Controversies
The temperance movement opposed the free lunch as promoting the consumption of alcohol. An 1874 history of the movement writes:
In the cities, there are prominent rooms on fashionable streets that hold out the sign "Free Lunch." Does it mean that some ... has gone systematically to work setting out tables ... placing about them a score of the most beautiful and winning young ladies... hiring a band of music? Ah, no! ... there are men who do all this in order to hide the main feature of their peculiar institution. Out of sight is a well-filled bar, which is the centre about which all these other things are made to revolve. All the gathered fascinations and attractions are as so many baits to allure men into the net that is spread for them. Thus consummate art plies the work of death, and virtue, reputation, and every good are sacrificed as these worse than Moloch shrines.
A number of writers, however, suggest that the free lunch actually performed a social relief function. Reformer William T. Stead commented that in winter in 1894 the suffering of the poor in need of food
would have been very much greater had it not been for the help given by the labor unions to their members and for an agency which, without pretending to be of much account from a charitable point of view, nevertheless fed more hungry people in Chicago than all the other agencies, religious, charitable, and municipal, put together. I refer to the Free Lunch of the saloons. There are from six to seven thousand saloons in Chicago. In one half of these a free lunch is provided every day of the week.
He states that "in many cases the free lunch is really a free lunch," citing an example of a saloon which did not insist on a drink purchase, although commenting that this saloon was "better than its neighbors." Stead cites a newspaper's estimate that the saloon keepers fed 60,000 people a day and that this represented a contribution of about $18,000 a week toward the relief of the destitute in Chicago.
In 1896, the New York State legislature passed the Raines law which was intended to regulate liquor traffic. Among its many provisions, one forbade the sale of liquor unless accompanied by food, while another outlawed the free lunch. In 1897, however, it was amended to again allow free lunches.
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