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.
The founding of the Merrimack Mills in lower Massachusetts in 1822
changed the industrial order in America.
It was the first mega-factory.
All that cotton picked by bonded slaves from the south came here,
where it was loomed by wage slaves
or, as we like to call them, women.
The way the mills first got their employees was Francis Cabot Lowell,
the founder of the Lowell manufacturing industry.
He went out to farm communities throughout New England,
himself, and he would talk to groups of farmers, and say, "Send us your
"daughters, we're going to take care of them,
"we're going to keep them on the morally straight and narrow,
"we are going to make sure they're educated,
"we're going to pay them well.
"Send us your daughters and they'll be working in our companies, making
"American products, and you can be proud of them."
Ranging in age from seven to 35,
the mill girls - or mules, as they came to be known -
worked an average of 73 hours a week.
They slept six to a room in dormitories and after work they were
encouraged by the mills' matrons to read and write and paint -
you know, to improve their standing in society.
They even had their own publication - the Lowell Offering -
full of poems and short stories celebrating the enlightened culture
of being strapped to a card spinner for 14 hours a day.
When the girls first came here it was really seen as
this revolutionary new way of running America.
This new industry, this new opportunity.
I'm not sure if they were looked up to but they were applauded -
they were applauded for taking the chance
and going to work for themselves.
Almost immediately, a kind of proto-feminist argument arose.
Were these mill girls being exploited,
or were they emancipated because they had paying jobs?
As opposed to staying on the farm and earning zilch.
Sure it was a lousy wages, they were medically misunderstood,
they were an nonentity at the ballot box, but they were making money.
No.
ALARM AND MACHINES RUNNING
SHOUTS: It was shit!
God!
Imagine listening to this for 16 hours a day.
This is worse than a Kasabian album.
The more highfalutin members of New England Society
took the term "mill girl" and turned it into a class slur.
There were rumours started about loose morality,
that they were going out and doing things
that girls of New England shouldn't be doing,
so the reputation started to change.
As the decades went on and more and more mills were built,
wages went down,
and it was the immigrant women who started to work in the mills.
Then it was seen really as dirty work
that only dirty people would do.
Because these women weren't home scrubbing and baking and ringing
and washing, they weren't fit for breeding or marriage,
and that's where we get the term spinster.
So, off the backs of slaves and through
the gnarled fingers of young women,
America entered its industrial age.
The self-employed enterprises gave way to factories.
People engaged in mind-numbing specialised tasks
making things for the nation to use
when the nation wasn't working.
Which was practically never.
The work ethic had become a maze of paradoxes.
On the one hand, it impelled the restless energy of a young nation.
America had become a powerhouse and there was a sense of mission.
But these same workers were trapped in a cycle of monotony,
forced discipline. Where was the individual creativity?
Where was that sense of usefulness that Franklin liked to talk about?
By the mid-1800s,
the northern United States was one giant steaming workhouse.
Consumed by the idea that a man's physical output
determined his destiny.
So, there was no excuse not to bust your butt.
Now maybe you're thinking, "Geez, Rich,
"didn't people ever lighten up back then?
"They couldn't have spent all their time working."
Well, of course there was leisure time.
There was baseball and cracker jacks.
A day at the track. Parades,
capades and county fairs, where the gals dressed in gingham.
If you had a little cash you could take in the follies.
Now, if you were a kid, you might spend a lot of leisure time
sitting down with your McGuffey Reader -
the most popular schoolbook at the time,
full of wisdom and lifestyle tips.
"Lucy has a new box, a big box, let us go and see it.
"Lucy's box is red.
"It is a hot day, let us go out.
"Let us go out with our dog, to the new cut hay.
"Let us put hay on our dog.
"It will be fun. Let us go."
And in the evening, the family would sit around and play a wildly popular
board game called The Checkered Game of Life.
♪ The game of life... ♪
It was invented in 1860, by a man named Milton Bradley,
and quickly became the favoured parlour pastime in America.
The object of the game was to reach successful old age -
which, at the time, was about 45 -
along the way trying to avoid such misfortunes as disgrace, property,
crime, prison, the fat office, and suicide.
Fun for the whole family.
That's life!
The game is still popular today, but it's been updated a bit.
For instance, you now achieve success
by graduating college, getting a job,
finding a spouse, finding a home, buying a car,
the suicide option has been replaced by bankruptcy,
but you can work your way out of total financial devastation
by merely helping the homeless or recycling.
Just like real life.
The whole notion of the American dream,
the land of opportunity,
is predicated on cultivation.
Anyone who's ever seen some fossilised septuagenarian
pottering around their sad allotment
can see how elated they are when they coax a few
runner beans into existence.
Why? Cos dirt makes people happy.
The notion of owning the proverbial 40 acres and a mule
was irresistible to a lot of Americans. In 1860,
true freedom for a lot of Americans lay out west.
The famous John Gast painting,
American Progress,
sums it up pretty succinctly.
Old America was a greasy mechanic trapped in a mind-numbing production
line with some fat, rich boss breathing down its neck.
New America, an ethereal female spirit
stringing telegraph wire like a Wichita lineman.
If the Wichita lineman was wearing a diaphanous negligee,
shepherding steam engines and wagon trains across the Great Plains
towards untold riches,
while terrorised buffalo and Indians scampered off into the margins.
Who wouldn't want a piece of that?
As America expanded, more and more Europeans followed,
trailing in the celestial prop wash
of that floating female godhead of fortune.
I told you there'd be more metaphors.
One group in particular made the most of their new-found opportunity.
Germans.
46 million Americans have some kind of German ancestry,
and that makes them the largest ethnic majority in America.
How did this happen?
Well, in 1848 a wave of rebellion broke out
against the autocratic princes and barons who ruled Germany.
Which at the time was a loose collection of near-feudal states.
After the revolt, some of these rabble-rousers
and organisers hotfoot it for America.
Fortunately their arrival coincided with the signing of
the Homestead Act, which had opened up the Midwest to settlers.
So, these God-centric German folk moved West,
settling along the Mississippi River in places like Iowa, or Illinois.
They brought with them a more precise work ethic
and some pretty nifty inventive ideas.
A lot of these early German colonies were very hard-core religious -
Moravians, Waldensians, Amish, Hutterites - you know, old school.
But even the most pious German can't seem to help himself when it comes
to work. By God, they've got to invent something!
That's why here at the Amana colonies,
a religious commune which, up until 1939, operated off of a mill race
invented the microwave.
The Amana radarange
is the first home-use microwave technology ever
invented, and you're looking at the very first model
ever made in the whole world.
So this actually wasn't called a microwave,
this is called a radarange. It's a Radarange, yes.
