor yourself you could help me tell what effect it has on a man, but when a man don't drink any it is hard to tell a man or satisfy him what feeling it has on one." While most experienced with the effects of alcohol, however, drinkers and saloonkeepers were suspect for that very reason. [44] Some lawyers brought in physicians as expert witnesses, but physicians who were not themselves drinkers found their authority called into question, while those who were risked having their sobriety challenged. [45]

Nor did this exhaust the obstacles to determining intoxication. Saloongoers, respecting saloon norms, were frequently careful to insist that they had not been paying too much attention to others' affairs. Often they claimed that they had not noticed a certain man's behavior, and that they did not consider it their "business" to observe him. [46] While 20-year-old actor Edward "Paddy" Ryan was willing to testify that David Moreland, a blacksmith, "had been drinking quite a bit;" he quickly continued, "I didn't pay much attention to him." [47] The discomfort many of them felt in having been caught watching, or worse, interceding in, another man's behavior is manifest in the confused testimony of Joseph Williams, a barkeeper who had cut off a patron:

Q. Why did you tell him he had enough?

A. It's my business to look after such men.

Q. Was his apparent condition that of intoxication?

A. Well, no, he was not intoxicated.

Q. You did not tell him not to drink any more?

A. I did it with all men.

Q. That would cut your business down?

A. That's my business ...

Q. The reason why you told him was because he was in an intoxicated condition?

A. No sir. He was a long ways from home and it was very cold and it is a man's business to look after such things when they are in his business. [48]

Of course, as the barkeeper claimed, it literally was his business to monitor the intoxication of his customers. Still, he was defensive about with the position in which he found himself, and not only because his employer was arguing that the man had not been intoxicated.

Because intoxication was so subjective, because saloongoing witnesses appreciated that labeling a man drunk allowed all manner of incursions into his business, and because they were committed to maintaining the boundaries of each man's business, saloongoers tended to be extremely reluctant to label their fellows as drunk. One exasperated plaintiff's lawyer, after fruitlessly attempting to get a witness to say that his client's husband had been drunk, finally erupted, "I will ask you this: Do you consider a man drunk as long as he can lay with his face down, and hang to the grass and holler?" The witness, unmoved, replied, "I don't know; he might be sober and holler." [49] Though an extreme example, this was consistent with most saloongoers' unwillingness to label anyone who had not actually collapsed, and some who had, as drunk. [50]

These drinkers chose to evade the tension between drunkenness and the autonomy necessary to manhood by defining drunkenness as narrowly as possible. What is most interesting about this approach is the path that they did not take. It might have been possible for saloongoers to negotiate, or at least contain, the conflicts between intoxication and manhood. The meaning of manhood in the late nineteenth century was highly contested, and constantly in flux. Though minding one's own business" had a tremendous cultural resonance with saloongoers, they could have worked to reshape or reformulate their notions of manhood when they became unsustainable. Becoming roaring drunk, for instance, has often been seen as an indication of, rather than a bar to, manliness. As Elliot Gorn pointed our in his work on antebellum Southern rough-and-tumble fighters, and Gunther Peck in his on Western miners, for instance, some men considered risky and self-destructive behavior an assertion of their freedom to use their own bodies as t hey saw fit--of their status as independent rather than enslaved. [51] Occasionally, these dramshop transcripts do reveal something of this sort. Certainly some witnesses made inflated claims about how much alcohol they had consumed without becoming intoxicated. Joseph Hermis, a "section boss," volunteered, "I mean to tell the jury that Ferman takes his drink the same as Joe Hermis and that I never saw him drunk ... Q. You take your drink? A. You bet I do. Q. Taken it today, haven't you? A. Yes sir." [52] When called to account for their saloongoing, moreover, some men did boast about their incapacity. George Webber claimed that "I did not draw a sober breath for six weeks." [53] Fifty-year-old West Virginian farmer and coal miner G. W. Duckworth and some of the witnesses in his trial, similarly, seemed to take pride in their extreme intoxication. Duckworth claimed to have gotten "About as drunk as a man could get." When discussing his failure as a provider in later testimony, however, even he volunteered tha t "he had no business to get drunk." [54] Most midwestern saloongoers, however, persisted in a definition of manhood precariously grounded in the language of "business." They were unwilling to forsake the ideals of rationality, independence, and freedom implied by that definition even under the pressure of legal action.

