Work In Progress

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.