English Origins of American College Drinking
In my recent four-part series on “sconcing”, a beer-drinking game practiced at English college dinners, I reflected that no precise equivalent existed in American universities, including the Ivy League. The prestigious, early East Coast universities, Princeton, Harvard and the rest, might be thought propitious for such a transplant, but it did not take place, not that I have been able to document.
That said, it would be a mistake to think English university traditions, entwined for centuries with drinking and even brewing, had no impact on the American college drinking pattern. They did, simply in other ways.
A well-researched 1938 study concluded this, from an ostensibly unlikely source: the Intercollegiate Association for the Study of the Alcohol Problem, published by the Methodist Episcopal Church.
Harry Sheldon Warner (1875-?) authored the study, entitled Alcohol Trends in College Life: a Survey of American College Attitudes on Beverage Alcohol During Periods: (1) — Prior to 1900; (2) — 1900-1910; (3), etc. A number of his other books are listed here.
Warner was an early associate of leading members of the American Prohibition movement and World League Against Alcoholism. He graduated in 1899 from Ohio’s Methodist-founded Baldwin University, today Baldwin-Wallace University (Berea Advertiser, April 12, 1901).
Commencing in 1900, with D. Leigh Colvin Warner helped bring the anti-drink message to the American campus. Warner wrote numerous books and tracts over a long career in support of prohibition.
According to the November 11, 1955 Milford Chronicle (Delaware), he was still lecturing in 1955. An essay by Mary Higley on Warner and the Intercollegiate Prohibition Association, as earlier named, forms part of the (1977) Guide to the Microfilm Edition of Temperance and Prohibition Papers (multiple editors). Higley offers further insight on Warner’s extensive field and campaign work and writing.
She notes he had a remarkable 70-year career educating collegians on the dangers of alcohol. Hence he soldiered into the 1960s, a very different period than Teddy Roosevelt’s, when he got his start.
Warner clearly was a well-educated, worldly writer and researcher. His works reflect a sociological, inquiring tone more than an inveighing, fire and brimstone approach. The long, finally unsuccessful fight against drinking carries today an aura of melodrama due to Carrie Nation and other lectern-thumpers, but the prohibition movement had many facets. Warner represented its systematic, reasoning side, informed by scholarly research.
His mantra was “objective study”, the need to gather all the facts, social, psycological, medical, etc convering alcohol and drinking, following which he felt the informed student would reject alcohol as part of the modern lifestyle.
This sociological cast makes sense as his chosen specialty area was the college: to be effective as an anti-drink campaigner he had to speak the language of his audience, and did. But no one should doubt: Warner was a thorough and inveterate anti-drink advocate. The committment was best summed up by his somewhat Orwellian-sounding 1928 book, Prohibition, an Adventure in Freedom.
His researches into the early American campus drinking holds our interest here. The following pages 5 and 6 of the 1938 book (via HathiTrust) explain how British university traditions influenced American student drinking.
As we see, Warner continues the discussion by identifying later German academic influence on the college drinking pattern. He adverts also to wine-drinking influence from France.
Consistent with my other research, he makes no suggestion sconcing ever took root Stateside, but that college boozing and its consequent keggers and busts have deep British roots,* there can be no doubt.
Part XVI explores a conference held by Warner’s group in Toronto in 1952.
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*At bottom more specifically English.
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