The boys and their booze: Masculinities and public drinking in working-class Hamilton, 1890-1946

Canadian Historical Review

Volumn 86, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 411-452

  Heron, Craig ^a  

^a YORK UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

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EID: 33749427572     PISSN: 00083755     EISSN: 17101093     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3138/CHR/86.3.411     Document Type: Review

References (163)

1. Hamilton Spectator [hereafter cited as HS], 20 Oct. 1924, 5;
2. Homeside Hotel, 15 Nov. 1945, RG 26-8 (Liquor Control Board of Ontario, Establishment Files), Archives of Ontario [hereafter cited as AO]. A few weeks later, another letter on the same subject arrived in the same file from the 'Boys from the Glass Works.'
3. Craig Heron, Booze: A Distilled History (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2003), 169-85.
4. The most sensitive analysis of these issues is found in Robert W. Connell's work, especially Masculinities (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995),
5. and The Men and the Boys (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
6. See also Ava Baron, 'On Looking at Men: Masculinity and the Making of a Gendered Working-class History,' in Feminists Revision History, ed. Ann-Louise Shapiro (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 146-71;
7. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995);
8. Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996);
9. Joy Parr, 'Gender History and Historical Practice,' in Gender and History in Canada, ed. Joy Parr and Mark Rosenfeld (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1996), 8-27;
10. and The Gender of Breadwinners: Men, Women, and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880-1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990);
11. Jock Phillips, A Man's Country? The Image of the Pakeha Male: A History (Auckland: Penguin, 1987);
12. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1994);
13. John Tosh, 'What Should Historians Do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Britain,' History Workshop 38 (Fall 1994): 179-202.
14. See, in particular, Bettina Bradbury, Working Families: Age, Gender, and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993);
15. Suzanne Morton, Ideal Surroundings: Domestic Life in a Working-class Suburb in the 1920s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995);
16. Mark Rosenfeld, '"It Was a Hard Life": Class and Gender in the Work and Family Rhythms of a Railway Town, 1920-1950,' in Canadian Family History: Selected Readings, ed. Bettina Bradbury (Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman, 1992), 241-80.
17. Ava Baron, 'Questions of Gender: Deskilling and Demasculinization in the U.S. Printing Trade, 1830-1915,' Gender and History 1 (Summer 1979): 178-99;
18. Ava Baron, ed., Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991);
19. Christina Burr, 'Defending "The Art Preservative": Class and Gender Relations in the Printing Trades Unions, 1850-1914,' Labour/Le Travail 31 (Spring 1993): 47-73;
20. Roger Horowitz, ed., Boys and Their Toys? Masculinity, Class, and Technology in America (New York: Routledge, 2001);
21. Keith McClelland, 'Masculinity and the "Representative Artisan" in Britain, 1850-80,' in Manful Assertions, ed. Michael Roper and John Tosh (London: Routledge, 1991), 74-91;
22. David Montgomery, 'Workers' Control of Machine Production in the Nineteenth Century,' in Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 9-31;
23. Parr, Gender of Breadwinners, 123-228.
24. Canadian material includes Stephen Maynard, '"Horrible Temptations": Sex, Men, and Working-class Male Youth in Urban Ontario, 1890-1935,' Canadian Historical Review 78 (June 1997): 191-235;
25. Thomas W. Dunk, It's a Working Man's Town: Male Working-class Culture in Northwestern Ontario (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991);
26. Colin Howell, ¢Manly Sport: Baseball and the Social Construction of Masculinity,' in Gender and History in Canada, ed. Parr and Rosenfeld, 187-210;
27. Lynne Marks, Revivals and Roller Rinks: Religion, Leisure, and Identity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Small-Town Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996);
28. Stephen Maynard, "Through a Hole in the Lavatory Wall: Homosexual Subcultures, Police Surveillance, and the Dialectics of Discovery, Toronto, 1890-1930,' in Gender and History in Canada, ed. Parr and Rosenfeld, 165-84;
29. Mike O'Brien, 'Manhood and the Militia Myth: Masculinity, Class, and Militarism in Ontario, 1902-1914,' Labour/Le Travailleur 42 (Fall 1998): 115-41;
30. Steve Penfold, 'Have You No Manhood in You? Gender and Class in the Cape Breton Coal Towns, 1920-26,' in Gender and History in Canada, ed. Parr and Rosenfeld, 270-93.
