Guidance for the Bibulous
In 1933, Ohio-born and Oberlin-graduated Guy Hickok was long-time Paris bureau chief for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
In February that year the paper carried his wry commentary on divers European drinking establishments. The object: to guide Americans for the kind of bar to be introduced once National Prohibition ended.
The time was nigh, after all. Hickok noted the air was “humid”, with talk of “percentages”, viz the strength of soon-newly legal beer.
He mused that normally a “congressional junket” would sally through European bars to update on saloon practices, but as it would just provide fodder for “comic papers and cartoonists”, he would do the job himself. That way, the citizen could learn the basic facts for just the price of the paper.
Throughout Hickok takes the suspect nature of the pre-Prohibition saloon for granted, whatever his true views on the matter were. Saloon nefariousness was an idée reçue, a shibboleth few dissented from publicly, even the “wets”. That the swing-door, wide open saloon of yore would never return was a matter of political correctness.
Saloon reform was widely discussed in the general media and academic circles (sociologists and the like). It also got attention, oddly as it seems, in brewing trade journals. During Prohibition it was one of the few things they had to talk about!
Hickok profiled drinking places in Britain, France, and Germany. His assessment for the last two was upbeat, but for Britain, rather gloomy: its pubs were no model for the new American bar, felt he.
He was, we can say, on the naysaying side of American journalists who had inquired into British pubways since the 1800s.
While some Yankee journalists appreciated the fundamental British affection for the pub, others focused on its iniquities, real and exaggerated, such as public drunkenness, street disorder, vice, family discord.
Hickok’s British survey was in this tradition, yet even on these terms rather summary. Plush pubs in London’s fashionable quarters, which were hardly unrespectable, received only a lukewarm nod. For whatever reason – perhaps the old Yankee distrust of British institutions – he looked to Continental models to inspire the new American bar.
Of Germany he noted, as many observers had since the 19th century, that beer gardens and indoor bars were resorts of the entire family, with drunkeness mostly absent. The contrast with the old American saloon, a classic resort of the male single or in packs, was patent to Eagle readers.
The Teuton bars served food too, which most patrons partook of. Resident musical ensembles helped further to moderate the tone. (Some in New York would have linked this benign image of the pub to the pre-1920 German-American beer garden).
Of German beer itself he stated little, excepting it was “bright”, in contrast presumably to sometimes cloudy British draught beer, for which he had only denigrating remarks. A “yeasty” odour at the English bar and overflowing mugs discomfited him in particular – the very things today’s craft beer fans enthuse over, the cloudy stuff no less.
French bars received most of Hickok’s attention, not surprising since he had worked in Paris between 1918 and 1933. Much of what he wrote applies equally today, as I can attest from regular visits to France.
His two types of French bar were the cafe, still the main type although sometimes called a brasserie, and the zinc, a more basic bar. Wines and beer, not spirits, were and are the staple in both, with food also a feature especially in the former.
He mentions a decorous morning drinking in France. While much lesser today it can still be observed, often a small beer or glass of wine.
Read the article yourself, linked above, for its inimitable period flavour. A bonus is the artwork reproduced which lends a photo-essay touch. The S. Van Abbé is particularly good, an intaglio drypoint portraying a classic tourist-and-bar staff encounter. See this biographical note on Salomon Van Abbé.