Hustlers, Beats & Others by Ned Polsky

New York: The Lyons Press, 1998 [1967]

266 pages. Paper. $27.95

Reviewed by Ralph Dumont

Apparently the one book Polsky wrote, Hustlers, Beats & Others is a collection of essays about various subjects (pool hustlers, Greenwich Village beats, criminological research methods, and pornography) linked together as a study in the sociology of “deviance” in American society. -e expanded 1998 edition is superior to the 2007 reprint of the 1967 original, owing to added material including numerous addenda in the text and footnotes (mostly from 1969) as well as a foreword and a new concluding chapter called “Thirty Years On,” written shortly before the author’s death in 2000. I decided to write about this book because I found it fascinating, well written, and free of the boring jargon and stale ideas that seem to characterize most sociological writing. Although anarchism is not a specic focus of Polsky’s, it is mentioned in the essay on the beats; the book is full of themes relating to work, leisure, crime, deviant subcultural identities, and the quest for freedom that deserve the attention of anarchists as well as anyone with a curious and critical mind. Polsky was no moralist, as is shown in his definition of deviance: “Deviance is what is morally stigmatized, at a particular time in a particular society, by that society’s decisive power groups” (204).

Polsky, a University of Chicago trained sociologist, said that he spent about 15,000 hours in poolrooms while studying the world of the hustlers. He loved the game and was a longtime player who even included himself in the category of occasional hustlers. Pool hustling was already in serious decline by the time Polsky wrote about it, although pool and billiards games generally were in the midst of a temporary revival following the Robert Rossen film The Hustler (1961) starring Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason. The essays relating to pool hustlers are concerned with the characteristics of hustlers, the methods of deception and the argot they use, and how someone becomes a hustler. Polsky’s approach is historically minded, looking at where the milieu of hustling came from, the reasons for its rise, and its dim prospects for the future. His central thesis is that hustling emerged as part of a heterosexual male culture of permanent bachelorhood after the Civil War that enjoyed its heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This subculture started to decline during the Great Depression owing more to demographic than to technological changes in American society.

Invented in fifteenth-century France, billiards was for a long time a strictly aristocratic game in France and England, played in private rooms of country houses and in gentlemen’s clubs. It was in this form that billiards was imported to the American colonies. But this “respectable” tradition eventually trickled down to the lower classes and established itself in public venues such as taverns and roadside inns. It was this second tradition of pool playing that became stigmatized and morally suspect. But it was not simply a matter of upper versus lower classes. The poolroom, along with the racetrack, became a vehicle by which the “sporting” fringe of the upper class devoted to drinking, gambling, and whoring worked in parallel to similarly hedonic pursuits of the lower classes to outrage middle-class morality. Eventually billiards ceased to be of much interest to the upper classes. My guess (Polsky does not discuss it) is that the defeat of the southern plantation aristocracy in the Civil War had much to do with the end of billiards as a game in the style of English country squires. In the industrializing, urbanizing America of the mid-nineteenth century with its new waves of working-class immigration and the spread of towns and cities to the western territories, poolrooms multiplied and became established as all-male domains. Reflecting the patterns of immigration, many of the early pool professionals and hustlers were Irish or German; later on they tended to be Italian or Jewish. And as blacks (or “Negroes,” the term Polsky consistently employs) migrated to northern cities, many of them also became represented among pool hustlers.

In the bachelor subculture of the poolroom, men could indulge in behaviors that many women found appalling, such as drinking heavily, cursing, chewing and spitting tobacco, #ghting, and dressing like slobs. Women interested in playing pool in those days would presumably have had to brave obscenities, leering, and pickup attempts, if not worse. He also thought that women faced physical limitations such as male-female differences in the structure of the arm that would make it di%cult for them to become good players, and that they would shrink from making certain difficult shots because of embarrassing poses it would force them to adopt. In the expanded edition, however, he acknowledges that many women have succeeded in becoming outstanding players.

Another element of poolroom culture, and the one most favorable to the hustler, was the formerly general practice of betting on games, which could take the form of player versus player, player versus spectator, or spectator versus spectator. Only new or weaker players would insist on “sociable” (no gambling) games. As pool is overwhelmingly a game of skill, the hustler would, first of all, have to have real and high-level skills. Unlike card or dice “mechanics,” the pool hustler had little room for outright cheating. But he was a type of confidence man skilled at manipulating impressions with an arsenal of deceptive practices revolving around not revealing his true speed, or skill, to the suckers. !e main form of actual cheating was known as “dumping,” a partnership con in which two hustlers play each other and make side bets with spectators. One hustler would throw the game to the other and share the winnings. When a hustler became too well known in a particular locale he would have to hit the road, looking for a fresh start.