31. Karen Dubinsky, Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880-1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993);
32. Karen Dubinsky and Adam Giwertz, '"It Was Only a Matter of Passion": Masculinity and Sexual Danger,' in Gendered Pasts: Historical Essays in Femininity and Masculinity in Canada, ed. Kathryn McPherson, Cecilia Morgan, and Nancy M. Forestell (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1999), 65-79;
33. Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997);
34. Carolyn Strange, Toronto's Girl Problem: The Perils and Pleasures of the City, 1880-1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).
35. The tendency of some writers to describe this disruption as a 'crisis of masculinity' is not helpful, since the term assumes a pre-existing period of fixed stability, rather than one of regular challenges. The issue of 'crisis' is addressed in Connell, Masculinities, 84;
36. Michael S. Kimmel, "The Contemporary "Crisis" of Masculinity in Historical Perspective,' in The Making of Masculinities: The New Men's Studies, ed. Harry Brod (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1987), 121-54;
37. Parr, 'Gender History and Historical Practice,' 17.
38. Craig Heron, 'The High School and the Household Economy in Working-class Hamilton, 1890-1940,' Historical Studies in Education 7 (Fall 1995), 217-59.
39. Cynthia Comacchio, 'Dancing to Perdition: Adolescence and Leisure in Interwar English Canada,' Journal of Canadian Studies 32 (Autumn 1997): 5-35;
40. David Howell and Peter Lindsay, 'Social Gospel and the Young Boy Problem, 1895-1925,' in Sports in Canada: Historical Readings, ed. Morris Mott (Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman, 1989), 220-33;
41. David I. Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, the YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983);
42. Neil Sutherland, Children in English-Canadian Society: Framing the Twentieth-Century Consensus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 91-151.
43. Mark Moss, Manliness and Militarism: Educating Young Boys in Ontario for War (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2001);
44. John Tosh, 'Imperial Masculinity and the Flight from Domesticity in Britain, 1880-1914,' in Gender and Colonialism, ed. Timothy P. Foley, Lionel Pilkington, Sean Ryder, and Elizabeth Tilley (Galway: Galway University Press, 1995), 72-85.
45. Craig Heron, 'Working-class Hamilton, 1895-1930' (PhD thesis, Dalhousie University, 1981);
46. Working in Steel: The Early Years in Canada 1883-1935 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1988);
47. and 'The Second Industrial Revolution in Canada, 1890-1930,' in Class, Community, and the Labour Movement: Wales and Canada, 1850-1930, ed. Deian R. Hopkin and Gregory S. Kealey (Aberystwyth and St John's: Society for Welsh Labour History and the Canadian Committee on Labour History, 1989), 48-66.
48. Steven Maynard has challenged the inadequate treatment of gender in my work; see 'Rough Work and Rugged Men: The Social Construction of Masculinity in Working-class History,' Labour/Le Travail 23 (Spring 1989): 159-69;
49. and 'Queer Musings on Masculinity and History,' Labour'/Le Travail 42 (Fall 1998): 183-97.
50. For a gender-sensitive approach to male workers in mass production, see Stephen Meyer, 'Work, Play, and Power: Masculine Culture on the Automotive Shop Floor, 1930-1960,' in Boys and Their Toys? ed. Horowitz, 12-32;
51. and 'Rough Manhood: The Aggressive and Confrontational Shop Culture of US Auto Workers during World War II,' Journal of Social History 36 (Fall 2002): 125-47.
52. Peter Baskerville and Eric Sager, Unwilling Idlers: The Urban Unemployed and Their Families in Late Victorian Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998);
53. Terry Copp, The Anatomy of Poverty: The Condition of the Working Class in Montreal, 1897-1929 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974), 30-43;
54. Michael J. Piva, The Condition of the Working Class in Toronto, 1900-1921 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1979), 27-86.