The very fact that drinkers found themselves testifying about their lives to hostile juries suggests that their attempt to hold the line on their definition of proper manly behavior had failed in the larger culture. It was ineffective largely because it was not only saloongoers who were concerned with the boundaries of drinkers' business. In particular, drinkers' wives had an interest in their husbands' affairs. While many midwestern men were congregating in homosocial groups, jockeying for position with one another, challenging and ratifying the borders of each others' business, some of their wives were increasing their authority within their families and even intervening in their husbands' behavior outside the home. The Iowa Temperance Standard, in 1869, chastised a woman who claimed that her husbands' drinking habits were "none of my business." It advised women to make men's drinking their business. Though presumably most drinkers' wives who brought suit under a dramshop act did not read this particular ar ticle, they acted as it advised. [55]

Women's challenges to saloongoers' business were, if anything, even more serious than saloongoers' challenges to one another. When men frequented saloons too often, some of their wives felt that they were failing in their family responsibilities. At its most serious, a conflict between man and wife over the boundaries of "business" could be just as violent as a saloon conflict. Domestic abuse of wives was, of course, rampant. Occasionally, the violence went the other way as well. One man breaking up a fistfight between a saloongoer and his wife found, to his surprise, that restraining the husband was not sufficient to stop the fight. Another man claimed that his wife had chased him from their home with a knife. [56] On the whole, the drinkers' wives in dramshop act trials were a tough bunch of women. One claimed, "I have taken the jug full [of my husband's liquor] and slammed it out in the yard right before him. I have disguised it [that is, adulterated it] in every way to sicken him." One participated in coc k fighting; one was a former army camp follower; two seem to have been prostitutes; some were themselves drinkers; and at least one had formerly worked in a saloon. [57]

These women, and other more 'proper' drinkers' wives, did not simply sit at home waiting for their husbands to return from the saloon. [58] Rather, they often took up the family responsibilities they felt their husbands had abandoned. Defense lawyers in dramshop cases often suggested that the women had taken over the household. One drinker had apparently taken to regular saloongoing to escape the constant criticism of the other three residents of his home: his wife, sister, and mother. A lawyer in another case referred to the drinker's wife as the "captain of the family." A third suggested that a different drinker's wife was "the head man of the house." A witness implied that a fourth was the "head of the family." Though the wives in these cases generally denied the defense s characterization of their home lives, it is clear from the testimony of drinkers and drinkers' wives that many wives of saloongoers did exercise what was perceived as an unusually great amount of power within the home. Drinkers complain ed that their wives would not "let" them have any money for drink, would not tell them family financial information, such as the wages of their children, or were trying to "drive [them] off." [59]

Despite the consensus in this period that it was a man's responsibility to financially support his family, some saloongoers were unable or unwilling to provide this support. Many drinkers' wives appear to have found alternate means of supporting themselves and their families. Some performed traditionally female tasks such as working out, sewing, or taking in washing. Some seem to have practiced prostitution. Some took over the management of family farms. One was in the real-estate business. Another took on the traditionally male task, which her husband had refused, of rowing a skiff down a river nightly to light government lamps on the piers. Others appear to have sought alternative male protection, whether from a father or from a boarder or neighbor. In any case, the drinking husbands, while engaging in the manly camaraderie and competition of the saloon, found their "business" seriously threatened from within their own homes. [60]

