The Benefits of Looking Ahead

ED: This is BackStory. I’m Ed Ayers.

MALE SPEAKER: What do you think is the biggest problem facing our country right now? Is it people not working hard?

MIKE ROWE: If you’re willing to learn a truly useful skill and really, no kidding, work your butt off, you’re still OK. We’re desperate for those people.

ED: That’s reality TV host Mike Rowe on Fox and Friends repeating a common theme on his show Dirty Jobs. You just need to work hard to get ahead. Maybe that’s why Americans work longer hours, take fewer vacation days, and retire later than people in most other industrialized countries.

But Americans haven’t always embraced hard work. The first settlers in the Jamestown Colony, for instance, had better things to do.

NANCY ISENBERG: People sat around. They played cards. They didn’t actually want to work. They came hoping to make quick riches.

ED: And so, to honor Labor Day, we’re looking at a history of the American work ethic. Coming up today on BackStory.

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MALE SPEAKER: Major funding for BackStory is provided by the Shiocan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

MALE SPEAKER: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts.

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BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, and I’m here with Ed Ayers.

ED: Hey, Brian.

BRIAN: And Peter Onuf’s with us.

PETER: Hey there, Brian.

BRIAN: We’re going to start off the show today by taking you to shop class at Central High. Location? Suburban anywhere, USA.

DON: Say, Nick, what are you doing?

BRIAN: This is clean-cut Don.

NICK: Nothin’.

BRIAN: And this is his rumpled, mopey friend Nick. Nick and Don are teenage characters from a 1950s short educational film called The Benefits of Looking Ahead.

KELLY RITTER: This film follows Nick, our protagonist, through his inability to focus on what’s important in life or the future.

BRIAN: Kelly Ritter is a professor at the University of Illinois.

KELLY RITTER: Don repeatedly asks Nick to think about the future, to look ahead.

DON: To succeed in something, you have to have a purpose and make plans for reaching it and work at all the time.

KELLY RITTER: And Nick repeatedly resists this.

NICK: Sounds crazy to me.

DON: Well, what are you doing after graduation?

NICK: Uh, I’ll think about that later.

BRIAN: The Benefits of Looking Ahead is one of thousands of social guidance films shown in American high schools in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. A company called Coronet Instructional Films produced most of these 10-minute shorts, which featured teenage-aged actors. The purpose of the films was to show kids how to become good, upstanding Americans.

KELLY RITTER: I mean, they were literally on everything– how to day, how to call someone. I looked at one about writing social letters. How to write a letter to grandma thanking her for having you come visit her this summer.

BRIAN: Boy, how did people ever figure out how to date before Coronet Films?

KELLY RITTER: I know. I know. Don’t call a girl the same day, because she’ll say no. We learned that.

[LAUGHTER]

BRIAN: Ritter says many of these films have a common theme.

KELLY RITTER: Work ethic is something that you need to understand as being perhaps the most important thing in your life– to be industrious, to be productive, to not have a lot of time sitting around contemplating things. Busy, busy, busy. Do, do, do. That’s sort of the work ethic in these films.

BRIAN: And that brings us back to poor old Nick, who doesn’t want to do anything.

NICK: Say, Don?

DON: Yeah.

NICK: Suppose you could look ahead, like you said? Do you suppose you could figure what I’m going to be like in a few years?

DON: That’s not hard. Judging by the way you’re going, I’d vote you, uh, least likely to succeed. You’re liable to end up just being a drifter. Maybe even a bum.

NICK: A bum?

BRIAN: Whoa, way harsh, Don.

KELLY RITTER: So at that point we see him imagining the future.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The future that’s not going to go well if he doesn’t plan ahead is Nick is going to live in what I would describe as a flop house.

BRIAN: Quite literally– quite literally gnawing–

KELLY RITTER: Yes.

BRIAN: –on the end of a loaf of bread.

KELLY RITTER: Absolutely. Gnawing it like an animal, right? And he has a sweater on with holes at the elbow. He’s smoking a cigarette. He’s looking out the window, and he obviously looks depressed and down on his luck.

NICK: That could be me, nothin’ but a bum.

BRIAN: And then I’m guessing he goes on to start planning, and his life changes.

KELLY RITTER: Yes. From there forward, he understands that to plan is to live properly is to have a good life.

BRIAN: Magically, Nick imagines a second, more successful future. And he realizes that he has to shape up if he wants it to happen. He gets busy, busy, busy.

He joins the math club, studies for chemistry. He even plans to meet the guidance counselor. By the end of the film, doubting Don is impressed by Nick’s transformation.

DON: Boy, you sure have been going places lately.

NICK: It’s easy, my boy. You just got to do a little looking ahead.

KELLY RITTER: And he gets the tag of the film in the last line.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BRIAN: The terrible acting and cheesy plots notwithstanding, many people in Cold War America considered the message in these films to be essential. Teenagers had to learn how to work hard, because they were the next generation of the rapidly expanding middle class. Ritter says teens were a crucial part of the economy.

KELLY RITTER: All these things, having a car, going to the movies, it’s significantly driven by teenagers and commerce. And it’s really critical to all these films, because if you don’t have a work ethic, everything fails. Everything falls down, and you lose your class standing.

And class here is very much allied in these films with race. Everybody’s white. People are middle-class white people. This is about saying, you’re already in the place where your parents have positioned you to succeed. Don’t lose it. Don’t screw up.

[LAUGHTER]

It’s completely your fault if you fail.