They trademarked the technology and everything, and eventually of course
that technology was taken to other places,
and so they obviously couldn't call it a Radarange,
otherwise that was copyright infringements and so people
called it a microwave, and that's what it's been called ever since.
Right. But it's really a Radarrange.
Correct. There's radar in there. Yeah.
By the 1960s,
Amana appliances had become a household name -
what every housewife and game show contestant dreamed of.
So, while some Germans made a life for themselves in the Midwest
trying to revolutionise how we eat popcorn,
a good number moved to big cities,
trying to revolutionise the labour movement.
The Germans who settled in Chicago in the 1800s were a completely
different culture than those pious,
prune-faced Puritans who settled in Massachusetts.
Let me put it another way - Germans don't take a lot of shit.
The atmosphere of labour relations in Chicago in the late 19th century
was a tinderbox to say the least.
There were relentless strikes, raw-knuckle demonstrations.
Flash-point confrontations between workers and owners.
Often organised by outside agitators who wanted a radical change
in how America worked.
There's a term in the United States for the lethargy and the lack of
productiveness that Americans feel at the beginning of the workweek -
it's called Blue Monday.
The saying goes, "Never buy a car made on a Monday."
Well, Germans had the same term - blaumachen.
But it describes the restlessness that Germans feel
when they're sitting around on a Monday
waiting for indigo dye to dry.
Germans don't like not being productive.
Do you understand? Chicago in 1880 was full of Germans and Bohemians,
companies like Pullman and MacCormick
paid them $1.50 a day,
they worked 60 hours a week,
six days a week, and because Germans expect to be paid for their efforts,
things weren't exactly Gemutlichkeit.
The Haymarket tragedy of 1886
is probably the singular most critical event
in the history of American workers' rights.
May 4th 1886,
when a protest was held against police brutality in Chicago
with the hope that 20,000 people would come.
The background of all this, of course,
is a fight for the eight-hour day,
the right to organise, the right to free speech,
all the things that were suppressed by the owners of industry.
The rally is called, it's disorganised,
it's terrible weather and only 2,000, 2,500 people show up.
So they mounted these hay wagons to talk,
and used fiery rhetoric about,
"This has to stop, this attack on workers,
"we are trying to organise unions."
Towards the end of the rally, most of the crowd had left,
there's 250 people in the crowd,
and the final speaker, Samuel Fielden, is speaking,
and the Police Inspector Bomfield marches his 176 police officers
up to the crowd, and says, "I command you
"in the name of the people to disperse."
And Samuel Fielden says, "But this is a peaceable meeting."
And at that very moment,
what is observed is a five-pound dynamite bomb
that lands at the foot of the police and kills a policemen.
That explosion blew out the lights,
and the police were armed and they started shooting.
The bomb blast killed seven policemen.
In the ensuing violence, four workers were killed,
many more were injured.
The next day, martial law is declared in Chicago,
and within a short period of time
this great, incredible, unfair trial takes place
and eight men are convicted of conspiracy
to commit violence and murder.
Six of them German-born, one American-born and one from England.
Americans were being told that long-haired, creepy, socialist
German agitators, bomb-throwers are trying to ruin our way of life.
That was the rhetoric in the newspapers.
It's about the basic fundamental democratic, and what is so much an
American ideal, the right to freely assemble,
the right to organise,
and the suppression of that is really what
the Haymarket story is about.
One of the great anomalies of the US is that, unlike the UK or Australia,
it's never had a Labour Party.
You know, a political party made up of and representing workers.
Why? Because the first labour movements in America
managed to let anarchists slip into their ranks.
Ever since, labour movements have been infected
with that dreaded word - socialism.
Which in America is a word that easily morphs into the next
word - communism.
The Haymarket Tragedy in Chicago reverberated
throughout the world and Chi-Town was now being perceived
as a hotbed of pink-tinged radicalism.
Social decay, poverty,
still smouldering from the devastating fire
that had nearly destroyed it in 1871,
and even worse, it had never won a World Series.
Frankly, the place was a mess.
So what do you do when you want a makeover in the eyes of the world?
When you want to show the big boys in London and Paris
that you're a major player on the world stage?
You throw a party!
The 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago was a World's Fair that made
other World's Fairs look like one of those skanky, syphilitic,
fun fairs in Skegness on a Friday night.
The city dredged 200 acres of swampland in South Chicago,
constructed an entire city out of plaster,
built a midway,
and introduced the world to carbonated drinks, hamburgers,
indoor lighting, bearded lady midgets,
the Ferris wheel, ragtime music,
hoochie coochie shows and the Pledge of Allegiance.
It really shined a light on Chicago and the work ethic of Americans
because people were aware of the fire in 1871,
and you're talking that
the city burned to the ground only 20 years prior to this.
So the amount of work and the amount of work even leading up to
even possibly competing to have the fair was huge,
but this was kind of proof positive
that they had really risen from the ashes
and had really shone a light on
the American worker, the Chicago worker,
and what people can accomplish
if they really put their minds to something.
And really everybody wanted it - from the hourly wager
to the rich elite people.
It was here that Henry Ford saw the internal combustion engine
that would give him the idea for a horseless carriage.
It inspired L Frank Baum to write The Wizard of Oz.
It was the template for future prefab wonders
like Disneyland and Las Vegas.
20 million people visited the Columbian Expo
in the six months it ran.
Shortly after it closed, it caught fire,
and melted to the ground like a 600-acre marshmallow.
But it changed the way the world viewed America
and the way Americans viewed themselves.
The designers of the fairs originally wanted this to be
greater and grander than any other fair.
I mean, when you talk 200 buildings over 600 acres
just placing your eyes on everything
would be over 300 miles of walking and it would take over two weeks.
And this was an opportunity for someone who had never... probably
never left Chicago to actually go and see things from, like, over 51
different countries that were represented at the fair.
What the Expo achieved was to create
the concept of mass marketing and packaging.
After the Expo, Americans became brand-conscious -
they didn't want any pancake syrup,
they wanted the pancake syrup they'd seen at the Expo.
The one that emanated from the corpus of a smiling black woman
who called herself Aunt Jemima.
America had become a consumer economy.
The beginning of the 20th century was the singularly most mind-blowing
decade of progression in the history of history.
What? Did you get a new iPhone X in 2018?
Good for you. Do you know how much things changed
between 1900 and 1910?
Well, in 1900,
an American might be sitting around trying not to contract diphtheria,
waiting for a horse-drawn cart to deliver some unpasteurised milk.
