Pull Yourself Up By Your Bootstraps

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.