The Roots of U.S. Work Culture—and Why the American Dream Is So Difficult to Achieve Today

When a colleague asked Thomas Edison how he’d made so many huge advances in everything from light bulbs to recording technology to botany, the inventor insisted that he’d simply put in the hours. “I tell you, genius is hard work, stick-to-it-iveness and common sense,” Edison reportedly said. Today, many of us are familiar with a pithier version of this adage: “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”

A new book from journalist and author Adam Chandler, titled 99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life, picks up where Edison’s declaration left off. The American dream once promised health, wealth and wisdom to people from every class and ethnic background—as long as they were willing to put in the effort. But times have changed, and for vast numbers of Americans, perspiration is no longer a guarantee of survival.

Throughout his book, Chandler looks back at some of our most cherished national myths about work, from the ethics of the Puritans to stories about burger-flipping teenagers who rose through the ranks at McDonald’s. The popular aphorism about “early to bed, early to rise” hits differently at a time when so many Americans struggle to put food on the table, even when they start one shift at the crack of dawn and end another shift late at night. As Heather Hahn, an expert at the Urban Institute, tells Chandler, “You might need multiple jobs because your income is unpredictable, but it’s hard to be available for more than one job when you don’t know what your schedule is going to be.”

As Chandler travels across the United States—talking with laborers, pastors, teachers and policy makers—he offers a hopeful vision for restoring the lost American dream. He urges people to have more meaningful conversations, to think like citizens instead of individuals, and to develop service programs that show young people how different kinds of Americans work and live. When it comes to myths about hard work, he writes, “the answer isn’t to give up on these values; it is to finally make them true.”

To mark 99% Perspiration’s release on January 7, Smithsonian editor Jennie Rothenberg Gritz spoke to Chandler about the past, present and future of the American workplace. Read a condensed and edited version of the conversation below.

The way Americans think about hard work goes all the way back to the Puritans. Why has this mind-set had so much staying power?

The Puritans came from a system where people were born with titles and didn’t really do anything to earn them. They were able to be wealthy and powerful just by virtue of their birth. They were looking for a way of life that was separate from the powers of the Old World. That’s why, in the U.S., we limit and ban titles of nobility. We weren’t going to carry this system over. So upward mobility became the calling card of American life.

You wrote in the introduction that you first started really thinking about the limits of upward mobility while you were writing your first book, Drive-Thru Dreams: A Journey Through the Heart of America’s Fast-Food Kingdom.

That was the kind of aha moment for me. In fast food, you meet people who have amazing success stories—“I started out in this industry when I was 15, and I wasn’t getting paid much, but I worked hard and I worked late, and I worked my way up. Now here I am. And anyone else could do this, too.” That’s the American dream, and it’s particularly stark in fast food because it opens that trajectory for people who otherwise might not have had those opportunities. But now it’s not so easy to ascend those ranks, based on what the wages are like and the rising cost of living.

Was there really a time when any kid could go from flipping burgers to owning several restaurant franchises?

In postwar America, fast food was seen as a ladder to the middle class, especially for people of color who had a harder time getting lines of credit. If you were part of a familiar chain, banks were willing to lend you money, and people would come to your establishment right away because you were a proven entity.

One of the big tropes in fast food is that Ray Kroc, the head honcho of McDonald’s, made more millionaires than anyone else in America. But fast-food restaurants are everywhere now. The market is saturated. And the average worker isn’t a teenager working for pocket money. The average worker is 26 years old and probably has some debt and some dependents. Meanwhile, the franchising costs are out of control. You’re stuck between paying fees to a big company and managing a staff. You’re told to limit the amount of money you pay your employees by keeping them below 40 hours a week, and there’s a lot of turnover because of that. The scheduling is unpredictable, and the jobs are unsustainable. It’s not the heady old days. This is true in a lot of industries.

You and I both come from immigrant families that were very upwardly mobile over just a couple of generations. Would you say that immigrants can prove the viability of the American dream—that they work hard and then see their kids reap the rewards?

What’s so enchanting and frustrating about American life is that there are so many examples of people who did work hard and did make it and achieve success. But there are also a lot of people who are working very hard and not getting by. The gap in mortality between people who have high school degrees and people who have college degrees used to be two and a half years in the 1990s, and now it’s eight and a half years. These are people who went into important trades that we need to keep our country going. They’re seeing their life expectancy decrease. That’s just one way we see how much harder it is to really succeed now.

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The main issues you address in this book involve people whose families have been here for many generations—not first-generation immigrants who are striving for a better life, but people whose parents or grandparents used to be able to earn a respectable living here in America, in professions that just aren’t viable anymore.

There was a durable, powerful middle class for a long time, and in the last decade, we’ve seen it finally slip away. I live just outside the Bronx in New York City. My local train station was painted by Norman Rockwell at one point. It’s real Americana. And what I hear when I talk to my neighbors is that a lot of them just want to be able to take their kids out to dinner and send them to summer camp and not have it be so mind-numbingly expensive. That’s something we don’t always see when we’re entrenched in certain media bubbles and ecosystems. And there’s a sense that if you go into debt, it’s your own fault, and you are the reason for it. It feels shameful.