A mere ten years later,
conceivably that same person could be driving to an airfield in Dayton
Ohio in a model T car, listening to a wireless radio broadcast through a
plastic headset,
wearing clothes freshly laundered in an electric washing machine, and
taking pics along the way with a Brownie camera.
While in an alternative universe, if you believe this guy's theory,
people were doing the same thing, except they were moving slower and
they would have shrunk somewhat in mass.
America had become a consumptive nation.
Its trade output was the largest in the world.
Stuff, stuff, stuff.
The world could not get enough of what America was cranking out.
Now, you would think with all this innovation,
that workers' rights would have progressed, but no.
Things were rolling along, but health care?
Forget it. Paid vacations?
Come on. Labour unions had no power whatsoever.
Still they continued to fight for shorter hours
and better working conditions.
The phrase that became popular during that period was,
"Eight hours of work, eight hours of sleep,
"eight hours for what we will."
Right. And the idea that eight hours for what we will would be to
get educated, and to be able to finally
have the things that the wealthy seemed to be able to have.
Of course, the wealthy bosses, the Scrooge McDucks
swimming in pools of 100 dollar bills resisted this fiercely.
Most of the captains of American industry
have at one point or another had their workers shot.
Go on, named any rich American industrials.
George Pullman, school dropout,
invented the Pullman car. Hooray! Everyone can sleep on trains.
Except for the 30 protesting workers at the Pullman brand in Chicago, who
were gunned down by federal marshals acting on Pullman's behest.
John D Rockefeller, school dropout,
founded standard oil. Everyone can heat their homes!
Except for the 66 striking miners, wives and children killed by
Rockefeller's deputised militia in Ludlow, Colorado.
Henry Ford, school dropout. Every American can now afford a car.
Except for the 64 laid-off employees machine-gunned by security guards at
Ford's plant in Dearborn, Michigan.
The evil-eyed Thomas Edison, school dropout.
OK, he never had any of his workers shot but he once electrocuted an
elephant just to spite his arch nemesis Nikola Tesla.
When Edison wasn't shooting current through circus animals,
he was illuminating America, with his light bulb.
But technological advances like this
actually had a detrimental effect on the average worker.
The great saviour of modern progress, indoor lighting,
just meant that people worked longer hours.
Manufacturers, who by nature are cold-blooded bastards,
strived to get even more out of their workers.
Something called Taylorism was born.
Frederick Taylor was a mechanical engineer from Philadelphia,
who, while working at the Bethlehem Steel Corporation in Pennsylvania,
became obsessed with time, motion, and human productivity.
He invented the term "management consultant" and then became one.
Now basically Taylor was that jobsworth twit at work.
You know - the one who insists
there's only one right way to do anything.
Except he took it to lunatic lengths.
He watched men loading pig iron and calculated the most efficient way to
wield a pig iron shovel, so that the maximum amount of pig iron could be
lifted in the shortest amount of pig time.
He invented something called the auto stereo cyclo chronograph,
and ran around the country
delivering his pig iron calculations and micro motion studies.
So naturally Taylor's studies were adopted by factory owners and
workers were stripped of the last few remaining
ounces of dignity that they owned.
Victorian nervousness, the Protestant ethic, craftsmanship,
pride - they were gone.
In fact, Taylor was so efficient
that he accomplished everything he wanted to with his life
by the age of 45, so then he retired and spent the
remainder of his life staring at his stopwatch waiting to die.
The workers of America were once again becoming dehumanised.
Reduced to mindless repetition just like
in those old Northern factory days.
Where had the craftsmanship gone?
To live the American dream you need to be happy in your work.
Otherwise it's not a dream, it's a nightmare.
You're lucky enough to have an occupation
where you're making something artistic or creative,
you're probably a happy worker.
If you're making something out of scarcity,
you're probably a happy worker.
That's why luthiers are probably a lot happier
than people making smartphones.
There's an old saying,
"I hope they make Martins in heaven,
"cos I know they make Gibsons in hell."
Actually, I just made that up.
But if there is a workers' heaven,
then it's here in Nazareth, Pennsylvania,
home of Martin guitars,
where every instrument is still crafted by hand.
And if you own one, the chances are the person who made it
is just as happy about that as you are.
A lot of people have been here for a long time,
there's a lot of pride in what we do,
but the question specifically about the work ethic,
I think they see that when they come in, nobody is sweating,
but we're working pretty hard and consistently focusing on quality.
There's a tremendous satisfaction in working with your hands,
creating something by innate skill,
whether you're carving it from scratch out of rosewood
or restoring it to its former glory.
The best part of this job is making, and is
you know, getting an instrument together
for someone to play, and enjoy playing music with.
That's what music is all about, so that's what I get to do.
I get to make people happy with
getting an instrument for them, you know?
So you worked in England and you worked in America?
Do you see a difference in the work ethic between Brits and Americans?
Yeah, yeah, there's a difference.
I think the Americans, they like to work longer hours.
Several of my colleagues here, they have two or three jobs,
and I think that's part of the American dream, is to strive for the
materialistic things in life.
What truly makes work a happy experience?
Well, obviously, you know, a positive work environment,
a balance between work and leisure,
being rewarded for your efforts.
But there's something else.
Making something of quality.
Something with a soul.
Look, I don't want to get all
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on you here,
but when a worker knows that his efforts are going to result in
something useful, something lasting,
something infused with artistry,
well, it's a beautiful thing.
You only have to look at a 55 T-bird.
The Golden Gate Bridge.
An airstream trailer, for crying out loud.
Like, the workers who build them are rational people -
you're a rational guy, right?
Yeah. And the product itself is romantic.
If you get a combination of rational and romantic, you get quality.
And that's the secret to worker happiness.
Love the thing you do.
It's that simple, folks.
1920s America was a time of dramatic social and political change.
For the first time, more Americans lived in cities than on farms.
It was roaring, the Jazz age.
Prohibition. Hemingway. Fitzgerald.
Why, if you didn't know better, you could swear Americans were
starting to get a little culture.
An art movement began to gestate.
A movement that at its core was anti-industrialist.
The arts and crafts movement in the '20s
wasn't just an artistic construct.
It was a backlash to the barbaric crap
America was churning out
and the conditions in which that crap was being produced.
It advocated economic and social reform
by returning to simplicity and traditionalism.
This derived more or less from the British social critic
John Ruskin, who believed that the moral and social health of a nation
was directly related to its art, its architecture,
and to the nature of the work itself.
This is a mission-style oak
handcrafted rocking chair,
based on the works of Gustav Stickley,
one of the many artisans and craftsmen of the early 20th century
who built Utopian societies,
so that they could abide and work in peace in an effort
to rekindle the true meaning of the phrase "work ethic".
This isn't just a rocking chair - oh, no.
