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The Old-Time Saloon

Not Wet, Not Dry, Just History

The University of Chicago Press

THE SNAKE

BACK in the days of deep tan and stone-bruises we boys knew that when we killed a garter snake, the animal might be as dead as a door-nail, but the tail would continue to writhe and squirm and wiggle until sundown. This is going to be an apt comparison, because the serious cartoonists of the church and anti-whisky publications, during the long drive against red liquor, always pictured Alcoholic Drink as a coiled serpent with fangs as long as from here to there. Nearly a dozen years ago the Anti-Saloon League, the W. C. T. U., the white neck-tie preachers and all of those deacons who never drank anything stronger than Hostetter's Bitters, closed in on the enemy. They pounded Mr. Snake with stones and battered him with clubs until he was just a battered and unrecognizable smear. They looked at the mangled remains and said: "Well, that job's done! Now there isn't an evil influence left in the world."

One of the rejoicing editorial writers used an unfortunate expression in recording the victory. He said that the forces of righteousness had "scotched the serpent." He forgot that there are two definitions for "scotch." It may mean "to put an end to." Or, it may mean something that costs $80 a case and never was within three thousand miles of Aberdeen.

We all know that the venomous thing was killed in 1920, but the tail is still seemingly alive and slapping around in all directions. No one will dispute that statement and, least of all, the good people who are dead set against the drink habit. They are still attacking the whitened skeleton of the retail liquor traffic because the tail continues to wiggle. They are denouncing the saloon as if we still had one on every corner. They just can't believe that the vicious old reptile is really dead as long as that tail keeps on writhing and squirming. When death agonies continue over a period of ten years, that's a record!

The trouble nowadays is that hardly any one can write about distilled, vinous and malt beverages without trying to float a lot of propaganda. All who write or speak for or against the occasional hoisting of the hip flask or the sharp rattle of ice in the shaker seem to be fighting mad. They become so overheated from using mean adjectives that they can't calm down and discuss the past, present and future of the Prohibition Crusade and the brewery output and the conversion of corn into corn juice without getting into a lather and abusing the opposition.

Is it possible to talk about various beverages containing more than one-half of one percent of kick, to ponder upon the causes leading up to Prohibition and to give some information regarding the old-time saloon without taking sides or circulating propaganda? Undoubtedly.

In the succeeding pages dealing with retail establishments which sold intoxicating fluids under sanction of the law, nothing will be said or done with the intent of giving offense to the extreme Drys or the extreme Wets or that in between population which may be classed as Slightly Moist. The idea is to dish up history instead of attempting to influence legislation. The record of the bar-room and the influences behind it may be read aloud from any Baptist pulpit without arousing a protest from any member of the flock. Not much will be written about the effects of the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act and no remedies will be proposed. Enough has been said and is being said and will be said without any brash volunteers rushing into the controversy. Just for the sake of novelty, we are going to join friendly hands and stroll into the past and find out what all the shooting is about by reminding ourselves of some undeniable facts concerning a certain kind of public resort called a "saloon."

No use talking, any viper that looks like a boa constrictor ten years after it is extinct, is worth talking about. Furthermore, they are talking about it. Those who insist upon continuing the noble experiment say: "If we compromise with the law-breakers and the forces of evil, it means a return of the saloon and its whole train of attendant horrors." Every militant Wet and member of the Association Against the Whole Proposition is shouting at the top of his voice: "Listen! We are opposed to the saloon, the same as you are. All we want is something to drink at a reasonable price and with the quality guaranteed."

The snake may continue to wiggle the tail, but no one has a friendly word for the snake. If you care to investigate you may discover evidences of the wiggle in any speak-easy and at many soft-drink parlors, table d'hote restaurants, road-houses, filling stations, barbecue stands and, possibly, a few hardware stores. But, even the obliging benefactor who is willing to slip you, for seventy-five cents, a shot of something that looks like kerosene and smells like arnica, will tell you that the saloon was an evil influence and we are a darn sight better off without it. All knocking it but still talking about it.

Do you recall any prominent and honored citizen of your neighborhood who passed on in 1920 and who is still a topic of daily conversation in the houses up and down your street? He is as much in the past tense as Julius Cæsar. But the scaly orthopoid monster known as the Saloon Business is still receiving obituary notices. As a member of the animal kingdom he must have been something of a dangerous reptile or he would not be remembered so vividly or hated so bitterly.

DISCUSSING WICKEDNESS

HOW many of you can claim any real knowledge of the saloon, obtained at first hand?

If the author let's on to know a good deal about the places at which drinkables were dispensed in the olden days, it is because every kind of saloon came under his observation. An explanation is inserted here and now to head off any sarcastic reader who might suggest that the title of this work should be "Confessions of an Ill-Spent Life."

He put in his boyhood and youth in a prairie town that had one watch-repairer, one druggist, one blacksmith and four saloons. He was not permitted to enter these dens of vice but he could not avoid smelling them or hearing the songs and the babble of loud and foolish talk. The street fights between a couple of agricultural huskies who had trained on copper-distilled Kentucky Sour Mash was a free show and the parade which trailed behind the Town Marshal and the combative drunk, up Main Street toward the "calaboose," was a frequent spectacle, not without educational value.