55. Carol Lee Bacchi, Liberation Deferred? The Ideas of the English-Canadian Suffragists, 1877-1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983);
56. Strange, Toronto's Girl Problem; Veronica Strong-Boag, The New Day Recalled: The Lives of Girls and Women in English Canada, 1919-1939 (Toronto: Penguin, 1988).
57. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994);
58. Maynard, 'Through a Hole in the Lavatory Wall'; and 'Horrible Temptations.'
59. Sharon Anne Cook, 'Through Sunshine and Shadow': The Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Evangelicalism, and Reform in Ontario, 1874-1930 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995);
60. Suzanne Morton, At Odds: Gambling and Canadians, 1919-1969 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003);
61. Robert Jarrett Rudy, '"Manly Smokes": Tobacco Consumption and the Construction of Identities in Industrial Montreal, 1888-1914' (PhD diss., McGill University, 2001);
62. Mariana Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991).
63. I attempt to unravel that process in 'Boys Will Be Boys: Working-class Masculinities in the Age of Mass Production,' International Labor and Working-class History (forthcoming).
64. Donald A. Garvie, Growing Up in the City (Dundas: Darm Publishing, n.d.);
65. Wayne Roberts, ed., Organizing Westinghouse: Alf Ready's Story (Hamilton, ON: McMaster University Labour Studies Programme, 1979).
66. See also Morton, Ideal Surroundings, 67-87;
67. Jane Synge, 'The Transition from School to Work: Growing Up Working Class in Early 20th Century Hamilton, Ontario,' in Childhood and Adolescence in Canada, ed. K. Ishwaran (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1979), 249-69;
68. 'Young Working Class Women in Early 20th Century Hamilton: Their Work and Family Lives,' in Proceedings of the Workshop Conference on Blue-collar Workers and Their Communities ., ed, A.H. Turritin (Toronto, 1976), 137-45;
69. and 'Immigrant Communities: British and Continental European in Early Twentieth Century Hamilton, Canada,' Oral History 4 (Autumn 1976): 38-51.
70. Harry Hendrick, Images of Youth: Age, Class, and the Male Youth Problem, 1880-1920 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990);
71. Heron, 'High School and Household Economy,' 217-59;
72. Stephen Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working-class Childhood and Youth, 1889-1939 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982);
73. Robert Stamp, The Schools of Ontario, 1876-1976 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 74-96;
74. Neil Sutherland, Growing Up: Childhood in English Canada from the Great War to the Age of Television (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 186-219.
75. Macleod, Building Character, 3-28;
76. E. Anthony Rotundo, 'Boy Culture: Middle-class Boyhood in Nineteenth-Century America,' in Meanings for Manhood: Constructing Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 15-36.
77. Joy Parr discusses the divergent streams of masculine identity within particular occupations in Gender of Breadwinners, 165-86.
78. See Anthony B. Chan, 'Bachelor Workers,' in A Nation of Immigrants: Women, Workers, and Communities in Canadian History, 1840s-1860s, ed. Franca Iacovetta with Paula Draper and Robert Ventresca (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 231-50;
79. Chauncey, Gay New York;
80. Howard P. Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999);
81. Nancy Forestall, 'Bachelors, Boarding-houses, and Blind Pigs: Gender Construction in a Multi-Ethnic Mining Camp, 1909-1920,' in Nation of Immigrants, ed. Iacovetta et al., 251-90;
82. Robert F. Harney, 'Men without Women: Italian Migrants in Canada, 1885-1930,' in Nation of Immigrants, ed. Iacovetta et al., 206-30;
83. Ross McCormack, 'Wobblies and Blanketstiffs: The Constituency of the IWW in Western Canada,' in Lectures in Canadian Labour and Working-class History, eds. W.J.C. Chernwinsld and G.S. Kealey (St John's, NL: Committee on Canadian Labour History, 1985), 115-26.