How does the nation’s history of slavery influence the way Americans think about work? The Smithsonian Institution exists because an Englishman named James Smithson left his fortune to the United States. He was an illegitimate child who couldn’t rise through the ranks of British society, and he admired the American system. And yet the red stone in our Smithsonian Castle came from a quarry that used enslaved labor. So both things are part of our story—the promise of meritocracy and the complete lack of value placed on enslaved labor. How does one undercut the other?

There’s obviously a certain way in which we take low-wage manual labor for granted as part of the legacy of slavery. This is one reason the culture of tipping is so fascinating. We haven’t been able to boost the minimum wage because we’re too focused on the idea that the work itself isn’t of value, but the exceptional performance of certain individuals can transcend that. I was a bartender for a long time. One problem is that there are people who don’t make tips in the back of the house. I made much more through tips than my bar manager did, and she worked much longer hours making a base salary. There was also a lot of luck, based on the calendar. One year I might get a shift on December 31, which is a great night to tend bar, and then another year, I might get January 1, when it’s crickets. If your rent is due, that makes all the difference in the world.

You write about Benjamin Franklin and his aphorisms about work. What influence did they have on the burgeoning American culture?

Benjamin Franklin had one of those great stories of success through ingenuity and hard work. So he was telling people, “This is how I did it. I woke up at 5 o’clock in the morning, and I worked till 9 o’clock at night, and I did that every single day.” That was extremely impressive, but you also had to have certain advantages to become Franklin. Even though he was poor, he was also educated. He believed that the more you helped people, the softer they got, and the less success you would see. That’s a very American idea, but it’s been proven false again and again. If you give people a little bit more support, they tend to do better, and we all prosper as a result.

Franklin was also a genius, right? Your book’s title, 99% Perspiration, comes from a quote about genius. But does everyone need to be brilliant and amazing?

A 2015 Pew study found that nine out of ten Americans prefer financial stability over social mobility. Just having steady finances is more important to most people than climbing the ladder. That really marks a shift in how we visualize success today.

Smithsonian recently published an article about the problem of rising heat in Miami. Politicians have been arguing against laws that would give workers more breaks and access to cold water during the day. And yet businesses in the Miami area lose $10 billion a year because of heat-related illnesses among their workers. Why don’t more Americans make those kinds of connections?

This is also a critical part of our DNA. It feels like some kind of capitulation for businesses to be better attuned to the needs of their employees. It feels like it’s getting in the way of the free market instead of helping it thrive. But when people keep leaving jobs because of burnout and unsustainable schedules, it costs the company so much more money. You lose one-half to two times the salary of the person who leaves, and sometimes even more. How many of those people would stay if their employers just paid a little more attention to morale and work-life issues?

You write about those fun, hip workplaces where you’re supposed to just really love being there. I used to work in a place like that. But once I started having kids, I’d see my younger coworkers staying till 7 or even 8 p.m. They’d drink a beer, go out on the lawn to throw a frisbee and then come back to work some more. Those of us who had to leave before 6 p.m. felt anxiety and guilt and a lot of pressure to be online every evening and weekend. Do workplaces need to do more to address different life stages?

Absolutely. That’s one important problem with those types of workplaces. There’s also the fact that people are expected to tie their identities to their company, to make sacrifices for a dream job. This really gained steam in the 1960s counterculture. People wanted their work to have meaning. That’s a very noble thing. As an older millennial, I remember being encouraged to do whatever I wanted to do. But it was tough when we all basically graduated into the Great Recession.

People weren’t able to follow their dreams. But they still wanted to feel like they were doing something meaningful—which is how we ended up with funny titles like “sales guru” or “technical ninja.” It all feeds into the idea that what you’re doing shouldn’t just be a job, it should be kind of higher calling. The problem is that then your work can subsume your identity, and you’re putting yourself in a very dangerous position when you’re subject to exploitation and layoffs and other whims of the workplace.

At the end of your book, you talk about retired General Stanley McChrystal and how he’s in favor of mandatory service periods for young people—civil service, not just military service. How would it change our culture if everyone completed 18 months of service after high school?

It would bring together people who have different backgrounds and different experiences. Right now, we’re segmented by income, race and politics. We’re moving into clusters where people are politically and financially and culturally more like us than ever before. That really eats away at the understanding we have about other people’s lives and struggles, and it’s sowing a lot of discord. National service could bring people together in a way that is also humbling. It could be attractive to the right, as a way of showing patriotic duty, and also to the left, as a way of equalizing opportunity. You could come from a city and go to rural areas and have the chance to do something meaningful but also learn a lot in the process. These are the kinds of experiences and interchanges we need to have.

I came away feeling like 99% Perspiration was a patriotic book. You aren’t like Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman coming in and telling Americans what to do. You’re an American who is really trying to figure out what we want as a country and how we can make that happen.

I grew up on the mythology of American ideals and American life, and I’m a product of that. One set of my grandparents escaped the Russian czar, and the other set escaped Nazi Berlin. I think if we can recast their success stories for future generations, it will only bring more prosperity and pride to our country. Success in in America is not finite. There’s real possibility here for everyone, and I believe in it.

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Jennie Rothenberg Gritz is a senior editor at Smithsonian magazine. She was previously a senior editor at the Atlantic.