He was in a college town for six years. The population was 20,000 and there were exactly 94 saloons in full blast, most of them ignoring laws intended to regulate the opening and closing hours and prohibit any sale to minors. Any one tall enough to hook his chin over the dispensing counter could obtain for a nickel a large goblet of beer. The goblet could have been used as an aquarium for gold-fish. The period was the eighties and "keg parties" were popular. Usually they were held out in the woods, and the large, perspiring keg was surrounded by "weenies," pretzels and young men who were preparing themselves to face the stern responsibilities of life.

From 1890 to 1900 the collector of the ensuing historical data was a hardworking newspaper slave in Chicago. For three years he did assorted reporting and for seven years he handled a two-column department known as Stories of the Streets and of the Town. He had to and he did snoop the wicked city from one end to the other. The Chicago of the nineties had nothing to learn from Port Said, Singapore, the lake front at Buffalo, the sea front at Bombay, or the crib section of New Orleans — the aforesaid spots having a world-wide reputation for wild wickedness. Chicago was just as tough as it knew how to be, and that's as much as you can ask of any town. Saloons everywhere and many of them open all night and all day Sunday. One of the most familiar statements in playful circulation was to the effect that when a drink parlor was opened anywhere in the loop, the proprietor went over and threw the key into the lake. The more famous hang-outs had not been closed for a single minute for years and years.

A blaring and glaring and insolent red-light district held day and night revelry on the very rim of the most highly respectable business section. Everything went, from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter. One could get into a poolroom or gambling house just as easily as he could get into the Public Library. The sea-going hacks rested all day and rattled all night. Thieves were protected and opium joints were benignly regarded as public necessities. If any member of a gang was caught in the drag net and slammed into the hoosegow, an alderman always appeared in the police court to secure his release.

How often did I hear the same old plea: "Your Honor, I've known this boy for years. He's a good boy an' works hard an' takes care of his ole mother. Mebbe he'd been drinkin' a little beer an' fell in with a hard crowd, but —"

The "boy" would be standing there, a perfect specimen of beetle-browed thug, with a record for house-breaking, vandalism, pandering and murderous assault.

The court was always merciful, for the reason that the alderman making the plea was one of several aldermen who had secured his appointment as police magistrate.

Probably no other city on earth ever got as much bad publicity as Chicago has received in the last ten years. Approximately 500 gangsters have been "bumped off" and the grand total of bribe money handed to officials would settle all of the European war-debt problems. We all know about the killings, but if the general public ever got the low-down and inside information on the number of officials who have been bought up and how much they took into the open hand, then Chicago would get some more press-agenting of the kind it doesn't need on the eve of the great Exposition.

Because I knew Chicago so well during the rampageous wide-open period and have kept close tab on recent developments through certain residents who know how to operate the X-Ray, I cannot refrain from drawing comparisons. Chicago was undeniably wicked in the nineties and it has been accused of dreadful wickedness during the twenties and into the early thirties. Our old friend, the snake with the ugly fangs, was chief organizer of the cussedness about forty years ago and he is said to have been in full partnership with Al Capone and his grim crew during the last ten years, and, because we are trying to write a fair biography of this same serpent, it will be proper to set down the differences between two kinds of outlawry.

During the nineties all of the alluring vices flaunted themselves in the open. Satan had all of his merchandise in the show-windows. The managers of the prolonged carnival did not kill one another. They co-operated, in the most friendly manner, to get rich by playing on the weaknesses of those who had lustful appetites and who were just as short on scruples as they were long on thirst. Just one big happy family.

The saloon of the nineties was denounced as a nesting-place for fraudulent voters, political crooks, lazy vags, organized criminals, cheap gamblers and painted females who strolled along all of the busy streets trying to become acquainted with men who had not yet learned about the badger game or the use of chloral hydrate as a sure producer of sound and prolonged sleep.

What a town it was! A certain greenie from the country observed this modern combination of Sodom and Gomorrah and supposed that all other big cities in the United States were about the same. A good many of them were.

All of the head-line attractions of that old-time sinful saturnalia have been wiped out. The day-and-night saloon is merely a memory. The red-light district was moved two miles to the south and later it was erased from the map. The lower courts are now ruled by able judges who cannot be touched by corrupt influences. Open gambling houses, open pool-rooms and convenient hop-joints are not tolerated. The lodging-house hoboes are no longer wintered by the thousands in order to carry elections. Stately sky-scrapers have been erected upon the sites of reeking doggeries and cigar store fronts masking unspeakable orgies. The lake front park, where an army of shabby derelicts used to sprawl every warm night, like the strewn dead on a battle-field, is one of the beauty spots of the world.

