CHAPTER 13

The road not taken

Our lives shall not be sweated From birth until life closes Hearts starve as well as bodies Give us bread, but give us roses …

Small art and love and beauty Their drudging spirits knew Yes, it is bread we fight for But we fight for roses too.

—JAMES OPPENHEIM, DECEMBER 1911

After the horrors of the Civil War, a new, quieter conflict, ultimately more powerful in its impact, emerged in the United States. Two roads, as Robert Frost put it in his lovely poem “The Road Not Taken,” presented themselves to Americans, and after a period of indecision that lasted nearly a century, we chose one of them, “and that has made all the difference.”

Nineteenth-century Americans still had more respect for thrift than for spendthrifts, and the word consumption meant something different then. As Jeremy Rifkin explained in the Affluenza documentary, “If you go back to Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of the English language, to consume meant to exhaust, to pillage, to lay waste, to destroy. In fact, even in our grandparents’ generation, when somebody had tuberculosis, they called it ‘consumption.’ So up until this century, to be a consumer was not to be a good thing, it was considered a bad thing.”

Yet the factory system had made possible a tremendous efficiency in the time required to produce products. And herein lie the roots of the new conflict: what to do with all that time? One side suggested that we make more stuff; the other believed we should work less. Luxury or simplicity. Money or time. Bread or roses. … Or perhaps a balance of both?

THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY

Across the Atlantic, a similar argument was brewing. In 1883, while in a French prison, Paul Lafargue, a son-in-law of Karl Marx, wrote a provocative essay called “The Right to Be Lazy,” challenging the make more, have more ethic. Lafargue mocked industrialists who “go among the happy nations who are loafing in the sun” and “lay down railroads, erect factories, and import the curse of work.”¹

Lafargue deemed laziness “the mother of arts and noble virtues” and suggested that even then, factories were so productive that only three hours a day of labor should be required to meet real needs. Like Marx, he pointed out that Catholic Church law had given workers many feast days honoring the saints when work was forbidden. It was no surprise, he suggested, that industrialists favored Protestantism (with its work ethic), which “dethroned the saints in heaven in order to abolish their feast days on earth.”

At the same time in England, William Morris, a poet, artist, and essayist (and designer of the Morris chair), claimed that under the factory system, “the huge mass of men are compelled by folly and greed to make harmful and useless things.”² “An immensity of work,” wrote Morris, was expended in making “everything in the shop windows which is embarrassing or superfluous.”

“I beg of you,” he pleaded,

to think of the enormous mass of men who are occupied with this miserable trumpery, from the engineers who have had to make the machines for making them, down to the hapless clerks who sit day-long year after year in the horrible dens wherein the wholesale exchange of them is transacted, and the shopmen, who not daring to call their souls their own, retail them … to the idle public which doesn’t want them but buys them to be bored by them and sick to death of them.³

“The good life of the future,” said Morris, would be totally unlike the life of the rich of his day. “Free men,” he maintained, “must live simple lives and have simple pleasures.” Morris defined a decent, wealthy life as requiring “a healthy body, an active mind, occupation fit for a healthy body and active mind, and a beautiful world to live in.”

THE SIMPLE LIFE

Back in the United States, new institutions like the department store helped promote a life of conspicuous consumption. “Urban department stores came in during the 1880s,” says the historian Susan Strasser, “basically to create the sort of place where people go and lose themselves and meanwhile spend their money.” By the 1890s, wealthy Americans proudly displayed the material signs of their success, wearing affluenza on their sleeves, you might say. But not everyone was impressed.

“In the late nineteenth century, there was a major revival of American interest in simple living,” says the historian David Shi. “Theodore Roosevelt was one of the foremost proponents of a simpler life for Americans during that period. Roosevelt was quite candid in saying that for all his support for American capitalism, he feared that if it were allowed to develop unleashed it would eventually create a corrupt civilization.” Shi provides other examples of this turn-of-the-century interest in simplicity in his wonderful book The Simple Life. Even America’s best-selling magazine, The Ladies’ Home Journal, promoted simplicity during that era.

