Bars Are Full of Good Ideas

Shutting them down—for prohibition or Covid—does more harm than you think.

- By Peter Suderman

Just days before the signing of the Constitution, George Washington, not yet America’s first president, took his pals out for a night on the town to celebrate the Constitutional Convention’s end. They went to Philadelphia’s City Tavern, where, if a surviving receipt is to be believed, he and his men consumed more than 100 bottles of wine, more than 30 bottles of beer, eight bottles of whiskey, eight bottles of cider, and seven bowls of punch, for an inflation-adjusted tab of somewhere between $15,000 and $17,000.

This was a big celebration, but it wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary. The Founders were drinkers and distillers. Washington produced his own brandy and whiskey at Mount Vernon, and he and his fellow revolutionaries imbibed vast quantities of spirits as they plotted independence and developed the machinery of American governance. Saloons were so heavily associated with revolutionary ideas, in fact, that they became known as “nurseries of freedom.”

Saloons were where the ideas that would define America were first hashed out, presumably via the kind of rowdy, unstructured conversation that tends to happen in bars. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that America was imagined, organized, and eventually built over booze consumed in saloons. Without saloons, America—or at least America as we know it—might not exist.

In the century and a half after the founding, saloons continued to be a key social institution, places of business, leisure, and community for many men—until Prohibition wiped them out, destroying in one fell stroke the cultural and economic infrastructure they had long provided.