Work Ethic in Industrial America Essay

8/3/2019 Work Ethic in Industrial America Essay

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Raymond Torres

History: 525-50Professor 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


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Around the turn of the century, new ideas for improving general working

conditions started to emerge. Disgusted by the overproduction, routinization, and mind-

numbness 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


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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 (pen-

named 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


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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).

InIntellectuals andWork, Ramsay Cook wrote that Rodgers demonstrated that

work ethic was a businessmans creed that affected the entire American culture. That


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"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.


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WORK CITED

Cook Ramsay, Intellectuals and Work, review of The Work Ethic in IndustrialAmerica, 1850-1920, by Daniel T. Rodgers, Labour / Le Travail, Vol. 4 (1979), pp. 269-

271.

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.

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Work Ethic in Industrial America Essay