Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts, by David W. Conroy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 351 pp., illustrated, $35.95 cloth, $15.95 paper. The title of David Conroy's superb study alerts us his purpose: Public Houses places us directly within the taverns of colonial Massachusetts, where we encounter proprietors, patrons, and the popular culture of drink in an immediate and engaging way. Further, the title underscores the very public nature of tavern life. From the 1630s the 1770s, colonists increasingly used their drinking establishments as open forums where they boldly challenged the constraints first of sacred and then of secular authority. Guiding us through some 15 decades of evolving tavern society, Conroy makes clear why this controversial institution became so central community and intercommunity communication by the revolutionary era. Conroy takes as his point of departure the anthropological theory that drinking customs can serve integrate a society both horizontally and vertically. He notes that through such symbolic rituals as treating, toasting, and tippling in congenial tavern companies, colonists strengthened ties their social equals and reaffirmed reciprocal obligations their betters and inferiors. these ways, tavern culture of the mid-17th century reinforced the prevailing social hierarchy, in addition supplying townsfolk and travelers with the necessities of drink, food, shelter, and meeting space. Although Puritan leaders acknowledged these traditional functions of drink and taverns as legitimate, they also embraced a newer ethic of temperance, personal restraint, and social control. As the number of lower-class taverns and drunken incidents increased with colonial growth in the late 17th century, these leaders gradually came view traditional drinking folk ways as agents of social disintegration rather than of integration. In other words, the 'functional' value of these customs and habits had come be considered 'dysfunctional' as new value systems were articulated, argues Conroy. the first chapters of his book, he makes it his principal task to trace the course of negotiation between old and new value systems in community life (pp. 6-7). The result is a lively and admirably evenhanded analysis of Puritan leaders' repeated efforts curb tavern use and of the drinking public's equally determined efforts resist reform. Both supporters and detractors of tavern culture are permitted their say, and neither side is romanticized, patronized, or vilified. This is in refreshing contrast much of the literature on colonial drinking, which either focuses exclusively on the Puritans' temperance views or looks back nostalgically at the quaintness of tavern in the George-Washington-slept-here style. Conroy then turns events after 1719, the year when Boston's selectmen significantly loosened restrictions of 40 years' duration on tavern licensing policies, patronage patterns, and consumption rates. Not only had tavern popularity grown while Puritan influence waned, but also the changing political climate was transforming taverns into important centers of public debate and factional organizing-facts not lost on the election-conscious selectmen. As conflicts with Crown officials escalated, tavernkeepers of all ranks became the chief disseminators of oral and printed political opinion colonists starved for news. Conroy carefully documents this expanding political role of both Boston and countryside drinking establishments from the 1720s the 1760s. Reintroducing the theme of social integration, he shows how upstart office-seekers (often tavernkeepers themselves) used toasts, treats, and the disinhibiting atmosphere of taverns cultivate new constituencies and challenge longstanding habits of deference toward royal and religious authority. Like their Puritan predecessors, however, many resistance leaders of the 1760s and 1770s began worry about the dissonance they detected between elements of tavern culture and a newer value system-republican ideology-which they increasingly embraced. …
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Jan 1, 2000
Eliga H Gould 
Open Access
