Essai de te contrôler !

Try to Control Yourself

The Regulation of Public Drinking in Post-Prohibition Ontario, 1927-44

Dan Malleck

University of British Columbia Press Release Date: 4/19/2012ISBN: 9780774822206     Countless authors, historians, journalists, and screenwriters have written about the prohibition era, an age of jazz and speakeasies, gangsters and bootleggers. But only a few have explored what happened when governments turned the taps back on. In Try to Control Yourself, Dan Malleck shifts the focus to the province of Ontario after the repeal of the Ontario Temperance Act, an age when the government struggled to please both the "wets" and the "drys," the latter a powerful lobby that continued to believe that alcohol consumption posed a terrible social danger. Did the Liquor Control Board of Ontario pander to temperance forces, or did it forge a new path? Malleck’s from-the-ground-up historical research of regulation in six diverse communities -- Toronto, Ottawa, Niagara, Essex County, Waterloo County, and Thunder Bay district -- reveals that the Board placated anti-liquor groups while at the same time seeking to define and promote manageable drinking spaces. Its goal was to provide more appealing places to in which to consume alcohol than the many illegal drinking dens or "blind pigs," places where citizens would learn to follow the rules of proper drinking and foster self-control. The regulation of liquor consumption was a remarkable bureaucratic balancing act, between temperance and its detractors but equally between governance and its ideal drinker. About the Author(s) Dan Malleck is an associate professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at Brock University. Table of Contents List of Tables and Figures Acknowledgments Preface: The Word on the Street Introduction: The Emergence of Liquor Control Bureaucracy in Ontario 1 Liquor Control Bureaucracy and the Mechanisms of Governance 2 The Public Life of Liquor, 1927-34 3 Idealistic Form and Realistic Function: Restructuring Public Drinking Space 4 Hearing the Voices: Community Input and the Reshaping of Public Drinking Behaviour 5 "As a Result of Representations Made": The (Dys)function of Patronage in the LCBO’s Regulatory Activities 6 Restructuring Recreation in the Drinking Space 7 Women, Children, and the Family in the Public Drinking Space 8 "Their Medley of Tongues and Eternal Jangle": Regulating the Racial and Ethnic Outsider 9 Public Drinking and the Challenges of War Conclusion Appendix: The Communities Notes Bibliography Index