We’re going to take an unexpected detour this week in our investigation of Equality of Dignity’s importance to American political culture. Next week we’ll continue our planned connection of the biblical origins of equal dignity to its centrality in American political culture.
Today, however, in honor of my friend Steven Attewell, of blessed memory, we’re going to explore a different but related direction: the dignity inherent in work.
Image: Steven Attewell
There are Public Intellectuals feted in newspapers and magazines for providing insights into society’s directions, history, scientific developments, etc. But I think there is also such a thing as an Intellectual for the Public: someone who doesn’t possess a famous platform, but rather loves learning and feels a compelling urge to share their knowledge with others in the earnest hope of bettering the lives of others. Steven was of this kind. An expert historian, he sought truth not dogma. His love of knowledge was bottomless. His desire to use that knowledge for improving the spirits and minds of others, especially the less fortunate, was inexhaustible. He died eleven days ago after seven years of illness, but in his last week he was still teaching his students on labor history and still contributing historical insight on his blog, investigating the political and historical context of X-Men ‘97.
Steven was the embodiment of what love of knowledge looks like.
He read incessantly. He could go as deep as any scholar on the last eight centuries of English political history, all of Roman history, and the last two hundred years of American labor legislation and movements. And he analyzed a prodigious amount of contemporary popular context with the wisdom of the past. Lengthy tributes to his popular culture teachings have popped up here and here and elsewhere.
And he didn’t sit in an armchair either. He spent years organizing labor unions, knocking on doors for candidates he believed in, and helping organize local Democratic party efforts.
Though my own political views often diverged from his, I gained from observing his superb of examples of: love of learning, concern for the less fortunate, belief in the illuminating power of history, and a commitment to taking action to improve democracy.
It is Steven’s scholarship on the dignity of work that I want to focus today. Job creation was both one of his great passions and a subject critical in the context of American democracy’s stability.
An Equal Dignity contains many elements – freedom from poverty, from violence, freedom to opportunity, to hold your own beliefs, to be listened to, to form meaningful relationships.
The dignity of work advances many of these elements simultaneously: reducing poverty, increasing opportunity, and improving interpersonal relationships. Unsurprisingly, ensuring Americans have jobs is often the top of mind of elected politicians. As an entrepreneur, I can attest that in my 30+ conversations with public officials – at municipal, state, and federal levels – the number one thing they all want to know is how many jobs your business will create.
What should be done to create jobs and nourish the dignity inherent in work?
Steven’s seminal book, “People Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America, from FDR to Reagan” tackles exactly this question. He seeks to understand how the American government can best create jobs. True to Steven’s beliefs, his book is both a leftist view of the role of government and a meticulously researched analysis of government records including cultural history, political movements, and economic data.
The thrust of Steven’s argument is that the New Deal, especially the Works Progress Administration, was far more successful in eliminating unemployment than is traditionally acknowledged, and this is because the unemployment data most historians rely on has known flaws which Steven fastidiously picks apart. He also shows why direct job creation did not diminish private job creation, as it is often charged with doing.
Whether or not you find Steven’s arguments as compelling as I do, one cannot escape the cultural and political principle whose power Steven showcases and champions: the sacredness of every human’s dignity. And how work elevates that dignity.
As Steven shows, the New Deal leaders of 1933 understood that American workers refused to take relief handouts from the government. In the words of New York social worker turned New Deal program leader Harry Hopkins:
“Relief was going out in great amounts, but men were going restless… the psychological impact of four years of depression [was creating] a dangerous feeling of hopelessness and dependence.” Hopkins inveighed against the humiliation caused by long lines needed for handouts, “It is a shameful business from beginning to end. Here these citizens… go to this relief office, timidly, ashamed, pride hurt, to go and ask a person they had never seen in their lives before [for help], and tell him the enormous secrets of their family life and economic conditions.”[i]
The solution was getting people work. People’s bodies could live on handouts but their souls could not. As Steven notes, ordinary Americans “supported a conservative self-help doctrine that… ‘work is the best antidote for poverty.’” [ii] They must live by the dignity of work. Since the private sector was petrified of taking risks in the Great Depression, New Deal leaders believed the government had a responsibility to step in. They grounded this responsibility in American norms. For these leaders observed through countless instances that “work is the form assistance desired by the unemployed themselves…. [They] want assistance in the form of work… What the workers really want is continued employment.” And it was empirically true at scale: in 1933, when the government offered work, seven million unemployed workers who had refused handouts applied for work.
The shift was dramatic. In a matter of months, millions of more people had greater dignity.
The wife of a worker employed by the Works Progress Administration said it best, “We’re not on relief anymore – my husband works for the government!”[iii]
I can report a personal example, too: my grandfather, of blessed memory, was a lifelong loyalist to the Democratic party because of the dignity of work. In 1933, as an eight-year-old, he saw the transformation overcome his immigrant father when, after long years of unemployment caused by the depression, his father received a job from the Works Progress Administration for a dollar a day shoveling snow in New York City parks. The echo of that dignity carried on in my grandfather’s mind for the next 82 years of his life.
Work is dignity. At a time when industrialized nascent democracies in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere backslid into authoritarianism, the dignity of work helped stabilize American society.
If we wish to live in a society in which people are equal in ways that matter to all Americans, dignity is it, and work is perhaps its greatest driver.
Whether you believe, as Steven did, that the government should step in directly to create those jobs, or you think entrepreneurs should be unleashed to create those jobs, or big corporations should be compelled to create jobs, or other methods or any combination of methods—everyone can agree that the dignity of work is essential to a fair and stable society. As Steven so well captured, and people know empirically: to be useful is to be fulfilled. As we saw last week in the Biblical origins of dignity, three thousand years ago, King David, in the Psalms attributed to him, attests, “When you eat from the labor of your hands you will be happy and it will be well with you.”[iv]
Modern psychological research on human being’s most important needs affirms the importance of the dignity of work. In 1943, the grandfather of modern Positive Psychology, Abraham Maslow, created a fundamental hierarchy of needs for a fulfilling life. Beyond food, shelter, and safety, people’s key needs are: meaningful relationships, esteem, and feelings of accomplishment. Meaningful work speaks to all of these: it helps a person feel they have accomplished something, helps them hold themselves in higher esteem, and with that esteem they are more likely to succeed in forming meaningful relationships.
Through both his academic and his activist efforts, Steven championed work’s dignity. He will live in many people’s memories. And, he will live on through the actions he inspired in others. It is easy to opine on anything and everything under the sun. It is far harder to read vast amounts, memorize it, then distill it down into practical lessons for the betterment of your society. Somehow, Steven managed to do all of that in his too brief life. Through his labor, he put hoisted the lessons of history and dignity of work into the hearts of thousands of people, making it far easier for the rest of us to carry it forward.
[i] Hopkins, Harry. Speech in Baltimore, November 1933. Folder “Speeches 1933” Harry Hopkins Papers, box 9. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY. As cited in Attewell, Steven. People Must Live by Work, 7.
[ii] Records of the CES, Appendix G folder “Technical Board Reports” as quoted in Attewell, 43.
[iii] Attewell, 27.
[iv] Psalms 128:2 cited in Sacks, “Economics of liberty and a message of Behar.”