North America
Americans drank heavily, for rum was cheap. In 1770 per capita consumption was 3.7 gallons of distilled spirits per year, rising to 5.2 gallons in 1830 or approximately 1.8 one-ounce shots a day for every adult white man. That total does not include the beer or hard cider that colonists routinely drank in addition to rum, the most popular distilled beverage available in English America. Benjamin Franklin printed a "Drinker's Dictionary" in his Pennsylvania Gazette in 1737, listing some 228 slang terms used for drunkenness in Philadelphia.
The sheer volume of hard liquor consumption fell off, but beer grew in popularity and men developed customs and traditions based on how to behave at the tavern. By 1900 the 26 million American men over age 18 patronized 215,000 licensed taverns and probably 50,000 unlicensed (illegal) ones, or one per hundred men. Twice the density could be found in working class neighborhoods. They served mostly beer; bottles were available but most drinkers went to the taverns. Probably half the American men avoided saloons, so the average consumption for actual patrons was about a half-gallon of beer per day, six days a week. In 1900, the city of Boston (with about 200,000 adult men) counted 227,000 daily saloon customers.
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Famous quotes related to north america:
“I do not speak with any fondness but the language of coolest history, when I say that Boston commands attention as the town which was appointed in the destiny of nations to lead the civilization of North America.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation; certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it: he cannot grow or mature.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)