The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition
Rorabaugh, W.J.
The drinking of bourbon simply does not translate into words. Hemingway couldn't do it, Faulkner couldn't do it, and they weren't trying to satisfy thesis requirements for a graduate degree...
...On the other, his quantitative data, admittedly incomplete and unsubstantiated, indicate that Americans' drinking was not out of line from Western Europeans...
...Accordingly, Rorabaugh insists on comprehending spiritual factors in terms of 20thcentury materialism...
...Those alternatives are the truest measure of how far we have descended from the pinnacle of military supremacy in the last 15 years...
...Today Americans drink ten times as much beer as whiskey...
...Indeed, it may have been significantly lower...
...Which is why W.J...
...He tells us about "alcoholic beverages" and " d i s t i l l e d s p i r i t s . " People d o n ' t drink "alcoholic beverages...
...Americans responded by drinking...
...Jimmy Carter of course thought he knew better--until last month...
...They drank a little more, and they drank it differently: They drank alone or surreptitiously...
...River during which he scores some valuable points for conservation...
...Rorabaugh has trouble discussing evangelical Christianity, a problem he acknowledges: " . . . materialism was coupled with spirituality, and young Americans of the 1830s were determined to build a society based on both elements...
...Missing in his work is any s e n s e o f a mediating intelligence behind the chatter...
...My own tastes run more to the carnivorous (Mailer), the omnivorous (Wolfe), even the anorexic (Didion), than to the macrobiotic McPhee...
...Happens every time...
...and the famous (if you follow these things) "Brigade de Cuisine," the author's paean to the mysterious chef and culinary artiste, Otto, who, when finally tracked down by the New York Times food critic, turned out to serve "inedible" artichokes...
...Karl 0 'Lessker for the Editorial Board contemporaries is less clear...
...Apparently our forefathers took their drinking seriously...
...The Independence movement had been nurtured in the taverns, and drinking came to be thought of as a symbol of liberation and equality...
...The original thesis wasn't called The Alcoholic Republic...
...The individual stories in this collection, like all of McPhee's works, first made their appearance as extended articles in the New Yorker...
...This new managerial style fit neatly with the rationalist philosophy that was coming to dominate social thought...
...This he sees as the evil reality of economic development...
...When considering the fact that Christian temperance reformers were often abolitionists as well, Rorabaugh notes that the reformers believed "temperance to be the more crucial reform . . . . a slave had only lost control of his body, a drunkard lost mastery of his soul...
...Reformers were morally flawed manipulators seeking to enhance their own authority...
...Imagine spending money on drink when you could be investing in factories...
...Surely it is far enough...
...Now he claims to have had his eyes opened, but unless he is willing--as President Franklin Roosevelt was in 1940, an election year--to invest every shred of prestige, power, and passion he has in the effort to restore America's defenses along the lines we have proposed here, he most assuredly will have presided over the Finlandization of the world, or the nuclear destruction of the United States...
...McPhee's affinity with the magazine, for which he works as a staff writer, is evident...
...During the early 1800s an expanding system of canals enabled Western farmers to ship raw corn to Eastern markets, and many Eastern farmers, unable to match the yields achieved on Western fields, turned to processing and manufacturing for regional and national markets now open to them as a result of the ne, w waterways...
...The author does not allow this possibility to hinder him from pursuing his point...
...His stories bring to mind every reason one never finishes those talky, flaccid articles that meander endlessly from impression to impression...
...Who needs a book...
...And (alternately) what cold-hearted materialists those capitalists were...
...They ate fruit, cabbage, and onions in season, but the basic meal was "hog and hominy" washed down with whiskey or hard cider...
...And washing down with liquor was usually the best choice: Most available water was not quite of Perrier quality...
...The notion that inebriation interferes with worship of and rational commitment to God is not seriously considered in Rorabaugh's analysis of the clergy's role in temperance advocacy...
...Rorabaugh wrote what eventually became The Alcoholic Republic, a study of drinking by Americans between 1790 and 1830...
...Expansionary industrialism destroyed their spirit of opportunity-only those craftsmen willing "to obtain loans or political subsidies, to accept capitalists as partners, or to form a corporation" could open their own shops...
...Americans depended on booze to provide the most exciting part of their diet...
...In it he wrote that Soviet political action is a fluid stream which moves constantly, wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal...
...After all, you need a catchy title if you are going to sell in a popular market...
...Indeed, so long as we continue most other economic and cultural exchanges, halfway (if that) measures are likely to be perceived as little more than dithering...
...Initially he writes that "enthusiasm for distilling had shown a lack of economic imagination" that prevented businessmen from developing capital...
...The author finds this preference to be "grotesque" and "absurd...
...Prior to 1840 Americans drank almost no beer, but they more than compensated for its absence with whiskey, rum, brandy, and cider--the hard stuff...
...The writing is still pedantic...
...Temperance organizations apparently founded on Christian doctrine were actually, Rorabaugh suggests, devices to restore the authority of the clergy and to ease the anxieties of a laity which had given up drinking because of painful hangovers...
...The main thing is that there should always be pressure, unceasing constant pressure, toward the desired goal...
...And those " h a r d - h e a r t e d materialists whose repression of their feelings enabled them to believe that all difficulties would be r e s o l v e d . . . through orderly industrial development" increased their efforts to deny workers the only available respite...
...It was also the best way to prepare that grain for sale in markets over 20 miles away: Whiskey was easier to transport as well as more lucrative than raw corn...
...Weren't the clergy such stuffed shirts...
