The Work Ethic in Industrial America 1850-1920

Second Edition

Daniel T. Rodgers

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780226136233
• eBook ISBN: 9780226136370
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The phrase "a strong work ethic" conjures images of hard-driving employees working diligently for long hours. But where did this ideal come from, and how has it been buffeted by changes in work itself? While seemingly rooted in America's Puritan heritage, perceptions of work ethic have actually undergone multiple transformations over the centuries. And few eras saw a more radical shift in labor ideology than the American industrial age.

Daniel T. Rodgers masterfully explores the ways in which the eclipse of small-scale workshops by mechanized production and mass consumption triggered far-reaching shifts in perceptions of labor, leisure, and personal success.  He also shows how the new work culture permeated society, including literature, politics, the emerging feminist movement, and the labor movement.

A staple of courses in the history of American labor and industrial society, Rodgers's sharp analysis is sure to find a new audience, as twenty-first-century workers face another shift brought about by technology. The Work Ethic in Industrial America 1850–1920 is a classic with critical relevance in today's volatile economic times.

1

Work Ideals and the Industrial Invasion

Works and days were offered us, and we chose work.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Works and Days” (1857)

“Work, work, work,” Henry David Thoreau lectured an audience in the budding factory town of New Bedford in 1854. “It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once.”¹ Like so many of Thoreau’s public activities, his “Getting a Living” was a quixotic gesture, a tilt at one of the most formidable windmills of mid-nineteenth-century opinion. It was the kind of irreverence to be expected of a man who could seriously describe his occupation as inspector of snowstorms and anticipator of sunrises. In a land reared on Franklin’s Poor Richard aphorisms and the busy bee of Isaac Watts’s poem—a land of railroads and heady ambitions, poised on the edge of a thoroughgoing experiment with industrialization—to doubt the moral preeminence of work was the act of a conscious heretic. But in the longer sweep of time, it was Thoreau who spoke as a conservative and a traditionalist. For the first American dream, before the others shoved it rudely aside, had been one not of work but of leisure. In the Western tradition, in fact, Thoreau’s vision was the oldest dream of all.

One could begin with Aristotle’s claim that leisure was the only fit life for man—the commonplace of a slave society that passed from there into one of the axioms of Western philosophy. Or one might begin with the fact of slavery itself and the social hierarchies that all through the West had set a man’s worth and freedom by his exemption from toil and had made gentility synonymous with leisure. Still closer to the common life was speech, where the ache of toil was fashioned into a tangled etymological relationship between the words “labor” and “pain” that remains deeply embedded in the languages of Western Europe.² But it was myth that most clearly gathered up and broadcast the painful indignity of work. Classical and Christian alike, the central fables of the West were shot through with longing for a leisured paradise.

The Greek and Roman poets mined the theme through the legend of a lost, workless past, a golden age at the beginnings of human history when the rivers had flowed with wine and honey and men had lived the effortless life of the gods. “All goods were theirs,” Hesiod wrote at the head of the tradition, and “the fruitful grainland yielded its harvest to them of its own accord.” And yet somehow, whether through punishment or confusion, man had lost that first innocent state. The age of gold had given way to a poverty-saddled age of want, pain, and endless work. Vergil’s lament summed up the centuries of mythmaking: “Toil conquered the world, unrelenting toil, and want that pinches when life is hard.”³

