Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior and Swearing in American History

The American Social Experience Series

by John C. Burnham (Editor)

The vast majority of Americans have, at one point or another gotten drunk, smoked, dabbled with drugs, gambled, sworn or engaged in adultery. During the 1800s, respectable people struggled to control these behaviors, labeling them bad and the people who indulged in them unrespectable. In the twentieth century, however, these minor vices were transformed into a societal complex of enormous and pervasive influence. Yet the general belief persists that these activities remain merely harmless bad habits, individual transgressions more than social problems. Not so, argues distinguished historian John C. Burnham, in this pioneering study.

In Bad Habits, Burnham traces the growth of a veritable minor vice-industrial complex. As it grew, activities that might have been harmless, natural, and sociable fun resulted in fundamental social change. When Burnham set out to explore the influence of these bad habits on American society, he sought to discover why so many good people engaged in activities that many, including they themselves, considered bad. What he found, however, was a coalition of economic and social interests in which the single-minded quest for profit allied with the values of the Victorian saloon underworld and bohemian rebelliousness. This combination radically inverted common American standards of personal conduct.

Bad Habits, then, describes, in words and pictures, how more and more Americans learned to value hedonism and self-gratification—to smoke and swear during World War I, to admire cabaret night life, and to reject schoolmarmish standards in the age of Prohibition. Tracing the evolution of each of the bad habits, Burnham tells how liquorcontrol boards encouraged the consumption of alcohol; how alcoholic beverage producers got their workers deferred from the draft during World War II; how convenience stores and accounting firms pursued profits by pushing legalized gambling; how swinging Playboy bankrolled a drug advocacy group; how advertising and television made the Marlboro Man a national hero; how drug paraphernalia was promoted by national advertisers; how a practical joker/drug addict caused a shortage of kitty litter on Long Island; and how the evolution of an entire sex therapy industry helped turn sexual experience into a new kind of commodity. Altogether, a lot of people made a lot of money. But what, the author asks, did these changes cost American society?

This illustrated tour de force by one of the most distinctive and important voices in social history reveals John C. Burnham at his provocative and controversial best.

Genres: Sociology, History, Nonfiction, Anthropology

378 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Professor John C. Burnham specializes in the history of medicine and American social history; his particular interest is the history of psychiatry.
He obtained his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1958.

Reviews

[Fred R · Rating 3 out of 5]

Burnham describes the rise to cultural acceptance of a variety of intertwined bad habits in a period spanning roughly 1910-1970. I remember James Q. Wilson remarking somewhere that what we think of as 60s liberation really got started in the 20s, and this book could be considered an in-depth exploration of that remark. It also provides a salutary counter-narrative to the conventional wisdom about Prohibition. What everybody today "knows" about Prohibition is, as Burnham points out, left-over propaganda financed by brewers and distillers.

The driving factors were: a. the economic interests of purveyors of vice, b. lower class morals, and c. and ethnic immigration. It's a good book, but he almost entirely neglects to discuss the effects of this explosion in minor vices, and what factors had changed over this period to allow them to be so successful. Certainly if he had then ethnic conflict would loom larger in his story, but I wonder what else. Many traditional technologies of social control were rendered obsolete by urbanization and the mass society. I'm going to keep believing as well that differential class reproduction was a major factor until somebody crunches the numbers and proves it couldn't have had much effect. Not only are you getting more children from the lower than the upper class (and thus spreading lower class habits through simple reproduction), but also I imagine that, even if an upper or middle class has numerical superiority, the growing classes will feel more confident and more capable of exercising power than the declining classes. It's about stock and flow.