84. Only a tiny percentage of Hamilton men married before the age of twenty, and, throughout the period, most waited until their mid- to late twenties. The 1921 census-takers recorded that ninety-nine per cent of males aged fifteen to nineteen, seventy-six per cent of those aged twenty to twenty-four, forty-one per cent of those twenty-five to twenty-nine, and only twenty-two per cent aged thirty to thirty-four were single. Of all males over fourteen, roughly one third were single - that is, some 13,000 men. Over the next twenty years, these proportions changed little, except for a noticeable drop in the number of bachelors in the twenty-five to twenty-nine age bracket (the new wartime boom in the early 1940s may well have sparked a new surge of marriages). Ontario, Office of the Registrar General, Annual Reports (Toronto), 1890-1924 (there are no published breakdowns by city after this date);
85. Comacchio, 'Dancing to Perdition,' 10-11;
86. Enrico Cumbo, 'Italians in Hamilton, 1900-40,' Polyphony 7 (Fall/Winter 1985): 28-36;
87. Heron, 'Working-class Hamilton,' 288-342.
88. Synge, 'Immigrant Communities'; 'Transition from School to Work'; and 'Young Working Class Women.'
89. Canada, Census, 1921, 142, 153-4;
90. Synge, 'Young Working Class Women'; and 'Transition from School to Work.'
91. By the turn of the century, the public holidays on the Canadian calendar consisted of New Year's Day, Easter, Victoria (or Empire) Day, Dominion Day, Labour Day, and Christmas. See Craig Heron and Steve Penfold, The Workers' Festival: A History of Labour Day in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).
92. Some of these men became more visible when their wives took them to court for non-support; see Annalee Golz, '"If a Man's Wife Does Not Obey Him, What Can He Do?" Marital Breakdown and Wife Abuse in Late Nineteenth Century and Early Twentieth Century Ontario,' in Law, Society, and the State: Essays in Modern Legal History, ed. Louis Knafla and Susan W.S. Binnie (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 323-50;
93. and Lorna McLean, '"Deserving" Wives and "Drunken" Husbands: Wife Beating, Marital Conduct, and the Law in Ontario, 1850-1910,' Histoire sociale/Social History 35 (May 2002): 59-81.
94. Edith I. Burley, Servants of the Honourable Company: Work, Discipline, and Conflict in the Hudson's Bay Company, 1770-1879 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997);
95. Peter DeLottinville, 'Joe Beef of Montreal: Working Class Culture and the Tavern, 1869-1889,' Labour/Le Travailleur 8-9 (Autumn 1981/Spring 1982): 9-40;
96. Heron, Booze, 30-49.
97. Kevin B. Walmsley and Robert S. Kossuth, 'Fighting It Out in Nineteenth-Century Upper Canada/Canada West: Masculinities and Physical Challenges in the Tavern,' Journal of Sport History 27 (Fall 2000): 405-30.
98. Cook, 'Through Sunshine and Shadow';
99. Jan Noel, Canada Dry: Temperance Crusades before Confederation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995);
100. Ruth Elizabeth Spence, Prohibition in Canada (Toronto: Ontario Branch of the Dominion Alliance, 1919).
101. The most revealing statement about this bachelor drinking in North America was Jack London's John Barleycorn (Toronto: Bell and Cockburn, 1913).
102. William Kilbourn, The Elements Combined: A History of the Steel Company of Canada (Toronto: Clark, Irwin, 1960), 120;
103. Canada, Royal Commission on the Liquor Traffic, Minutes of Evidence (Ottawa: Queen's Printer, 1895), vol. 4, pt. 1, 181, 209. In 1914 a petition signed by thirty-five large firms in the East End objected to a new liquor store licence, which would allegedly be 'injurious to the moral welfare of the district.' HH, 9 Feb. 1914.
104. Tighter state regulation of drinking had won out over full-scale prohibition in the two decades before the war. Ontario's voters had voted in provincial and national plebiscites on totally shutting down the 'liquor traffic' in 1894, 1898, and 1902, and Hamilton's ratepayers voted on a series of municipal measures to reduce the number of licences issued to shops and hotels. HS, 30 Sept. 1898, 8; 5 Dec. 1902, 10; 7 Jan. 1913, 1; 2 Jan. 1915, 1; HH, 18 Nov. 1908, 10; 3 Jan. 1911, 6; 21 Apr. 1911, 1; Canada, Department of Agriculture, Statistical Year-Book of Canada, 1900 (Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1901), 567.
