Raymond Torres History: 525-50 Professor Brian Greenberg February 9, 2011 The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920

provided an analysis of Americas working life being transformed from 1850 to 1920. As cities grew, there was a shift from independent owned shops to factories where workers found themselves being dictated by work schedule, machinery and productivity. . By the end of the nineteenth century, the triumph of the work ethic (Rodgers, 1978, p. xii), was obvious as mass consumption and material abundance paved through the insufficient pre-industrial ideas. The irony of that triumph according to Rodgers was that even though the Puritan work ethic (work was morally good and redeeming) was still important, it no longer was consistent with the continued and drastically changed condition of labor. Rodgers shows how work ethic failed to meaningfully address the real condition of laboring within the industrial society and he does this by placing them into series of inter-related frameworks (e.g., women, childrens literature, political rhetoric, and leisure). With the transformation of industrial environment continues and volumes of goods pouring into the middle class, Rodgers describes the erosion of Protestant ethics giving way to the cultivation of leisure and to a noisy gospel of play (Rodgers, 1978, 29). By the end of the Civil War, the idea, where work had a redeeming factor or fundamentally good, became a misplaced sentiment within the growing economy of factories and hireling laborers. Critics across the political spectrum, such as Christian

Torres 2 socialist Jesse H. Jones and abolitionist Wendell Phillips attacked the wage system and advocated that it was a danger to democracy because it cheated, demoralized, and "enslaved" the workingman (Rodgers, 1978, 30-32). Although many defenders of the growing economy of factories advocated that hard work still had a place in the world with a promise of upward mobility, it was later determined that promise was false. It required resources and capital for the cost of building and maintaining a business, which was simply out of reach for most of the workers. It became difficult to justify the argument that a worker had a reasonable chance to leave the wage system. However, when it became apparent that a single worker could no longer obtain a business for their own, workers collectively united their resources and banded together into a cooperative workshop for profit sharing. Cooperation allowed the workers to possess independence, the full value of his toil, and the notion that workers would be their own bosses and every man his own employer (Rodgers, 1978, 41). Unfortunately, the excitement surrounding the idea of cooperative was typically plagued by short of capital or strike or lockout, with only a small amount of factories lasting more than a couple of years. Of those that lasted, they eventually collapsed from being the boss to hiring wage hand. When the Knights of Labor collapsed in the 1880s, the cooperative movement lost one of its principal organizers, and a great deal of momentum in the movement evaporated (Rodgers, 1978, 45). Other attempts to change working conditions and create incentives for efficiency met with the same fates with neither profit sharing nor stock purchasing plans caught on.

Torres 3 Around the turn of the century, new ideas for improving general working conditions started to emerge. Disgusted by the overproduction, routinization, and mindnumbness caused by industrial toil, education became the new tool for change. Work, it was argued, should be performed by those who are creative and thoughtful whose goal should be the maintenance of an industrial democracy. Jane Addams believed that integration of education and work with a cultural industrial awareness could be achieved through vocational education. Her hope was to promote industrial workers above the brutality of their conditions by making them responsive to the needs of a society which was growing more complex and interdependent. Vocational education received political support, but businessmen involved in organization of vocational school changed that vision by stressing the need for efficiency within the educational system that would "make of each citizen an effective economic unit," not for cultural awareness. Vocational schools became training institutions to the need of their communities where jobs were matched to their individual capacities. This allowed competent workers to be placed into jobs that will provide them a small but steady flow of skills and income. John Dewey rejected the businessmans version of industrial democracy, and stressed flexibility, initiative, and intelligence in education. Rodgers demonstrated that these conflicts of ideas were important but it clearly showed how fragile the line was between education to help workers see the full dimensions of their work and education to adapt them, unthinkingly, to it (Rodgers, 1978, 86-87). After the turn of the century, it became very important that there should be a distraction from the toils of labor, both in and out of the workplace, and for both industrialists and laborers. As work areas were being remodeled to increase worker

Torres 4 morale and efficiency, many opponents of the industrial order said that the best remedy for monotony and drudgery was decreased work and more leisure time. Middle class employees took more vacations and while consumers across the income range bought recreational goods such as bicycles and spent their time off at ball games and movie houses. The visible shift toward consumption and away from saving and ceaseless work extended from a widespread way of thinking which rejected the older, moralistic arguments for laboring. At this point in the book, the author speeds through selected lines by Walter Lippmann and economist Simon Patten which describe the emerging economy and compare old and new money management trends. It is here that Rodgers comes close to identifying an adaptation of the work ethic which addresses conditions of work and leisure during the first decades of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, this cursory overview of economic thinkers falls short of analysis. In chapter five entitled, Splinterings: Fables for Boys, Rodgers demonstrates how popular literature of the period underwent a change from the didactic, work-tied tale to imaginative fairy tales which marked another evidence of a retreat of the work ethic moralist (Rodgers, 1978, p. 132). Literacy works such as William T. Adams (pennamed Oliver Optic) offered healthy moral lesson tempered with a good juvenile lessons to young readers, while writers such as Mark Twain often offered lessons of disobedience to conventional authority. The final three chapters of the book, Rodgers discussed various political change of the new work discipline such as the organized labor proposal to secure a ten hour

Torres 5 and then an eight hour day, as well as the restructure of oppressive factory conditions (e.g., surveillance and locked factory gates) and the preservation of the dignity of labor (Rodgers, 1978, 174). Middle class women moved to reclaim their productive work (Rodgers, 1978, 183). Finally, the author shows that the convergence of competing political definitions about work resulted in deceptive, vague statements which denied the term work ethic any substance it may have initially carried into industrial society. Wealthy claimed to be part of the laboring classes and groups such as radicals and conservatives placed labels on opponents who were too lazy to earn his living by his own toil yet ever eager for the chance to appropriate the labors of someone else as lazy and parasitic (Rodgers, 1978, 211-212). Such rhetoric descriptions allowed another form of thinking about the way that work was once and what it should it be. It focused upon the issues of independence, creativity and the necessity of work that troubled men about labor. In Values of Work Ethics, McGowan writes that Rodgers appropriately describes the changing relationship between both worlds of the efficiency and profit of industrialism to those seeking for a harmonious relationship between personal satisfaction and moral virtues associated with work ethics (McGowan, 1979, 315). Further, McGowan commented on the ironies of how America did not reject the traditional work ethic or accept certain conditions of industrial employment or that work was not providing the satisfaction they wanted because work itself was monotonous and less interesting(McGowan, 1979, 315). In Intellectuals and Work, Ramsay Cook wrote that Rodgers demonstrated that work ethic was a businessmans creed that affected the entire American culture. That

Torres 6 "work ethic" was a businessmans creed where man was ordained by God to work as a means for development, physically, morally (Cook, 1979, 270). That man rejected this Puritanism creed not on work ethics but its corruption through tramping, jumping from job to job, and at times, rebellion. Cook commented that Rodgers splendidly argued how "work ethic" contributed to woman's discontent, because if work was so ethical, why were women excluded from its most challenging aspects? The importance of this book lies mainly in Rodgers demonstration of the challenges posed by industrialism which he describes as traditional work ideas and the reaction of these ideas based upon individualism promised by work ethics.

Torres 7 WORK CITED Cook Ramsay, Intellectuals and Work, review of The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920, by Daniel T. Rodgers, Labour / Le Travail, Vol. 4 (1979), pp. 269271. McGowan, Barbara A., Values of the Work Ethic, review of The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920, by Daniel T. Rodgers, Review of Politics, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Apr., 1979), pp. 314-317. Rodgers, Daniel T., The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974, 1978.