Hustling itself violated only misdemeanor laws against gambling. Contrary to the impression given in The Hustler that hustlers could make good money at their trade, in fact they often had to moonlight at other employments, both legal and criminal. Some of them might be fences, burglars, drug pushers, loan sharks, or pimps. A common response to the question “why hustle?” would be “It beats working.” But since hustlers lived almost entirely in the poolroom and did little else, it seems fair to say that hustling was an obsessive job in its own right. Polsky emphasizes the sense of colleagueship and esprit de corps he observed among hustlers, alongside a high degree of individualism. Hustlers tended to have a sense of history and knew all the stories about the past and present greats among them. !ere was some overlap between professional tournament players and hustlers, and there was also the phenomenon of occasional hustlers, who constituted a lower tier in terms of both skill and prestige. Some notable figures from the worlds of jazz and Hollywood were pool hustlers at some stage in their lives, including Jelly Roll Morton, Sonny Greer (Duke Ellington’s drummer), and actor George Raft, who partnered with fellow hustler and Broadway songwriter Billy Rose.

Pool hustling declined as billiards lost much of its general popularity. Professional pool lost paying spectators, and fewer people were interested in betting on games. A second movie about pool hustlers, The Color of Money (1986), also starring Paul Newman, led to another revival, but even smaller and more short-lived than the last. Many bars now have small, coin-operated pool tables where gambling is discouraged. Bar hustling is not considered, by such hustlers as remain, to be worth the costs and risks involved (moving around frequently, splitting meager winnings with a partner, facing the prospect of beat-downs or even robberies by sore losers). Writing at the turn of the millennium, Polsky described a transformed game no longer stigmatized by middle-class morality against gambling, a game whose latest crop of aficionados were Asian-American kids, and which was far less dependent on the old bachelor subculture as more women became involved.

According to Polsky, sociology is, or should be, “the study of how society is really run as distinguished from how the society’s civics textbooks say it is run” (112). In his essay on the research methods of sociology’s criminological subset, he lambastes the social-work orientation of criminologists. By this he means that they tend to be preoccupied by the idea of “rehabilitating” criminals and therefore approach their studies from a moralistic rather than scientific perspective. As a result, the criminologists of his time were unable to provide meaningful analyses of criminal subcultures and lifestyles. For Polsky, leaning on Max Weber, value neutrality is key to the scientific claims of sociology. However, this does not mean a pretension to Olympian pure objectivity. Consonant with this theme, he endorses Nietzsche’s position in the Genealogy of Morals that all knowing is a matter of perspective. "e perspective that most criminologists bring to the table is that of law and order. "ey study only criminals who are in the jail, court, probation, and parole systems. "e idea of associating with uncaught criminals in their ordinary lives is anathema to these criminologists. But this is exactly how it should be done, says Polsky, who identifies this method with the “open-air anthropology” advocated by Bronislaw Malinowski. Polsky conducted studies like this himself by associating with drug dealers, robbers, and other criminals without ever becoming “one of them.” The ideal he upholds is empathy that does not pass over into identity with the object of study. He recounts several interesting conversations with tough guys, including one who talks about his guns with the reverence of a craftsman for the tools of his trade. Polsky insists that this method is not as dangerous as it may sound, provided that researchers stay on the level with the criminal and guard against allowing themselves to be drawn into an accomplice role. Keeping faith with criminal informants is important, and not only for reasons of personal safety; he compares this with anthropologists who keep faith with native people and do not turn them in to colonial officials and their cops.

Concerning the sociology of pornography, Polsky says that at the time (early 1960s) it didn’t exist, though such studies are now legion. The major source then was Kinsey’s Institute of Sex Research. Polsky makes two main, hardly surprising, observations on this subject: 1) prostitution and pornography are parallel stigmatized institutions serving as necessary safety valves that help to make tolerable the legitimate expression of alienated sexuality in monogamous marriage and family; and 2) the distinction between hardcore pornography and highly erotic art on the basis of “socially redeeming value” is spurious. Polsky modifies the first point by pointing out that prostitution and pornography are not entirely cross-cultural phenomena since they are primarily associated with “longtime monetary economies” (186). He might rather have said they are associated with civilization, both East and West. About the second point, Polsky says that courts have deluded themselves that they are following and applying “community standards.” In the retrospective chapter, Polsky takes note of the considerable erosion in America’s Puritan cultural heritage, one of whose manifestations is a greater acceptance of pornography, which is therefore less “deviant,” even as some things remain beyond the pale (most notably child porn and intercourse with animals). In the earlier editions of the book Polsky, referring to Kinsey’s data, said that only a small minority of women had any interest in pornography. Later on, he admitted that this view needed modification in view of more recent social changes. In this section, he also discusses the complete lack of evidence for claims made by feminist anti-pornography ideologues such as Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Gri"n, and Robin Morgan that pornography is a cause of rape and other sexual assaults.

