Unmade in America: The cultural construction of the alcohol abuser in the industrializing United States.

摘要

Since the rise of the cult of the self-made man at the dawn of U.S. industrialization, the alcohol abuser has epitomized unmade selfhood—the person who either squanders success or never achieves it because of alcoholic excess. "Unmade in America" argues that from the antebellum era to the 1930s, cultural constructions of the alcohol abuser were shaped and reshaped in constitutive relation to the changing ways Americans defined the demands, possibilities, and limits of self-making in response to the process of industrialization and the rise of consumer culture.;Heralding a cultural reorientation from scarcity to abundance in an era of growing industrial capacity, psychotherapeutics prompted the Progressive-era formulation of increasingly multi-causal explanations of alcohol abuse which emphasized psychosocial selfhood and resisted moral or hereditary reductionism. After 1900, bourgeois Americans embraced consumerist self-making practices which encouraged a normalization of drinking, especially during Prohibition. Experts and lay thinkers vanquished the eugenic double-damning and rescued a new generation of middle-class alcohol abusers from its fatalism by popularizing the concept of "alcoholism": a form of psychosocial maladjustment which led to self-erasing rather than self-enhancing consumption, and which was subject to psychosocial readjustment. Alcoholism was not simply the product of a sudden rediscovery of addiction in late 1930s. Instead, alcoholism achieved cultural salience gradually between 1900 and the 1930s, in a process characterized by debate and conflict.;The early temperance movement inculcated producerist values of self-denial which normalized abstinent self-making and spread new optimism concerning the prospect of reforming drunkards, whose addiction antebellum Americans attributed to voluntary moral failure. As the unstable post-Civil-War economy generated a crisis of self-making, professionalizing medical experts, temperance reformers, and their critics increasingly interpreted drunken failure through the lens of evolutionary hereditarianism. More and more middle-class Americans came to believe that alcohol was a hereditarily degenerating agent that weakened the self-making capacities of the living and the unborn. Between the late 1880s and 1910, as frustration with unmade drinkers mounted, an increasingly harsh eugenic hereditarianism doubly damned Euro-American "inebriate" and "dipsomaniac" alcohol abusers as morally incapacitated by defective heredity—as racially degenerate white men who were incapable of effective self-making. Simultaneously, however, a countervailing psychotherapeutic movement rejected eugenic fatalism and promised to restore alcohol abusers to effective self-making by tapping plentifully healing energies thought to reside in the unconscious mind.