This is a revolt against conventional life
and its insensibility to beauty.
Against cheap industrial progress and the even cheaper cheapness of
the lives that were lost for that progress.
It was made well and sold cheap.
Today a genuine Stickley chair can go for upwards of five figures
and many of them, many of them are owned by Barbra Streisand.
Ultimately, the arts and crafts ethos would inform the work
of Frank Lloyd Wright, a name that inspires reverential gasps
whenever a highbrow discussion of American architecture takes place.
Frank used a unique vocabulary of form and space and pattern which,
when he wasn't banging the wives of his clients,
changed the notion of what architecture should be
to most Americans.
He used open spaces and horizontal lines,
and a free-flowing sense of proportion,
all the while maintaining a heady arrogance
and usurping the talents of the underlings who work for him.
And banging the wives of his clients.
Among his most notable creations are his house here in Oak Park Chicago,
Falling Water in Pennsylvania,
the Usonian homes of New York,
the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan,
Taliesin in Wisconsin, where a disgruntled cook
named Julian Carlton buried
an axe in his mistress's head while Wright was away in Chicago
on a so-called business trip.
The cook then set fire to Wright's home and burned it to the ground,
killing six more people.
Many of these rooms are open to the public now, and allow visitors to
wander around and gaze in amazement at Frank Lloyd Wright's handiwork,
somehow conveniently overlooking the fact that a man put a fucking axe
into the head of the woman Frank loved,
and he had to bury her in a casket that he made with his own hands.
Just about the most gut-wrenching, heartbreaking thing you can imagine.
But, hey, come on, look at this filigree.
What's the message here, folks?
Life is a mixture of achievement and tragedy.
If you've achieved something with your life,
that's how the world remembers you.
If you haven't, you're just some poor schmendrick
whose mistress got killed by an axe-murderer.
In terms of social reform,
the arts and crafts movement was just a blip on the radar,
pretty much killed off by the arrival of the Great Depression.
It's pretty hard to take pride in your work when there isn't any.
At the start of the 1930s,
more than a quarter of America's wage-earners were on the skid.
For most of that decade,
America was in the throes of depression,
and amidst this upheaval,
writers and artists used their work
to document the working man's struggles.
To try to dignify it.
John Steinbeck's novel Of Mice And Men
told the story of George and Lennie,
two fellas trying desperately to get a slice of the American dream.
And guess what - it doesn't end well.
The struggle for the American dream
was a compelling narrative not only in much of America's literature,
but in its art as well.
Grant Woods' American Gothic is arguably
the most recognisable painting in America,
and its meaning has always been open to speculation.
What's going on here?
What's the relationship between this apparently
humourless-looking couple,
who look like their faces are being dragged into
the fertile aisle of the soil right underneath their feet?
What's with the pitchfork?
And the frivolously ornate window?
In an otherwise claptrap house.
It's a real chin-scratcher, folks, but what the hell does it all mean?
To me, these were the quintessential Americans.
This was the American couple.
A little kind of worn out but hard-working, really durable,
resilient people, and for a long time that was my image of what the
American people look like.
This is like the stalwart
and pretty grim or at least not very humorous
people that were the backbone of the country.
I think that's maybe what it meant.
If you look at the painting, it's almost as if
you can see two different images at the same time.
One is of this hard-working, simple, rugged, Midwest couple,
and at the other time you see this dour, maybe doubtful, adrift,
lonely couple who don't seem particularly happy
with the lot that life has given them.
I think a represents a kind of
joyless austerity in work.
We don't quite know what to make of these people,
we don't know what to make of their age differences,
we don't know whether they are being ridiculed or celebrated,
we don't know if they're from the 1930s or the 1890s.
This is not an easy painting, it's very dour,
it's very severe, and yet it does suggest
one's complex relationship to work.
The painting isn't called American Gothic because of the emotionally
vacant couple, it's called American Gothic
because of the house behind them.
Which you could buy in a catalogue at the time.
And the house's defining feature is the ornate window,
that's what drew Grant Wood to it.
In this sense, Gothic doesn't mean Teutonic,
or Edgar Allen Poe, or The Cure, it just means ornate.
To a lot of Americans,
American Gothic represents the stigma of landlessness,
the sort of poverty always hanging right over our heads.
Because, in America, if you don't work, you starve.
Literally, figuratively,
spiritually, when American strangers meet,
first thing they ask each other is, "What do you do?"
Not, "What do you think? What do you feel?"
"What do you do?"
An American's character is defined by his labours.
What is why this posing couple looks like
they can't wait for Grant Wood to finish his portrait,
so they can get back to pitchforking.
Wood was a regionalist painter trying to capture the essence of the
Midwest in his portraits.
He put remarkable detail into the human characters he painted.
But his landscapes are cartoonish.
Grant Wood's version of Midwestern American is fat, bulbous,
impossibly pregnant with greenery -
why, a weed would be blasphemy.
But Wood wasn't being naive, he was being satirical.
In the real world, Wood's bountiful Midwest was blowing away.
The Dust Bowl had devastated the land.
Those hard-working farmers of the Midwest
had actually overworked the soil.
And the promise of endless abundance
that America was built on had become a joke.
When we think about the real landscape of farming
in the Midwest in the 1930s,
you have droughts, the Dust Bowl, farm strikes, labour unrest.
None of this comes into the sunny landscapes of Grant Wood.
He is as far removed as you could imagine,
from the kind of turmoil of farming in the 1930s,
and the reason for that is that, for him,
farm-scapes had very little to do with the reality of farming.
They are homages to the farms in an idealised sense of his childhood.
Grant claimed to be the plainest kind of fella you can find.
"There isn't a single thing I've done or experienced," he said,
"that's been even the least bit exciting."
He was a modest, homespun-looking guy,
who you'd pass on any small-town streets and barely notice.
But that was deceiving because, in fact,
Wood was a classically trained artist
who'd studied extensively in Europe,
and could faithfully imitate the masters like Van Gogh or Monet.
By 1930, the year that he painted American Gothic,
Grant Wood had clearly come into his own distinctive style,
and it divided people.
Serious art critics, they didn't like it,
they thought it was too naive and non-dimensional.
You know, all those boob-shaped trees and hills,
kind of stuff you would find in a gift shop.
Way too feminine.
Conversely, the human figures in his paintings are all masculine.
Even the woman look like men.
If his hard-working beefcake manly men figures
remind you of anything, it might be this.
Romantic nationalism.
The idea that the superiority of a nation is tied to its terrain.
The connection between Wood's work
and a kind of fascist aesthetic is not a new idea.
