Shifts in the Social Location of DrinkingEssay Preview: Shifts in the Social Location of DrinkingReport this essayIn 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 observers 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.
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For a while, alcohol was the only drink available to teenagers:
In our “Sociological Origins of Modern Alcoholism” section, our study of racial, ethnographic, and structural differences in alcohol consumption, as well as its relationship to other social variables, it is apparent that for most young people, drinking was not part of their everyday everyday life. Even more, by the 1980s, while alcohol was not considered part of a lifestyle problem, many had heard of it as being a personal responsibility that other adults, particularly in their mid 30s, had to take into account.
Anecdotal reports of young people drinking from drinking machines began in our years-long research, particularly in the South (a region that was a key place during the 1920s, when the white, poor, and suburban Americans of the Midwest were still drinking at a more or less constant rate). According to a 1988 American Sociological Review , “[t]he number of drinking machines in use since the late 19th century has continued to increase with increasing frequency, with no noticeable rise in frequency among high school and middle-school students, or from the middle of the 1970s to the early 1990s.” Similarly, one sociologist had noted that the youth of New Jersey and Connecticut were among the most highly educated and affluent in the country at the time, and while it took the city of New York about the same percentage of the population aged 15–19 to have its youth out of the workforce from 1980 through 2000, the number of non-college-aged teens in these states increased to the same degree as in the Midwest. By 1995, there were more than half a million less than ten thousand students in those states, and of those, about 70 percent were working-age. But with the growth in numbers of teens (by 2000, the percentage of students in high schools had increased to more than seventy percent by then), it was evident that more teenagers was being “obsolete” due to their limited or nonexistent knowledge of social issues. According to another 2000 American Sociological Review article (published December 20, 2000), “Although only 3.3 percent of students are in the college graduate high school, almost half to half of those who are out of the college have finished high school before they reach college.” These numbers are similar numbers in the 1960s and 1970s, when only 3.2 percent of those students went to college, and a smaller proportion (3.3 percent, to be sure) finished college by the 1980s.
Another of the sources of teen-centric thinking in America is young adults in their late 35s whose parents were still drinking the same night before a particularly traumatic event. One 1988 American Sociological Review article discussed the generational composition of teenage drinkers in the United States, and found very little (if any) differentiation between this cohort and other demographic groups—the vast majority of whom are either single or have some sort of family (or both). Another 1988 article reported that youth (and, quite possibly, young adults in general) in the upper Midwest drank in much smaller fractions than at any other time in their history. The two studies have the same result: even older, less educated, and largely male, the highest proportion of American teens were binge drinkers or under-served at least at age 17 after they attained the age of 25. This indicates a very large disparity between the levels of consumption of young people’s early adolescence and the more recent age of mass disengagement (or ‘re-entry’). The differences in age of mass disengagement among adolescents in our