Where the classical poets had clung to the past, Christian mythology captured the same compound of protest and desire in a more complex design—first in the vision of a garden “eastward in Eden” in which all man’s wants had been satisfied, and still more hopefully in what Augustine called the “eternal leisure” of heaven. The biblical tradition was more ambiguous than the classical, and from the beginning it contained seeds of more positive attitudes toward labor. Adam was no idler in Eden, after all, but was placed in the garden to watch and to “till” it, while the Judeo-Christian God himself “worked” and “rested.” But Christianity heightened the vision of paradise by pushing it into the reachable future, and the pattern of the Christian myth—in which men fell out of a bounteous harmony into a vale of toil and sorrow, to endure until redeemed to permanent, heavenly rest—reverberated no less strongly than the classical fables with the aching pain of labor. By the end of the Middle Ages, popular versions of the two myths were close enough to coalesce, Christian optimism merging with the sensuousness of the classical golden age as the paradises fused and fused once more with the palpable milk-and-honey Edens that, according to European folk legends, lay hidden somewhere at the ends of the earth for an adventurous explorer to regain. It was a compelling vision, the more so because its roots sank so deeply into the potent stuff of experience. To work was to do something wearisome and painful, scrabbling in the stubborn soil. It was the mark of men entrapped by necessity and thus of men who were not wholly free. At best work was an inescapable necessity, a penance for old sins. Surely not this but leisure was man’s first estate, the telltale mark of paradise, the proper focus of men’s longings.

The myths waited only for a land to claim them, and with the discovery of America Europeans eagerly turned the hints the new continent offered into visions of a world untouched by the age-old curse of work. Columbus was the first to see the outlines of the ancient fables in the new world, finally giving up his hopes for a passage to the Indies only to conclude that he had all but reached the gates of Eden itself, perched like the stem end of a pear somewhere in present-day Venezuela. His report was but the first of the images of a land of all but workless plenty, soon inextricably intertwined with stories of the fabulous wealth of Mexico and Peru, which long hovered over the American continents. Exploring the Carolina coast a century after Columbus, Captain Arthur Barlowe found himself in the midst of such “incredible” fruitfulness that, seen through the mists of classical learning and desire, he was certain it was the “golden age” intact—a land where “the earth bringeth forth all things in abundance, as in the first creation, without toil or labor.” Even farther to the north the shaping force of desire produced visions only slightly dimmer. Captain John Smith was a veteran of Virginia’s first, starvation years by 1614 when he undertook a careful mapping of the New England coast. But he came away convinced that three days’ work a week would satisfy any settler in that fruitful land, much of that spent in the “pretty sport” of fishing.⁴

Soberer, disillusioned adventurers often brought back far less flattering reports of America, bearing tales of native savagery and cannibalism and of a coast that turned to barrens and ice as one penetrated northward. But the European imagination fed on stories such as Barlowe’s, on the image of an American paradise where the fruitful earth and innocent men lived in the original leisured harmony. As astute a reader of the explorers’ reports as Montaigne concluded that the American natives whiled away their days in dancing in an ease far more perfect than the ancient poets had ever imagined. No cares troubled them, he wrote, no poverty, and “no occupations but leisure ones.” “All men idle, all,” Shakespeare caught the same hopes in The Tempest, his “American fable” in Leo Marx’s phrase; but

. . . Nature should bring forth,

Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance,

To feed my innocent people.

Not only for those Europeans who stayed at home but for the Englishmen who came to Virginia and the colonies to the south, that dream of a leisured America was to have a long and stubborn history. Here was a new Eden, they claimed of Virginia, “the paradise of the world,” “a land even as God made it.”⁵

Yet among those Englishmen who settled the country north of the Chesapeake, nothing was more common than to describe their American paradise as a “wilderness”—as a “howling wilderness” during moments of stress. Disappointment figured in the wilderness cry, most clearly in William Bradford’s poignant description of Cape Cod in autumn that stands at the head of the tradition. Theology likewise buttressed the idea, for every Puritan minister knew the Book of the Revelation’s promise that when troubles were thickest God would send his church into the “wilderness” for safekeeping. Still, the wilderness image had deeper roots than these, and throughout the seventeenth century, long after the Northern colonists had learned to love their land and prosper in it, it echoed and reechoed in their writings.

