I recall that on a Saturday night in downtown Madison, WI two decades ago, all the shopkeepers put steel grates down over their display windows when they closed at 6pm on Saturday. Not to keep out burglars -- the streets were flooded all night with UW students with 1200 SAT scores, but to keep said scholars from drunkenly falling through the display windows.

These days on State St, a place most flooded with UW students, you simply won't see steel grates on any display windows! None that I can recall anyway.

Beer drinking in WI is a tradition. Traditions have a tendency to stick around for a long time. Plus, some of the local brews are excellent! Even then, in the past decade in Madison, along with the general national trend, there is a distinct shift from drinking beer to drinking wine.

Next thing you know this bigoted "Razib" character will tell us that Irish people that don't speak Gaelic are prone to drinking!

There's a book out about moonshining in Minnesota during prohibition: "Minnesota 13". It centered in Stearns County, which is about 90% German Catholic, and to all intents and purposes the Catholic Church treated moonshining as civil disobedience. Stearns County was a major source of high-quality moonshine (they used copper vessels and pipe) and saved a lot of people from hard times.

Abolitionism, women's suffrage, and prohibition were closely related causes and were mostly Protestant (and often effectively anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant). Populism and Progressivism tended to be anti-alcohol but the more successful politicians softpedaled the issue in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

I should add that Congressman Volstead of the Volstead Act (Prohibition) represented a mostly German area and was defeated immediately. Prohibitionists and drunks come from the same populations (Sweden and Ireland have a lot of teetotallers).

Volstead's successful opponent, from the leftwing Farmer Labor Party, accused him of atheism, but Volstead denied it. Otherwise he could be PZ's hero.

Some interesting stuff on temperance from the Catholic encyclopedia ( from circ. 1920 i guess)

here http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/...then/ 14482a.htm

Note how England created it's gin problem by banning the import of French spirits, and then tried to solve the gin problem by making beer cheap.

( I also liked the way they called whiskey acquae vitae)

Note how England created it's gin problem by banning the import of French spirits, and then tried to solve the gin problem by making beer cheap.

check John Nye's War, Wine, and Taxes: The Political Economy of Anglo-French Trade, 1689-1900 .

Yeah, Italian Americans don't speak Italian except cursewords and some mispronounced food items, yet they still spaghetti and meatballs.

Yeah, Northern-European cultures seem to have a bigger problem w/ alcohol than Southern European ones, I guess, b/c people tend to get drunk on beer and whiskey rather than wine. When did you last see a frat-party where everyone was chugging wine?

Yeah, Northern-European cultures seem to have a bigger problem w/ alcohol than Southern European ones, I guess, b/c people tend to get drunk on beer and whiskey rather than wine. When did you last see a frat-party where everyone was chugging wine?

part of this is genetic; southrons metabolize alcohol more efficiently. but there are also cultural mores against binge drinking and displays of drunkenness in places like italy which don't exist in scandinavia.

Chinese have less of an alcohol problem than Nortthern Europeans, too, even though they don't metabolize alcohol well, so my guess is that the genetic factor is lesser.

Japanese have learned to overcome their genetic handicap and become drunks. In general, since about 1600 the alcoholic peoples have become dominant in the world.

Emerson:

I'd like to dig up some research on Japanese drinking rates and occurrence of the genetic inability to process alcohol well. I think it's actually a pretty interesting phenomenon.

You are correct that Japan is a drinking culture, through and through, but on the ground I'm seeing a rather interesting phenomenon of partial teetotaler practice amongst many Japanese, namely that they prefer not to drink due to their own bad reaction, but more often than not will nominally drink small amounts for show if the social situation requires it. It's a non-insignificant amount of people from the somewhat random sampling of the 100 or so people I work with as clients.

I'd really like to see a real analysis done on it that's both quantitatively tight and yet cognizant of the different qualitative social mores towards the subject.

I think that teetotalling cultures and drinking cultures are often the same. Sweden and Ireland have large teetotalling populations.