Wood's nemesis at the University of Iowa,
Horst Janssen, tried to discredit Wood
in the years after Wood's death in 1942.
Janssen was a die-hard modernist,
he loathed Wood's work, and he wrote a very influential article
in the mid-1940s comparing Wood's work
to the aesthetic of the Third Reich.
He was absolutely damning, it was terrible for his reputation.
Wholly off the mark, but was very much a part of mid-1940s criticism
after Wood's death, conveniently,
when he could no longer defend himself.
♪ New Country Corn Flakes
♪ From fields of corn
♪ So majestically waving. ♪
No American painting has been more parodied than American Gothic.
Anytime you want reduce someone to simple one-dimensional yokels,
pose them with a pair of overalls and a pitchfork.
♪ New Country Corn Flakes, They're made from corn. ♪
All right, we get it, it's visual shorthand
for people too uptight to relax.
But relaxation was always going to be the antidote,
to the chronic overwork that drives America.
Give people something to do, placate them.
The greatest work incentive America ever came up with was escaping the
crap you put up with each day, and going into a darkroom,
staring at a blank canvas that projected dreams onto it.
In the year 1925, 50 million people a week went to the movies.
The equivalent of half the nation's population.
In Chicago, in 1929,
theatres had enough seats for half the city's population
to attend a movie each day.
American cinema-goers were now being fed the American dream by Hollywood.
Not only were they looking at themselves,
they were looking at people who had reinvented themselves.
And, for a few hours, everyone could escape reality.
Before remembering that the next day they'd have to go back to the
production line loading that pig iron.
The emergence of modernism in America finally
allowed film-makers and writers and artists
to question the American dream.
In fact, anytime a literary or artistic endeavour is designated the
great American so-and-so,
it's actually about how great America isn't.
Take the great American novel, The Great Gatsby, what's it about?
Self-made millionaire trying to use his ill-gotten gains to buy his way
into Long Island society, but he can't have the one thing he wants,
Daisy Buchanan...
..played by Mia Farrow in the 1974 film version of the book.
Who convincingly portrayed the character's shallow quality.
Why didn't you wait for me?
Because...
Rich girls don't marry poor boys, Jay Gatsby.
The great American play, Death of a Salesman.
The American dream has left Willy Lohman behind,
but he can't let it go,
and he tries heartbreakingly to instil it into his kid, Biff.
Why is he crying?
Dad, will you let me go, for God's sake?
Will you take that phony dream,
and burn it before something happens?
The Great American movie, The Godfather.
The violent criminal actually believes
his family and his business can be accepted
into mainstream American society,
on his own insanely misguided terms.
I worked my whole life, and I don't apologise,
to take care of my family,
and I refuse to be a fool,
dancing on a string held by all those big shots.
The message is always the same,
OK, hard work may make you money,
but it can't buy you love, or status, or redemption.
When Americans get above their status,
they become victims of tragedy.
In a way, we are all not-so-great Gatsbys.
By the time the '50s rolled around,
the nightmare of the previous decades
had comfortably reverted to a dream.
Americans could pursue it with unbridled optimism,
and, boy, did they ever.
They bought everything they could get their hands on.
It was all new and shiny
and a reminder that they'd defeated fascism.
The idea that the '50s was the golden age of happiness in America
is one of the great lies of our history.
Yeah, it was a great decade, if you were white and middle-class.
There was peace and prosperity,
Elvis, big fin Oldsmobiles.
But the '50s was really a decade of physical and spiritual restlessness.
Big-city northerners pulled up stakes and headed south and West.
California's population grew by 49%,
Florida's by 79%.
By 1960, a third of America had traded in the urban grind
for a driveway and a sad tree.
Uncle Ike Eisenhower,
America's non-politician President,
worried that Americans were becoming deadened in mind and soul
by a materialistic philosophy of life.
So in 1957, he passed a bill to put "In God We Trust"
on American money.
Just to remind Americans that every impulsive purchase
was a slap in God's face.
There's something wrong with human nature!
What is it in the nature of men that causes men to lie?
And hate? And cheat?
And steal?
God started showing up on TV as well.
His Earthly vessel was a lantern-jawed Calvinist preacher
from North Carolina named Billy Graham.
Graham's televised crusades...
Yep, that's what he called them.
..were the equivalent of a rock concert,
culminating in a discharge of salvation-seekers
streaming toward his pulpit for repentance.
Graham became America's first religious superstar.
His message wasn't much different from those Massachusetts Puritans.
Only God can judge.
But a more self-centred piety was also forming,
one that better served the working stiff of the '50s.
This preacher promoted the gospel of self-esteem,
and his God was less an avenging angel
and more like a motivational speaker.
In 1952, Doctor Norman Vincent Peale published a self-help book
called The Power of Positive Thinking.
It was, in essence, a dream manual supplanting the
physical work ethic with self-realisation.
Peale preached that what the mind can conceive and believe,
the mind can achieve -
through a combination of fate and self-confidence,
any obstacle could be surmounted.
So the only logical conclusion for his followers was that if they did
exactly what this man said, they could end up just like him.
A man whose picture was on the cover of his own book.
And as they filed out of the auditorium after his sermons,
they got a double dose of inspiration,
by seeing that this man wasn't so high and mighty
that he wouldn't be seen standing in the lobby amidst
stacks of the very same book he'd just been talking about.
For three consecutive years between 1953 and 1956,
only the Bible outsold The Power Of Positive Thinking.
Church attendance rose by 20% in the '50s.
The rich didn't get much richer,
the poor didn't get much poorer but the middle class boomed!
Mushroomed!
In 50 short years, America had gone from a subsistence economy
to a consumer economy, to an acquisition economy.
In 1950, there were 10 million television sets,
by 1960, 47 million.
Many of them tuned in to see Ozzie and Harriet,
a sitcom about a conformist white suburban family,
mirroring the white suburban conformist families watching them.
Look, if you two are gonna loaf,
you go in the other room and do it. I've got work do here.
You know, Sonny, I have a hunch we're not wanted around here.
You know, I think you're right.
You don't have to knock me over the knuckles with a wooden spoon.
Ha-ha! A wooden spoon.
Where's my knee?
The major networks created shows like Ozzie and Harriet,
Leave It To Beaver, and The Donna Reed Show to mollify viewers.
These characters didn't talk about the Marshall Plan or Palestine,
blacks and Mexicans didn't inhabit this world.
It was an antiseptic vision of middle-class America
where everything smelled minty fresh.
When any president from Reagan to Bush to Trump trots out that
Make America Great Again bromide,
this is the era they are invoking.
If the American Dream is a promise of upward mobility,
for one brief period in our history, it worked.