[PIANO MUSIC PLAYING]

BRIAN: Of course, Nick can Don are only characters in a story, but it’s a familiar story. In fact, Americans have long viewed the country’s entire history as one triumphant tale of prosperity through hard work.

PETER: So today on BackStory we’re taking a closer look at the stories about work Americans have told and why they’ve put such a high premium on the work ethic. We’ll hear how attitudes about hard work have been bound up with class since the earliest colonists. We’ll look at how American travel logs in the 1830s promoted the stereotype of the “lazy Mexican.” And we’ll also consider how Booker T Washington caused a stir in the late 19th century by urging fellow African-Americans to “cast down your bucket where you are” rather than fight for equal rights.

ED: So we’re doing a show, guys, on the work ethic in America. And, you know, around the world people think that at least Americans think that they work harder than anybody else. That we’re rich because we made it happen. Peter, where did this idea begin, do you think?

PETER: Well, we think we work harder. And some of the first settlers of North America did work very hard. Now, you say, they just had to survive. You had to work.

But they also did so for religious, for spiritual, reasons. And that was in order to instill self-discipline, you had to believe it was for a higher purpose. And one of the great things about Protestant Puritanism, this dissenting faith within the Christian tradition, is that it puts a premium on taking discipline from religion into life in the world at large. From the monastery or the church, into the fields and farms and factories.

And this idea that work is a form of prayer, you might even say, of honoring God, in achieving self-respect, there seemed to be something of valuable, ennobling about the very act of work. Because, of course, hard workers contribute to the health of the community. So this seems to be a virtuous circle.

It makes everybody happy. It makes for a prosperous and thriving community. And it does seem to begin and get validation from this set of religious beliefs.

ED: Now, Peter, that makes a lot of sense. And people have heard about the Protestant work ethic. Is that what you’re talking about here?

PETER: Yeah.

ED: Well, didn’t it get translated into secular form by, say, Benjamin Franklin so that people who weren’t of this religious faith could still think it was theirs as Americans?

PETER: Yeah, absolutely. Franklin’s a wonderful example. He comes from, well, Puritan Boston and goes to Philadelphia. And that move’s a crucial one, because Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, represent the melding of different ethnic groups. And it’s the place, you might say, that everybody could become a Pennsylvanian and or an American.

And Franklin’s version of the work ethic is very practical. You can see the transition from religious faith to practice in the larger world. And that practice in the larger world, working out your work ethic, is something that anybody can follow that lead.

BRIAN: Peter, that’s pretty convincing. But how does that move through history? Was that just hardwired into the American psyche in the 19th and all the way through the 20th century?

PETER: Well, Brian, I think the wires can get crossed because there are, of course, other cultural imperatives. The biggest one, I think, is the aristocratic imperative not to work, or not to demean yourself by working with your hands, to be above work. And those things, I think, are intention in the middle class through the 19th century. Would you agree, Ed?

ED: Well, I would see your point and double it, because it’s not merely intention, it’s embodied in the most powerful form of labor in 19th century America, which is slavery. You know, the only people in America who can make long-term claims to really being aristocratic are the people who benefit from the forced labor of other people.

PETER: Good point

ED: And we have a war over basically what’s the definition of work. Should people benefit from the sweat of other people’s brow, as Abraham Lincoln says. And the people who are not enslaved or who have not been driven away have a chance to do something that people in Europe could never have done– to establish their own farms, to have their own land, to create their own businesses. So there’s a kind of correspondence, guys, between this mythology of the Puritans and Benjamin Franklin and life on the ground for people who are fortunate enough to be free.

BRIAN: So, Ed, do you think that the economic uncertainty that surrounded running your own farm with the changes in the weather or running a business in 19th century with a very high rate of failure, did that become one of the reasons that people actually could never work enough?

ED: Well, part of this is that the rate of failure’s very high on all those things.

PETER: Yeah.

ED: And that’s why it goes back to Peter’s point. Therefore, just working hard in and of itself, regardless of whether you succeed or fail, becomes a virtue in and of itself. America’s famous as the land of second chances. And if you’re working hard, you’re a lot better able to take advantage of the next opportunity.

So it becomes sort of woven into the broad fabric of American society in the 19th century. Did you guys mess it up in the 20th?

[LAUGHTER]

BRIAN: Well, like we did with a lot of things, Ed, in the 20th century, we expanded it to a broader number of people, I would say. And I think we have to look at one of the biggest changes in the workforce in the 20th century, which is the entry of middle class married women into the workforce. It had been the ideal that those middle class married women would not have to work.

In fact, we had the family wage, which was in essence paying guys a hell of a lot of money so they could support the whole family. Well, that starts to change during World War II where those women are working for a higher ideal. They’re joining defense industries. They’re doing whatever they need to do in order to help America win the war.

Some of these women are pushed out of the workplace after World War II. Some of them decide to leave the workplace. But a very funny thing happens by the middle of the 1950s– many of those middle class married women are back in the workplace.

And now they don’t have to do it for economic reasons, but they want to fulfill themselves. They want to work more than they absolutely have to for economic reasons.

ED: So that sounds great, Brian, but today it feels as if people are trapped, in some ways, into two-earner households. It’s sort of like you can’t get by without that. How did it go from us working so hard because we kind of feel that it’s the ennobling thing to do to a situation in which we feel like we have to just to keep up?

BRIAN: It’s the economy, stupid.

