Work Ethic

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Work Ethic

The work ethic is a debased, vulgarized version of a moral vision that the German sociologist Max Weber conceptualized a century ago as the Protestant ethic. In the Reformed Protestantism of the sixteenth-century Geneva theologian John Calvin, an inscrutable God predestined men and women to salvation or damnation yet withheld from them the ability to read his design or discover their eternal fate. They could only hope to have intimations of an answer to that most urgent of all questions. The capacity for steady work seemed such an intimation, because Calvin's God wished to be worshipped in the world, not in monasteries and other such retreats from it. Work was, for Reformed Protestants, a way of worshipping their God and easing their anxiety.

In Weber's ingenious formulation, Protestants who dedicated themselves to unremitting labor were decisive in the creation of capitalism because they believed God disallowed pleasure as much as he demanded industry among his faithful. Their ascetic reluctance to enjoy the fruits of their labor left them nothing to do with the mounting wealth that came of their diligence but to put it back into their businesses. Thus they inadvertently—and systematically—amassed capital.

Weber took Benjamin Franklin and his Poor Richard maxims as the epitome of the Protestant ethic. And observers before and since have seen America as a culture singularly wedded to work and peculiarly convinced that work was the core of the moral life.

But Weber probably misread Poor Richard and certainly misread Franklin. Franklin was no Puritan. He pursued the pleasures of the flesh from his youth to his dying days. He gave up work itself at an early age, quitting the printing business for what he unabashedly called leisure and philosophical amusements.

Franklin was hardly alone in his aversion to the laborious and his enjoyment of the carnal. Few of the richest men in early America embraced an ethic that made moral significance of work. Few, indeed, did much work. Southern planters had squadrons of slaves to clear the land and till the soil; they spent most of their time exchanging social visits with one another. Northern merchants enjoyed an equivalent leisure; their ledgers reveal that they rarely made more than three or four sales a day, their letter books show that they rarely wrote more than three or four letters a day, and their diaries indicate that they spent the better part of their time dining and chatting with fellow merchants. Common people in all the colonies similarly sought relief from the biblical curse on labor that attended the expulsion from Eden. Promotional pamphlets routinely promised those contemplating migration to the New World that they would find there a life of Edenic ease. Hogs and cattle multiplied marvelously, without human effort. Crops flourished in fertile soils. Fish ran so abundantly in the rivers that a single netting would feed a man for a week. Birds flew so thickly in the air that a single shot fired into the flock would bag half a dozen. Men and women went to colonial America for the prospect of wealth and leisure that it offered more than for the work that it required.

After the Revolution the emphasis shifted. In the staple-producing South, work remained a slave's affliction and exemption from physical labor remained a mark of gentility. But beyond the regions where tobacco, rice, and cotton absorbed men's ambitions, the pace of business quickened. North of the Mason-Dixon Line, a veritable revolution in transportation—scheduled transatlantic shipping, turnpikes, canals, steamboats, and, at the end of the era, railroads—opened a vast new access to the market. Farmers responded to the incentive to produce more for it. An emergent middle class set standards of respectability that increasingly centered on a new gospel of work.

The norms themselves were not new. The Puritans had brought them to New England, the Quakers to Pennsylvania. But they had been confined to Puritan and Quaker precincts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the young Republic they overspread much more of the North.

Everyone noticed. European visitors commented in tones at once acerbic and astonished on Americans' obsession with what the novelist Charles Dickens would later call the "almighty dollar." Almost without exception, such observers complained of meals frantically wolfed down so as to lose no time that might be spent making money. They remarked on the meager fare of amusements and the absence of a substantial class of men and women devoted to them. As Alexis de Tocqueville, the great nineteenth-century French observer of American life, noted, even the wealthy considered themselves obligated to persist in "some kind of industrial or commercial pursuit." A rich man "would think himself in bad repute if he employed his life solely in living."

Americans themselves testified to the same effect, in their words and in their actions. The mill girl turned poet Lucy Larcom recalled New England childhoods "penetrated through every fibre of thought with the idea that idleness is a disgrace." Merchants withdrew from the politics they once dominated because commerce demanded all their time in the nineteenth century as it never had in the eighteenth. Artificers in the 1820s petitioned for ten times the number of patents they had thirty years before. The very beverages that Americans drank made manifest the changes: coffee, a stimulant, displaced whiskey, a depressant.

Needless to say, there were those who did not embrace the new ethos or give themselves enthusiastically to incessant labor. Urban artisans still celebrated "Saint Monday" and punctuated the rest of the work week with booze breaks and other premodern rituals of conviviality. Farmers sometimes disdained the opportunities that new markets offered. A Pennsylvanian remarked that he had thought to move to Kentucky till he heard that there was no winter there so people had to work all the time; "that was not his fancy." But such common folk did not occupy, or even have access to, the command-posts of middle-class opinion.

The work ethic of the new nation was not the Protestant ethic that Weber delineated. It was far more broadly diffused: a secular faith rather than a sectarian one. It was essentially disconnected from anxiety over salvation: the notion that work was a "calling" in which the worker glorified God virtually vanished from common parlance.

This work ethic justified work by its usefulness to the early Republic and, more, by its advantage to the worker himself. Work built character. Work kept a person from the debilities of idleness. And work was the way to a new American dream of success. As the idea of the "calling" disappeared, the idea of "the self-made man" came to the fore. By diligent application, men of modest origins could become rich. By industry alone—"plain, rugged, brown-faced, homely clad, old-fashioned industry," as the mid-nineteenth-century minister Henry Ward Beecher would later put it.

There was an irony in all that. The crux of the work ethic was that labor in a social context made economic life more than mere drudgery by the sweat of the brow. Such labor conferred moral meaning on toil. But the more that men worked harder for private gain—for success and self-advancement—the more they dissolved the social context that could make their labor meaningful. It was a conundrum that would only be exacerbated with the advent of the factory system in the years ahead.