The other main essay in this collection is about the Village beat scene in New York in the summer of 1960. Most beats were not writers and did not seek publicity. Their ideal was to have no relationship, not even a hostile one, with the square world. But in practice this turned out to be impossible to realize. Already by this time, San Francisco beats had become a tourist attraction, and many of them $ed this attention by going to New York, where the same thing eventually happened. Polsky professes sympathy for much of the beats’ criticism of American society, and he defends them against a journalistic myth taken from Hollywood movies and Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” that associated them with violent teenage hoodlums. The affinity for jazz was at the core of the “white Negro” role, and Polsky points out that it was not new, tracing it back to white jazzmen of the 1920s such as Bix Beiderbecke. He also mentions his own bohemian history, starting as a “13-year-old zoot suiter” who was vice president of his high school jazz club and hung out at the Apollo #eater and other music venues in Harlem (172). But Polsky was also critical of the beats. To him they were “characteristically ignorant of history, even of their own history” (145). Beats resented the label of “hipster,” despite their own debt to the mostly black hipsters of the 1940s jazz world who were noted for their argot and their drug use.

Drug use was pervasive too among the majority of beats. #ere were junkies in the beat milieu, but the majority preferred nonaddicting drugs, principally marijuana. Polsky credits the beats as the main transmission belt for the diffusion of marijuana use to middle- and upper-class whites outside the jazz world, and he supplies a detailed chart showing the history and spread of marijuana use from Mexico to New Orleans, and from black to white jazz musicians and fans. Polsky reports that the beats he interacted with, both black and white, accepted his “square” company readily enough. But he was unable to convince some of them that he was not a fink or a plainclothes cop.

Like bohemia in general, the beat milieu tolerated or encouraged forms of sexuality disapproved in the wider society. Bisexuality and interracial relationships were common. But Polsky observed that the beats failed to develop deep and lasting relationships. He found that “lack of virility, however defined, is a frequent problem among the white males (and a characteristic of all long-time junkies)” (159). Nor did he find race relations to be as harmonious as the subcultural ideology claimed. Polsky doubted that white beats really accepted black men in their totality, but only in their “‘Negro-ness’ (as bringer of marihuana and jazz, etc.),” which amounted to “an inverted form of ‘keeping the nigger in his place’” (178). #e beat world was more about blacks wanting to be white than whites wanting to be black. He had a theory that American urban blacks of that time had a forbidden desire to be white from having internalized white ideals of physical beauty. !is was a driving force in the interracial relationships in beat sex life, which Polsky characterized as “essentially a conspiracy between white females and Negro males” (179) that was subtly but intellectually opposed by the white males. The hip attitude toward blacks was certainly better than what prevailed in white square (including northern liberal) society, but could be improved if the white beats accepted the “inescapable aspect of the Negro-wanting-to-be-white” (181). He then proposed a bold solution: “miscegenation on a grand scale, the production of more and more Negroes who can pass, and ultimately the total ‘mongrelization’ of the two races” (181). Polsky acknowledged that his views on this subject were bound to touch raw nerves; whatever their merits, they probably still do.

Greenwich Village in 1960 was still a residential enclave of Italian Americans. !e in#ux of beats into the neighborhood provoked conflict between them and the Italian community, which Polsky described as “going down fighting” (151), sometimes in a literally pugilistic sense as hoodlums from the Catholic Youth Organization would beat up beats.