[LAUGHTER]

It just goes into the tank in the mid ’70s and 1980s. And in order to maintain a middle class standard of life, if you’re a two-parent family, you pretty much have to have both of those parents working. So I would say the balance of working in order to achieve more– and I want to be very clear now that I’m talking about the middle class– the balance to achieve more and the balance of absolutely having to do it really shifts in the ’70s and the ’80s.

PETER: Brian, I think you’re right when you talk about this tension between how much of the way we work and the way we think about work is determined by deep-seated cultural, even spiritual, values and how much of it is just a reaction to the world we live in. We are immersed in stimuli, things suggesting that we need to accumulate more and more.

BRIAN: Yeah.

PETER: It’s true that many Americans work very, very hard. In a way, the work ethic has become the accumulation of things that are outside ourselves, even though what compels us to work comes from deep-seated values within ourselves.

ED: So it sounds like this Protestant work ethic thing’s been tangled from the very beginning right up to today, right?

PETER: I think it is. We gotta live with it. It’s a work in progress.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ED: Earlier we heard from Kelly Ritter, a professor of English at the University of Illinois and author of Reframing the Subject– Postwar Instructional Films and Class-Conscious Literacies.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Perhaps no American embodies the archetype of the self-made man more than Booker T Washington. Born into slavery in 1856, Washington was the most famous African-American leader in early 20th century. His autobiography, Up From Slavery, became a bestseller.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Booker T was actually really quite aware of the value of hard work.

ED: This is historian Nathan Connolly.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Not only hard work personally, but through constant pronouncements of the values of hard work. And, again, Victorian/Protestant values for African-Americans to really win over so many whites who were critical to the building of black educational institutions in the South.

ED: In 1881, Washington established the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. There, African-Americans learned trade skills. Washington believed that through education and self-reliance, blacks could get ahead, even in the face of racial discrimination.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Tuskegee becomes such an important institution of, you know, black industry and learning and really of the modernizing– a symbol for the modernizing South, that he’s chosen in 1895 to speak at the Atlanta Cotton Exposition, one of the most important events for demonstrating the future of the South, black and white, for the next century.

ED: In his Atlanta Compromise address, Washington laid out his philosophy of racial uplift. Connolly says the speech hasn’t aged well, but it’s worth revisiting.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: And it’s that notion that the South will, through its own technological might, really maintain a certain kind of prominence and visibility and really a return from the fall of the Civil War.

ED: So the Cotton Exposition doesn’t sound like the best marketing ever, but what it really is is basically a World’s Fair. So the thing is that between 1890 and 1910, the all-time peak of lynching, we should point out, Booker T Washington finds himself on a stage in front of not integrated, but both a black and white audience. So what does he say, Nathan?

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Well there really is no one better placed than Booker T Washington to take that stage at the time in 1895. I mean, the South needed to show the world that they did have kind of buy-in from African-Americans in terms of their Southern cultural ways. In the years leading up to the Exposition in Atlanta, so many states had redrafted their state constitutions to actively disenfranchise African-Americans, and so Booker T Washington had to try to find a way to articulate a vision of equality that wasn’t necessarily promising African-Americans, or even demanding from whites, a notion of explicit political power.

ED: Right.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: And when he gets on that stage, Booker T Washington tries to walk this very fine line between pushing for a certain kind of black advancement while not troubling whites who might be very concerned about the ways in which African-Americans might want to push for social or political equality.

ED: So how does he thread that needle? How does he, you know, encourage African-Americans, kind of calm white Americans, and yet not back down?

NATHAN CONNOLLY: The most famous line from that speech which really was captured his rhetorical genius, he says, “in all things that are purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress,” unquote. And the image there of the hand is absolutely intentional, because it’s the laboring hand that will move the South forward as a region, right? And it’s the fingers that might represent blacks and whites. And they don’t have to necessarily touch to all work in concert.

ED: Right.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Now, to be very clear, you have, obviously, the workspace where you have black and white workers who may be from, you know, the lower classes working shoulder-to-shoulder, but the idea that they would be equal contact, and, again, social contact, in evening events or in parlors, that, as an idea, was considered anathema to the white Southerner.

ED: So it’s interesting, today people often focus on the part of the hand metaphor as separate as the fingers. But you’re saying that the important part is the unity based around the work ethic. That he’s saying, listen, if you’re looking for people who are willing and able and have the brains and the energy to help make the South great, you have them here among you.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Well, I would say that, you know, depending on who is listening that they can latch on to different parts, because certainly for African-Americans who are looking for equal access to, you know, train cars or to swimming or to parks, right, they don’t necessarily like the idea of separate as the fingers, right?

ED: Mm-hm.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: And to be very clear, we place a lot of emphasis on Booker T Washington as a kind of singular architect of a particular kind of what some call racial accommodationism, but he was really was an expression of a much wider sentiment of the era that believed in property ownership, that believed in thrift, that believed in kind of work ethic as a way around the problem of disenfranchisement. So the 1895 moment is really a kind of opening of the different approach to politics and political power that African-Americans themselves have to adopt in a place that is still very much mired in racial terrorism and other forms of explicit discrimination.

ED: You know, Nathan, and so he’s faced with a paradox by the 1890s– now we’re here 20 years after Reconstruction– that so many opportunities are closed to black people just by the color of their skin. They’re never given a chance at advanced jobs or jobs that require a lot of training, jobs that have responsibility.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: That’s right. One of the deep ironies– in the many deep ironies of American race relations is that after slavery is when African-Americans really get stained with the reputation of being lazy. And so it becomes really important, one, to demonstrate that African-Americans, as a people, are not averse to work at all, but, in fact, are deeply committed to labor in the name of social uplift.