Assuming your idea of the American Dream is cultural malnutrition,
patio furniture and a sad tree.
What was so great about the '50s?
Well, the middle class mushroomed, the economy was robust,
the opening salvos to the civil rights movement were fired.
The interstate was built, people were going places.
So, naturally, something had to be invented
to tap into America's insecurity about its abundance.
The Red Scare.
I don't think you have
any conception of the dangers of the Communist Party.
The Communist witch-hunt of the '50s
orchestrated by the firebrand nutcase Joseph McCarthy
tapped into the heart of America's insecurity about its
new-found wealth.
A conformist, brainwashed nation was under threat
of being turned into a conformist brainwashed nation.
If fighting communists and getting a bit rough with them
is un-American, then I must plead guilty to being un-American.
The target of McCarthy and his right-wing zealots
was the working left.
The people who made their living as academics, politicians,
screenwriters, artists.
And the best thing you can do to an artist is to
tell him he can't be an artist.
The mass conformity of the '50s,
and the hysterical attempts to protect it
led to rock'n'roll, abstract Expressionism, beatniks,
the books of Hugh Selby, Henry Miller and that begat hippies,
counter-culturalism, the SDS, the Black Panthers,
LSD, Charles Manson,
alternative medicine, continental philosophy,
social media addiction,
and ultimately the dystopia that we live in today.
Although McCarthy was doing his best
to whip up his anti-Communist hysteria,
most Americans were just happy to live the dream.
Ensconced in a customised bungalow somewhere in rolling Meadows Estates
with a big old fancy set of wheels parked outside.
In a prefab world, craftsmanship
will always find a way to seep through.
You know, in the 1930s, it was a fancy, shmancy window
in a claptrap house.
In 1956, it was a Lincoln Premiere.
Look at this - chrome, tail fins,
white walls, tucked and rolled interior, plenty of headroom.
Seats 12 for dinner, six miles to a gallon,
Detroit was the manufacturing envy of the world.
You are about to witness the very exciting story
of a city and its people.
It will be an adventure that will open new sites
and familiar surroundings.
It was a time when America was bold and optimistic about its future and
Detroit responded with big cylinder monsters,
dripping with chrome and luxury.
This was, of course, the direct result of Henry Ford, who,
when he wasn't gunning down his employees,
had figured out how to get them to build a new
car every two and a half hours.
America was on the move, and Ford, Chrysler,
and General Motors sold millions.
Suffice it to say, Detroit was the industrial showpiece of the world.
A place where people could come to find opportunity,
the epitome of the American Dream.
Then it all went down the dumper.
How could the legacy of Henry Ford,
an industrialist so worldly admired
that Hitler himself had given him a shout out in Mein Kampf,
turn into this?
Nobody's buying tyres no more, for the
simple fact that, you know, the economy, the gas situation, it's
a major crisis.
There's a lot of people already laid off, and if any more
get laid off it's going to be a crisis out there, boy.
If they think the economy is bad now,
what is it going to be like when all them people are all laid off?
What are they going to do?
It seems like a crime and that would obviously go up, you know,
it would darn near make a Christian turn bad.
Detroit went bust because it made a product that many,
many Americans did not want,
and then once they lost that brand loyalty,
they could not figure out for many years how to recover it.
And what was one of the great, unionised,
well-paid, secure, industrial workforces
in the entire world suddenly found itself with
shrinking prospects and ultimately most of them out of a job.
Not just on the auto assembly lines,
but companies that made parts to sell to GM, to sell to Ford,
to sell to Chrysler.
All those people out of business,
all those workers displaced,
and Detroit as a city collapsed in on itself,
and depopulated, and portions of it are coming back now,
but it's never going to be a great American city again.
It's a great tragedy,
it's a great tragedy brought about
not by the failure of the workers but
by the failures of the managerial class.
Let me tell you a little story.
When I was growing up in the south,
there was a fellow in our town used to just stand in the middle of the
road and just yell.
"Mustang shitbox!" That's all he would say, "Mustang shitbox!"
"Mustang shitbox!"
A bit of a fixture. So, naturally, we called him Mustang Shitbox,
and the story was that he'd gone to Detroit to work on Mustangs
because he loved Mustangs,
just lived and breathed Mustangs.
By the time he got the job, the production values
on the Mustang were so poor that
basically it was just a joke on wheels.
The soul of the machine was destroyed and it destroyed his soul.
And he came home just a broken man.
So what had happened?
Well, Ford had fallen on bad times, right?
Horrible design, bad management,
Japanese competition,
and. worst of all, the city of Detroit had turned its
back on Ford. Wouldn't help him out.
Ford built Detroit. When it needed Detroit's help, Detroit shafted it.
So what are you saying, Rich?
Detroit ruined a human being?
No, I'm not saying that at all.
I mean truth is, Mustang Shitbox, that guy,
that dude was messed up long before he went to Detroit, whoa.
Our town should've never let him go in the first place, that's my point.
Communities are supposed to take care of their people.
For the people of small-town America,
security comes from being part of a company and part of the community.
So what do you do when the wheels fall off?
This is Lancaster, Ohio.
In 1947, this town was featured on the cover of Forbes magazine as the
quintessential American town.
Home of the Anchor Hocking glass Company,
the largest manufacturer of table glassware in the world.
Everybody loved Anchor Hocking,
if you gave your mum Anchor Hocking glasses at Christmas,
you were good for the year.
Then something horrible happened.
The company got sold to a bigger company,
they sold it to another company,
and every one of them just squeezed the profits right off the top.
They pilfered, they purloined, they plundered it,
people would come to work and not even know who owned the company that
day, this is the kind of town that
even Springsteen wouldn't write a song about. It's that grim.
We have a higher poverty rate than we once had.
My wife is a teacher in the school system,
and we have a 50% or so poverty rate,
people that receive free lunches,
that type of thing, which just did not used to be the case,
this used to be a very upper-middle-class town.
There's not as many jobs. There's more families struggling,
There's not any help for anybody.
And if you need help for things, you don't meet those requirements.
It's like they make it impossible around here to live.
In these economically depressed regions of the American Midwest
and Great Lakes region, Lancaster, Youngstown, Detroit,
these famous examples,
there seems to be a real crisis of confidence.
People feel trapped in these communities.
They don't have the resources to leave, but at the same time staying
provides no standard of living, and it is emblematic of this
potential transformation,
this post-industrial transformation in the work ethic,
where a hard days' work doesn't provide a decent wage,
doesn't provide a living wage.
78% of the people in this town voted for Trump,
not because they wanted to, because they're desperate.
And so they pinned their hopes on a New York City millionaire with a bad
combover, who's never set foot in Ohio.