But wives also posed challenges to drinkers' business that extended beyond the home, up to, and within the 'manly' saloons. Some wives testified to having followed their husbands to the saloon, or having sent their children to bring them home. [61] Harriet Ferman, for instance, went to the saloon to retrieve her husband, who was a barber:

There was a customer wanted to be waited on in the shop. I looked around and I could not find him and I walked in the saloon after him ... I asked him to come home. He said I should go and attend to my own business. I says, "Come home and attend to your business ..." [62]

Eugenia Peacock, the wife of a prosperous merchant, similarly went to the saloon to retrieve her husband and to forbid the saloonkeeper from selling to him. According to her testimony, the saloonkeeper "merely cursed at [her] and informed [her] that he, defendant, thought Mr. Peacock ... knew his ... own business, and knew when he had enough." [63] In both cases, the similarity between the confrontation of husband and wife and among saloongoers is manifest. It was a confrontation about the boundaries of the saloongoer's business. Like saloon-going men, women occasionally felt uncomfortable about interfering in their husband's business. Though Polly Jackson followed her husband to the saloon and later testified to his behavior in court, she insisted, "I did not go down for the purpose of watching him; to see where he got his drinks. I went down because he had lots of things in his pockets that I expected to put away." [64] If they overcame these scruples, however, saloongoers' wives had considerable resources, rising from a spate of new laws in the second half of the nineteenth century designed to discourage saloongoing. Apart from the dramshop laws themselves, saloonkeepers in many states were legally bound to honor drinkers' wives requests not to serve their husbands. Wives, that is, had the authority to "shut down" on their husbands at will. [65] One bill proposed, though never passed, in the Illinois Senate went even further, requiring married men to present their wives' written permission before purchasing liquor. [66]

A number of drinkers' wives used this power, and gave notice to saloonkeepers not to allow their husbands to purchase alcohol. William Ferman complained that whenever he chose to stay out all night playing the fife in a saloon, his wife would harass him. Since "a man has got to say something," they would quarrel, and "then she will go and for spite work say, 'I will shut down on you.'" [67] Emma Rush, the wife of blacksmith James Rush, claimed to have warned a saloonkeeper, "Well, don't sell him any more, for if you do, I will put the law in operation against you." [68] Some husbands, through violence or persuasion, convinced or compelled their wives to rescind their orders, but courts held that saloonkeepers could not accept such retractions if they had any reason to suspect coercion on the part of the husband. If saloonkeepers did not heed the notices, wives had several options in the courts, one of which was to bring a suit under their states' dramshop acts. District judges and juries were extremely sympat hetic to drinkers' wives suing saloonkeepers, and they seem to have usually won their cases in the first instance, though the decisions were often overturned on appeal. At any rate, the threat of such a lawsuit was a real one to midwestern saloonkeepers, and many of them took wives' notices very seriously indeed, further reducing the autonomy of drinking men. [69]

The very structure and intent of the dramshop acts challenged drinker's control of their "business" still further. The dramshop acts were intended to allow drinkers' wives to claim financial support from saloonkeepers when their husbands failed to provide. Some plaintiffs were widows of drinkers killed in alcohol-related accidents, and some had been abandoned by their drinking husbands, but in many cases, these failed breadwinners watched, and even testified in, their own wives' trials. Some of these husbands--who, after all, stood to benefit at least indirectly from any settlement their wives might win--cooperated with their wives' cases, testifying to their own degradation. Even then, however, they often revealed discomfort with others' intrusion into their business. When asked about his drinking habits, for instance, one drinker who had admitted that he had been "arms length acting the fool" said snidely, "Probably there is witnesses that would know more about it than I do--because they have kept an accoun t of it and I have not." [70] Other husbands allied with the saloonkeepers, alliances that often did the saloonkeepers' cases more harm than good by illustrating to juries the extent to which the drinkers lacked concern for their own families' financial well-being. To make their cases, plaintiffs often presented their husbands' failures in stark terms. Martha Duckworth's declaration typically described her husband G.B's condition as "feeble and helpless ... disordered and disabled." [71]