Secondly, in many instances, when black folk are not deliberately being denied jobs, they’re being forced into very coercive labor relationships.

ED: Right.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: And it really does incentivize the notion of entrepreneurship and owning one’s own business, to be free from evil bosses or managers or other kinds of landlords–

ED: Sharecropping.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Sharecroppers. Exactly. And folks who would look to exploit African-American dependency on white capital.

ED: So there’s a power within Washington’s speech that’s even greater than it’s apparent. It’s not just work hard for other people, it’s work hard for yourself, for your own family, for your own African-American community.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Precisely. Precisely. And it’s really through demonstrating that black people can accumulate wealth and capital and that white political figures and other kinds of folks can benefit from that black industry that Washington’s own political calculus is born. He believes that, you know, very strongly that property ownership and entrepreneurship and industry and innovation can come from black sectors in ways that would actually make white life better in the South as a whole. And so both white and black listeners are finding a utility in the way that Booker T Washington framed the race problem and linked it to the work ethic as a kind of emancipatory aspect of American life.

ED: And this speech becomes the foundation for ever mounting fame by him. He becomes a confidant of presidents of the United States. He’s welcomed into the circles of power in Washington. He works behind the scenes against segregation, disfranchisement, and gets away with it.

And his autobiography that tells this story and that has the Atlanta Exposition speech within it becomes a bestseller for white as well as black audiences in the first part of the 20th century. So I think a lot of people remember the metaphor of lower your buckets where you are, right? Rather than dreaming of some other kinds of rights, put down your buckets where they are.

And so you can see why people liked that. Yeah, stay right where you are–

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Right.

ED: –and don’t bother us.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Yeah. I mean, and it’s really critical that these are words being spoken by a black man in a Southern political context.

ED: Right.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: It’s enough, you know, for many whites to simply have Southern senators or, you know, white politicians who can say that blacks really enjoy their social station in the South. But to have someone of accomplishment, and someone of clear, you know, intelligence say that this is the way that the South will go forward, that really does cause it, for lack of a better word, to go viral, right?

I mean, you have Northern newspapers and Southern newspapers that are running reprints of the speech. You know, many people are talking about it as being one of the great pieces of oratory in the 19th century, likening it to the Gettysburg Address. And there are a number of ways in which, you know, many African-Americans themselves are trying to look at the speech as a blueprint.

ED: Mm-hm.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: And it’s really critical for Booker T Washington’s own biography that he was someone born under slavery. And in that he does lay out an important narrative about the greatness of America and his ability, through his work ethic, to leave the humble beginnings of a Virginia cabin, slave cabin, and rise to the dais at the Atlanta Cotton Exposition in 1895 or to dine with presidents, by the time you get to the turn of the century, then any African-American can achieve similar heights from similarly humble beginnings.

ED: So, Nathan, when all is said and done, how do we evaluate the impact of Booker T Washington on our understanding of the American work ethic?

NATHAN CONNOLLY: So I think we should evaluate him, one, as someone whose commitment to the work ethic had a long-standing influence over the ways in which African-Americans tried to demonstrate their equality across the 20th and even into the 21st century. Now, he as a symbol never really fare too well coming through the 1960s. No one there is really going to overtly talk about accommodation in the face of Jim Crow. And so he becomes a less attractive symbolic character as we move through the 20th century. But it’s certainly the case that between the 1890s and really the 1930s, there isn’t a more important symbolic figure to kind of the black American project of social uplift than Booker T Washington.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ED: Nathan Connolly’s a historian at the Johns Hopkins University. He’s the author of A World War Concrete– Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BRIAN: Hey, Peter, earlier you were talking about how the Puritan settlers of New England embodied the work ethic. Was that true for all settlers throughout the colonies?

PETER: Well, not really, Brian. It’s true that those first colonists had to work really hard just to stay alive. But that doesn’t mean that everyone who came over expected to work hard. Now take the settlers in Jamestown, Virginia, for instance.

NANCY ISENBERG: The early years of Jamestown are really disturbing.

PETER: This is historian Nancy Isenberg.

NANCY ISENBERG: The people who went there expected to find gold that would be lying around on the beaches and they would suddenly acquire wealth. And people sat around. They played cards. They didn’t actually want to work.

They came hoping to make quick riches. And I think that’s a more common theme in American behavior than the idea that everyone is committed to hard work and sees this as a particular virtue that across the board Americans share.

PETER: In her new book White Trash, Isenberg argues that class has always been much more important in determining social mobility than one’s work ethic. She says that was especially true during the Colonial period.

NANCY ISENBERG: Many of the colonists who were sent over, a lot of them weren’t even prepared. They hadn’t been farmers, so they didn’t even– this was true particularly in the settlement of Georgia. So you can’t expect suddenly for people to know how to farm. And farming is actually incredibly difficult, hard work.

PETER: So how did those first settlers plan to get rich so quick? Well, by getting other people to work for them.

NANCY ISENBERG: So the real goal is not essentially to do it all on your own. It’s actually to find someone beneath you.

[LAUGHTER]

PETER: Yeah.

NANCY ISENBERG: Most of the early people who came to the New World were children, young boys. And what were they going to do? Well, they were going to be servants. They were going to be apprentices. They were going to be the labor that was going to be exploited.

