The New Temperance: The American Obsession with Sin and Vice

Abstract

The New Temperance: The American Obsession with Sin and Vice, by David Wagner (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997), $16 paper, $60 cloth. Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History, by John Burnham (New York: New York University Press, 1993), $19.50 paper. The study of drug use was preoccupied with deviance until realization that deviance was a moving target shifted our attention to the normal. In 20-century America, normalcy is cultural property of metynomic middle class (DeMott, 1990). Like true north on compass, this class locates others. Disproportionately powerful in normative and political realms, it shapes iconic American Society. Two recent books-sociologist David Wagner's The New Temperance and historian John Burnham's Bad Habitsexamine middle class and its attitudes toward pleasures of flesh. Both books consider use of psychoactive drugs as well as a set of related practices: sexual behavior (in both books) and vices of gambling and swearing (in Burnham's book). They offer analyses of tension between pleasure and repression-or, if you prefer, self-indulgence and self-control-in American middle class. Burnham covers period from mid-19th century to late 1960s; Wagner's chronology begins where Burnham's ends. In these two books, Gusfield's dictum [t]he sociologist picks up where historian closes (Gusfield, 1969:2) is literally true. These equally compelling books are incompatible with each other. Burnham argues that middle class has sunk ever deeper into intemperance and hedonistic amorality, while Wagner argues that same group has become increasingly judgmental and abstemious. Wagner believes United States has become more repressive and intolerant, while Burnham argues that it has embraced tolerance at cost of civility. Maybe both arguments are valid and some huge change occurred around 1970. Maybe each argument reflects disciplinary limits of its author. Maybe each analysis is skewed by politics of its author. Maybe both authors are undone by same methodological error: search for confirmatory evidence and dismissal of disconfirmatory data. Maybe all of above are true-in any event, both books are worth reading. Each author's endpoint is shaped by his opening assumptions about whether this country is going to hell in a handbasket (as my grandmother would have put it) or run by a bunch of damned bluenoses (as my grandfather would have put it). Neither author provides particularly convincing evidence of ubiquity of values and practices around which his work is organized,* but each author's contentions have some ring of truth. Read in tandem, these books force closer inquiry about trends in middle-class values and personal behavior as well as their connection to public policy. Wagner begins with a conviction that a new exists in United States. He argues that it is characterized by repression of and intolerance for pleasures of body: certain kinds of food (high in fat, in sugar), forms of sexual relationships (multiple partners, unsafe sex), some patterns of alcohol use (frequent, dose), and use of other drugs (tobacco, marijuana). He assumes that past decades have been a period of high claimsmaking in this multistage arena (p. 42) and that a global impulse to temperance underlies changes in each area. Burnham begins with a different set of certainties, particularly that American middle class is increasingly tolerant of what used to be called the minor vices (sexual promiscuity, cursing, gambling, drug taking). His history traces a century of decline in an American consensus about respectability that repudiated deviant lower orders and included decent working-class people as well as middle class. He assumes that temperance values currently are on defensive and do your own thing is in ascendancy. …