Once in a while I go in from the country to look at the city I knew so well and which befriended me and opened the door of opportunity. The frontier metropolis with which I hob-nobbed has disappeared. In its stead has arisen a new city of Titanic towers, gorgeous architecture, amazing stretches of immaculate boulevards, overwhelming vistas, and a thousand tributes to beauty instead of a thousand tributes to gross materialism, tinctured with gaudy vice.

Going back as a Rip Van Winkle, I can motor all around town without discovering one trace of the glaring sinfulness which gave Chicago such an evil reputation in the nineties. When I was a reporter I heard a lot of shooting and once I discovered the body of a murdered man just across the street from our rooming-house, and when John McCutcheon and I walked south on Wabash Avenue late at night to get to our humble nook at Peck Court and Michigan Avenue, we used the middle of the street, so that no hold-up man could step out from an alley and salute us with a piece of lead covered with leather (professionally known as a "black-jack") or an elongated canvas bag filled with sand. If he had robbed us, the joke would have been on him but, just the same, we didn't want to have our heads caved in. Finally we moved over to the north side and took refuge among the law-abiding Germans.

The whole present situation is most confusing to some of us who knew the old rip-snorting and ruffianly Chicago and now find a brand-new metropolis which strikes us as being a combination of the Garden of Eden and the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. As often as I have gone back, I never have seen any one who looked like a Sicilian shooting at some one else who, also, looked like a Sicilian. They say that whole fleets of beer-trucks move from one place to another, guarded by policemen, but I never have discovered one of the trucks. They say there are night dancing places and shuttered speak-easies where one may sneak in, having secured credentials, and buy cocktails that smell something like cocktails, at a mere dollar a piece. Maybe these drink-parlors are operating but I never saw the inside of one and I never will, unless some one blindfolds me and backs me in. Not that I am unfamiliar with the sight of some one demonstrating his disapproval of the 18th Amendment. But, why go to a lot of trouble in order to be gypped?

Pardon this long detour but we cannot intelligently investigate the wiggle of the snake's tail unless we regard conditions in some such place where, outwardly, everything seems cleansed and purified while inwardly, if we are to believe the newspapers, life is just one high jinks after another with nothing to mar the festivities except the occasional carrying out of the dead.

Once I was supposed to be a fairly keen reporter but now I must be asleep at the switch. If I hadn't read all the books about gangsters and all the articles about oceans of beer and Niagaras of synthetic hooch, I would be under the impression that the old town had gone pretty much Presbyterian except for ten thousand parties in private apartments and select homes, or secluded trysting places where open-minded collegians and liberated flappers are wont to "play around" together. Probably no one past the age of fifty can quite fathom the significance of this modern "playing around." It seems to mean that any young person can do anything as long as violations of the statutes and fractures of the moral law are perpetrated in a spirit of fun and not in earnest. Stop me, if I am wrong.

The old-trade-marks of alcoholic hilarity have vanished but the would-be repealers insist that we have generated conditions which are more disgraceful and more dangerous than those of the decades immediately preceding the World War. The confirmed Drys insist that nothing that can happen under Prohibition will stack up along side of the multiplied horrors of the Dark Ages when saloons were running. Whichever side is right, people should be informed about saloons, bar-keeps, free lunches and the continued desire of our citizenry to rest their feet on the brass rail.

WHAT WAS A SALOON — AND WHY?

IF you think there is no call for the work now under way, consider a few facts. You know that the Anti-Saloon League, the W. C. T. U., and other societies specializing on moral welfare are still fighting the saloon. What do the residents of our fair, or fair to middling, land know about the saloon, what it looked like, what it smelled like, what it sold and to whom, and why it became such a peril and nuisance that years after being legally wiped out of existence it is still regarded as a menace?

Half of the territory of the United States was Sahara dry under local option forty years ago. More than half of the states were dry by legislative enactments twenty-five years ago. All of the public drinking places were restricted during the War Period and the Government measures wiping out every saloon on the map went into effect eleven years ago. Stop and count up. Even in the cities which are now regarded as Anti-Prohibition strongholds, no person under the age of thirty-two ever saw the inside of a saloon. Young men and young women attaining their majorities this year have dim recollections of lager beer signs and bottles lined up behind plate glass fronts. No one under fifteen can distinctly recall seeing a grog shop, a distillery, or a brewery in open and unashamed operation. To them the "family resort" is just as much ancient history as the Battle of Bunker Hill or the Fall of the Bastille.

Furthermore, taking into account the fact that very few women who date back to the old wide-open days ever visited a saloon, and that residents of many states have to be at least fifty years of age in order to cherish any definite recollections of hardwood bars and foaming faucets, and that a large slice of the population, even during the high tide of the wet era, shunned the booze joints and rode on the wagon or partook politely in clubs, hotels or restaurants, and you are compelled to admit that probably three-fourths of the population of our land are densely ignorant regarding the bar-rooms which swarmed so insolently during the Victorian period. Yet, the saloon is a live issue eleven years after the liquor traffic was laid out in a casket and formally dispatched to the cemetery.

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Excerpted from The Old-Time Saloon by George Ade. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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