105. James L. Sturgis looks at early enforcement practices in '"Whiskey Detectives" in Town: The Enforcement of the Liquor Laws in Hamilton, Ontario, c. 1870-1900,' in Policing the Empire: Government, Authority, and Control, 18830-1940, ed. David M. Anderson and David Killingray (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 202-18.
106. Ontario, Report of the Operation of the Liquor License Acts (Toronto: King's Printer, 1916)-49.
107. HS, 29 Mar. 1900, 8; 8 Sept. 1900, 8; 12 Jan. 1910, 12; 23 June 1910, 12; 3 Aug. 1910, 12; 23 Aug. 1910, 10; 14 Sept. 1910, 12; 21 Sept. 1910, 12; 27 Oct. 1910, 16; 30 Nov. 1910, 4; 7 Dec. 1910, 14; 29 Dec. 1910, 11; 1 June 1916, 15 (see also reference in n. 32). In 1910 one member of Hamilton's Board of Licence Commissioners claimed that 'there were more drunken men on the streets on Sundays since the [saloons] afterhour business had been cut off than there were before, because blind pigs had become quite numerous.' HH, 19 Apr. 1910, 7. The alleged blind pigs were apparently small-scale operations, which would 'only sell to men of their own nationality,' and would 'make sure that the purchaser is well known to them.' HS, 1 June 1916, 15. The police made no serious efforts to clean up this 'immorality' and tended to target the more vulnerable immigrants; see John Weaver, 'Social Control, Martial Conformity, and Community Entanglement: The Varied Beat of the Hamilton Police, 1895-1920,' Urban History Review 19 (Oct. 1990): 113-27.
108. Methodist-Presbyterian, Social Survey, 19-21.
109. These surveys are discussed in Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, A Full-Orb'd Christianity: The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900-1940 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996);
110. and Alan Hunt, 'Measuring Morals: The Beginnings of the Social Survey Movement in Canada, 1913-1917,' Histoire sociale/Social History 35 (May 2002): 171-94.
111. H. Julia Roberts, 'Taverns and Tavern-Goers in Upper Canada: The 1790s to the 1850s' (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1999).
112. For the fullest recent study, see Madelon Powers, Faces along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman's Saloon, 1870-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). The usefulness of saloons was apparent in 1910 when the local Board of Licence Commissioners decided not to cut off the licence of the Stockyards Hotel 'owing to the large number of meals it served daily to employees of the east end factories,' but axed a few others because they provided no real accommodation. HH, 21 Apr. 1910, 1.
113. The term is used to denote a distinctly new phase of industrial- capitalist development that began in Canada at the turn of the century and incorporated new managerial schemes, technology, and labour-recruitment practices into much larger, corporate-controlled workplaces. In the same spring as the local social survey, the machinists' local business agent reported that 'Mr. Taylor's system of scientific shop management is in use in some shops here.' Machinists' Monthly Journal 25 (June 1913): 588.
114. Joseph R. Gusfield, 'Passage To Play: Rituals of Drinking Time in American Society,' in Constructive Drinking: Perspectives on Drink from Anthropology, ed. Mary Douglas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 73-90.
115. Robert E. Popham, Working Papers on the Tavern, 2: Legislative History of the Ontario Tavern, 1774-1974 (Toronto: Addiction Research Foundation, substudy no. 809, 1976), 7, 29.
116. London, John Barleycorn;
117. Powers, Faces along the Bar.
118. One of the most influential books in the post-World War Two 'alcohol-studies' field was a study published in 1969 that compared the behaviour of drunks across many cultures and discovered that there was no consistent pattern that could be attributed to 'the release of inhibitions,' as so many writers had previously assumed. The authors concluded that the drunken comportment was culturally constructed and that drunks acted out well-understood scripts of behavioural expectations. See C. MacAndrew and R.B. Edgerton, Drunken Comportment (Chicago: Aldine, 1969).