In the end the word “wilderness” served as a shorthand for a sense of self and of mission. Unlike the first new world adventurers, the settlers of Puritan New England and Quaker Pennsylvania came with no hopes for prelapsarian ease. They were laborers for their Lord, straighteners of crooked places, engaged in a task filled with hardship, deprivation, and toil. They did not expect to pluck treasures from the land but planned to civilize and tame it, even as they expected to struggle to civilize and tame the wild places in themselves. At times this amounted to a thirst for affliction, a distrust of idly gotten fortune as a snare and a temptation. God’s people “must come into, and go through a vast and roaring Wilderness, where they must be bruised with many pressures, [and] humbled under many overbearing difficulties,” Thomas Hooker told his Connecticut flock with the same trust in adversity with which other Puritans warned prospective settlers away from the “overflowing riches” of the West Indies. Such men came ready, if not eager, to work in the sweat of their faces and to see, as William Penn wrote, “what sobriety and industry can do in a wilderness against heat, cold, wants, and dangers.”⁶ They chose to call America a wilderness because it fit the countervision in their minds’ eye that the moral life was a matter of hard work and hard-bitten determination. Out of the American Eden they fashioned a land preoccupied with toil.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, when Europeans began to come in numbers to inspect the new American nation, they marveled at the extent of the transformation. Almost without exception, visitors to the Northern states commented on the drawn faces and frantic busyness of Jacksonian Americans and complained of bolted meals, meager opportunities for amusement, and the universal preoccupation with what Charles Dickens damned as the “almighty dollar.” The visitors’ assessments of the pace of American life are not to be fully trusted. Moving in the company of business and professional men, few of the Europeans actually entered an American workshop or followed a farmer across his fields. There was, moreover, something of a litany to the repeated complaint about the Northerners’ compulsive activity; it became a ritual as much a part of the American tour as the Patent Office or Niagara Falls. Yet the Europeans were genuinely perplexed at the absence of an extensive class devoted to the pursuits of leisure. “In the United States,” Tocqueville wrote, “a wealthy man thinks that he owes it to public opinion to devote his leisure to some kind of industrial or commercial pursuit or to public business. He would think himself in bad repute if he employed his life solely in living.” After ten years as a resident of Boston, the Viennese immigrant Francis Grund came to the same puzzled conclusion:

There is, probably, no people on earth with whom business constitutes pleasure, and industry amusement, in an equal degree with the inhabitants of the United States of America. Active occupation is not only the principal source of their happiness, and the foundation of their national greatness, but they are absolutely wretched without it, and instead of the “dolce far niente,” know but the horrors of idleness. Business is the very soul of an American: he pursues it, not as a means of procuring for himself and his family the necessary comforts of life, but as the fountain of all human felicity . . . it is as if all America were but one gigantic workshop, over the entrance of which there is the blazing inscription, “No admission here, except on business.”⁷

It was not the pace of work in America that inspired responses like this so much as its universality, its bewilderingly exalted status, the force of the idea itself.

Yet, on the whole, the objects of these complaints were not disturbed at their ignorance of what another visitor, in a distinctly European phrase, called “the difficult art of being gracefully idle.” Mid-nineteenth-century politicians and poets alike in the North dwelled expansively on the dignity of labor and the moral worth of those who worked. “Labor, gentlemen, we of the free States acknowledge to be the source of all our wealth, of all our progress, of all our dignity and value,” William Evarts told a campaign audience in 1856, in a conviction that, with slightly altered nuances, could be heard at virtually any lyceum series or political rally—Whig, Democrat, or Republican.⁸ Amid the paeans to industry and the disrepute of leisure, it was little wonder the Europeans concluded that the Americans had mortgaged the pleasures of life to the wilderness virtues: business, speculation, work, and action.

