The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America by W. J. Rorabaugh

Abstract

technology and culture Book Reviews—Labor and Technology 915 and summary rather than synthesis, and it is not always clear how some of the details he includes from medieval authors fit into his overall argument. Still, his book offers the reader a rich and absorbing tapestry of ideas and suggests a new historical context for reappraising our own suppositions about progress, the place of technology in cul­ ture, and the human value of production. Brian E. Daley, S. J. Dr. Daley is associate professor of historical theology at the Weston School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He specializes in the theology of early Christian writers and in the history of Christian spirituality. The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America. By W. J. Rorabaugh. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Pp. xiii + 270; illustrations, notes, appendix, index. $28.00. There is much to recommend this book—its wide-ranging insights, the brisk prose, and a cluster of colorful biographical sketches. With good reason it has been frequently and favorably reviewed, and it has won at least one prize. Even so, its range could have been wider still, there were places where the author’s prose betrayed his purposes, and it is not clear whether the thumbnail sketches necessarily made their intended point. W. J. Rorabaugh opens by noting that the apprenticeship system served “multiple purposes.” It was “a mechanism by which youths could model themselves on socially approved adults,” an “institution to insure proper moral development through the master’s fatherly responsibility for the behavior of his apprentice; and it was a means of social control imposed upon potentially disruptive male adoles­ cents” (p. vii). Although there were abuses built into the system, what replaced it was even worse, Rorabaugh contends. “In the end oldfashioned apprenticeship was swept away by a wave of change that engulfed traditional society and its artisan culture through the power of concentrated capital, the genius of mechanical innovation, and the ideology of self-help” (p. 209). Urban youth who might once have signed indentures as apprentices were by the Civil War era left to fend for themselves, having no real place in the new industrial order and, consequently, little sense of social purpose or professional pride. “We are left with a present that does not work and a past that is lost,” laments Rorabaugh. “What we have gained is freedom, but the cost was high” (p. 209). Benjamin Franklin’s Boston years are used to show that in the Colonial era the apprentice system was strongest in New England, but even there it was “anemic” if “entrenched” (p. 16). English apprentice and poor laws were difficult to enforce in the guildless New World 916 Book Reviews—Labor and Technology TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE setting. The dislocations of the Revolutionary era further weakened the institution, as did republican ideology, court rulings limiting a master’s authority, and the emphasis placed on individual responsi­ bility by evangelical religion. Technological changes marked by in­ creased mechanization and the factory system saw the disappearance of some craft trades in the 1850s even as new skills—notably those of machinists—commanded higher wages and status, if only for a time. A more impersonal world unfolded where some apprentices and craftsmen “found answers for themselves, but a great many simply washed up on the shoals of experimentation, worn out as individuals more ragged than rugged” (p. 130). Rorabaugh draws other interesting conclusions. He observes in passing that the apprentice system could exist side by side with and even overlap with the slave system of the Old South. Northern ap­ prentices, most of whom were involved in some form of factory labor, enthusiastically joined Union forces during the Civil War, their mili­ tary service temporarily giving place and pride “in a world gone awry” (p. 200). They made good soldiers because they instinctively thought of themselves as “part of a vast war machine, a cog in a wheel within a wheel” (p. 201). Yet for all of this I wish Rorabaugh had done more, that he had written a more inclusive and less eclectic account. He focused on the tragic side of the apprentice system’s decline; he might have...