119. These behaviour patterns are evident in newspaper reports of police-court proceedings during 1900, 1910, and 1920. For 1900, see HS, 20 Feb., 8; 2 Mar., 8; 7 Mar., 8; 16 Mar., 8; 2 Apr., 8; 9 Apr., 8; 14 Apr., 8; 25 Apr., 8; 3 May, 8; 3 May, 8; 9 May, 8; 11 May, 8; 25 May, 8; 28 May, 8; 31 May, 8; 2 June, 8; 12 June, 8; 3 July, 8; 11 July, 8; 25 July, 8; 3 Aug., 8; 6 Aug., 8; 14 Aug., 8; 25 Aug., 8; 28 Aug., 8; 30 Aug., 8; 31 Aug., 8; 7 Sept., 8; 12 Sept., 8; 21 Sept., 8; 26 Sept., 8; 8 Oct., 8; 13 Nov., 8; 12 Dec, 8; 24 Dec, 8; for 1910, see Ibid., 5 Jan., 12; 15 Feb., 12; 14 Mar., 12; 15 Mar., 12; 18 Mar., 20; 8 Apr., 15; 11 Apr., 12; 2 May, 1; 9 May, 14; 13 May, 20; 16 May, 14; 23 May, 14; 25 May, 14; 6 June, 12; 11 June, 1; 4 Aug., 10; 5 Aug., 4; 15 Aug., 10; 22 Aug., 12; 21 Oct., 20; 27 Oct., 16; 28 Oct., 12; 11 Nov., 11; 24 Nov., 14; 8 Dec, 14; 21 Dec, 9; and, for 1920, see Ibid., 14 Apr., 17; 28 Apr., 21; 12 July, 7; 16 Dec, 23. The mid-nineteenth-century pattern of violence and competitiveness in defence of masculine honour and pride is discussed in Walmsley and Kossuth, 'Fighting It Out'; see also Michael Kaplan, 'New York City Tavern Violence and the Creation of a Working-class Male Identity,' Journal of the Early Republic 15 (Winter 1995): 591-617;
120. and Elaine Frantz Parsons, 'Risky Business: The Uncertain Boundaries of Manhood in the Midwestern Saloon,' Journal of Social History 34 (Winter 2000): 283-307.
121. For a Toronto police-court reporter's reflections on the drunks who washed up in court, see Harry M. Wodson, The Whirlpool: Scenes from Toronto Police Court (Toronto: n.p., 1917), 102-15.
122. Hamilton Police, Annual Reports, series A, 1900-1905, 1909, 1912-13, 1915, RG 10, Special Collections, Hamilton Public Library [hereafter cited as HPL]; Police Regis-ters, series M, 1909-10; HS, 4 Mar. 1910, 4; 9 May 1910, 14; 6 June 1910, 12; 11 June 1910, 1.
123. See, for example, HS, 27 Sept., 1900, 8; 2 Oct. 1900, 8; 8 Oct. 1900, 8; 28 Dec. 1900, 8; 4 May 1910, 14; 21 May 1910, 12; 25 May 1910, 14; 13 June 1910, 12; 3 Aug. 1910, 12; 16 Aug. 1910, 10; 26 Oct. 1910, 14; 15 Nov. 1910, 12. For more on this kind of domestic conflict, see Golz, '"If a Man's Wife Does Not Obey Him'";
124. and McLean, '"Deserving" Wives and "Drunken" Husbands.'
125. Many witnesses before the Royal Commission on the Liquor Traffic had testified to declining consumption and public drunkenness during the serious slump of the first half of that decade. See also Canada, Inland Revenues, Report (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1917), pt. 1, xvi, for statistics that show drops in national per capita consumption at that point and in the economically depressed years of 1908-9 and 1914-15.
126. Edward Arthur Warwick Smith, 'The Dialectics of Faith: Laity, Clergy, and Church Life in Three Hamilton Anglican Parishes, 1889-1914' (PhD diss., University of Guelph, 1999). Later the same year, the Hamilton Trades and Labor Council affirmed its toleration of such moderate consumption when it revised its standing policy on booze in its meeting hall; it refused to ban alcohol from the premises but allowed only bottled beer (and not kegs). Hamilton Trades and Labor Council, Minutes, 3 Oct. 1913, 321-2, Special Collections, HPL.
