Booze: A Distilled History (review)

Does the subtitle A Distilled History suggest a distillation of accumulated scholarship on the history of alcohol in Canada? Or does its archness hint that this is a history for the general reader? In fact, Booze: A Distilled History is neither.

The writing style and the format are too academic for the general reader. And, as a distillation of accumulated scholarship, it simply isn't. Though a very comprehensive bibliography is provided, the analysis put forward in Booze is one that was common before any of that bibliography was written.

Essentially, the thrust of the analysis is that alcohol is relatively harmless, that prohibitionism was a failure and a dead end, that alcohol plays a useful role in male bonding and in recreation, and that the history of alcohol since Prohibition is a history of society learning to loosen up.

On the last point, the tone of the argument becomes so 1970s one almost expects to read that critics of alcohol are just 'uptight.' The reader is assured, for example, that the loosening of liquor laws in the 1970s came about because baby boomers yearned for greater freedom. Possibly they did. It is also possible they were merely self-indulgent and irresponsible. Why assert one without even considering the other?

Similarly, the reader is informed that recent indignation aimed at one premier for drunk driving and another for drunkenly throwing money at a doorman's feet shows that Canadians still have a double standard about drinking. Perhaps so. But it is surely as likely that it was not the drunkenness that caught the attention of Canadians. Their reaction against the one premier was for behaving irresponsibly, and against the other for behaving like a lout.

Booze often downplays the problems presented by alcohol, and perhaps this is what leads to an almost flippant treatment of the Prohibition movement. Certainly, it was not the cure its advocates claimed for all the physical, economic, and social ills of Canada. But it was a recognition that those ills existed, and an attempt to treat them. That gives the movement full marks for being ahead of the political parties. Rather than seeing it in isolation, then, it might be more useful to see prohibitionism as a stage in understanding the problems created by urbanism, industrialization, and capitalism, and in developing responses.

Prohibition's rapid decline in the 1920s is examined largely through anecdotes. Since bootleggers didn't keep books or diaries, there isn't much choice. But there is still a problem. To experience that problem, tell a group of friends that you once saw a car stop at a red light. Then watch the blank looks. Stories about breaking the law make good anecdotes. Stories about obeying the law don't. So it is that anecdotal evidence from the 1920s will invariably show Prohibition to have been a failure.

Some important questions are not examined at all. For example, Prohibition is frequently blamed for creating an increase in drinking, and its failure is often cited as the reason for the Prohibition movement's decline. But Canadian drinking appears to have begun to increase to around 1900, almost a generation before Prohibition (except in pei). And the organized Prohibition movement may have begun its severe decline at least as early as 1920, well before it can have been apparent that Prohibition did not work.

Then there are interesting questions about women. Booze asserts, perhaps correctly, that women were more anti-alcohol than men. So why is there evidence of an increase in drinking by women in the 1920s? To attribute this change, in any important degree, to the example of women in movies seems a stretch. As well, there is the remarkable coincidence that the vote began to turn against Prohibition precisely in the period when women got the right to vote.

There are important strengths in this book. It assembles a rich and suggestive collection of anecdotes. It is both painstaking and deft in its unravelling of provincial liquor regulations. It offers a...