PETER: OK, so you don’t have to work, but just somebody does have to work if there’s going to be prosperity. If you’re even going to get food to eat. Who does the work? And why do they do it?

NANCY ISENBERG: Right, and that’s why when we think about class, the most important thing about class– and since we’re talking about the earliest English notions of class– is that for them the master needed servants. And eventually, as we know, in Virginia and the South and even in New England, they needed slaves. Or they relied on Indian captives to turn into a servant population.

And this is a really common 18th century theory that what gave you liberty was the ability to have power and exercise authority over other dependent classes. That was a mark of your independence. And that’s really what is sort of an old English idea that was easily translated into the New World and easily translated into the Colonial period.

PETER: Well, Nancy, you couldn’t translate the English social system to America. You couldn’t sustain all those distinctions. Some people were above others, but how did you get control over labor? How did you become a master? Seems to me you’re talking not about a work ethic, but about a mastery ethic.

NANCY ISENBERG: Yeah, I think part of what– I mean, if we look at Jamestown, for example, and what happened in Virginia, you were rewarded by– given more land if you brought over more indentured servants. And it didn’t matter whether they arrived alive or dead.

[LAUGHTER]

So you still got–

PETER: Hold it, hold it, hold it. You want dead servants?

NANCY ISENBERG: Yes, you want dead servants because even if they don’t make it, you know, traveling across the Atlantic, you’re still going to get land in the end.

PETER: Right. Right.

NANCY ISENBERG: But then you have the other idea that somehow that it still requires an individual motivation and initiative. And then if you just pull yourself up by your bootstraps, somehow you’ll magically be able to overcome what are really, really difficult obstacles, when you think about how horrible life really was in the 18th century.

PETER: Right. So how does it happen that we now have the myth that in a democracy it’s up to you and that that makes sense to a lot of people? Even people who are on the margins. Where did the work ethic come from? Because I think your book is a brilliant study of wealth, as you might say.

NANCY ISENBERG: No, I think that’s really important. I mean, when we went to give the positive spin, we talk about working hard and that this somehow leads to social mobility.

PETER: Mm-hm.

NANCY ISENBERG: But the one thing that Americans have to realize is that social mobility has never been guaranteed. And it isn’t even what Franklin and Jefferson guaranteed. They guaranteed horizontal mobility. You have the right to keep moving if you fail. Move westward, my son. Somehow that’s the solution.

PETER: Nancy, your interpretation hinges on the importance of class, or you might say the hidden history of class, or one that we’ve willfully overlooked. I’m guessing that you’d say that we have a notion of the work ethic because of the myth that we are all middle class. We’ve all risen to this level so that this may be in our history, as you’re describing it, that there were these social distinctions. But that’s not us, because we’re the land of the free.

NANCY ISENBERG: Right, I mean, I think, you know, people take it back to the time of the revolution. They take it back to, you know, the way in which revolutionaries tried to place less emphasis on class and say and we’re fighting this British tyranny that was attached to a class system. But we know, and this myth was recently celebrated by Charles Murray in his book about white people where he said that in America, we don’t have– we’ve never had a class system, you know, since we were founded. Or if we do– I love it when he says, or if we do– somehow we should pretend that we don’t.

[LAUGHTER]

PETER: Right.

NANCY ISENBERG: Which I think is really telling–

PETER: Yeah, yeah, it’s interesting.

NANCY ISENBERG: –where you’re not supposed to admit that we have a class system when in fact, as I also try to show, in numerous political instances class moves front and center. So we try to hide it. We try to pretend it’s not there. But then it eventually does end up playing a major role in defining political conflict and political controversies in United States history.

PETER: Nancy, I’ve had the pleasure of knowing for some time now, and I can say with a good authority that you’re a hard worker. What happened to you?

[LAUGHTER]

PETER: You bought into– did you buy into this thing? Did you drink the Kool-Aid? Or would you grant that that value, which you say is mythological, is one that actually has been internalized?

NANCY ISENBERG: I think that, yes, middle class people are told that you will be rewarded. That’s the whole theme of the meritocracy. But one of the themes I also highlight that is concealed in our system is that we don’t start in the same place.

So much of your opportunities are determined by the wealth and privilege that comes from your parents, and that’s been proven by sociologists. That’s the key to success. So it’s actually where you start that still carries a great deal of weight.

Today in the United States, middle class and upper middle class parents give over 50% of their wealth to their children. We are actually replicating the old world monarchies that Jefferson wanted to free us from because it’s all about the wealth of your parents, and they create opportunities. But what we’re not recognizing– we have to recognize privilege. And that’s something we have a really difficult time doing.

It’s better to say it’s a work ethic. That it’s something that’s part of your character, and you’ve earned it by spending hours and hours advancing your knowledge, advancing your expertise. When, in fact, not all doors are open to everyone equally.

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ED: Nancy Isenberg is a historian at Louisiana State University and author of White Trash– The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.

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PETER: Hey, guys. Let’s hit the phones and take a call from one of our listeners. We’ve got Michael on the line from Forest, Virginia.

Michael, welcome to BackStory.

MICHAEL: Pleasure to be here.

PETER: Michael, what’s on your mind?

MICHAEL: So it seems like at the current moment that there’s kind of a shift going on with the public’s attitude towards agricultural work with things like the local food movement and the organic movement that it’s becoming something more desirable for some people. So on the one hand, it is kind of a desired job and something that’s seen as connecting you with nature.

ED: Right.

PETER: Right.

