Learning, Working And Living Book

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.