Unless, of course, that foot was covered in a golf shoe.
I want to make our military so strong, so powerful,
so great that nobody's going to mess with us.
When Trump got elected, a lot of people worried
he was going to start a war.
I don't think they foresaw he was going to restart the Civil War.
The only problem with the new old Civil War
is it's based on our revised ideas of morality.
What does that mean?
OK, let me ask you this.
Why has it taken 160 years
for all those Confederate statues to be demolished?
Because up until a few years ago,
most white people didn't actually think they were that racist.
This nation today, regardless of social class,
is more deeply divided than it has been
at any time since the Civil War.
You have to take into account that
the Republican Party has essentially
become the National White People's Party.
And large numbers of middle-class Americans are not white.
Interestingly, it's the regions where we have the highest levels of
immigrant populations are booming economically, are the most diverse,
and are the most prosperous.
Diversity and prosperity seem to go hand-in-hand.
So if I'm watching Fox News and I hear how immigrants are ruining the
country, I'm going to probably be much more likely to believe that -
if there are not immigrants who I've actually met,
and live in the community and I see that they're contributing.
It easier to stereotype and dehumanise
that which you've never met before.
Americans like to brag that they don't have a
class system like Britain -
you know all that Downton Abbey stuff.
They like to think that travel and distance
and migration turns them into a homogenised society
with a shared work ethic.
That's total bullshit.
America has a class system, it's very simple.
When you go to work, if your name is on the outside of the building you
work in, you're rich.
If your name is on your desk, you're middle class.
If you're name is on your shirt, you're fucking poor!
It's like I said earlier,
when Americans raise above their status,
they are victims of tragedy.
When they can't raise above their status, they're victims of comedy.
A lot of the sitcoms in the early days of television
cast poor workers and white trash as objects of disparagement.
Struggling to maintain some semblance of pride.
The Honeymooners!
When you saw the opening titles to The Honeymooners,
you knew it was a show where Jackie Gleason,
playing a Brooklyn bus driver,
and Art Carney, a sewer worker, were trying to reach for the moon.
They would constantly invent
get-rich-quick schemes that ultimately backfired.
And it was hilarious watching two men repeatedly fail at
the American Dream while wrecking their own homes.
Jed Clampett and his hillbilly family
trying to reconcile their Depression-era roots
with the millionaire denizens of Southern California.
Loping around, spouting corn-fed homilies out of lopsided mouths,
Americans lapped it up,
subconsciously understanding that poor people in America
may never escape their plight,
but can at least win an occasional moral victory.
Especially when it meant that the rich folks
ended up looking more like the hillbillies.
Her and me is going out hunting.
Ain't that right, Miss Hathaway?
Yes... Yep!
Jethro, you can take that pink chicken back out to the cement pond.
We're going out to shoot us a nice, big, fluffy, souffle.
Gomer Pyle? Yes.
All in the Family? All in the Family.
The Jeffersons! Oh, I love the Jeffersons.
Oh, the Jeffersons! Good Times! Good Times. Yes. Yes. Jimmy Walker.
JJ Walker. That JJ was dynamite!
Oh, man! Television never seemed to reward the American worker with any
upward mobility, despite all their best efforts, you know.
These people could not escape the situation, know what I mean, Erika?
Yes. Cos if they could escape their situation,
it wouldn't be a situation comedy, right?
No. That class system Americans refuse to recognise, yeah,
well, it was all over the television.
Eventually, the TV working class families started moving upwards.
Middle-class, urban characters living in brick-walled lofts.
Nowadays, the middle class may be slathered all over television but
obviously that's not a real reflection,
because America's middle class is shrinking.
It's patently obvious
that America's middle class is slipping down the economic ladder.
How do you know the middle-class is shrinking?
Well, when politicians start using it as a political football.
I know why we are strong, I know why we have held together,
I know why we are united.
It's because there's always been a growing middle class,
this guy doesn't have a clue about the middle class, not a clue.
Does anyone have a clue about the middle class?
Course not. What does the term even mean?
Well, interestingly enough,
the middle class was invented by Benjamin Franklin.
He believed that Western migration would create class stability,
that the sheer size of America would reduce class conflict,
and that every American was entitled to a happy mediocrity.
And that's what the middle class is, the happy mediocrity.
The white-collar workers, the middle managers,
the guy or gal walking into some fluorescent hellhole every day,
sitting down at a gun-metal grey desk,
piled up with paperwork, and on the wall is a poster
of some skydivers holding hands and underneath it says, "Teamwork".
90% of Americans claim they're middle class.
In other words, marginally comfortable.
And it's those people who are seeing
those margins tighten everyday.
In the '70s and '80s,
the middle-class life in America became quite bumpy.
Under Nixon, you had price controls,
you had serious intervention.
In the economy post-Nixon,
you have the Carter Administration, where something that was
terrifying the middle class occurred, which was stagflation.
Productivity stopped growing, output stopped growing,
so people's incomes weren't increasing anymore,
but their expenses were through the roof.
America was heading into its worst economic crisis since the '30s.
And things weren't about to get any breezier.
Fortunately, a hero was waiting in the wings.
And once he got his pants on,
he'd come riding into Dodge City to clean the town up.
I'm speaking to you tonight to give you a report on the state of our
nation's economy.
I regret to say that we're in the worst economic mess
since the Great Depression.
He promised salvation,
he was going to reduce government spending, taxes, regulations.
Sound familiar?
Up until the 1980s,
most working people here in America who were middle class received a
defined-benefit pension.
Major companies were allowed to walk away from that commitment to the
social fabric, so that, one after another,
defined-benefit pension plans vanished.
That's a very significant event
because now people are insecure in their jobs,
and they're insecure in their prospects,
for a reasonably comfortable old age.
The middle class are the people who did everything right,
they got a college degree, they developed a marketable skill,
they built up a resume, they got married,
they cranked out a couple of kids, they bought a Chevy.
Modest, responsible people just trying
to get their slice of the American pie.
And now they're scrambling around job fairs or combing the
classifieds, going on to job websites,
listening to some self-styled vacuous guru
tell them how to get back the job they already had.
Now, I have a theory - and it's just a theory.
Craftsmen have to work with their hands,
artists work with their hearts,
rich people work with their brains,
poor people work with their backs,
but the middle class has to work with their personalities.
And if you've ever met Americans,
a good number of them can barely negotiate
the rope barriers in an airport check-in.
Yet they're expected to figure out
their place in the corporate beehive.
Who to boss around, who to be subservient to, whose ass to kiss,
whose ass to kick, how to handle the psychological demands,
the mind games, and the poorly defined expectations
dumped on them by corporate management.