MICHAEL: But at the same time, it’s seen as something really difficult. And I know from my parents’ generation, it was something to be avoided. So I’m wondering over the course of US history how this kind of attitude has changed about how desirable or undesirable agricultural work has been?

PETER: Yeah. Michel, that’s a great question. I’ll kick off our collective answer by speaking briefly about the early period. And in the thought of Thomas Jefferson, the experience of early America, which was, of course, predominantly agricultural, agricultural work was the work of the land. It was the work that made America prosperous, so there was a certain, you might even say glamor to it, but it was a kind of a civic glamor, because early thinkers like Jefferson thought that farmers who produced for larger markets and for us all, as you like to say, were also independent.

They had a place to stand. They owned their own property. They could subsist. And I think what’s changed over time, and I’d like to hear my colleagues talk about this, is that the new locavore movement is dissenting from the way things are for the mass of Americans and establishing a new kind of independence outside of conventional industrial markets.

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ED: That’s quite the gauntlet you’re throwing down there, Peter.

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The 19th century was, I think, the century of the rise and fall of the farmer in some ways. You know, as Peter says from Thomas Jefferson’s era the romanticization of the farmer, the incredible spread of the United States was basically the spread of farmers and sort of putting land into what they saw as productive use. But by the eras after the Civil War, the decades after the Civil War, their great political crisis was the farmers versus everybody else.

They felt that the currency system was stacked against them. They felt that their cultural stock was in rapid decline. This was when words like “hayseeds” and “hick” were first invented and deployed.

And so I think that the patterns you’re talking about now a comingled reverence for the farm, but an abandonment of the farm, have been going on now for well over a century.

BRIAN: And you can see that, Michael, absolutely embedded in government policy in the 20th century. The reverence lingers through the notion of the single-family farm. And so the government’s basically subsidizing people through cheap land to now go way out to the west where the land is much more arid, and where it’s utterly impossible for the individual to farm a, you know, 40-acre plot without lots of irrigation and stuff. So that reverence is there, this notion of the independent farmer. But the wherewithal to actually accomplish that is not there.

ED: I’d kind of like to know where Michael’s coming from on this. So, Michael, are you involved in this big change? Are you involved in agricultural labor?

MICHAEL: Yeah, I am. My fiance and I are in our second year right now running a small farm and bakery.

ED: What do you farm? Michael, what do you grow?

MICHAEL: We grow a lot of salad greens, just mixed vegetables. About 30 different varieties.

ED: Wow.

MICHAEL: We also raise ducks for eggs. I know a lot of my friends who work on farms who grow vegetables this kind of year is kind of the time where you question the sort of romanticism that you have about it when you’ve been working out in the heat for long days and everything.

ED: So do you see the work that you’re doing as a kind of self-conscious return to the past? Or is this sort of a new departure?

MICHAEL: I don’t really see it as a return to the past because at least for us we’ve really embraced many parts of technology. We’re using computers to learn things to a large degree, and to make our work more efficient.

BRIAN: Yeah, one of the things that strikes me about farming really all the way back to Peter’s period in the 18th century is that farmers jump on any technological change or possibility. They’re often the ones who bring these things to the market, whether it’s, you know, the reaper or using tractors or the whole digital revolution that you refer to in terms of using computers.

MICHAEL: Right.

ED: So it seems to me a constant for all of this– this is a show about the work ethic– is that you farmers find ways to work as hard as you possibly can in one way or another. I mean–

BRIAN: Yeah, in spite of all that technology. You know, it’s true the folks at where I live drive an air-conditioned cabs, but they’re driving those tractors as soon as the sun comes up. And in fact, they’re often driving then at night, which I was really surprised. So regardless of the technological improvements that you refer to, Michael, my sense of farmers is I would never do that. That’s too much work.

MICHAEL: Exactly. One advantage that we have now is I can listen to shows like your all’s while I’m working and take my mind off it a little bit.

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ED: That’s terrific.

PETER: Now that’s the good life.

ED: That’s great. Thanks a lot, Michael.

MICHAEL: All right, thank you.

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ED: If you have a question about our upcoming shows, let us know. We’re working on episodes about the history of manufacturing, debating in America, and a Halloween special– The History of Horror. You’ll find it all a backstoryradio.org. Or just shoot us an email at backstory@virginia.edu.

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In the early 19th century, most Americans didn’t pay much attention to their neighbors south of the border.

RAYMUND PAREDES: It’s important to remember how isolated much of the 19th century Mexico was from the United States.

ED: This is historian Raymund Paredes. He says that isolation began to change in the 1830s. Anglo writers, mainly from the American South, began to travel throughout Mexico and publish accounts of their journeys. They wrote about a beautiful land, vast and bountiful.

These travel narratives also describe Mexican people, and Americans basically recycled longstanding English stereotypes about the Spanish, such as their supposed cruelty and cowardice. And their lousy work ethic.

RAYMUND PAREDES: “The Mexicans are commonly very indolent of loose morals.”

ED: This is Paredes reading from a 19th century travel narrative written by Mary Austin Holley of the famous Austin family that later colonized Texas.

RAYMUND PAREDES: This view exhibits why it is no means wonderful that these people have been the dupes and slaves of so many masters.

ED: Writer Alfred Robinson gave Mexicans a slightly more positive assessment in his travelogue Life in California. In his view, the Mexicans were hospitable and kind, but still pretty lazy.