Not only the laws but even the court proceedings seem to have been designed to attack the manhood of drinkers. Drinkers were often very reluctant witnesses. When his friend's wife asked him to testify, for instance, Swede Zwanzig Johnson first insisted, "I not want to bother in it--I never want to go in a court...." Only when "she cry pretty hard" did Johnson consent. [72] Once in the courtroom, testifying saloongoers (who usually addressed court officials as "sir," a courtesy rarely reciprocated) were often subjected to humiliating skepticism, mockery, ethnic slurs, and insult by lawyers of both sides and even, occasionally, by judges. Twenty-seven-year-old saloongoer James Powell, for instance, could not have been pleased at an exchange during his testimony:

The Court: "Are you right now? Are you drunk or sober?

A. I am all right now.

Q. There is a little defect in your speech, isn't there?

A. No sir.

Mr. Withey: I thought you were a little tongue-tied.

Court: It would be a good thing if he was, arid his mouth tied too, for a while. [73]

These court officials often suggested that saloongoing witnesses were unreliable, dishonest, lazy, and incompetent. One referred to a living drinker as a "rotten ... putrid ... and repulsive carcass." Another referred to a saloongoer as a "miserable, unwashed, uncleansed, unannealed and graceless scamp." A third claimed that a saloongoer was a "horse-jockeying, gad-about sort of man, a frequenter of houses of ill-fame, a runner of a threshing machine.... [74] Considering the fact that often all of the witnesses, lawyers, jurors, and observers in these courtrooms knew one another, being a witness could hardly have helped a saloongoer to maintain the already tenuous boundaries of his manhood. [75]

Given all that they had to lose from being identified as drinkers, it is natural that some witnesses went to great lengths to assert that they were abstinent. Some drinkers and saloonkeepers, of course, did defend their drinking habits, and took offense at the state's intervention in their activities. Maxim Plumadore, for instance, defiantly refused to apologize for presence in the saloon, "I went there because I wanted to go; I go there to take my beer when I feel like it, and I felt like it at that time." [76] More often, however, they attempted to dissociate themselves from the saloon. One barkeeper insisted, "[n]o sir, I never drink nothing. I never have for years. I want this Court to know it." [77] The attorney for another saloonkeeper asked his client's 26-year-old assistant, "Q. Did you drink or have you for eleven years drank intoxicating liquor of any shape?" Though the plaintiff successfully objected to the line of questioning before the barkeeper responded, we can assume that the barkeeper had pl anned to claim that he had been a teetotaler since he was fifteen. [78] Another man claimed utter ignorance of saloon events. The saloonkeeper's lawyer joked knowingly, "You don't do much of that kind of business, do you Billy?" [79] Others claimed that, though they went to the saloon daily, they never drank intoxicating liquors there; that they drank only soda pop; that they had since gone teetotal; that they had only stopped into the saloon for a moment looking for a man, or were only looking through the doorway. [80] Saloonkeepers sometimes attempted to extend the patina of sobriety over their entire establishment, by claiming that they only served "BB" (Birch Beer?), which was non-alcoholic; that the beer they served was so weak that "a man could drink a barrel of it and not get drunk;" that men mainly came to their places to read newspapers, socialize, have lunch, and "warm their shins" but rarely drank. [81] Of course, some of these disclaimers had elements of truth, given the many social functions of t he saloon. [82] They were certainly tactical, since many of the witnesses had interests or sympathies in the cases. They were also, however ("I want this Court to know it."), attempt by saloonkeepers and saloongoing men to distance themselves from an unmanning association with alcohol.

