Shifts in the Social Location of Drinking

In the late 1920s, alcohol use became a symbolic arena for a more general conflict within middle-class America, a conflict to a large extent between an older generation committed to the values of "Victorian morality", and a younger generation experimenting with new lifestyles and gender roles. Prohibition, adopted originally with strong popular support, eventually rendered drinking a perfect symbol of generational revolt, "the symbol of a sacred cause". The year 1928, in a temperance observer's view, marked the beginning of a "college drinking epidemic "marked by" a wider diffusion of drink practices and greater regularity of use among larger numbers". At the same time, partly by raising the effective price of alcohol and forcing it into its most concentrated form, Prohibition wiped out beer consumption and effectively limited working-class drinking.

While Prohibition had reduced consumption overall by two-thirds at its most effective, and even around 1930 by one-third, middle-class drinking levels in the aggregate had been little affected. In image and to a large extent in reality, the modal social location of heavy drinking shifted from middle-aged workers to affluent college students. As a college student put it in 1929, "the drunkard is still with us". The type has passed from the tired working-man to the jaded fraternity-man".

While the college generation coming of age in the late 1920s and 1930s played a crucial role in its eventual entrenchment, the change to a much "wetter" cultural outlook on alcohol filtered into many segments of American society. In literary and bohemian subcultures, we can set the watershed as occurring a half-generation before the general middle-class change; famous American literary figures with a reputation for heavy drinking are particularly concentrated in the cohort, which came of age after 1910. Working back from cirrhosis mortality data for different birth cohorts, it seems that among urban Black Americans, primarily of lower socioeconomic status, the shift to a much "wetter" culture also begins with the cohort, which came of age during the 1920s. In the "dryer" regions of the U.S. -- the South and Prairie states -- entrenchment of drinking in the middle class is a much more recent phenomenon.