RAYMUND PAREDES: “You might as well expect a sloth to leave a tree that has one inch of bark left upon its trunk as to expect a Californian to labor whilst a real glistens in his pocket.”

ED: So they don’t seem too self-conscious about saying these things.

RAYMUND PAREDES: No. No.

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ED: Great.

RAYMUND PAREDES: No, there wasn’t a whole lot of political correctness in the middle of the 19th century. The American readership was very interested, and some of these books were the 19th century equivalents of New York Times Bestsellers. And they were widely read, and people who had been to the Southwest often times went on speaking tours. It’s important for people to realize that these books had an enormous impact on the shaping of American attitudes towards the Southwest and the peoples who lived there.

ED: By the 1840s, this stereotype began to spread beyond travel narratives and seeped into debates over the United States’s westward expansion. Paredes says the Americans used the alleged laziness of Mexicans to help justify the US invasion of Mexico in 1846.

RAYMUND PAREDES: You see and read over and over again where American writers say, Mexicans don’t deserve to hold this territory because they don’t exploit it very well. They’re too lazy.

There was a lot of comment on that California would never prosper in the hands of Catholics, because Catholics celebrated so many holidays. They never had time to actually develop the land.

ED: That’s a very New England perspective, right?

RAYMUND PAREDES: Yes, a very New England perspective. And obviously there’s something of the Protestant ethic that’s present in Protestant attitudes towards Mexican Catholics. There was a widespread belief that Protestants worked a lot harder than the Catholics did, that they were much more aggressive in exploiting territory and land.

You can also see that in the South, particularly in those states where large numbers of people moved to Texas and Tennessee, for example, and Mississippi, they transferred many of their attitudes towards black slaves to the Mexicans. They had to be directed. You had to have people overseeing everything they did, because they were lazy, they were stupid, they were not capable of making decisions on their own.

ED: And, yeah, it’s hard to read the stereotypical language and not just see it as a transparent cover for, you know, determinations by Anglo-Americans to take what they want. And so do you think that those travel narratives flow into other very popular art forms, like the dime novels about the West and then about early movies about the West? Is there sort of an unbroken stream into those representations?

RAYMUND PAREDES: Well, I don’t know that it’s an unbroken stream, but certainly there’s a line of development that extends from the travel narratives to, as you say, dime novels and both the fictional Westerns and television Westerns as well.

ED: To do you ascribe sort of the staying power of the stereotype associated with Mexicans? Many immigrant groups have been labeled as lazy when they first appear in the United States– the Italians, the Irish– and yet that seems to have faded away.

RAYMUND PAREDES: Well, live the proximity of the two countries is obviously a factor. There’ve always been pockets of bigotry.

ED: Right.

RAYMUND PAREDES: Particularly along the border. And I think it’s important to remember that when times are bad economically for large segments of people, they start looking for scapegoats. And this is part of the process.

I don’t think the current existence of stereotypes about Mexicans, which are deeply rooted in American culture, doesn’t mean that things haven’t gotten better. Mexican immigrants are resembling other immigrant groups before them, and they are a culturating and assimilating. And I think that a hundred years from now, we will see Mexican immigration is very much of a piece with the immigrant patterns before.

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ED: Raymund Paredes is the Commissioner of Higher Education for Texas and the author of The Mexican Image in American Travel Literature, 1831 to 1869.

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BRIAN: We’re going to end the show today reflecting on how the workplace shapes America’s work ethic. Silicon Valley historian Margaret O’Mara says many companies have structured their environments to make employees more productive. She told us about one trailblazing company with a workspace that’s gotten a lot of media attention over the years. In many ways, it’s changed the way Americans have thought about the work ethic.

Now, we’re not going to tell you which company. But if you listen to O’Mara’s description, a company by excerpts from a Harper’s Magazine profile The Workspace, you might be able to figure it out.

MARGARET O’MARA: It’s more than just a workplace. It’s like an entire city in one workplace campus.

MALE SPEAKER: “Indeed, a sight as rare as it is delightful. What might have been taken for a wealthy suburban town is given up to busy workers. And at the termination of long street’s, a pleasing view greets and relieves the eye– a bit of water, a stretch of meadow, a clump of trees, or even one of the large but neat workshops.”

MARGARET O’MARA: It’s a place where people go out to eat. You can play sports. You can go see musical performances.

MALE SPEAKER: “It pays also in another way. The wholesome, cheerful surroundings enable the men to work more constantly and more efficiently. The questions to be answered are these– is it worthy of imitation? Is it likely to inaugurate a new era in society?”

MARGARET O’MARA: It’s designed to be different than any type of workplace that’s been around before.

So the place I’ve been describing to you is built in the early 1880s outside Chicago– Pullman, Illinois, the company town of Pullman Palace Car Company. So if what I’ve been describing seems resonant to the Silicon Valley workplaces of today, you’re right. Today we have campuses like the headquarters of Google, known as the Googleplex, which, like Pullman, is a self-contained company town of sorts.

BRIAN: Yeah. Like Pullman in the 1880s, Google’s workspace has also gotten a lot of press. Just listen to this CBS report from 2013.

MALE SPEAKER: This campus in Mountain View, California, offers employees comforts, privileges, and perks that workers at most other companies can only envy. Google famously provides three meals a day plus of unlimited snacks. It gives workers their own garden space to grow vegetables.

ED: OK, so O’Mara is comparing the luxury campus at Google with the way George Pullman, the industrialist, built an attractive modern town to inspire a good work ethic in his factory employees. But there’s got to be differences here, right? Pullman was all about routinized factory work, and Google fashions itself as promoting creativity and innovation.

