Yesterday, Jeff reviewed the stated purposes of Oregon’s Liquor Control Act of 1934 as part of an exploration of the regulation of strong drink in his state. Lew has been writing along a similar line for some time on his separate blog Why The PLCB Should Be Abolished. Cass has been running a similar campaign here in Ontario at FreeOurBeer.ca. I like these campaigns as anyone should who lives in a jurisdiction with a sensory lab. It is, after all, just beer.
But one of the odder things about the good beer discussion is sometimes a bit of pressure to sing of the same song sheet. When I posed a category titled “Beer Bloggers Against Drunk Driving” there is a bit of a chilly response, the idea that one ought not to introduce anything negative into the conversation. One should not have a strong opposite view that asks why good beer might be a wee bit obsessively too central to the world view of those who write about it. It is, after all, a drug.
All that comes to mind for me when I look at the values Oregonianites captured in that law of 1934, we see words that sit in a middle ground, that challenge me to ask how I think about them now almost 80 years later:
(a) To prevent the recurrence of abuses associated with saloons or resorts for the consumption of alcoholic beverages.
(b) To eliminate the evils of unlicensed and unlawful manufacture, selling and disposing of such beverages and to promote temperance in the use and consumption of alcoholic beverages.
(c) To protect the safety, welfare, health, peace and morals of the people of the state.
I have been thinking about words like these a bit lately. They don’t seem to me as bad as the discussion might have led us to believe. In the comments following his post, Jeff raised the spectre of that darling of pre-WWI American prohibitionists, Carrie Nation. I noted that Carrie Nation was not a proponent of temperance but of abstinence. See, my point is that preventing abuse, promoting temperance as well as protecting peace and morals is pretty much what much of western culture wants when it goes to work or mows the front lawn or sends the kids to school. Which may mean we have to consider that in the end maybe temperance won and much of western culture is the better for it. None one advocates for abuse, intemperance, peacelessness and immorality. Of course not, no more than you would support other scourges of 1800s life like child labour or lack of public health. We underestimate or dismiss how more widespread and heavier drinking was then compared to now and how it may have come smashing into conflict with industrialized urban life.
So, is good beer the natural descendant of the temperance movement? Just as lower alcohol lager was presented as a temperance drink in the latter 1800s, is tastier beer now conveying the notion that mass produced beer need not be mass consumed? This is not to say that the liquor control boards should not be undone. I want to buy my beer in cornerstores and gas stations in Ontario like I can in nearby Quebec and New York. But should we reject all? What values can you not support? What regulations would you keep?
[Original comments…]
The Professor – September 11, 2012 12:24 PM
Interesting stuff.
I see where you’re coming from, but I’m not so sure about the idea of ‘good’ beer promoting temperance. In some quarters I don’t see ‘good beer’ as even promoting _respect_ for beer. Especially true in an era where the trend is to package higher ABV beers in larger measures; strong beers of the type which were traditionally sold in 7 or 8 ounce bottles are now appearing on the shelves in 22 oz ‘bombers’ (an ironically accurate descriptor).
Even at my ‘local’, a college town bar which has featured multiple taps of excellent beer since the 1980’s, the bartenders now routinely steer the clientele towards the higher ABV products which they serve by the pint. The ABV number has become the main selling point.
Certainly not seeing much temperance there.
Bailey – September 13, 2012 8:30 AM
http://boakandbailey.com
Been processing this one. As I’m sure is becoming boring, we ended up looking at it through the prism of the development of CAMRA. The founders of the Campaign, when interviewed, talk about the fun they had ‘getting tanked up’; it was born on a drunken weekend; and early meetings fell into disarray when everyone got drunk and punchy. The major focus of the first members wasn’t the blandness of beer, though that did annoy them, but its diminishing strength.
These days, CAMRA’s official line (as we read it) is that real ale is ‘good’ booze, while supermarket discounted strong cider and spirits are ‘bad’. Its rhetoric is of responsible drinking. Something changed somewhere along the line.
So… that’s as far as we’ve got with that thought.
Alan – September 13, 2012 9:53 AM
But your direction and steps along it are so determined and surprisingly un-travelled. Reminds me of Andy Crouch discovering no one had visited Michael Jackson’s library of records at Oxford.
Jeff Alworth – September 13, 2012 3:37 PM
http://beervana.blogspot.com/
Alan, sorry for the slow response.
I don’t dispute anything you say from a philosophical point of view. But this is public policy, not philosophy. The OLCC was set up simultaneously to sell booze (and raise revenue) and to limit and regulate it. Many of our convoluted laws arise from this confused mission. If you wanted to encourage a sane approach to booze (and we do want to!), you’d draft laws in a different way. 1934 was a long time ago and most laws from that era have aged badly.
As to Carrie Nation, no retractions. The “temperance” movement was an abstinence movement. It was the precursor to Prohibition, and the “temperance” of the title was pure political spin. The temperance gals hated booze and didn’t want it tempered, they wanted it illegal.
For what it’s worth, history is a little unkind to them. They were addressing a very serious issue, one that was by all accounts way out of hand. They didn’t have the benefit of knowing that Prohibition would be born imperfectly or that it was unenforceable in any case. They were offering a decent solution to a terrible problem. I cut them a lot of breaks. But that doesn’t mean I buy their spin.
Jeff Alworth – September 13, 2012 3:39 PM
http://beervana.blogspot.com/
I should say it doesn’t mean I’m blind to their spin.
Alan – September 13, 2012 5:21 PM
I am not going to agree with this due mainly to its immediate undermining of my thesis: “The “temperance” movement was an abstinence movement.”
My main thought is that old chestnut (which is, of course, itself an old chestnut) that the past is a foreign land. I think there is enough room for separate camps of alcohol abolitionists and temperance movement types. But there are any number of points of time between 1840 and 1940 for the two to move, morph, overlap and merge. Plus, what was happening in Maryland and Wisconsin would have greatly differed from the harder dry states.
That being the case, happily, we might both be right or have each enough fact to use for illustration purposes to give the appearance of being right.
Bailey – September 15, 2012 3:50 AM
http://boakandbailey.com
Sign at CAMRA’s 1979 Great British Beer Festival: “Avoid hangovers — stay drunk!”