Rich Hall's Working for the American Dream

What does that phrase even mean?

Cos it's wildly open to interpretation.

But I think to a lot of Americans

it's being given the chance to do your work with dignity.

So, for the next 90 minutes or so,

we're going to examine the old American work ethic,

and try to understand how, far too often, labour

seems to get in the way of work.

If you don't know the difference between labour and work,

it's like the difference between sleeping and dreaming.

In other words, the American dream is littered

with a lot of lumpy mattresses.

Did you like that metaphor?

I did. There's going to be plenty more, so stick around.

The notion of the American dream

has been embedded in America's creation myth

since the day the first Pilgrims planted their buckled boots on

Plymouth Rock. Which actually never happened

because Plymouth Rock is the size of a small garden feature.

But the hard work ethic and the very definition of success itself

has mutated over the years.

From something spiritual, to something material,

to something that nowadays seems almost undefinable.

Still, it's the cement that unifies Americans.

From industrialists...

..to politicians...

..to artists...

..to writers...

..to the everyday working stiff,

the message is the same.

Put in a little elbow grease,

and your efforts will be rewarded.

But it doesn't always work out that way.

Sometimes the dream turns into a nightmare.

America was founded on the idea of redemption, second chance,

a fresh start, if you're willing to put your back to the plough.

No country has condensed its creation myth more than America -

you were a slave, or an indentured servant,

lazy, alcoholic, landless,

impoverished, riddled with typhoid,

or accidentally tomahawked by a Mohican,

guess what? You're not making it into America's history books.

Americans celebrate exceptionalism and progress.

It's a reason that we call ourselves "the" land of opportunity

and not "a" land of opportunity,

because apparently most Americans have never heard of New Zealand.

But here's the thing - for every industrial achievement,

for every rags-to-riches story, for every great invention,

from this incredibly pliant but durable jacket, to this smartphone,

somewhere scores of people are hunched over workbenches

trying desperately not to stitch or solder their fingers together.

If hard work is so ethical,

how come there's seldom anything ethical

about making people work hard?

When Americans talk about a work ethic,

what they mean is hard effort is its own virtue.

It's a doctrine that came across on the Mayflower

the day the Puritans set sail for Plymouth Rock.

The Mayflower sailed into Cape Cod, Massachusetts,

in November of 1620 after a 66-day voyage.

Now, it's generally noted about half the people on the boats were

separatists, Calvinists - but here's a more specific breakdown.

33 of those people were elderly,

and pretty much wished they'd died on the boat

before they ever arrived.

Another 57 realised immediately what a horrible,

horrible mistake they made leaving Europe.

The remaining 42 set about making

the lives of the other 90 excruciatingly miserable.

It's kind of like Butlin's, but worse.

The first couple years were really hard,

they came over, and the first year they planted their crops

and enough of them came up that they could survive another year.

But the following year it didn't do so well,

and it looked like the crops would fail

and that would have been the end of the colony.

So the Puritans who settled the colonies

in North America were predisposed to misery.

They believed they were the people that the Book of Revelations

had chosen to go into the wilderness

because some shit was about to go down.

So they were willing to flagellate themselves with toil because that

is an inherent Calvinist principle.

OK, in essence, Calvinism goes like this - God has predetermined who's

making the team and it's the hardest workers.

But just because you're on the team

doesn't mean you're in the starting line-up,

but if you don't act like you're in the starting line-up you're

not even going to make the team.

Man's character, fate, and morality

are determined by his labours.

If you were educated or aristocratic,

you were called master or mistress.

If you were a craftsman like a wheelwright or glass-blower,

you were a goodman. Beneath the goodmen

were the indentured servants.

Beneath the indentured servants were the kids,

who were exploited beyond belief.

Put out to labour from sun-up till sundown.

So a typical day in a Puritan kid's life would probably consist of

awakening before dawn,

sitting down to a hot steaming bowl of grubs and larvae,

then they would be sent out into a field where they might be strapped

to a large immovable boulder in the hopes that

a sudden growth spurt would dislodge the thing.

