Bachelor bash

Brown historian Howard Chudacoff plumbs the realm of the single man

by Ian Donnis

Howard P. Chudacoff

Hoisting a pint of Harpoon IPA and surveying the scene from a bar seat during his premiere visit to the Hot Club, Howard P. Chudacoff is right at home. Although married for 31 years and admittedly not much of a nightlife denizen, the Brown history professor's milieu is the archetypal dark, smoky, swank-tuned and gin-soaked realm of the American bachelor.

It's a place long seen not just as debonair or loutish, but negative and detrimental to the national interest. In fact, such scorn and derision were heaped on bachelors during colonial days that they were required to pay a special tax. "Even in the 20th century, there are some people who made a link between a large group of unmarried men and the rise of Nazism -- that's the link," Chudacoff says.

Sheesh, and I thought my bachelor brethren and I were just savoring our independence. When a couple of the guys down the bar from us start to briefly hoot for some inexplicable reason (there are virtually no women present at the bar at this point on a recent Tuesday evening), they hardly seem like incipient fascists. Thankfully, Chudacoff, who spent more than five years developing The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture (Princeton University Press, 1999), assures me that historical perceptions of single men behaving extremely badly are indeed overstated.

As a peak in the proportion of unmarried men in the 1890s coincided with the proliferation of salons, cafes, pool halls, dance halls and other urban gathering spots, "The reality is that for most of the time, most bachelors were simply minding their own business and creating a subculture," Chudacoff says. "What was interesting, that I had not anticipated, was that half of the men who were bachelors were still living at home with one or both parents. In many ways, they were simply boarders in the family household, because they had jobs and nightlife."

Now that doesn't sound at all like the ritual of wretched excess and vulgarity known as the bachelor party, but such venerable traditions have to get started somewhere, I suppose. The word bachelor, for example, which has no real female counterpart, is rooted in the medieval concept of a knight who lacked the cache to have his own cast of vassals. And it's only relatively recently that the contemporary meaning which we associate with bachelors has come about. Regardless, says Chudacoff, "For over a century, the bachelor life -- mythical or not -- has served as a male ideal."

Long before the likes of Sly Stallone and Steven Seagal were held up as symbols of masculine strength, Teddy Roosevelt was one of the first role models for bachelors. But the real epitome of male aggression and competitiveness, says Chudacoff, was the Irish prizefighter, John L. Sullivan, the Boston strongman, last of the bareknuckled heavyweight champions, who, "liked to go into a saloon, buy everyone a drink, challenge anyone in the house to a fight, and pay off the house for all the damages."

From 1900 through the 1960s, the percentage of unmarried adults waned as Americans embraced marriage in growing numbers. But the percentage of unmarried men and women has again peaked in the last decade of the century, propelled by the prevalence of divorce and the coupling of people who dwell together, but don't marry. Meanwhile, the average age at which men lose their freedom, er, I mean tie the knot has climbed to 27, from 22 in 1960. "That's really a remarkable difference in less than 40 years," marvels Chudacoff, 56, who specializes in American urban and social history. "That has a large impact on the number of men who are unmarried."

Other factors influencing the bachelor boom of the late 20th century include the diversions of our consumer culture and the tendency of some college grads to delay marriage. Chudacoff also credits Hugh Hefner, the Playboy founder, who made bachelordom, "not only attractive, but respectable -- a full-time occupation where [men] were not just looking at naked women and looking for sex. Hugh Hefner, his philosophy [of a bachelor] was someone who was a connoisseur of sports, cars, stereo equipment, movies -- all that kind of thing."

Chudacoff, who conducted his research largely by examining old US Census records, says it's difficult to discern insights about the health of the nation from the relative percentage of bachelors at a given time. He does acknowledge, however, that, "sociologically, you can relate a high proportion of bachelors in society to high rates of crime and violence," since teenagers and young men are more prone to acting out, violent behavior and nasty habits. Still, the professor is not about to bash bachelors as a monolith of lumbering lunkheads.

"Some people would say left to his own devices, a man would sit at home with a remote control and watch ESPN or Schwarzenegger, drink beer and belch -- that it's women who have tamed men and made them respectable," says Chudacoff. "The question is, whether the woman is the civilizing force or the responsibility of the family. I think it's too simplistic to say that women tame men, but there is a moderating influence of being in a couple, rather than being a single."

And while researchers have documented that married men live longer than their single counterparts, many bachelors are content to persist in their ways. The point was driven home to Chudacoff when he appeared on two separate radio programs in which two 32-year-old men, one from Wisconsin and the other from Nigeria, extolled their satisfaction with single life, despite facing parental pressure to get hitched.

For his part, Chudacoff married at 24 and has no regrets. "I did not write this book because it's wishful thinking," he says. "I wrote it because it's an interesting and overlooked subject."

Ian Donnis can be reached at idonnis[a]phx.com.