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W. J. Rorabaugh (1945–2020)

Author of The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition

13+ Works 430 Members 7 Reviews

About the Author

W.J. Rorabaugh is Professor of History at the University of Washington in Seattle

Works by W. J. Rorabaugh

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Canonical name
Rorabaugh, W. J.
Other names
Rorabaugh, William Joseph
Birthdate
1945
Date of death
2020-03
Gender
male
Occupations
historian

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Reviews

Originally published in 1979, it's possible there's now new data (hard to find as it was at the time of author's research) on alcohol output in America between 1790-1840, an era of very heavy drinking. This level of drinking stopped almost overnight with the temperance movement (The American Temperance Society was founded in 1826) and religion revivals.

This was interesting overall -- it is a scholarly work -- but the author may have overreached in his analyses of *why* there was so much drinking going on. Such as saying pioneer folks were lonely/isolated & anxious. Did he have any hard evidence that was so? Yes, I'm sure some turned to drink because of isolation.

More interesting were facts such as how/why whiskey replaced rum (simply put, rum was taxed) as favored drink.

I think at the time, this was a groundbreaking work on this topic.
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ValerieAndBooks | 2 other reviews | Mar 29, 2021 |
I read this book for my continuing project to self-educate in labor history. The early part of my education, this book and a book about merchant sailors, mostly cover ground predating the existence of labor unions as we know them today (or even as we knew them in the '50s), but I understand why Professor Jamie Bronstein at New Mexico State covers this material -- it's impossible to understand labor unions (i.e. working people) of the 20th century and today if we don't understand the conditions of working people generations ago.

Rorabaugh's book discusses the final age of the apprentice, from just pre-Revolution America to the Civil War, a war that finished off the institution of apprenticeship for all intents and purposes. Apprenticeship was, like slavery, a combined social/economic institution -- it provided cheap labor while also teaching youths about hard work and keeping them restrained from running wild in the streets. (One of the odd features of Rorabaugh's book is that he appears to believe in the salutary aspects of this social control, even at the cost of freedom and self-reliance.)

It's hard to pinpoint chickens and eggs, but the downfall of the apprentice system coincided with a rise in evangelical religious belief (a personal relationship to God, rather than God-as-master) and increased education, along with concentration of economic activity in urban areas. All of these factors were intertwined in the general cause of a rise in individuality and a moral system of self-determination.

Mechanization, of course, was probably the single most important factor in destroying the apprenticeship system. When machines perform crafts, skilled craftsmen can be replaced with unskilled machine-operators. Further, machines and factories are expensive -- capital is far more important than skill in establishing a business. An apprentice, then, who might have formerly finished his apprenticeship and gone out to the world as a journeyman in order to save money to open his own shop now had no such path -- where was he going to get the money to compete with a Massachusetts textile factory?

More particular to my interests, unions are hardly mentioned in the book. Journeyman formed trade groups to advocate for wages and to keep apprentices out of their industries (since more apprentices result in more journeyman, i.e. more labor, thus resulting in lower wages), but these seemed more akin to guilds of masters than to full-fledged unions of working people.

The book closes with the Civil War, the end of which results in an enormous labor force "returning" from war, both of newly freed African-Americans and soldiers, many of whom ran away from apprenticeships to enlist.

The book is obviously written for an academic market, but for that, it is well-written and mostly engaging. Rorabaugh sometimes engages in too much anecdote, rather than letting those stories illustrate his analytical points, to the point where his point is sometimes lost in pages of mind-numbing detail about the letters sent from apprentice to father and back. Still, to get a sense of the nature of middle-class work "from Franklin to the Machine Age in America," the book is quite useful.
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wearyhobo | Jun 22, 2020 |
In 1961 the journalist Theodore White published his book [b:The Making of the President 1960|549449|The Making of the President 1960|Theodore H. White|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1376578064s/549449.jpg|3282723]. As an entertaining first-hand account of the close 1960 presidential election between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, it spawned a new genre of campaign histories written by the journalists who covered them, a sort of "history 1.5." With the notable exception of Richard Ben Cramer's [b:What It Takes: The Way to the White House|380057|What It Takes The Way to the White House|Richard Ben Cramer|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1439417065s/380057.jpg|2583527], however, none have ever risen to the level of White's seminal work.

Yet while White's book has long stood as the standard account of the election, it is not without its flaws. Foremost among them, as William Rorabaugh points out, is its bias: White's description of the handsome young Kennedy triumphing over the less-appealing Nixon reflected the greater amount of time that White spent with the Kennedy campaign and the greater access he was granted to it. White's account also suffers to a degree from a lack of hindsight, as political trends barely visible to White and his contemporaries stand out much more clearly with the perspective of time. This desire to revise and supersede White's book is at the heart of Rorabaugh's study, which benefits from archival and published material to offer a revised interpretation of the contest.

The book begins with an overview of presidential politics in the 1950s. This was a decade dominated by the genial figure of Dwight Eisenhower, who won easily the two elections in 1952 and 1956 and who presided over a generally prosperous nation. As his vice president, Nixon was well-positioned to inherit the Republican nomination in 1960, yet he still faced the ultimately-unrealized prospect of a challenge from the rising star of Nelson Rockefeller, who had been recently elected governor of New York. By contrast, nearly a half-dozen Democrats vied for their party's nomination, with Kennedy winning it through a combination of organization, effort, corruption, and personal appeal.

Kennedy's nomination posed a dilemma to Nixon in terms of his strategy, as he faced the question of whether to focus his appeal on African Americans in the North or white Southerners. Had the Democrats nominated one of the other contenders, such as Lyndon Johnson or Stuart Symington, Nixon would have been well positioned to appeal to the potentially decisive body of African American voters in Northern cities. Kennedy's nomination pointed the way to the latter option, yet his selection of Johnson as his vice president (a decision that, along with Rockefeller's refusal of the Republican vice-presidential nomination, Rorabaugh sees as the decisive factor in the eventual result) raised doubts as to the effectiveness of that approach. Ultimately Nixon couldn't decide which avenue to pursue, which opened up both groups to Democrats' appeals and resulted in a solid majority in the electoral college.

By challenging preconceived notions about the 1960 election, Rorabaugh's book provokes the reader into a stimulating reexamination of the contest. Yet the book suffers from a couple of notable shortcomings. For all of his claims to reinterpretation, Rorabaugh's bibliography is curiously dated, with a number of important works (most surprisingly Robert Dallek's invaluable biography of JFK, [b:An Unfinished Life|4424|An Unfinished Life John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963|Robert Dallek|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1441483826s/4424.jpg|1214489]) unaccountably absent. This constrains his interpretation of the factors in the election to the short-term developments of the 1950s, leaving out any consideration of the influence of longer-term trends such as the shift of the South away from the Democrats in presidential politics (which, as Kari Frederickson demonstrated in [b:The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South|1574447|The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South 1932-1968|Kari Frederickson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388621534s/1574447.jpg|1567169], predated the decade). Because of this, while achieving its author's goal of improving on White's classic, the book falls short in its analysis of this memorable presidential election.
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MacDad | 1 other review | Mar 27, 2020 |
I got really tired of this guys rhetoric before I got to the Vietnam protests, but his factual information was great.
 
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aulsmith | Jul 21, 2015 |

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