Ultimately Penn and Hooker and their heirs assaulted the paradise myths themselves, redrawing their moral to suit their revaluation of toil. Like the Puritans before them, nineteenth-century moralists agreed that Adam had worked in Eden or, if not, that his idleness had been all the worse for him. Over and over again, to anyone who would listen, they insisted that work was not a curse, whatever the hints in the Genesis story. Nor was it merely a painful means to moral health and redeeming grace. Labor was a blessing: not “a burden or a bare necessity . . . [but] a privilege, a glory, and a delight.”⁹ Among academic moralists, the economists held out against the idea that work was natural to man, clinging, by and large, to the older idea that labor was a fragile, irksome habit grafted onto a human nature as lazy as it dared to be. But the weight of moral thinking was against them. Man was “made to labor,” the century’s orators asserted. “It is his destiny, the law of his nature,” placed there by a creator who was himself, as Henry Ward Beecher—mid-nineteenth-century America’s most famous preacher—insisted, the most tireless laborer of all.¹⁰

In the end, even heaven itself—Augustine’s “perpetual sabbath”—fell before the onslaught. The idea of an eternity of rest vexed and troubled many nineteenth-century American Protestants, and their most widely read spokesmen answered that uneasiness with promises of more “palpable” and “useful” tasks than mere praise and singing. “Surely there must be work to do in heaven, / Since work is the best thing on earth we know,” the mill girl turned poet, Lucy Larcom, wrote toward the end of the century. New York’s flamboyant evangelist DeWitt Talmage claimed more confidently that heaven was “the busiest place in the universe.”¹¹ Shunting aside generations of mythmaking, the moralists succeeded in writing the gospel of work not only on the land but on paradise itself. “God sent you not into this world as into a Play-house, but a Work-house,” ran a Puritan reminder.¹² It was, in fact, a choice Northerners made for themselves.

In our day we know that perplexing decision as the “work ethic,” It is a simplified label, as inviting to abuse as it is convenient, but it points to an important truth: for the elevation of work over leisure involved not an isolated choice but an ethos that permeated life and manners. It reared its head in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in countless warnings against the wiles of idleness and the protean disguises of the idler. It gave a special reverberation to the word “duty” and set an infectious model of active, conscientious doing. Theodore Roosevelt caught its tenor in his thundering insistence that only the strenuous life was worth living, that “nothing in this world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.”¹³ That conviction was by no means Roosevelt’s alone. The doctrine of the industrious life pervaded churches and children’s storybooks, editorial columns and the stump rhetoric of politics. Not least, it transformed the processes of work themselves, energizing, mechanizing, and systematizing them in ways that made those who cared most about the worth of toil at once immensely proud and profoundly uneasy. But in another sense the phrase is misleading, for the work ethic as it stood in the middle of the nineteenth century, at the threshold of industrialization, was not a single conviction but a complex of ideas with roots and branches.

The taproot, as Max Weber suggested long ago, was the Protestant Reformation. Universalizing the obligation to work and methodizing time, the Reformers set in motion convictions that were to reverberate with enormous consequences through American history. At the heart of Protestantism’s revaluation of work was the doctrine of the calling, the faith that God had called everyone to some productive vocation, to toil there for the common good and His greater glory. Paul had said as much centuries before, but the Reformers stripped down the list of admissible callings, lopping off not only the beggars and rascals whose idleness cumbered the land but the courtiers and monks who were no better. The medieval summum bonum, a life of contemplation and prayer, suddenly was no vocation at all. “True Godliness don’t turn men out of the world” into “a lazy, rusty, unprofitable self-denial,” William Penn insisted, joining the attack on the monasteries; faith set men to work in the occupations of the secular, commonplace world. Nor was their labor there to be seen as an act of penance and mortification, as Christian tradition so long had had it. Laborare est orare: work itself was prayer, from the governing duties of kings to the meanest peasant’s task. In the end faith, not labor, saved, of course; the Reformers never confused the secular vocation with a believer’s primary, spiritual calling. But Protestantism extended and spiritualized toi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Frontispiece
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Work Ideals and the Industrial Invasion
• 2. Hireling Laborers
• 3. “Mechanicalized” Men
• 4. Play, Repose, and Plenty
• 5. Splinterings: Fables for Boys
• 6. Sons of Toil: Industrial Workers and Their Labor
• 7. Idle Womanhood: Feminist Versions of the Work Ethic
• 8. The Political Uses of Work Rhetoric
• Epilogue: Charles W. Eliot and the Quest for Joyful Labor
• Notes
• Index