In a passage that sounds almost like a description of post-left anarchy, Polsky says,“It might be reasonable to call the beat an anarchist… but more important is the fact that the beat doesn’t want to promote anarchism or any other ism” (156-57). The beats are “not apolitical but consciously and deliberately antipolitical” (156), rejecting radical sects along with major parties. Some beats initially admired Fidel Castro, but this support evaporated quickly as Castro revealed his authoritarianism. Polsky suggests that Nietzsche would make a good ancestor for the beats. A major characteristic of beats that Polsky noted was their aversion to work. Some lived o" parents or girlfriends; others got by precariously through panhandling, short cons, borrowing money, and odd jobs when necessary. Polsky questioned whether the freedom from routine square jobs was worth the price of voluntary poverty compounded in many cases by drug addiction. The scuffling often consumed more time and effort than a straight job would, and it limited the possibilities of leisure, because a city is an unfriendly place if you don’t have money. !is is still a problem for those dedicated to the idea of zerowork, and it will continue to be a problem until such time as the refusal of work becomes generalized and poses the possibility of overthrowing the dictatorship of political economy.

Beats tended to be intellectual lightweights, and not many of them were habitual readers. Square attention to the beats revolved almost entirely around the highly visible minority of them who were writers, like the famous trio of Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs. Polsky was unimpressed with beat literature. He dismissed Ginsberg’s poetry, which he described as “Allen’s mishmash of Blake-Whitman-Pound-Williams” (235), but admired him on a personal level. He met Ginsberg several times and praised him for his generosity.

The beats were absorbed by their hippie successors, who had less interest in Negro jazz, except for the blues, of which much white rock music was a denatured imitation. In the retrospective chapter, Polsky clarifies the definition of subculture. Like the larger culture, a subculture must involve transmittal from one generation to another; otherwise it is not a subculture but just a fad or a fashion. In his presentation the counterculture generations — hipsters, beats, and hippies, and came to a definitive end in the early 1970s, with the conclusion of America’s direct involvement in the Vietnam War.

Polsky says nothing about the punk phenomenon, which broke out shortly after the demise of the old counterculture and partly in protest against it for its compromises and absorption into the complacency of corporate rock music and mainstream liberalism. Punk has persisted for a number of years (longer than a generation), which !ts Polsky’s requirement for subculture status. In its initial manifestation, punk tended to be more combative than the beats or hippies, but it fell into the limitations of all oppositional subcultures, such as the tendency to become bogged down in the style and identity of an alternative model of consumption.

Another weakness of subcultures is their perennial susceptibility to recuperation that makes them strive to be less “deviant.” "e gay liberation movement is a case in point. "e riot provoked by the police raid on the Stonewall Tavern in 1969 was an act of insurrection whose concrete results brought greater freedom for many people. But this spirit of rebellion is squandered in the present focus of gay politics on fighting for the right of gay people to participate as equals in the bourgeois and statist institutions of marriage and the military. Subcultural identity, whether freely adopted or imposed by the greater society’s labeling, represents a sort of cultural nationalism. Subcultures based on racial or sexual oppression start to dissolve as capitalist society moves toward unburdening itself of archaic prejudices. Hip capitalism distances itself from traditional bourgeois society’s paternalistic strictures of social conformity. The nationalism of the recuperated culture-group is maintained by its more middle-class representatives, who establish themselves as leaders and identify with liberal politics. Greenwich Village remains a stronghold of gay culture, but today it is so thoroughly gentrified that no one practicing what Polsky observed as a beat way of life could survive there.

Polsky’s observations on the Italian resistance to the beats’ colonization of the Village point to another relation between capitalism and cool that has manifested itself repeatedly —the familiar role of declassed artists and bohemians as the shock troops of gentrification. The tragically hip of recent years, like the ones who took over the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, fit this role to a T. The pioneering hipsters price out the resident ethnic groups, and the succeeding waves of hip immigrants in turn price out the pioneers. Millennial hipsterism continually disavows itself with cannibalistic snark; it is a commonplace that you won’t find a hipster who owns up to being one. Present-day hipsters aren’t so much a subculture within American society as they are part of a global postmodern youth consumer culture that recycles all the countercultures of the past, drained of content. Plenty has already been written recently attacking the millennial hipsters, so I won’t dwell on them. The essential point is that the idea of counterculture is bankrupt because it has merged with the normative culture and no longer holds any prospects for refusal. It is against culture itself (the commodity that sells all other commodities) that deviance and subversion will have to turn.

Nowadays there is little to be gained from studying hipsters in their natural habitat. If the subcultures are worn out, then so too will be those who study them. Polsky, who was simultaneously sympathetic to and hard-headedly critical of the “deviant” milieus he studied, gave it as good a shot as anyone could. "at there can be an authentically anarchist sociology or anthropology seems a dubious proposition, but these academic specializations at their best can produce knowledge and insights that anarchists can and should make use of.