The vast majority of Americans have, at one point or another, gotten
drunk, smoked, dabbled with drugs, gambled, sworn, or engaged in
adultery. During the 1800s, "respectable" people struggled to control
these behaviors, labeling them "bad" and the people who indulged in them
unrespectable. In the twentieth century, these minor vices were
transformed into a societal complex of enormous and pervasive influence.
Yet the general belief persists that these activities remain merely
harmless "bad habits, " individual transgressions more than social
problems. Not so, argues distinguished historian John C. Burnham in this
pioneering study. In Bad Habits, Burnham traces the growth of a
veritable minor vice-industrial complex illustrating the special
heritage shared by these vices. As this vice complex grew, activities
that might have been harmless, natural, and sociable fun resulted in
fundamental social change. When Burnham set out to explore the influence
of these bad habits on American society, he sought to discover why so
many "good" people engaged in activities that many, including they
themselves, considered "bad." What he found, however, was a coalition of
economic and social interests in which the single minded quest for
profit allied with the values of the Victorian saloon underworld and
bohemian rebelliousness. This combination radically inverted common
American standards of personal conduct. Bad Habits, then, describes, in
words and pictures how more and more Americans learned to value hedonism
and self-gratification - to smoke and swear during World War I, to
admire cabaret night life, and to reject schoolmarmish standards in the
age of Prohibition. Tracing the evolution of each ofthe bad habits,
Burnham tells how liquor control boards encouraged the consumption of
alcohol; how alcoholic beverage producers got their workers deferred
from the draft during World War II; how convenience stores and
accounting firms pursued profits by pushing legalized gambling;