And all the while trying to appear like they know what they're doing.
Corporate employers never say they're looking for a
hard worker, you know, someone who will give you
a straightforward exchange of wages for effort.
Nope, they need you to be outgoing, friendly,
resourceful, qualified, dedicated, and passionate.
Let's face it, if you can fake all those emotions,
what the hell are you doing working at Yo-Yo Tech?
You should be in Hollywood accepting an Oscar for Best Actor.
Yeah, the middle class is struggling,
you can blame it on the crash of 2008 or stagnant wage growth,
or downsizing or outsourcing,
but that doesn't answer the simple basic question -
why did you get shitcanned and not the other guy?
Because the other guy had better people skills than you.
You weren't dynamic enough,
you didn't read enough motivational material.
How can you take the abuse you get on a sit?
What you need is a rousing motivational tirade -
kind of like Alec Baldwin
in Glengarry Glen Ross.
I can go out there tonight,
the materials you got,
make myself 15,000 dollars.
Tonight, in two hours - can you?
Can you?
Go and do likewise.
AIDA, get mad you son of a bitches, get mad.
You know what it takes to sell real estate?
It takes brass balls to sell real estate.
America doesn't have brass balls anymore, we left them on the moon,
that was our last team success.
Nowadays, success is measured through personal growth.
Yeah, you can walk through any book store and pass that one section,
try not to be reminded why you, personally, are a big loser.
Generally these will follow two different approaches,
there is the numerical approach to success,
you know, the seven habits of highly effective people,
the five-second rule, the 40 pillars of pyramidal success.
Or it's some sort of anthropomorphic vaguely childlike approach.
Barking Up The Wrong Tree.
Who moved my cheese?
Eat that frog.
The Uterus Is A Feature, Not A Bug.
I don't even know where to begin not knowing what that means.
The straightforward approach to self-improvement
by men like Norman Vincent Peale
has given way to a litany of bona fide gibberish by clowns
such as Seth Godin,
author and corporate guru who somehow manages to string words,
images and balloons into some sort of narrative event.
Getting started with this is really hard, but if you do the physics,
after the first two breaths,
the percentage change in latex that you're making gets smaller and
smaller and smaller with each breath.
And then the model is if you can get the first two breaths over with,
you're gonna get the balloon filled up, cos it's downhill from there.
At the beginning, there's lots and lots and lots of argument,
and discussion with the lizard brain.
As if the only thing holding you back is that crazy
lizard running around inside your brain.
You know, that's good advice for Jim Morrison,
that is useless for the corporate world.
The corporate world doesn't want you to be successful or dynamic.
The corporate world doesn't even know your name.
That's why they gave you a laminate.
America has become a country where
you can create your own fantasy of what it means to be an American.
You don't even have to bother working anymore.
The self-made man has become the self-made-up man online
where you really can invent yourself. Quite literally,
you can be just exactly whoever you want to be online.
You can be any age, race, gender,
class, educational level,
you can completely fabricate yourself.
Now that may not be in the spirit of
the hard work to earn the American Dream,
but it's still very much in line with this re-creation of identity.
Nobody can prove the truth because nobody knows what the truth is.
And if you can't prove the truth,
just prove the other person is lying.
That's the world we live in.
An entire generation of selfie stick-wielding narcissistic fuckwits
who believe that every opinion is valid, every belief is relative,
and you can define yourself by something other than what you do.
I believe we can keep the promise of our founder,
the idea that if you're willing to work hard,
it doesn't matter who you are, or where you come from,
or what you look like, or where you love,
it doesn't matter whether you're black or white or Hispanic or Asian,
or Native American, or young or old,
or rich or poor, abled, disabled, gay or straight.
You can make it here in America if you're willing to try!
The US of A sells itself as the land where
you can rise from rags to riches.
Opportunity is the main component of that ethos.
In 1931, the author and social critic James Truslow Adams
coined a phrase for it - "the American Dream".
Back then, it had more to do with idealism than materialism.
Too many of us now tend to worship
self-indulgence and consumption.
Human identity is no longer defined by what one does...
..but by what one owns.
The greatest misconception of the American Dream, and this has been
documented in years of polling,
that it really doesn't mean wealth.
In fact, wealth usually comes in toward the bottom of what people
associate with the American Dream.
Towards the very top, the things people most associate the dream with
are family, community, freedom.
Wealth plays a role but not a predominant role,
and it's not central.
When Americans are free to pursue their dreams,
there is no limit to what we can achieve.
This is truly an exciting time in our country.
Every day, we are accomplishing great things for our people.
We are really moving along, we are bringing back our jobs,
we are making America great again. Thank you.
One of the interesting similarities between Trump and Obama is
their adherence to the dream.
Barack Obama, the subtitle of his book,
the Audacity of Hope, is reclaiming the American dream,
that there was something good that we've lost or neglected.
Donald Trump, what prefaced "Let's make America great again"
was a phrase along the lines of,
"Sadly, the American Dream is dead,
"but if I get elected, I'm going to bring it back
"bigger and better than before."
We will make America wealthy again!
Having said that, it seems for the first time in generations as if Americans view
the notion that they'll be more
successful than their parents as not guaranteed.
70% of Americans hate their jobs.
Many of them to the Nicholson-esque extreme in The Shining.
So why do we do it?
Cos it feels good when we stop, that's why.
Despite all the rhetoric, America's actually only
the 17th hardest working country on the planet.
They're 11th in gender pay disparity,
they're number two in workplace injuries,
and number one in unpaid workers' holidays.
But that doesn't bother Americans because we inherently believe we
shouldn't be paid to sit on a beach,
rubbing suntan lotion into our fat necks.
A holiday is an experience,
and Americans prefer things to experiences.
Things like a big plasma screen TV and patio furniture,
God bless 'em.
The Protestant work ethic is never going to go away,
it's part of our metaphoric identity.
But, despite what old Donnie T says,
what made America great was the
Protestants, the Germans, the Irish,
the Muslims, the African-Americans, the Asians,
and the Mexicans who came here, just like those Puritans,
in the haphazard chance they might find
redemption in dignity in their work.
And barring that, a big old plasma screen TV,
and patio furniture will do very nicely.
Maybe this can all best be summed up in the philosophical ramblings of
that astute Canadian band, Loverboy.
So I'll let them speak for themselves.
♪ Everybody's working for the weekend
♪ Everybody wants a little romance
♪ Hey, yeah
♪ Everybody's goin' off the deep end
♪ Everybody needs a second chance, oh
♪ You want a piece of my heart
♪ You better start from the start
♪ You wanna be in the show
♪ Come on, baby, let's go. ♪