Politicized Coffeehouses and Beer Halls Once Rallied Dissenters
Older veterans still cluster together mornings for a “senior coffee” at various McDonalds in Rapid City, South Dakota, and other fast-food diners across America. Veterans can also be found afternoons recalling their heady days of military service over a drink at the local American Legion or VFW. But cheap coffeehouses and bars now rarely serve to rally political dissenters the way they once did.
Has serious dissent itself been driven deeper underground–now without identifiable social magnets for sharing sentiments and tactics on either the political Left or Right?
We still have coffeehouses in most cities, quiet places to enjoy exotic coffees, read a book, play a game of chess, and discuss political ideas. The intellectual life of a city used to be more in evidence there than in schools and colleges, at least for the adult public.
The Wikipedia article “English coffeehouses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” describes how the public at large, not just students, had a place to exchange ideas: “Topics discussed included politics and political scandals, daily gossip, fashion, current events, and debates surrounding philosophy and the natural sciences. Historians often associate English coffeehouses, during the 17th and 18th centuries, with the intellectual and cultural history of the Age of Enlightenment: they were an alternate sphere for intellectual thought, supplementary to the university. Political groups frequently used English coffeehouses as meeting places.”
In Berkeley during the 1960s, coffeehouses were the intellectual magnet for the Left. Marxists pamphlets and posters were everywhere. Demonstrations and activist strategies were planned in these convenient meeting places. The Right met with violence when it attempted to set up shop. Activism probably came more from the coffeehouses than from the University of California classrooms back then.
The political Right seemed to have preferred beer halls to organize political strategies, as Wikipedia describes: “Beer halls in the early 20th century existed in most larger southern German cities, where hundreds or even thousands of people were able to gather during the evenings, drink beer and often engage in political or social debate. They were also places where political rallies could be held, a tradition still alive today.” One famous gathering started on the evening of November 8, 1923, and became known as the “Beer Hall Putsch,” led by Erich Ludendorff and Adolf Hitler.
