Try to Control Yourself: The Regulation of Public Drinking in Post-Prohibition Ontario, 1927–44 by Dan Malleck (review)

By conducting an exhaustive reading of the records of Ontario’s Liquor Control Board of Ontario (lcbo) from the 1920s through the 1940s, Malleck dives deep into the landscape of public drinking culture in the province and provides the reader with a fascinating slice of cultural history that engages politics, commerce, class, ethnicity, and gender. Throughout the book, Malleck provides concrete examples of drinking establishments (hotels) and community members from towns and cities across Ontario, and paints a clear picture of this facet of everyday life in the province in these years. Owing to Malleck’s rich detail and invigorating writing style, we can envision the interiors of these establishments and the goings-on of their proprietors and clientele.

At its core, Try to Control Yourself explores the mechanisms the province employed to control individuals’ behaviours; thus, the main scholarly fields to which Malleck’s book contributes are the histories of bureaucratic regulation and controlling alcohol consumption. The main question he seeks to address is: after the repeal of Prohibition, how did the government extend its regulatory reach and shape citizens’ notions of what constituted proper drinking behaviour in public? Focusing on public drinking through the lens of the lcbo – the provincial regulatory agency that regulated who drank, and where, when, and what – Malleck greatly contributes to our understanding of alcohol, the state, and society.

The book challenges some prior assumptions about the oppressiveness of Ontario’s liquor control regime. Other studies have argued that the lcbo was governed by dry ideologues and was needlessly restrictive, that it consistently penalized working-class drinkers and ethnic minorities, and that it was dominated by political wheeling and dealing. Instead, Malleck demonstrates, the Board’s relationship with the public was more fluid than has often been assumed. The regulators often accommodated to local conditions and diverse personal circumstances of the liquor establishments, they did not uniformly discriminate against particular social groups, and they often were impervious to political patronage and favours.

Prohibition was repealed in Ontario in 1927 and, beginning in 1934, the main public establishments in which alcohol consumption was permitted were hotels (that is, taverns with rooms to rent), whose proprietors had to apply to the province for a license (called a beer and wine authority) to serve alcohol. Malleck’s book concentrates on the lcbo’s regulation of hotels in the years 1934–1944 and closely studies the reports written by the Board’s inspectors who visited the hotels. A litany of restrictions were placed on hotels that wished to serve alcohol: where patrons could sit, which employees could serve them, the architecture of the beverage room, where and how women could mingle with men, whether music could be played, whether dancing could be incorporated, where and how much food could be served, and a ban on gambling. The main concern of the government was to ensure respectability of the drinkers. As alcohol was reintroduced as a legal beverage, the authorities sought to maintain tight controls on propriety in accordance with public concerns. The anti-drink sentiments that had led to the enactment of Prohibition were still quite strong among certain segments of the population. And yet, government officials did not want to be too restrictive, for fear that they would instigate illegal liquor commerce – bootlegging and blind pigs. Thus, the province’s objective was to maintain a balance: closely regulating the conditions of public drinking to maintain moderation, order, and respectability while allowing enough opportunities for social alcohol consumption so that drinkers would not be driven to underground outlets which were seen as a threat both to lawfulness and to tax revenue collection. While the lcbo did not open the flood-gates and permit liberal drinking, neither did it represent a continuation of the prohibitionist mindset. Malleck argues that the lcbo’s regulatory regime reversed the earlier trajectory of drying out the province; instead, it stood between the...