Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior and Swearing in American History (American Social Experience) [Paperback]

John C. Burnham (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1994 | ISBN-10: 081471224X | ISBN-13: 978-0814712245 | Edition: 1

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 liquor control 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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Burnham, one of the first modern scholars to bring a new point of view to the Prohibition era (i.e. that Prohibition worked) now addresses a constellation of American `bad habits' with the same fresh insight. Readers will be fascinated by well-documented and illustrated information about the genesis of habits such as cigarette smoking, taking drugs, drinking, swearing, and `swinging.' Burnham breaks from the traditional `history of reform' by concentrating not on reformers but on the proponents of misbehavior. A combination of economic greed on the part of many large corporations and a spirit of rebelliousness, enormously stimulated by the media, opened the way for the nihilistic advocacy of bad habits."

-Choice,

"A provocative, refreshing, and not-to-be-ignored account of America's `rituals of transgression' by one of the foremost historians of American culture writing today. Burnham turns the conventional history of America's anti-vice crusades on its head in this fascinating account of how the bad habits of the 19th-century Victorian underworld became the `minor-vice industrial complex' of the 20th century. Burnham shows how powerful economic interests, mass media advertising, and the entertainment industry worked to make bad habits into big business. Bad Habits is an eye-opening, disturbing, and timely social history of our national vices."

-Nancy J. Tomes,SUNY, Stony Brook

About the Author

John C. Burnham is professor of history at Ohio State University and the author of Paths into American Culture, How Superstition Won and Science Lost, and Jelliffe: American Psychoanalyst and Physician.

Product Details

• Paperback: 353 pages
• Publisher: NYU Press; 1 edition (February 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081471224X
• ISBN-13: 978-0814712245
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,441,851 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How Profits and "Lower-Order Parochialism" Changed America, August 3, 2000

By 

Christopher P. Atwood (Bloomington, IN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior and Swearing in American History (American Social Experience) (Paperback)

"Bad Habits" aims to change the way people think about the issues of personal freedom and social responsibility in America. John Burnham takes drinking, smoking, drugs, gambling, sexual misbehavior, and swearing, all traditionally considered "minor vices" and follows their path into acceptability and colossal profitability. As he states in his preface, he started out thinking he would have a nice laugh at how neo-Puritans can't stand to see other people have a little fun. But by the end of his research, he had stopped laughing.

Burnham made one key decision: rather than focus on the reformers (and just assume that everyone "naturally" wants a drink or a smoke), he decided to focus on the anti-reformers. What was driving them? As he found, money, of course. Pressure for repeal or liberalization of laws and social mores against the "minor vices" starts with back-stage funding by those who sell both the item in question-brewers, casino owners, marijuana dealers, pornographers-and related items, from glass-bottle manufacturers to money launderers. This is not big news, although it's worth repeating that agitation for liberalization of drug laws, for example, has always been funded chiefly by drug traders and their financial allies. Moreover, as Burnham shows, legalization is only the first step. After all, if marijuana is legal and no one smokes it, then the investment in funding legalization organizations has been wasted. Not to worry: Burnham demonstrates that just as prohibition really does work in reducing the "bad habits," so too legalization and a good ad campaign really do increase the number of indulgers. Of course an ad campaign needs to be directed at the right audience. Just as tobacco executives do, pornographers, drug-dealers, and liquor merchants also know that their profits comes from heavy users and heavy users need to be started when they are young.

But who would believe such obviously self-interested advocates? Here Burnham builds on social history to identify "lower-order parochialism" as a significant force advocating and celebrating the "bad habits." Formed in America's 19th century urban areas where minor-vice merchants, exemplified by the saloon-keeper, became intimately intertwined with the bachelor sub-culture, new immigrants, and the Bohemian scene, "lower-order parochialism" validated the "bad habits" as a positive act of rebellion against the dominant Yankee, middle-class, often evangelical, coalition who supported reform campaigns. In the barracks of World Wars I and II, this lower-order parochialism was able to break out of the urban red-light districts and make abstention seem deviant. Those who made money off the minor vices found an increasing public for their campaigns first to normalize and then to celebrate the minor vices. From the repeal of prohibition onwards, Burnham traces the process by which our mores are approximating those of the Victorian underworld.

The minor vice industrial complex has always found vital support in irresponsible members of the upper class: they indulge, they invest, and they find taxes on legal vices can reduce their own. The spread of state-sponsored lotteries as alternatives to income tax increases is a case in point.

But what about the lives ruined by drinking, lung cancer, gambling, and so on? Burnham details how the minor vice industrialists heavily fund organizations that study and combat these problems-but only as long as the organizations treat them as a problem for the individuals concerned and not a problem for the industry. Funding research on alcoholism or "compulsive gambling" forms a wonderful counterpart to the insistent advocacy of more and more "moderate drinking," "responsible gambling," etc. Only where no "responsible" use exists (as in smoking) do they have to resort to stonewalling.

After a century of growth, the minor-vices are not simply isolated entities; they work together synergistically as a combined force aiming to destroy the standards of the "prudes" and replace them with those of the "lewds." Casinos and brothels can't stay in business without selling liquor, liquor and tobacco products are the major advertisers for pornographic magazines, tobacco companies buy up liquor giants, Hugh Hefner financed the marijuana legalization lobby, etc. Thus the significance of swearing: it does not make any money but is a powerful way of outraging "prude" sensibilities and publicly announcing lower-order standards

Burnham does not wish to sound like one of the more hysterical opponents of "bad habits." He does not advocate new campaigns of Prohibition. He bends over backwards to avoid dramatization, and if anything pulls his punches. The massive documentation in Burnham's footnotes show the care he has taken not to push his evidence farther than it will go. But his portrait of the minor-vice industrial complex is all the more troubling for that.

1.0 out of 5 stars Biased and largely unsubstantiated arguments, November 15, 2011

By 

Lew - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior and Swearing in American History (American Social Experience) (Paperback)

Burnham in the introduction claims that in conducting research for this book he could not help but divert from his original agenda (which he never really states) and instead produce a book about how the "Victorian underworld" and proponents of the "minor vices" were successful in infiltrating and eventually winning over popular culture in their quest to become mainstream. It is this blame-assigning viewpoint and use of archaic language that detaches the author from any sense of credibility when speaking about these matters, and indeed it seems (although he never states this) as if he has never experienced any of these horrible vices himself.

I would've never read this book had it not been assigned reading in a Society and Engineering course. In short, the book is definitely on interesting subject matter and Burnham does a splendid job in destroying any curiosity or relevance the reader may have had.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars How to be a jerk while calling other people name, October 20, 2010

By 

Jennifer Pillow Taylor (Cali, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior and Swearing in American History (American Social Experience) (Paperback)

So you want to condemn other people and not seem like a jerk. Here's how.

1. Research only instances of really bad people and claim their vices will have the same results for everyone.

2. Ignore all research, including over a hundred years of proof that such vices are good for you.

3. Remember that moderation is a myth.

4. Blow things out of proportion. Make sure everyone is too guilty to consider how wrong you are with common sense.

5. Write a book.

Isn't lying about things easy? Doesn't everyone around you feel bad for superstitions made up 400 years ago that are proven to be the opposite? Good for you.