THE ORIGINAL OCCUPY

When the Occupy Wall Street protesters took over New York City’s Zucotti Park in September 2011 to champion the cause of “the 99 percent,” they had no idea that exactly a hundred years earlier, their theme was anticipated in a beautiful novel by James Oppenheim, a former Greenwich Village teacher and settlement house worker. Harper Brothers published The Nine-Tenths in New York in September 1911. Its title anticipates the 99 percent of Occupy fame. But the novel provides a far more nuanced understanding of human need and political organizing than that of the angry but unfocused later movement.⁴

The novel fictionalizes two real events while changing their order. The first of these events was the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, a well-known disaster that resulted in the death of 146 young women on March 24, 1911. In the novel, the Triangle Fire becomes “the East Eighty-First Street Fire.” It starts with a carelessly tossed cigarette in a print shop and results in the death of dozens of very young women, who work making hats one floor higher in the same building. Overcome with guilt, the owner of the print shop, Joe Blaine, learns of the plight of poor women workers in New York and, in an effort to redeem himself, sells his shop and uses the money to start a paper, The Nine Tenths, which helps the women workers organize a major strike. The real strike on which the story is based took place more than a year before the Triangle Fire.

In the fall and winter of 1909 and 1910, in what was deemed “the Uprising of the Thirty Thousand,” masses of factory workers shut down their machines and took to the streets, supported by the Women’s Trade Union League. Their demands centered on safe working conditions, an increase in pay, and shorter working hours. The fictional Nine-Tenths is the organ of solidarity that holds them together and publicizes their cause when the mainstream press will not. This was the original Occupy.

After a few months, in the novel as in reality, the Uprising of the Thirty Thousand ends with a measure of success, as many employers give in to the women’s key demands. The most prominent of the real holdouts was the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, which refused to improve safety conditions. A year later, its belligerence produced tragedy.

After the strike, Joe marries and goes on a honeymoon. On his return to New York, he describes his hopes for their city, “the city of five million comrades”:

They toil all day with one another; they create all of beauty and use that men may need; they exchange these things with each other; they go home at night to gardens and simple houses, they find happy women there and sunburnt, laughing children. Their evenings are given over to the best play.… They have time for study, time for art, yet time for one another.⁵

Oppenheim’s vision of the good life, while still infused by the gender bias of his day, is an enlightened one of modest homes, modest comfort, and most of all, time to appreciate the things that are not things but are the best things in life. Oppenheim understood that poor as these women were, they could not live on money alone. They needed the nonmaterial joys of life—art, beauty, nature, play, learning, friendship, and love, and for all of these things, they needed time.

In December of that same year, 1911, Oppenheim published the work for which he is most famous, a poem called “Bread and Roses,” which became a popular song by Judy Collins in 1976. “Hearts starve as well as bodies,” a line from the poem reads. “Give us bread, but give us roses.” The poem describes the women of the Uprising of the Thirty Thousand, marching through New York, watched from “a million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,” where their sisters toil with neither “bread” (money) nor “roses” (and the time to smell them).

The theme of bread and roses inspired others, including, according to anecdotal reports, the thousands of women who filled the streets of Lawrence, Massachusetts, a month after the poem was published, demanding higher pay and shorter hours in what came to be called the Bread and Roses Strike.⁶

THE SHORTER-HOURS MOVEMENT

Organized labor had not yet then accepted the definition of the good life as a goods life, in which the marker of progress was the consumption of stuff. Indeed, for more than half a century, the demand for shorter hours topped labor’s agenda. In 1886, hundreds of thousands of workers filled American cities, demanding that an eight-hour workday be made America’s legal standard. That didn’t happen until 1938, when the Fair Labor Standards Act made the eight-hour day and forty-hour week the law of the land. And by then, labor leaders were fighting for a six-hour workday. It was needed, they argued, as much for spiritual as economic reasons.