BRIAN: That’s right, Ed. But O’Mara says despite those differences, both Pullman and Google sought to model a productive environment for other companies.

MARGARET O’MARA: Because of the immense media attention that is given to these companies and the workplaces they create, they have a huge influence on other types of workplaces and on popular perceptions of what good work is and what a good job is.

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Technology companies have typically hewn to a cathedral model of creating campuses, self-contained total immersion environments. That the way to instill a great work ethic, to create the happiest and most productive workers is to sequester them from all of the hurly-burly of everything else. But if we look through the longer history of human innovation, we see that oftentimes it’s the bizarre, the hurly-burly places, the places where lots of different people are coming in contact with one another are the places where new ideas often emerge.

They’re crossroads. They’re trading ports. They’re literally bazaars, like the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul.

Whether it be a London coffee house in the 17th century, or it be a Seattle coffee house in the 21st century, that often times these places that are more open can be places where new ideas and new notions of what work is and what a work ethic is can emerge.

ED: That’s Margaret O’Mara. She’s a historian at the University of Washington and the author of Cities of Knowledge– Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley.

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PETER: We played a tape of O’Mara describing her comparison between cathedrals and bazaars to former employees of Google and Microsoft, and we received interesting reactions. We’ll post those interviews on our website backstoryradio.org.

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BRIAN: Ed, Peter, we’ve just done a whole show on the work ethic, but there’s one thing–

ED: Boy, and I’m tired, too.

BRIAN: Exactly. There’s one thing that keeps cropping up, and that’s how horrible it is in America to be lazy. So what do we make of this work ethic? We know it’s a bit of a myth, but what purposes does it serve? And why is it so terrible to be cast as lazy in America?

PETER: Well, I’d say, Brian, it’s the idea that you don’t have any self-respect. Because if you’re a good American, you have internalized these values and you will work hard, and that’s part of your sense of who you are. Other people impose it on you, that’s their sense of how they can take advantage of you.

ED: You know, one reason I think, guys, that the work ethic’s so strong in this country, there seems to be so much to work for. You know, for generation after generation, there was really not a horizon, a boundary, for how much you could accumulate in this country. And I think one reason that people worry about this so much now, maybe one reason we did a show about it, it’s not clear that the work ethic is going to bring the results that it did for earlier generations. So as you’re saying, we’ve internalized this ethic, but does it ever sort of turn on us?

PETER: Well, but it’s not just that we have to be good, hardworking citizens. The country has to be there for us to work in and on. And I think you’re right about the external idea of a great frontier. Those horizons that you were talking about, Ed. Without those horizons, I think the internal state projects an external reality that sometimes is just not there.

ED: So we’ve looked at the history of the work ethic. You know, it makes a lot of sense when you have a continent that needs to be, quote, “conquered” and you have so much social mobility, but today what’s a work ethic do in a cubicle or on an assembly line?

PETER: Well, we got the work ethic, but we don’t know where to go with it. And I think the future of work and the economy itself is the great big question. It’s not our willingness to work, because I think that willingness to work has been a big theme in American history, but why do we work? What’s the point of working?

BRIAN: Well, Peter, my assessment of history is that each time Americans have asked a version of the question you just asked, the answer has turned out to be a pretty positive one.

ED: Yeah, I think I kind of have to agree with Brian on this one, Peter.

BRIAN: Yes.

ED: You look back on the past, and this isn’t the first time that Americans have worried that the era of the work ethic and getting ahead was coming to an end. People really freaked out when they thought that the frontier had closed at the beginning of the 20th century, and that was really going to be the end of American democracy and of American prosperity. And yet, somehow, events come along, scramble the story, and my guess is that we’re going to see this happen again.

That something that we’re not predicting– say the rise of the personal computer– is going to come around and stir things up again. But, Peter, what do you think? Am I overly optimistic?

PETER: I think this is a tribute that both you guys are making to the work ethic itself pure and undiluted without any empirical support. And I’m all for it.

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ED: That’s going to do it for us today, but we’re always working hard online, so head to backstoryradio.org and let us know what you thought of the show today. And while you’re there, weigh in on our upcoming shows. We have one about the history of manufacturing, another on presidential debates, and a Halloween special covering the History of Horror. You’ll find it all at backstoryradio.org.

Or send email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter @BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

PETER: BackStory is produced by Andrew Parsons, Bridget McCarthy, Nina Ernest, Kelly Jones, Emily Gadek and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Milner is our technical director. Diana Williams is our digital editor. And Melissa Gismondi is our researcher. We had help from Brandon Van Kannewurf. Special thanks this week to Brendan Wolfe.

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ED: And, you know, we’d like to give special thanks this week to Kelly Jones, who’s been a stalwart ally for a long time here at BackStory who’s going off to start her own exciting enterprise.

PETER: If you’d like to check out Kelly’s podcast on the strange terror of choice, check it out it dooverpodcast.com.

BRIAN: If it doesn’t work, try to get it.

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PETER: We’re going to miss you, Kelly.

ED: Good luck.

BRIAN: BackStory’s produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Major support is provided by the Shiocan Foundation, The Naitonal Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by The Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment. And by History Channel, history made every day.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia, and the Dorothy Compton Professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Peter Onuf a Professor of History Emeritus at UVA and Senior Research Fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond.

BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

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ED: BackStory is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.