Late-nineteenth-century midwestern saloongoers were in an awkward position. Though many of them, whether farmers of self-employed tradesmen, continued to lead lives closer to traditional ideals of independent manhood than their contemporaries, their ideas of proper manly behavior were confused and contradictory. Try as they might to "mind their own business," they were chronically unsure who was capable of doing so, and when outside intervention was required. When called upon to make such distinctions and to justify saloon codes in public, they failed or evaded the question. The central role of competition in saloon behavior and in the enactment of manhood within the saloon seems to have made it almost impossible for these midwestern men to reach a consensus on limits to autonomy that the law insisted, and that they were forced to agree, must exist.

The drinking men of the rural Midwest, and probably of much of the rest of the late-nineteenth-century United States, were handicapped as well by the fact that they shared much of their rhetoric and ideology with reformers who were becoming increasingly vociferous in their opposition to drink. Temperance reformers worked tirelessly to uphold an ideal of manhood centered exactly on the concepts of economic and political autonomy and control over a household that constituted the "business" of the saloongoer. The fact that witnesses in dramshop cases were so often at pains to distance themselves from the consumption of alcohol suggests that even within the saloon, the contention that alcohol was inimical to responsible, independent maleness had considerable resonance. The failure to reimagine and defend saloon life that comes through so clearly in these trials is, on an individual scale, the same failure that would constitute the "decay from within" of the prohibition movement. The decline of the premier male s pace of the nineteenth century came largely out of a tension in saloongoers' own ideologies of manhood.

ENDNOTES

I would like to thank Matthew Abraham, Nancy Berlage, Lawrence Charap, Kelly Emerson, Darby English, Francois Furstenberg, Thomas Herzing, Mara Keire, Jotham Parsons, Kay Picart, Dorothy Ross, Kim Ruffin, and Ronald Walters for their valuable help in reading versions of this paper. The research could nor have been done without the tremendous knowledge and enthusiasm of the reference professionals who dug through dusty warehouses, located long-ignored sources, and pointed me in new directions. In particular, I am grateful for the assistance of Nancy Witman at the Michigan Law Library; M. Cody Wright, James Cohlmeyer, and Charles Cali at the Illinois State Archives; Jill Trueblood at the Illinois Supreme Court; Linda Robertson, Carol Emerson, and Timothy Gatti at the Iowa State Law Library; and the Johns Hopkins Special Collections department. This research was also made possible by research grants from the State Historical Society of Iowa and the Littleton-Griswald Research Fund of the American Historical Asso ciation, and by the hospitality of Susan Cramer, Carolyn Frantz, Evelyn Holler, Judy and Ed Pilewski, and Peggy, Mark, Eric, Allyn, Tim, Emily, Anna, Kristin, and Rebeckah Weddle.

(1.) These two images parallel the "two competing mythic dramas" of the "frail and endangered adolescent male" whose bad habits had led to uncontrollable instincts potentially "culminating in death" and the "autonomous young man of the frontier" discussed in Carol Smith Rosenberg, "Davy Crockett as Trickster: Pornography, Liminality, and Symbolic Inversion in Victorian America," Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1985), 91-92. Both E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993), 180 and Catherine Gilbert Murdock, Domesticating Drink: Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870-1940. (Baltimore, 1998), 15, point out this seeming contradiction.

(2.) For a discussion of the constructed and contested nature of nineteenth-century manhood see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago, 1995), 6-7; For arguments about the volatility of male ideals in the late nineteenth century, see Bederman, 11-13; Rotundo, American Manhood; Ava Baron, "The 'Other' Side of Gender Antagonism at Work: Men, Boys, and the Remasculinizarion of Printers' Work, 1830-1920," in Ava Baron, ed., Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor (Ithaca, 1991), 47-69, pp. 59-60; Kevin Mumford, "'Lost Manhood' Found: Male Sexual Impotence and Victorian Culture in the United States, "Journal of the History of Sexuality 3 (1992): 33-57, p. 35; Kim Townsend, Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others (Cambridge, 1996), 16-17; Judy A. Hilkey, Character is Capitol: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill, 1997), 142-43; and Robyn Cooper, "The Fireman: Immaculate Manhood," Journal of Popular Culture 28 (1995), 139-170, p. 147.

