Caleb Crain remembers the jolly fellows, "a certain type of American man—rowdy, boastful, hard drinking, and fond
of games, brawls, and tricks—who could dependably be found in village
taverns and on city streets":
Jolly fellows found themselves besieged when the nineteenth century's famous reform movements began to attack drinking, brawling, gambling, and whoring. Reform arose in the Northeast but quickly spread south and west, transforming society wholesale: The average American drank an estimated 7.1 gallons of alcohol in 1830, but only 1.8 in 1845. The alteration is sometimes credited to the religious movement known as the Second Great Awakening. But Stott quotes a Mississippi boatman's belief that "religion is generally located in the upper story" and suspects that the deeper cause was industrial capitalism, which shifted America's ethos from sympathetic interdependence to prudent individualism.
Manners became finer, diets became more sophisticated, homespun fabrics gave way to factory-made ones. Men in suits were unlikely to soil them by brawling. An early sociologist, studying the change as it hit an Indiana village in the 1860s, noted that guilt, gossip, and legal coercion joined forces. Before, "the typical man was a fighter"; afterward, he was "a champion of denial." Once credit agencies started to record men's drinking habits, jolly fellowship was doomed.
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