127. The trend toward much more lavish furnishings had drawn its inspiration from Britain, where the 'gin palaces' had begun to introduce such decor as early as the 1830s. Robert Elwall, Bricks and Beer: English Pub Architecture, 1830-1939 (London: British Architectural Library, 1983);
128. Mark Girouard, Victorian Pubs (London: Studio Vista, 1975).
129. Andrew Davies, Leisure, Gender, and Poverty: Working-class Culture in Salford and Manchester, 1900-1939 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992).
130. and 'Alan Studholme,' Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Volume 14: 1911 to 1920 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 976-80;
131. Brian Paul Trainor, 'Towards a Genealogy of Temperance: Identity, Belief, and Drink in Victorian Ontario' (PhD diss., Queen's University 1993), 190-250;
132. Samuel Walker, 'Terence V. Powderly, the Knights of Labor, and the Temperance Issue,' Societas 5 (Autumn 1975): 279-93;
133. Gregory S. Kealey and Bryan D. Palmer, Dreaming of What Might Be: The Knights of Labor in Ontario, 1880-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982);
134. Ronald Morris Benson, 'American Workers and Temperance Reform, 1866-1933' (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 1974);
135. For the story of Ontario's Prohibition experience, see James Dubro and Robin F. Rowland, King of the Mob: Rocco Perri and the Women Who Ran His Rackets (Toronto: Viking, 1987);
136. Gerald A. Hallowell, Prohibition in Ontario, 1919-1923 (Ottawa: Ontario Historical Society, 1972);
137. C.W. Hunt, Booze, Boats, and Billions: Smuggling Liquid Gold!(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1988);
138. Peter Oliver, G. Howard Ferguson, Ontario Tory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 137-9, 143, 159-69, 265, 269-80.
139. The main suppliers were doctors willing to write prescriptions for alcohol (which were then filled at new government dispensaries), small-scale bootleggers, some of them women, operating out of their own premises (by 1925 the Hamilton Herald estimated that there were 'fully 2,000 private houses in Hamilton selling bootleg whisky, real beer or some kind of booze'), hotel-keepers (most of them, according to an Ontario Provincial Police inspector, who quietly continued to offer full-strength drinks), and brash entrepreneurs like Hamilton's Rocco Perri (self-styled 'king of the bootleggers') who organized the distribution. On bootlegging activities in Hamilton, see the following files from RG 36-8, the AO]: Old City Public House, 12 Dec. 1923, box 62; Jockey Club, 27 Aug. 1926, box 181; Wellington, 3 Feb. 1928, 21 Jan, 1929, box 181, See also Dubro and Rowland, King of the Mob;
140. Hallowell, Prohibition in Ontario, 96-129;
141. Hunt, Booze, Boats, and Billions;
142. and Whiskey and Ice: The Saga of Ben Kerr, Canada's Most Daring Rumrunner (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1995).
143. On the growing consumption of spirits, see HH, 11 Sept. 1918, 1; 21 Feb. 1922, 1; HS, 18 Jan. 1919, 7; W.F. Nickle, In the Debates on the Address in Reply to the Speech from the Throne, February l7th, 1925, 11, LCBO Archives. In the United States, a 1932 study commissioned by the anti-Prohibition forces reported, 'The working class is consuming not more than half as much alcohol per capita as formerly,' and a survey of social workers reached similar conclusions. Clark Warburton, The Economic Results of Prohibition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 202.
144. Peter Archibald's interviews with elderly Hamilton residents similarly reveal that many cut back their alcohol consumption in the 1930s; 'Do Status Differences among Workers Make a Difference During Economic Crises? The Case of Depression Hamilton,' Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 35 (May 1998), 143.
145. Looking over the consumption statistics for the 1920s, Ontario's Liquor Control Board concluded in 1929, 'The results plainly show that economic conditions, rather than laws, influence the gross sale of liquor.' Ontario, Liquor Control Board, Report (Toronto: King's Printer, 1929), 10.
146. Robert E. Popham and Wolfgang Schmidt, comps., Statistics of Alcohol Use and Alcoholism in Canada, 1871-1956 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958), 37-8;
147. Ben H. Spence, 'Prohibitory Legislation in Canada,' in American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Annals 109 (September 1923): 259-64.