(3.) See, e. g. Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill, 1996); Lee Ann Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1890 (Athens, GA, 1995); Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill, 1992); Scott Sandage, Deadbeats, Drunkards, and Dreamers: A Cultural History of Failure in America, 1819-1893, Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University (1995), 263; and Townsend, Manhood at Harvard, 17.

(4.) Prominent among the many historians who have discussed the relationship between this economic change and ideals of manhood are McConnell, Glorious Contentment, 139, who ties it in to Thomas Haskell's helpful notion of the "recession of causation;" Baron, "The 'Other' Side;" Pamela Haag, "The 'Ill-use of a Wife': Patterns of Working-Class Violence in Domestic and Public New York City, 1860-1880," Journal of Social History 25(1992): 447-477, p. 466; Mumford, "'Lost Manhood' Found;" Bederman, Manliness, 11-13; Hilkey, Character is Capital, 5-10,142; Clyde Griffen, "Reconstructing Masculinity From the Evangelical Revival to the Waning of Progressivism: A Speculative Synthesis," in Mark C. Cames and Clyde Griffen, eds. Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago, 1990), 183-204, (191).

(5.) Rotundo, American Manhood; Bederman, Manliness, 17; Townsend, Manhood at Harvard; Elliott Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986), 192-193.

(6.) Of course, even those saloongoers who were self-employed probably did feel threatened by "the octopus." To begin with, they were in an increasingly perilous economic position, increasingly aware that their prosperity depended on distant forces such as railroad directors and commodities brokers. For a discussion of the crisis of manhood as experienced by Kansans in the Gilded age, for instance, see Michael Lewis Goldberg,. An Army of Women: Gender and Politics in Gilded Age Kansas (Baltimore, 1997), 148-171. As Perry Duis shows in The Saloon: Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston 1880-1920 (Urbana, 1983), 15-47, late-nineteenth-century saloons were increasingly owned or controlled by national brewing companies.

(7.) Thomas Noel, The City and the Saloon: Denver 1858-1916 (Lincoln, 1982), 91; The other major treatments of the saloon in these years were Duis, The Saloon; and Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (New York, 1983).

(8.) Gain, The Manly Art; Madelon Powers, Faces Along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman's Saloon, 1870-1920 (Chicago, 1998), 29-30; Murdock, Domesticating Drink (Baltimore, 1998), 15-16.

(9.) Duis, The Saloon, 274-303. Madelon Powers, "Decay From Within: The Inevitable Doom of the American Saloon," in Susanna Barrows and Robin Room, eds., Drinking: Behavior and Belief in Modem History (Berkeley, 1991), 112-131. Murdock, Domesticating Drink, 83, explores the same question.

(10.) Gorn, Manly Art, 142. Powers, in Faces Along the Bar, addresses the problem of primary accounts of saloon life by making use of fictional accounts, oral traditions, and other non-traditional sources. Robert Griswold, in "Divorce and the Legal Definition of Victorian Manhood," in Carnes and Griffen, Meanings for Manhood, 96-110, makes evocative use of transcripts from divorce trials in California district courts. This paper is largely based on slightly over a hundred case files and printed briefs, mainly from Michigan, Iowa, and Illinois, but also from Kansas, West Virginia, and Washington. The cases had all been brought under "dramshop" or "civil damage" acts between 1870 and 1901, and had all been appealed to and heard before their states' supreme courts. It might be objected that by selecting only those cases that had been heard by state supreme courts, I am getting a skewed sample. When saloonkeepers lost their suits, they were more likely to be able to appeal than were plaintiffs, so I may be seeing more cases in which plaintiffs had stronger cases or courts were more sympathetic to them. This data set would be problematic for some purposes, but I do not believe that the possible pro-plaintiff bias would have a meaningful effect on the use I am making of the transcripts

(11.) Supreme Court of Illinois, "Case Files 1820-1970", Record series 901.001, Illinois State Archives (hereafter, ISA Case Files), Douglas D. Lowry v Syvia L. Coster, p. 121: Testimony of D. Newton.