...Manufacturing output tripled during the 30-year period from 1810 to 1840, while the consumption of alcohol dropped by nearly two-thirds between 1830 and 1845...
...In rural areas wells were scarce...
...and stream water was often at least one-quarter mud...
...While the choice is certainly not contemporary, it is essentially Christian: St...
...Advocates of both found the effects of heavy drinking to be at odds with their own purposes and beliefs, and they argued diligently to persuade the public that temperance was beneficial...
...The Pinball Philosophy," a piece so slight it is almost invisible...
...How terrible everything was...
...It is all very depressing, and books about booze should not be depressing...
...Expansionary industrialism wrecked custom and traditional social ties...
...Washington, D.C., had no public wells because the citizenry refused to pay the higher taxes necessary to finance construction...
...Rorabaugh learned that during the early years of the Republic the consumption pattern was different...
...Expansionary industrialism seduced the American innocents away from ex34 ]'HE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1080 citing farm life into "dull, unvaried" factory jobs...
...Although by the late 1700s there was growing skepticism regarding the contribution of liquor to good health, most people continued to treat illness with whiskey...
...The new commercial growth inspired an interest among businessmen for more disciplined operations--a discipline incompatible with the on-the-job drinking that had become a standard American practice...
...Every other moment becomes THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 35...
...In doing so these rationalists formed a de facto alliance with evangelical Christians in their opposition to hard drinking...
...Grain embargoes, withholding licenses for the sale of high-technology goods, and boycotting the Moscow Olympics are all very well, but to the tough-minded men in the Kremlin they can only indicate pique, not resolve...
...For 15 dollars you can buy this book and read about other people drinking: for the same amount you can buy two fifths of bourbon and do it yourself...
...Yet when capitalists encourage thrift, they are described as exploiters...
...A passive observer, he floats through his stories on a continual stream of facts and anecdotes that ultimately contrive to say nothing...
...Drinking water in New York City cured not only thirst but also constipation--"running water" took on a whole new meaning...
...To compensate for a lack of substance, McPhee bloats his chronicle of the mundane with a false poeticization...
...There is an unpleasantness about Rorabaugh's work...
...his thesis advisor suggested that title when Rorabaugh decided to convert his work into a book...
...But while water originally supported the popularity of liquor, Rorabaugh found that it eventually contributed to a reduction in alcohol consumption...
...John Joshua Gilder is a free-lance writer living in New York...
...Paul expressed the same priority in his epistles to Philemon and the Galatians...
...Weren't those early 19th-century Americans a bunch of sots...
...Today, it is difficult for us to understand that attempt, for while we retain the belief in materialism, we find it difficult to comprehend nineteenth century revivalism fully...
...The average Americans generally lived on corn, pork, and liquor...
...Whiskey made from corn was patriotically American...
...The Keel of Lake Dickey," about a canoe trip (a McPhee staple) down the St...
...While reviewers consistently applaud McPhee for shunning the "sexy" topics that, it is suggested, are such easy game for those other journalistnovelists, the reader may fred his prose a very bland diet...
...As well as 70 pages on vegetables, this new collection includes "The Atlantic Generating Station," about a plan to float a nuclear power plant off the New Jersey coast, a piece of reporting that in the aftermath of Three Mile Island (if that was really necessary to clue you in) seems depressingly simple-minded...
...On the one hand, Rorabaugh cites European visitors' observations of Americans' drinking habits which suggest that the latter imbibed more heavily...
...Its main concern is to make sure that it has filled every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power...
...Rorabaugh's research shows that their annual intake of alcohol between 1770 and 1830 was one and a half times what ours has been since 1960...
...In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies...
...Official acceptance of communal drinking had waned--" men who chased dollars naturally disffpproved of liquor"--so more drinking had to be done on the sly...
...One suspects that Mr...
...Rorabaugh discusses the social, political, economic, and theological influences of the post-Revolutionary era on drinking...
...Alone among post-World War II administrations the Carterites have ignored the truths that George Kennan spelled out in his famous "X" article of 1947, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct...
...Traditionally, liquor had been considered to be a "good creature of God...
...Whether early Americans outdrank their European SPECIAL EDITORIAL (continued from page 5) fully to understand the depth of our commitment and the price they would have to pay for disregarding it that they will be moved to step back from the precipice...
...After all, the author states, "devotion to religion" is " a highly charged emotionalism...
...people drink whiskey and beer...
...Hemingway couldn't do it, Faulkner couldn't do it, and they weren't trying to satisfy thesis requirements for a graduate degree in history...
...Rorabaugh wrote the book with his collar buttoned and his tie knotted in place...
...The tune Rorabaugh has scored is composed of a recurring malady: Ain't It Awful...
...But even if Rorabaugh can find no personal God to be reckoned with, he can spot a devil: expansionary industrialism...
...punctuated with occasional tidbits of c o r McPhee is f~ll of impressions...
...Pre-industrial life was boring and monotonous, but industrialization just made things worse...
...U; How one reacts to Giving Good Weight may depend to some extent on how one feels about vegetables, not simply because vegetables are the subject of the title piece, or because an intense interest in cabbage may be needed to carry one along, but because John McPhee's writing is about as close as you can come to a literary equivalent of vegetarianism...
...But if it finds unassailable barriers in its path, it accepts these philosophically and accommodates itself to them...
...And no one wants to read some dry old history book-you've got to make it sing...
...The trivial is given equal time with the important, with no suggestion that there might be a hierarchy of issues and ideas...
Vol. 13 • March 1980 • No. 3
