The Reign of Gilt

by David Graham Phillips

There was a time when work undoubtedly was both a curse and a degradation. When the many labored under the lash that the few might reap, when the toilers got only the toil and the idlers got all the results, when the highest ideals of the human race were a full stomach and fine raiment and the gratification of other crude desires and appetites—then work was justly regarded as degrading drudgery. But not now, hard though laziness and cheap vanity strive to keep alive such fictitious distinctions as are given an air of actuality by phrases like “master and servant,” “employer and employé,” “capital and labor,” “gentleman,” “lady,” et cetera, et cetera. The truth of the dignity of labor, the dishonesty and degradation of every form of parasitism, however gaudily tricked out, appears despite the subtleties of snobism.

The political ideal of a barbarian is to rule others; the political ideal of a highly civilized man is to rule himself and let his fellow-men alone. The industrial ideal of a barbarian is to live in empty-headed and ambitionless idleness upon the labor of others. The industrial ideal of a civilized man is to work, and work incessantly in conditions that permit him to reap the full reward of his efforts and to make those efforts in the direction best suited to his capacities. And he has a deepening scorn of all the tricks by which some men live, taking all and giving nothing. Nor is his scorn the less when those tricks happen to be made “respectable” by law or by custom.

Is it any wonder that a man with the brain of an Æsop or an Epictetus should have revolted against compulsory labor that could much better have been performed by an ox or an ass? On the other hand, is it not amazing that any man with a thinking machine in his skull and vital force flowing along his nerves can be content to lead a life that would bore a grasshopper? The “curse and degradation” theory of work adapts itself to climates. Man began in the tropics, where idleness is least difficult; therefore for a long time absolute idleness was the ideal of this theory. But when man moved up into the colder parts of the earth, where to idle was to be physically miserable, the theory was slightly modified. The curse and the degradation of work were thought to lie in the doing of useful work. To tilt with iron-pointed sticks, to stab and jab and cut, to spend days and weeks chasing little foxes that could not even be eaten if by chance they were caught, to hit little balls with little sticks, to sit all night matching monotonous picture cards—all such “amusements,” the hardest kind of work, work at which the thinking part of any human being might well balk, were regarded as “worthy of a gentleman.” To plough, to sow, to reap, to manufacture something that might be used, to perform any kind of useful labor, mental or manual, was “low” and “menial.”

Toward the middle of the last century, with our growing wealth and the rise of a leisure class through false education, the Old World ideas found their way across the Atlantic. And in every community there began to be at least a few persons who took on the supercilious and contemptuous attitude toward work. Fortunately for the good sense and happiness of the American people, at about that time modern industrial conditions changed the whole system of getting and keeping prosperous.

In the old days, idle and brainless barbarians could hold on to and even add to their possessions—agricultural land. But in the new days of intense energy, of rapidly changing values, of trade, commerce, and competition, of rise in the price of labor and fall in the price of money, property is always growing wings that must be clipped daily and often hourly to keep it from taking flight. It is getting harder and harder to reap where one has not sown, to induce men to work without a proper return, or, after wealth has been acquired, to hold on to it without the use of brains and energy. And so, the old theory is dying out, chiefly for the usual reason for any human advancement—changed conditions compelling men to change their point of view.

The reason the rich men’s sons are going to work is that they, or at least their sagacious fathers, know that if they don’t work, the men who do work will get their wealth away from them. And this reason of necessity is going to bring about a revolution where all the shrieking of the reformers, all the logic of the moral philosophers, all the talk about the dignity of labor and “happiness only in hard work” make no headway worth the measuring. Maxims of good sense and good morals can’t be pounded or preached into poor short-sighted, irrational, shadow-chasing humanity. Nature and the laws of environment do not preach. They quietly but relentlessly compel. And sad wrecks they make of the pretensions and pomposities of the conceited human animal.

It is in vain that aristocracy-worshiping mothers of America dream of an Old World upper class for their sons and daughters. It is in vain that silly sociologists prattle about the necessity and the advantages of a “leisure class.” Modern environment says “Work; work hard! Be a somebody or I will make you a nobody!” And work we must. And presently we shall hear the last of the notions that idleness or useless employment is “noble” and “dignified” and “aristocratic.” And only in mad-houses will be found men and women who continue in their grown-up periods of life the pastimes of childhood—playing with blocks and soldiers and toy tools. What of the old notions of property rights and distribution of wealth will go by the board and what will remain, no one can foresee. Nor does it in the least matter, since we can be certain that no conditions will arise in which the idler will be more comfortable or the worker less comfortable than in the past or at present.

The change in the attitude toward work is coming from both sides of the world. The rich are more and more forced to work. The not-rich are demanding and compelling better opportunities to work. Look at our national life in the broad, and you see all elements concentrating on the democratic platform—Work! Beyond question the “workingman” is discontented. Nor will his discontent decrease. On the contrary, the more he has, the more he’ll want. His appetite will grow with what it feeds on. This Republic was started by just such men, was started for the purpose of creating ever more and more of them. The eagerness for better pay, for better treatment, for better surroundings, whether that eagerness be in the capitalist or in the street-cleaner, is proof that the Republic is still doing business at the old stand in the old way. And the more or less turbulent wrangling over the division of the rewards will never cease. If there were any signs of its ceasing or of its abating, then indeed might we justly despair of Democracy. Content means caste; discontent means Democracy.

Work is democratic, not because all kinds of men engage in it and so make it common, but because of its effect on the individual worker. Every impulse toward Democracy is fostered by it, just as every impulse toward caste is encouraged by leniency toward the idea of the value of a leisure class.

The sooner ambition is roused in every man, woman and child, the sooner they learn that by work alone can their ambitions be gratified, the sooner will an ideal democratic condition evolve. America is ahead of all the great nations in the race toward this ideal Democracy, because there is the nearest approach in America in every walk of life to a condition in which idlers are few and toilers many.