ISSUE 45, LUNCH, Part 2: Free Lunch
Free Lunch
Lunch came to the United States in the decade before the Civil War as a noon meal to tide over city women out shopping in the commercial boulevards of San Francisco, New Orleans, Baltimore, and New York. Prior to the erection of these houses of resort, meals tended to be allocated differently in the day: morning breakfast, 3:00 dinner, 7:00 supper. Some hotels and Coffeehouses offered 11 a.m. soup to go with coffee.
Men became acquainted with the noon meal in the 1860s when barrooms were exploding in number in American cities, and to induce custom, barkeeps offered a “free lunch” to bar patrons. Some believed it was to get more men drinking earlier in the day, buying beverages in the late morning. The lunch was rudimentary—a vat of soup or stew, pickles, a haunch of roasted or boiled meat.
The meal gave rise to a new urban character—the “lunch bummer”—an unemployed middle aged fellow in disheveled condition who would haunt the barrooms for the free lunch—his sole sustenance for the day, and not pay for a beer. A related character, the “lunch fiend” was better dressed, garrulous, and induced other fellows to stand him a round. He was more a parasite than a bum. Neither was welcome in the halls of hospitality, but the bummer was more reviled. “Kicked from one saloon to another, he is forced to watch until the crowd is greatest, then rush in and “Fill Up” before the watchful eye of the proprietor or attendant can detect him.” In saloons with a lustrous reputation for cookery the scramble at the announcement of lunch was dangerous. “Pushing shoving, elbowing, treading on each other’s corns, scowling and damning they go, all gravitating to the steaming cauldron from when the fragrant soup is ladled out by the clean, white aproned attendant.” [Harrisburg Patriot (September 21, 1867), 1).
At some juncture in every city the saloon keepers realized that free lunch was a losing proposition. When the saloon keepers of New Orleans determined to shut down the free lunch at the end of 1867, one of the city’s impoverished poets complained:
Know ye the land of cypress and myrtle,
Are Emblems of deeds we quake to repeat,
Where the round of corned beef and the soup of the turtle
Free gratis for nothing we’ll never more eat.
{New Orleans Times (December 10, 1867), 1]
The suspension of free lunch was temporary. Too many paying patrons favored it, so it would be reinstated for periods of time until saloon keepers determined once again that it was a liability. They always did, because sooner or later a William Parks would sit at the counter, as he did a Robert Dobie’s Saloon at 108 Clark Street, and devour the spread. Whe Dobie demanded pay, Parks refused, was beaten, fled, secured a magistrate, and had Dobie arrested and fined. Parks used Dobie’s Free Lunch Sign, torn from above the saloon door, as evidence against the keeper. [“A Free Lunch not a Free Lunch,” Chicago Daily Inter Ocean (May 18, 1880), 6]
The temperance associations and Methodist churches noted the power of the free lunch. There had been in 1790s London and 1805 Baltimore a charitable institution, The Soup House, designed to nourish the urban poor. But only after the institution of the Free Lunch did the Temperance Societies realize that lunch might be the lever to save a soul from demon rum. The problem of course that a lunch bummer is a man far down the road to perdition and immune to moral suasion. “A lunch bummer is a fellow too lazy or proud to work, or with some chronic objection in that direction . . . [they] just live on so from hand to mouth, from day to day, and do not care a single iota for the opinion of the world or any one in it.” [“Lunch Bummers,” New Orleans Times-Picayune (February 3, 1873), 2.]
They did, however, care for lunch. The Methodists saw this and decided bread first, salvation next.