(12.) In some states, "dramshop acts" were known as "civil damage acts." Ernest Hurst Cherrington (ed), "Civil Damage Laws," in Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem (Westerville, OH, 1925-30), 617. Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wisconsin passed these laws between the 1840s and the 1890s. Jack Blocker cites this information in "Give to the Winds thy Fears:" The Women's Temperance Crusade, 1873-1874 (Westport, Ct., 1985), 115. Duis, The Saloon, 98.

(13.) Iowa State Law Library, (hereafter ISLL) Bound Briefs, Peter Ewen v. Ellen Wertz, (1878), p. 32: Testimony of Peter Ewen, "He would come in from the country at ten or eleven o'clock, as farmers do, and call for bologna and boiled eggs, and sometimes would ask for a glass of beer to drink with it...." On urination troughs, see Powers, Faces, 30-31. On the nature of saloon camaraderie see Powers, Faces; Rosenzweig, Eight Hours; Noel, The City and the Saloon; Duis, The Saloon, and George Ade, The Old-Time Saloon: Not Wet--Not Dry Just History (New York, 1931).

(14.) ISLL, Bound Briefs, A. F. Bissell, Administrator of Estate of Frank S. Law, Deceased v. Frank Starzinger, p. 3-4: Petition for Rehearing.

(15.) Albert J. Bellows, M.D. The Philosophy of Eating (New York, 1868), 222; Joel Dorman Steele, Hygienic Physiology, With Special Reference to the Use of Alcoholic Drinks and Narcotics, Being a Revised Edition of the Fourteen Weeks in Human Physiology (New York, 1888), 140. Rev. J. T. Crane, Arts of Intoxication: The Air, and the Results (New York, 1870). John B. Gough, "Risky Business," in Tipton (Iowa) Advertiser, March 20, 1862: "It is a risky business to touch the brain, and it is the business of alcohol to do it."

(16.) This paper draws on a rich body of historical works detailing the connection between alcohol and manhood. Rotundo, American Manhood, 180, briefly discusses the paradoxical relationship between the saloon and manhood. Griswold, "Divorce and the Legal Redefinition of Victorian Manhood," 96-110, uses divorce trial transcripts to explore the relationship of sobriety to norms of male behavior. Rosenzweig, Eight Hours; Duis, The Saloon; Noel, The City and the Saloon; and Powers, Faces, all discuss and analyze the male culture of the saloon.

(17.) ISLL, Bound Briefs, C. S. McZee v. William Manatt (1884) p. 14: Testimony of George H. King.

(18.) Lee Edelman, in his Homographies: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York, 1994), 50-51, uses the phrase "enacting manhood" in a different context. Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, NC, 1998), 81-82, appropriates the phrase. ISLL, Bound Briefs, C. S. McVey v. William Manatt (1884), p. 14: Testimony of Robert Connelly, a 59-year-old laborer. Connelley claims to have kicked a "Johnny Reb" and his son out of the saloon. Supreme Court of Michigan, Bound Briefs, Michigan State Law Library, (hereafter MSLL Bound Briefs), Augusta Thomas v. William H. Dansby, Amos Deming, and James Bennett, p. 61: Testimony of Richard Setchfield. These transcripts rarely, if ever, discuss racial conflicts, presumably because of the nature of the rural midwestern population and of the exclusion of non-whites from these saloons was so manifest that it was rarely challenged. As a result, I have not included race in my analysis. It would be interes ting, however, to read these transcripts as moments within the construction, maintenance, and reworking of male "whiteness."

