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(More customer reviews)"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.
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Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior and Swearing in American History (American Social Experience)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.
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