From the book’s cover and packaging, it would be easy to mistake George Ade’s The Old Time Saloon for a sentimental paean in the tradition of McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon by Joseph Mitchell or The Tender Bar by J.M. Moehringer. My edition of Ade’s book is from 1993 but nowhere on its dust jacket or title page do you learn that it was originally published in 1931 and was his last book; nor, for that matter, do you even learn who Ade was.
George Ade was a journalist from Indiana who was prominent around the turn of the 20th Century. In addition to his success as a columnist, he later became well known for writing plays and sometimes screenplays, as several of his works were produced as movies in the pre-sound era. He initially gained repute writing about “street life” in Chicago, and he is particularly known for his use of street language and slang. He also wrote the humorous fables, gaining him the sobriquet “The Aesop of Indiana.” He was quite famous at the time, and won praise from Sir Walter Raleigh (not that Sir Walter Raleigh, we’re talking about the English poet, essayist and “Cambridge Apostle”), who, on a U.S. tour in 1915, pronounced Ade “The greatest living writer in America.”
In 1931, Prohibition was still with us but was gasping for air and the nation was divided over whether the obviously failed experiment should continue. The “drys” and “wets” were so entrenched in their camps that they were almost unable to discuss the issue rationally, and Ade wrote this short book as a serious/sardonic attempt to limn the temperance question objectively. He was in favor of reversing Volstead but wanted to provide context and rationale for his stance on this issue, as well as to give the wets credit where it was due. “Is it possible,” he asks in the introduction, “to ponder upon the causes leading up to Prohibition and give some information regarding the old-time saloon without taking sides and circulating propaganda? Undoubtably.”
The Old Time Saloon, then, is not a nostalgic appreciation of saloons but a memoir in which Ade lists the many enormities committed by those who ran such establishments. He places blame for prohibition squarely on their shoulders, pointing out that the temperance army had been railing against them for half a century and the saloons had done nothing but aggravate their accusers through market saturation (he compares the abundance of saloons prior to 1920 with that of “filling stations” at the time of his writing) and flaunting any regulations through various forms of graft, refusing to modify their policies, like being open 24/7 in some cases, and doing little to discourage their most damaged patrons, unable to turn away any business because of fierce competition. The saloons, accused of being the epicenter of all sorts of social ailments, as a whole, did nothing to contradict their depiction as monsters. The prohibitionists’ miscalculation was to completely conflate saloons with social drinking in general, and they were confounded to see that, having shut down the former, they were still unable to prevent the latter, and, further, that the lot of the average working person was not that much improved under the new regime of intolerance.
After Ade is finished pointing out the ways in which the saloons walked blindly over the ledge, he discusses particular elements of the saloon life. Under his brutally critical gaze come the free lunch, the sentimental songs that the barflies sang, the typical conversations that prevailed, the “regulars,” and other building blocks of saloon life. My favorite chapter is “What They Drank,” which informs us, for example, that before the end of the 19th Century, Scotch whiskey was almost unheard of on these shores. “It seemed to arrive with golf.” Also, that most of the time the bartenders were pouring shots and beer or other chasers including water and even milk, and had little knowledge, let alone expertise, about cocktails. I know there were, even decades before the 1890s, famous bartenders that were experts on making various cocktails and at least one even published bartenders’ guides to spread the mixology gospel, but these Jerry Thomases were not typical. Cocktails were regarded with derision in many less sophisticated locales, according to Ade — it was a men-only milieu at the bar and cocktails were seen as a sign of “effeminacy.”
There aren’t any modern versions of the saloons Ade describes. You can find something like them, but even the most backwards modern bar is way more civil than what Ade describes. The gender segregation alone would be a non-starter today, and for excellent reason. (Joseph Mitchell may have considered McSorley’s segregated bar to be “wonderful,” but that was due to his endless desire to wade tediously through the sewer of nostalgia.) The temperance advocates accomplished the better part of their mission over the century following their seeming victory and then seeming defeat.
A final comment about George Ade, who became popular in his time and was widely read and celebrated but today is generally neglected. Ade isn’t mentioned in The New American Literary History, edited by Greil Marcus, that tries so hard to be inclusive (even though Anita Loos is there, who had a similar literary reputation and career), and he isn’t acknowledged by The Norton Anthology of American Literature, which is six volumes long and appears to include every Tom, Dick and Harriet that ever published a line. He wrote eloquently, but it’s a style and sense of humor that hasn’t been fashionable for a long time. His most famous books were anthologies of his fables, which are so loaded with antiquated references and otherwise convoluted as to be almost incomprehensible today. (Random excerpt: “He danced with the local Chickadees, but all the time his heart was far away. in the Dramatic Column.”) The Old Time Saloon is a bittersweet document, coming as it does towards the end of his career, and in its pages he depicts himself as a kind of ghost, or, specifically, as Rip Van Winkle, transported from the first decades of the new century to the weird new post-Volstead world of the early 30s, trying to reckon what the hell happened, and why it happened, while he was asleep.