This brings us back to Louis Deal and George Bear and the question of why black bartenders were tolerated and even embraced in the South and utterly rejected in the North. When Beck finally let Deal go, the Cincinnati Enquirer made sure to track down Bear and elicit his reasons for the vehement opposition to Deal. Bear claimed he wasn’t a racist, of course — indeed, he had “no objection to the colored man as a helper or porter, as was the case in many saloons.” The problem, he explained, was that “too many good white men were in need of situations to permit of the introduction of colored barkeepers in first-class establishments,” adding that it wasn’t “a matter of personal spite, but of self-protection.”
Off the record, however, the white bartenders said something different: Deal’s employment, they claimed, was an intolerable “insult to the white men engaged in the same business.” Here was the crux of the matter. It wasn’t just that black men would be taking open jobs, it was that they would be redefining the very status of the job. In the last decades of the 19th century, bartenders strove to extract their profession — under strong attack from a powerful temperance movement that regarded them as, essentially, accessories to slow murder — from the louche sporting milieu in which it had evolved and turn it into a regular profession. They unionized, started wearing uniforms (Jerry Thomas’s brocade vests and diamond stickpins were out, replaced by the neat white coat), established schools and subjected themselves to the frugal discipline of the cash register. Rather than tossing drinks from glass to glass in a wide liquid arc or shaking them, they preferred to stir them, with an elegant, restrained rotation of the wrist; much less vulgar. Elaborate garnishes were reined in, drinks got lighter and dryer and less intoxicating. Bartending, the suggestion was, was skilled labor, just like, say, making watches or taking photographs. A bartender was a solid member of the middle class. A bartender was respectable.
To the average white American in the late nineteenth century, black labor was essentially synonymous with unskilled labor. To a degree, that was not wrong (and here I am drawing mostly on R. R. Wright’s 1913 article in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, “The Negro in Unskilled Labor”): The 1900 census showed 75 percent of black workers performing such labor, and a large proportion of the remainder doing their skilled labor in an agricultural context, where a townsman such as George Bear would not see them. Only 6.9 percent of black workers were found in the (skilled) “manufacturing and mechanical pursuits” and 1.2 percent in “professional service.” This wasn’t the whole story: In fact, the percentage of skilled black workers was — despite every obstacle thrown in their way — rising rapidly. But as Wright observed, although the black unskilled worker was a “welcome guest” in Northern cities and was migrating there in large numbers, it was only with “extreme difficulty” that the skilled black worker found a place there.
From the point of view of George Bear and his fellow barkeepers in “first-class establishments,” to tolerate black men behind the bar in such a place was as good as to acknowledge that bartending wasn’t watchmaking; that it wasn’t skilled labor. It didn’t matter the slightest that a man like Louis Deal could stir up a perfect Widow’s Kiss and had a sure-fire hangover cure. For Deal and his fellow black mixologists, of course, this was a perfect Catch-22: the very act of stepping into a lucrative job in a first-class saloon destroyed the value of that job.