148. HS, 17 Oct. 1924, 5; Weaver, 'Social Control, Martial Conformity, and Community Entanglement.'
149. Oliver, G. Howard Ferguson, 137-9, 143, 159-69, 265, 269-80;
150. Heron, 'Working-Class Hamilton,' 550-9;
151. Ontario, Liquor Control Board, Reports, 1927-46. For examples of the moral regulation exercised through the new stores, see LCBO Archives, Circular Letters, 30 (30 June 1927), 324 (5 Apr. 1928), 333 (18 Apr. 1928), 450 (16 Aug. 1928), 526 (1 Nov. 1928), 750 (10 July 1929), 692 (24 Apr. 1929), 759 (23 July 1929), 807 (3 Oct. 1929), 917 (11 Feb. 1930), 1105 (2 Oct. 1930), 1112 (16 Oct. 1930), 1264 (5 June 1931), 1879 (29 Apr. 1937), [unnumbered] 18, 28 July 1927; 15 Mar. 1928, 11 May 1928, 24 Oct. 1930.
152. During 1932, the brewery-backed Moderation League organized a factory-by-factory plebiscite across the province, apparently with the full co-operation of local industrialists. The results of this informal poll were overwhelmingly positive. Nearly fifteen hundred workers in nine Hamilton factories participated in the plebiscite, two-thirds of whom supported beer by the glass. To get action ultimately took the combined pressure of veterans, labour, and breweries, along with hotels concerned about their disadvantage in the tourist trade after the United States ended Prohibition in 1933. For a resolution to Premier Ferguson from the Hamilton branch of the Army and Navy Veterans' Association, see HS, 7 Apr. 1930, 7. The Conservative government delayed proclaiming the legislation until after the election, which it lost, but the new Liberal administration under Mitch Hepburn wasted no time in activating it. File: Liquor Control Operation, 1932, MU 1748, Henry Papers, AO; John T. Saywell, 'Just Call Me Mitch': The Life of Mitchell F. Hepburn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1991), 119-22, 140-4, 170, 174-6.
153. For a fascinating analysis of these new drinking places in British Columbia, see Robert A. Campbell, Sit Down and Drink Your Beer: Regulating Vancouver's Beer Parlours, 1925-1954 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).
154. Davies, Leisure, Gender, and Poverty;
155. David W. Gutzke, 'Gender, Class, and Public Drinking in Britain during the First World War,' Histoire sociale/Social History 27 (Nov. 1994): 367-91; HS, 21 Oct. 1919, 6; 10 Oct. 1924, 5; Liquor Control Operation, 1932, MS 1748, Henry Papers, AO;
156. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986);
157. Strange, Toronto's Girl Problem; Strong-Boag, New Day Recalled.
158. RG 36-8, AO: Terminal, 30 July 1935, box 18; Savoy, 15 Aug. 1939, box 350; Strand, 27 Apr. 1845, 19 May 1945, box 367. Robert Campbell explores the struggles of British Columbia's female drinkers to find a place for themselves within that province's beer parlours in 'Ladies and Escorts: Gender Segregation and Public Policy in British Columbia Beer Parlours, 1925-1945,' BC Studies 77 (Spring 1988): 30-53;
159. and Sit Down and Drink Your Beer, 51-77.
160. For an eloquent statement on the importance of finding the body in history, see Joy Parr, 'Notes for a More Sensuous History of Twentieth-Century Canada: The Timely, the Tacit, and the Material Body,' Canadian Historical Review 82 (Dec. 2001): 720-45.
161. See Valerie Hey, Patriarchy and Pub Culture (London: Tavistock, 1986);
162. Geoffrey Hunt and Saundra Satterlee, 'Darts, Drink, and the Pub: The Culture of Female Drinking,' Sociological Review 35 (Aug. 1987): 575-601;
163. Anna Kraack, 'It Takes Two to Tango: The Place of Women in the Construction of Masculinity in a Student Pub,' in Masculinities in Aotearoa/New Zealand, ed. Robin Law, Hugh Campbell, and John Dolan (Palmerston North, NZ: Dunmore Press, 1999), 153-65.