Demon Rum and Drunken Men: Working-Class Immobility in the Nineteenth-Century Tavern

Whether citizens were eating and drinking or purchasing consumer goods, consumption in the nineteenth-century United States was understood to be radically significant. That significance in turn prompted a wide range of... [ view full abstract ]

Whether citizens were eating and drinking or purchasing consumer goods, consumption in the nineteenth-century United States was understood to be radically significant. That significance in turn prompted a wide range of performances, from temperance meeting testimony to blackface minstrelsy to consumer boycotts. These spectacles—often public but sometimes private—became integral to nineteenth-century literature and mass culture. Moreover, they reveal how the interplay between reader and author (or performer and spectator) frequently shifted the message in unexpected and occasionally unintended directions.

Spanning literary and theatrical genres, the papers on this panel ask how consumption allowed people to perform a specific American identity, be it the respectable member of the middle class, the heroic disabled veteran, or the activist vegetarian. Such performances not only foreground the centrality of the body and its transformations to nineteenth-century society, but also reveal how apparently simple acts of consumption became critical symbols of an increasingly self-reflective culture. Collectively, our essays reveal a nineteenth-century America eager to flaunt its social progress but often hampered by its own hypocrisies.

“Demon Rum and Drunken Men: Working-Class Immobility in the Nineteenth-Century Tavern”In the 1840s, a geographically-diverse group of ex-drunkards known as the Washingtonians gathered to perform scenes from their former drunken lives. Almost exclusively working-class men—including butchers, blacksmiths, and rock blasters—Washingtonians sought to climb into the middle class through such performances. However, my essay argues that these displays ultimately revealed the persisting lure of drink and the inherent challenges of upward mobility.  Central to Washingtonians’ failure was their collective inability to refrain from bodily sensationalism. For instance, lecturer A.V. Green related how during one bout of delirium tremens, a “fiery-eyed devil” threatened to rip out his limbs and fingernails. Meanwhile, ex-inebriate John Gough performed convulsant DTs scenes as he imagined dodging “millions of monstrous spiders.” As speakers increasingly gained notoriety for their graphic re-enactments, middle-class observers denied the former drunkards entrance to their ranks. Accordingly, the majority of Washingtonians soon backslid into alcoholism, beginning a new cycle of drunkenness with each tavern gathering.