"Men even contract the dirty, filthy habit of chewing tobacco, and when the habit gets a good hold upon them they are never satisfied except when they have a wad of the stuff in their mouth. So with drinking. It is largely a habit"
About this Quote
Jarvis reaches for the gross-out image on purpose: a "dirty, filthy" wad of tobacco isn’t just a vice, it’s a visible, almost comic degradation. For a late-19th-century politician, that kind of blunt sensory language is a tool of governance. He’s not debating policy; he’s building disgust, turning a personal practice into something you can practically taste and recoil from. Once the audience feels that revulsion, the leap to alcohol is easy.
The key move is the word "habit". Jarvis frames drinking less as moral failure and more as behavioral capture: "when the habit gets a good hold" reads like possession. That phrasing does quiet political work. If drinking is "largely a habit", then it’s not primarily a question of character, class, or culture; it becomes something the state, the church, or the community can justifiably interrupt. Habit language suggests reformability (break it) while also implying dependency (they are never satisfied). It’s a proto-public-health argument smuggled through moral rhetoric.
Context matters: Jarvis comes out of a post-Civil War South where modernization campaigns collided with older masculine rituals of chewing, spitting, and drinking in public life. By linking tobacco and alcohol, he collapses the distance between "social custom" and "addiction", giving temperance politics a broader target and a cleaner narrative. The subtext is paternalistic but strategic: if men can be trained into these cravings, they can be trained out of them - and the reformer gets to claim the role of surgeon, not scold.
The key move is the word "habit". Jarvis frames drinking less as moral failure and more as behavioral capture: "when the habit gets a good hold" reads like possession. That phrasing does quiet political work. If drinking is "largely a habit", then it’s not primarily a question of character, class, or culture; it becomes something the state, the church, or the community can justifiably interrupt. Habit language suggests reformability (break it) while also implying dependency (they are never satisfied). It’s a proto-public-health argument smuggled through moral rhetoric.
Context matters: Jarvis comes out of a post-Civil War South where modernization campaigns collided with older masculine rituals of chewing, spitting, and drinking in public life. By linking tobacco and alcohol, he collapses the distance between "social custom" and "addiction", giving temperance politics a broader target and a cleaner narrative. The subtext is paternalistic but strategic: if men can be trained into these cravings, they can be trained out of them - and the reformer gets to claim the role of surgeon, not scold.
Quote Details
| Topic | Habits |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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