A quick Google question “How many Americans are there” gives me an estimated population of America in 2022 of 333,271,411. In 2022, it was estimated that over 158 million Americans were in some form of employment, while 3.64 percent of the total workforce was unemployed. 3.64% of 333 million is 12,131,079 “unemployed” - there were 72.5 million children in the United States in 2022, and 58 million in the 65-and-older category, which assumes they are retired. By my admittedly crude accounting methods, of the 333 million Americans who are NOT children, retirees, employed, or “unemployed”, there are still 32,640,321 who are not working.
So I wonder - what are they up to? (Clearly, they are not all doing genealogy…)
When you talk to people about “work” you find that we all have a lot of notions about what counts as “work” - and it is interesting to look at how those notions have changed over time.
Once upon a time, ads like this one drew people who had known scarcity and poverty in Europe to claim land in the American West. They surely knew that this land had been stolen from previous occupants, but many of them convinced themselves that those previous occupants had not been “good stewards” of that land. They justified their possession of the prairies of the MidWest by asserting that their efforts to farm and develop industries on that land gave them a right to it that the indigenous tribes did not have - in other words, they made a moral judgment that the nomadic hunters who had lived off the land for centuries before had not worked for a living.
There were two components of history and culture behind this idea. One was the Protestant work ethic described by Max Weber in 1905. Weber’s theory traces this attitude towards work to Martin Luther, who “conceptualized worldly work as a duty which benefits both the individual and society as a whole” - in other words, Protestants tied their salvation to work1, and the idea that equated “hard work” with “good morals” still permeates our society in subtle ways.
The other component was the struggle seen for millennia in Europe between the “civilized man” and the “barbarian.” Modern Americans have a few popular notions about who the Celts or the Gauls were, and may have a vague notion that somehow, those people were displaced by “the Romans.” But the story of European civilization is one in which newer models of living that depend on exploiting agriculture and raw materials for wealth and influence - almost always at the expense of those doing the hard labor - slowly displaced older models of living off the land, hunting, and following migratory game.
Somehow, along the way, being a citizen, working hard, and letting your betters (aka, shareholders) profit from your labor became your moral duty as a person.
Stop me if you’ve heard this, but we live today in a post-industrial society.
When I look at the documentation of my ancestors in census records, it is easy to see the trend away from farming and farm-related work as the most common occupation. After about 1871, more recent ancestors experienced the Industrial Revolution, which is evident in the number of people employed by the railroads or in factories. A century later, with the rise of computers, we entered the information age - and I have spent my entire adult life doing what could be classified as “knowledge work”.
I doubt that my 3x-great grandfather, William Callin, who cleared acres and acres of Ohio forest with his five sons and turned his land into prosperous farms, would recognize anything I do as “work.” He probably would have been appalled that his grandchildren were leaving the farms he worked so hard to establish so they could earn wages in factories. Industrialization was, to men like William, something to be resisted, and they made compelling moral arguments against it. In 1869, The New York Times described the system of wage labor as "a system of slavery as absolute if not as degrading as that which lately prevailed at the South".2
If you look at things from William’s point of view, or at least from the point of view of Midwestern American Protestants like him, the only thing more morally outrageous than not working would be to have someone else steal your labor. This would explain why people like William and his brother George were willing to defy the law and help enslaved people escape from the South.
I know I don’t want to spend any more time than I have to spend being “employed” - but I don’t plan to ever “stop working.” I have found this to be true of many people, especially those who work at creating art or those in the field of education. Most of them keep their “day job” to pay for the basics, but their drive is focused on making their art, supporting their community, and doing things that corporations have not figured out how to exploit for coin.
On the flip side, though, I don’t think anyone wants to go back to working their ancestral farms; even with modern time- and labor-saving technology! I suspect that whether we stay employed or find a better way to support ourselves and our work, there is one ever-green meme that will never go out of date:
I am aware that I am oversimplifying the theological divide between “faith” and “works” - this post is already long enough!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery#History
Good point about white settlers not recognizing the labor of the Indigenous peoples as "work." I wonder if there isn't a third factor. Wage labor. You mention stealing the labor of others through slavery, but when exactly did humans engage in the trade and barter of their own labor for wages (currency, cash, moolah, wampum)? What constitutes "work" also varies by gender, perhaps.
Great piece. I especially loved the accumulated clippings!