Afterwards, four or five hours in a dank schoolhouse,

where the only books were a Bible

and a trilogy called Thousands And Thousands Of Mohicans,

Not So Many Mohicans, Last Of The Mohicans.

And afterwards, chores such as sewing by candlelight

until you went blind,

or assisting Mom through yet another stillbirth.

Good times.

Everyone knew their place, and everything was achieved

for the greater glory of God.

If you think about it, there is no more effective incentive to work

than the notion that when a flashing white-hot streak of lightning fills

the sky, and a blindingly bright figure of Christ descends to Earth

to pluck his chosen ones,

you don't really want to be caught goofing off at the water cooler.

The belief in personal salvation through work

is how the Plymouth colony survived.

Work, work, work, work, work.

Idle hands are the devil's workshop.

They proved that you could tame the American wilderness,

but the flood of people who followed - the Amish, the Quakers,

the Lutherans, the Protestants,

the Catholics - they didn't adhere to that same aesthetic.

Probably because they looked at these right-wing religious zealots,

and thought to themselves, "Hey, wait a minute,

"if hard work is the core of spirituality,

"how come the most spiritual people of all -

"monks - don't work at all?"

Major paradigm shift.

Religious freedom gave way to personal motivation.

By the middle of the 18th century in America,

a good deal of secularisation had taken place.

The idea that one worked for the glory of God

was slowly replaced with the byword "usefulness".

America was still a spindly legged puppy,

and the only way it was going to survive was if every man, woman,

and child expended some dogged persistence.

Benjamin Franklin, more than anyone else,

condensed this idea into the kind of aphorisms

that stuck easily into people's heads.

He invented the bumper sticker before there were bumpers.

Franklin was America's first

exemplary model of the self-made man.

He was born poor in the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1706.

At the age of ten, taught himself to read Latin,

but dropped out of school.

He invented swim fins for the hands.

So you knew this guy was going places.

Then he became a printer's apprentice,

and that the age of 24 started

publishing, under a pseudonym, Poor Richard's Almanac.

A compendium of idioms and weather forecasts and predictions,

written in a vernacular that regular people could relate to.

"A penny saved is a penny earned."

"Fish and visitors stink after three days."

"I believe that once all the hoopla has died down,

"that The Dave Clark Five will be bigger than The Beatles."

1730, he was elected official printer for Pennsylvania,

cranking out state currency.

The man was literally given a license to print money.

He would go on to invent the Franklin stove, bifocals,

American independence,

and something else but I can't quite think of right now.

It'll come to me.

He was an abolitionist and a vegetarian.

It would have been useful if Franklin had invented the wristwatch

because his exhortations about time equating money

would have been lost on most 18th-century New Englanders.

They didn't know what time it was.

They knew when the sun came up, when the sun went down,

they knew when it was planting season,

harvest season, fallow season.

It was a self-employed nation.

Industrious but not yet industrial.

It was a very simple economic tenant.

A man's efforts are his to exert,

and the successes are his to be reaped.

For a short period, this pure fiduciary equation worked.

But then that pesky old southern bugaboo, cotton, raised its head.

Cotton. It's hard to believe that a huge chunk of America's problems,

racial tensions, the Mason-Dixon line, the Civil War, Reconstruction,

Jim Crow laws, the KKK, civil rights,

some bigoted 20-year-old kid running a Dodge Challenger into a group of

protesters, every dumbass, redneck,

cracker-barrel shred of racism that exists in America is the indirect

result of a fabric - a fabric.

God, if only northerners had been happy wearing wool

or hemp or muskrat pelts, America would be a different nation.

A nation itching and

scratching its sweaty ass off but a less racist nation.

In our historically redacted world, we like to think that the north was

anti-slavery and thus morally superior to the south,

but that's not remotely the case.

Southern slavery and King cotton

were inextricably intertwined with the north.