Unconvincing But Useful

The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition

William J. Rorabaugh, 1979

Unconvincing was the biggest takeaway I had from this book. It isn’t the only one of my field reading library I reacted to in this way. Another was Stephen Mihm’s Counterfeiters. But in any case, William Rorabaugh’s book began, “the United States [between 1790-1830] underwent such profound social and psychological change that a new national character emerged,” and that excessive drinking during this period was a symptom of this stress. America’s democratic ideals and cult of individual freedom made men (after a few initial remarks, he didn’t spend a lot of time talking about gender differences in consumption) desire independence and achievement, but Rorabaugh said they lacked the will or “motivation” to really work for their goals until the Second Great Awakening (yeah, so you can already see what my problem with this is going to be). Their frustration and guilt led them to alcoholism and maybe to other forms of social action. Rorabaugh claimed there was “little psychological difference between a drunkard’s hallucinations and an Anti-Mason’s hysteria.” Apparently he did not feel the need to explain why Anti-Masons were their era’s deplorables; he just assumed we would take that as a given. “America,” Rorabough concluded, “was left as a culture dominated by an ambivalence that could be transcended only through an anti-intellectual faith.” Or, as his data purported to show, by drunkenness. Maybe he should have explored more deeply whether those two options were that different?

Rorabaugh introduced clergymen and temperance moralists in the first paragraph of the book; but in a study that claims to address hidden psychological causes, he never really discussed their motivations. The data, especially on changing rates of per capita consumption, was sometimes startling. Americans in the 1970s drank more than 18 gallons of beer per capita! If this has continued at anywhere near this level, I wonder who is drinking mine? Similarly, I wonder about the distribution and change over time of early drinking patterns. Rorabaugh said that by the 1820s “half the adult males...were drinking two-thirds of all the distilled spirits.” At least, I think that’s what he said -- the endnotes were completely impossible to follow. A reviewer actually attacked the Oxford Press for the illegibility of the references in this book.  The problem is, they exacerbate the overall lack of specificity in the narrative, by making it impossible to nail down times and places where critical observations were made or to check the sources who made them. Another reviewer complained of the overgeneralized, almost caricature way that Rorabaugh talked about his subjects. Americans ate too quickly and drank too much, he claimed, because their food was horrible. Farm owners were not heavy drinkers, but “is it any wonder that farm hands turned to strong drink?”

In spite of these flaws, Rorabaugh provided some interesting data and a perspective that shines light on the nineteenth century from an interesting angle. “Between 1790 and 1810,” he observed, Americans managed “to bring into production almost as many acres as had been planted in the preceding two centuries...In 1790, only one hundred thousand of four million Americans resided in the West; by 1810 one million of seven million did.” This was dramatic change and it seems reasonable to suspect that it created social stresses that may have driven some increased alcohol consumption, or political action. And then there’s the supply side. Rorabaugh provided a really good synopsis of early American distilling, especially “across the Appalachians” where corn was abundant but too bulky to bring to market. His depiction of the west as a cash-poor land of unprecedented farm surpluses helps explain the growth of western distilling in the decades before canals and railroads. “From 1802 through 1815,” he said, “the federal government issued more than 100 patents for distilling devices ...more than 5 percent of all patents granted.” By 1810, distilling was concentrated in Kentucky, Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and upstate New York, and by 1840 these four areas produced more than half the nation’s grain and fruit spirits. Western New York production peaked in 1828 and continued even while flour shipments ramped up. New York state’s distilleries peaked in 1825 at 1,129, producing 18 million gallons. By 1840, the industry seems to have consolidated, with 212 distilleries producing 12 million gallons. In 1850, 93 distilleries made 11.7 million gallons and in 1860, 77 distilleries made 26.2 million gallons. Distilling was becoming a big business.

This data was really useful to me. Rorabaugh’s analysis was not as helpful for my purposes, but still instructive. Although his charts showed a steadily increasing value of the product of New York distilleries, Rorabaugh’s narrative described a “whiskey glut” that he said “exemplified the inability of Americans who clung to traditional agrarian values to promote change.” The “surplus grain had the potential to become either food for industrial workers or, if sold in the market, the means of acquiring money that could be used as capital to build factories” Unfortunately, western farmers lacked our 20:20 hindsight. Rorabaugh’s response to their choice to make whiskey rather than become industrialists illustrates a problem faced by contemporary historians looking at the rural past. This type of anachronistic misunderstanding of rural people became extreme during the Progressive era, when elite intellectuals took it upon themselves to save the benighted country people.