(19.) Gorn, Manly Arts, gives full emphasis to the competitive nature of saloon interactions. ISA Case Files, Hugh M. Schorb v Keturah Webber (1899), p. 124. ISA Case Files, Schorb v. Webber, p. 130: Testimony of Gideon Cooper; S.C. of Iowa, ISLL Bound Briefs, Nancy Jewett v Lorenz Wanshura (1874), p. 41: Testimony of Henry Spiegel; Noel, City and the Saloon, 91; ISLL Bound Briefs, Jewett v. Wanshura, p. 43: Testimony of Louis Haussler, "Is it nor a fact that he can drink any six men in Monticello drunk? A. He never tried me." MSLL, Bound Briefs, Augusta Thomas v. William H. Dansby, Amos Deming, and James Bennett, p. 3: declaration of plaintiff. For the description of A. A. Free's attack, see MSLL, Bound Briefs, Thomas v. Dansby, p. 2: Declaration, and p. 52: Testimony of Margaret Wells. Washington Supreme Court, Washington State Archives, Case Files, Case #7653, Winnifred Woodring, a minor, by Mary Woodring, Guardian ad Litem v. P. Jacobino, (1908), p. 83: Testimony of Harry Lott; p. 88: Testimony of Garfiel d Hamilton.

(20.) ISA, Case Files, (microfilmed) Baker & Reddick v. Emma Summers (1901), p. 98: Testimony of C.C. Murdock.

(21.) ISA Bound Briefs, People of the State of Illinois v. Jacob Albrecht (1874), p. 14: Testimony of John Kyle.

(22.) Atchison County Court House, Atchison, Kansas, Case Files #8738, Ruth Reneer v Rosina Zibold and Emma Haegelin, partners in the firm doing business under the firm name a style of Zibold and Haegelin (1901), p. 3: deposition of William Reneer. The defendants, female saloon-owners, were the widows of the original partners. Anyone carefully reading these footnotes will notice that women occasionally arise as saloon owners, bartenders, and saloongoers. I treat this in my Ph. D. dissertation, "Manhood Lost: Alcohol, Gender, and the Self in the Nineteenth-Century United States," Johns Hopkins University (1999). Both Murdock, Domesticating Drink and Powers, Faces, treat the theme extensively. For present purposes, however, it is enough to know that extended female presence in the saloons considered here was very rare, and even shocking and remarkable to male saloongoers, except on special occasions.

(23.) ISA Case Files, Tarjer O. Hobbet v. Ambrose Betting and John Whitman (1890). Andrew Larson, who was boarding with the Hobbets, and Ole Hobbet were run over by a train on their way back from a saloon. Defense attorneys argued that they were run over not because they were too intoxicated to move off the tracks, but because they were fighting over Tarjer. According to a defense witness, they had begun quarrelling over Tarjer in the saloon. Tarjer's attorneys denied this, and they prevailed, but the transcript suggests that, whether or not it lead to their deaths, they had been quarrelling over Tarjer in the barroom.

(24.) On sidewalk quarrel, see MSLL Bound Briefs, Elizabeth Doty v. Wellington Postal, Frank Postal, and Orville M. Bush, (1889), p. 27: Testimony of James Powell. For Woodring fight see WSA, Case Files, Woodring v. Jacobino, p. 28: Testimony of William Baldridge.

(25.) "Self Respect," in the (Marshalltown) Iowa Temperance Standard, June 10, 1869, p. 4. Grace Strong, The Worst Foe: A Temperance Novel (Columbus, Ohio, 1885); Abby Eldridge, Norman Brill's Life-Work (New York, 1875), 62; The Itinerant's Daughter: A Temperance Story [collectively written by members of the Burlingame WCTU, each taking a chapter] (Burlingame, Ks., 1908).

(26.) "Night Owls," Written and Composed by Arthur West (New York, 1894); Emma Grattan's Favorite Songs, "Rollicking