“The human values of leisure are even greater than its economic significance,” wrote William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, in 1926. Green claimed that modern work was “meaningless, repetitive, boring,” offering “no satisfaction of intellectual needs.” Shorter working hours were necessary “for the higher development of spiritual and intellectual powers,” Green claimed. His vice president, Matthew Woll, charged that modern production ignored “the finer qualities of life. Unfortunately, our industrial life is dominated by the materialistic spirit of production, giving little attention to the development of the human body, the human mind or the spirit of life.”⁷

Juliet Stuart Poyntz, education director of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, declared that what workers wanted most of all was “time to be human.” “Workers,” she observed, “have declared that their lives are not to be bartered at any price.… No wage, no matter how high” was more important than the time that workers needed.⁸

TIME TO KNOW GOD

Behind them, as Professor Benjamin Hunnicutt of the University of Iowa points out in his books Work Without End and Free Time, rallied prominent religious leaders, who worried that workers had no time for reflection and spiritual matters, no “time to know God.” Jewish leaders challenged Saturday work as violating their Sabbath and led the fight for a five-day workweek. Catholic leaders backed Pope Leo XIII’s call (in his encyclical Rerum Novarum, 1891) for a “living wage,” or family wage, that would guarantee the breadwinner in working families sufficient income for a life of “frugal comfort.” But beyond that, they believed that more time was more important to workers than more money.

During the 1920s, Monsignor John Ryan, editor of the Catholic Charities Review, pointed to Saint Augustine’s claim that natural law demanded a “maximum” standard of living as well as a minimum one. “The true and rational doctrine,” Ryan wrote, “is that when men have produced sufficient necessaries and reasonable comforts, they should spend what time is left in the cultivation of their intellects and wills, in the pursuit of the higher life.” They should, he said, “ask, what is life for?”⁹ The Jewish scholar Felix Cohen pointed out that, in the biblical tradition, work was a curse visited upon Adam for his sin in Eden and suggested that, with wasteful and unnecessary production abolished, it would soon be possible to reduce the work-week to ten hours!¹⁰

THE GOSPEL OF CONSUMPTION

But industrial leaders in the 1920s had their own religion, the gospel of consumption. A reduction in working hours, they believed, might bring the whole capitalist system to its knees. Increased leisure, Harvard economist Thomas Nixon Carver warned, was bad for business:

There is no reason for believing that more leisure would ever increase the desire for goods. It is quite possible that the leisure would be spent in the cultivation of the arts and graces of life; in visiting museums, libraries and art galleries, or hikes, games and inexpensive amusements … it would decrease the desire for material goods. If it should result in more gardening, more work around the home in making or repairing furniture, painting and repairing the house and other useful avocations, it would cut down the demand for the products of our wage paying industries.¹¹

It would, you might say, reduce affluenza. He had a problem with that.

After the Model T began rolling from Henry Ford’s assembly lines in 1913, a cornucopia of material products followed. Businesses sought ways to sell them—and the economic gospel of consumption—giving rise to an advertising industry that looked—and still looks—to psychology for help in pushing products.

“Sell them their dreams,” a promoter told Philadelphia businessmen in 1923. “Sell them what they longed for and hoped for and almost despaired of having. Sell them hats by splashing sunlight across them. Sell them dreams—dreams of country clubs and proms and visions of what might happen if only. After all, people don’t buy things to have things. They buy hope—hope of what your merchandise will do for them. Sell them this hope and you won’t have to worry about selling them goods.”¹²

The agrarian philosopher Ralph Borsodi warned Americans eloquently of where this was all heading in his 1929 jeremiad, This Ugly Civilization.

Man has a habitable globe on which to spend his time—a veritable treasure trove and alchemist’s library full of useful raw materials whatever his genius may lead him to design. Yet he burns the coal and the oil, cuts down and devastates the forest, pollutes and poisons the streams and lakes, and levels hills and mountains, not because this is the wisest use he can make of his time but merely that he may keep his factories busy and make the money with which to buy what they produce.… It is perhaps one of the gravest defects of the earn-and-buy economy, which the factory has brought into being that it has made money the measure of all things economic.… The true economy is not of money but of time, just as the true waste is not of money but of the irreplaceable materials of nature.¹³

But Borsodi’s warnings fell on deaf ears at a time when the world’s first mass-consumption society came in dancing the Charleston. Cash registers were ka-chinging, and the stock market soared—higher, higher, higher—like that of the ’90s. People’s wants, the captains of American industry declared, were insatiable, and business opportunities therefore boundless. During the ’20s, their gospel of wealth had plenty of believers. There were those who thought it would never go down.

