Manners and Southern History

Fifty Percent Moonshine and Fifty Percent Moonshine: Social Life and College Youth Culture in Alabama, 1913–1933

Fifty Percent Moonshine and Fifty Percent Moonshine Social Life and CollegeYouth Culturein Alabama, 1913-1933 Lisa Lindquist Dorr "The only time a girl does not want the spotlight on her iswhen she is on a wild party/' remarkeda short entry in the first edition of the Rammer Jammer , the Universityof Alabama'snew student humor magazine.Introduced in 1924 during Prohibition, the Rammer Jammer confirmed the connection between alcohol and the social relationships between men and women.1 After alluding to young coeds partying with abandon, the entry continued, "All shewantsthen ismoonshine, fifty percent moonshine and fifty percent moonshine."2 Dating, college life, and getting "tight" walkedhand in hand on the Universityof Alabama campus, placing Alabama in the mainstream of the youth culture of the 1920S.3 This is not to say that all college students, much less all women, went on "wild parties," nor that they all engaged in the new social customs of youth. Mannersand morality werecontested issues in college townsacross the country. As Paula Pass has shown, in the 1920$, college youth created new forms of heterosocial interaction that caused parents, administrators, clergymen, and even fellow students endless concern.4 Alabama was nodifferent from elsewhere.Nevertheless,the forms of socialinteraction that characterized relationshipsbetween southern men and womenin the 19205 were not solely the result of the dislocations of WorldWar I and the rise of modernism thereafter. Suchactivities appeared in 1913and 1914, and illuminate the transition away from traditional forms of courtship. Bythe 19205, the white students who attended Alabama'smajor white state universitiesconsciously sawthemselves as part of a national college scene characterizedby 45 46 Social Life and College Youth Culture in Alabama, 1913-1933 dating, petting, and drinking, but one that had a peculiarly southern cast.5 Alabama's college dating rituals redefined the calculation of white women's value, believing that it no longer resided solely in their virtue. Instead, college attitudes suggest that women could increase their sexual capital, and thus their worth as desirable women, by spending it, rather than saving it. To adults, however, women's virtue was a fragile commodity that required protection, not only from the black beast rapist, but also from white college men and college women's own desires. Sexualized behavior rendered women common and cheap and needed to be controlled at all costs if respectable white women were to continue to be self-evident proof of white superiority. While Alabama reflects well-established patterns of the youth culture of the 19205, the distinctive racial and classenvironment of the segregated South during prohibition shaped Alabama's college life, as well as the efforts adults—parents, college administrators, and the Klan—exerted to contain their seemingly waywardyouth.6 By the 1920$, the youth culture on college campuses openly celebrated dating and rituals of physical intimacy like necking and petting. While the sexual component of dating relationships seemed to blossom after World War I, the diary of one female student at the Universityof Alabama between January 1913 and September 1914 suggests that the "promiscuous" dating and dancing of the 1920$ was nothing entirely new. Daphne Cunningham rated and dated with the best of them.7 Shelived at home with her parents within walking distance of the University. Shewas a member of the Kappa Delta sorority, took classes in history, Latin, and English, and received a bachelor of arts degree in I9i6.8 Her life, or at least the aspects of it she deemed worth recording for posterity , however, centered on dating, a word that she herself used. In both 1913 and 1914, she listed social activities with fifty-five different men.Virtually every day a variety of men walked her home from classes, spent time with her at her home, took a meal with her family, and accompanied her to some form of commercial entertainment. She frequently attended movies with men—fifty-three times in 1913, and forty-three times in the first nine months of her 1914 diary. Most Sundays, a young man took her for Sunday dinner at a local hotel, though she rarely attended church unless it was on a date. She attended twenty-four university dances in 1913, and nineteen in 1914. She took rides with men, both in buggies and in cars. Shewent to University athletic events, concerts, and plays, went "to town" in the late afternoon or evening (or both), played bridge, had picnics, and even made Lisa Lindquist Dorr 47 candy on a...