SHORTER HOURS DURING THE DEPRESSION

Then one day in October 1929, it all collapsed. “Wall Street Lays An Egg,” declared the headline in Variety. Millionaires suddenly became paupers and leaped out of windows. Breadlines formed. With millions out of work, the idea of shortening work hours, “work sharing,” was back in vogue. Even Herbert Hoover called shorter hours the quickest way to create more jobs.

Once again, labor leaders like William Green were demanding “the six-hour day and the five-day week in industry.” Imagine their delight when word came from Washington on April 6, 1933, that the US Senate had just passed a bill that would make thirty hours the official American workweek. Anything over that would be overtime. Thirty hours. That was eighty years ago.¹⁴

The bill ultimately failed in the House by a few votes. President Franklin D. Roosevelt opposed it because he was convinced that federal job-creation programs—the New Deal—offered a better way to both reduce unemployment and keep industry strong.

But some businesses had already adopted thirty-hour workweeks, with excellent results. The cereal tycoon A. K. Kellogg took the lead, in December 1930. Kellogg was a paternalistic capitalist who ran his company with an iron hand. But he had a certain radical vision. In Kellogg’s view, according to Hunnicutt, leisure time, not economic growth without end, represented the “flower, the crowning achievement, of capitalism.” The vision came to Kellogg because he mourned his rigid childhood and his own addiction to long hours of labor. “I never learned to play,” he once told his grandson, regretfully.

Kellogg offered his workers thirty-five hours’ pay for a thirty-hour week, and he built parks, summer camps, nature centers, garden plots, sports fields, and other recreational facilities for them. The plan immediately created four hundred new jobs in Battle Creek, Michigan, where Kellogg’s plants were located. Productivity rose so rapidly that within two years Kellogg could pay his thirty-hour workers what he had previously paid them for forty hours. Polling of Kellogg’s workers during the ’30s showed overwhelming support for the thirty-hour week; only a few single males wished for more hours and higher pay.

OLD EIGHT HOURS HAS GOT US ALL

But after Kellogg died, the company waged a long campaign to return to the forty-hour week. The reason: benefits. As benefits increasingly became a larger part of the wage package, it made more sense to hire fewer workers and keep them on longer. But the thirty-hour week at Kellogg’s wasn’t fully abandoned until 1985, when the company threatened to leave Battle Creek if the remaining thirty-hour workers (about 20 percent of the company, and nearly all women) didn’t agree to work longer. The women held a funeral (complete with a casket) for the thirty-hour week at Stan’s Place, a local bar, and one, Ina Sides, wrote a eulogy:

Farewell good friend, oh six hours

’Tis sad but true

Now you’re gone and we’re all so blue.

Get out your vitamins, give the doctor a call

’Cause old eight hours has got us all.¹⁵

While writing his book Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day, Hunnicutt spent time with many former Kellogg workers. Most remembered the thirty-hour week with deep fondness. They remembered using their leisure well—to garden, learn crafts, practice hobbies, exercise, and share in a vibrant community life. “You weren’t all wore out when you got out of work,” said one man. “You had the energy to do something else.”

Chuck and Joy Blanchard, a married couple who both worked at the plant, remembered that Chuck took care of the kids and was a “room parent” at their school “long before anyone heard about women’s liberation.” They also remembered that after the return to forty hours, volunteering in Battle Creek went down and crime went up. The Blanchards say they had little, but their lives, blessed with abundant leisure, were happier than those of young families today, who have so much more stuff but never seem to have time.

Never before or since in America had ordinary industrial workers traveled so far down that “other road”—the road of time instead of money. In that sense, the Kellogg’s workers were, as Hunnicutt sees them, explorers in a new and wondrous land that all Americans might have come to if World War II had not intervened and—in demanding a vast national outpouring of labor—locked the gate. Today, we meet people who cannot quite believe that more than half a century ago, in a corner of the United States, full-time workers were spending only thirty hours a week on the job. But it happened. And it can happen again when we get a grip on affluenza.