Eight Hours for What We Will by Roy Rosenzweig

The values of nineteenth century America were largely white Anglo-Saxon values that stressed Protestant self-reliance and Victorian respectability. Men worked and subdued the frontier (both literally and figuratively), while the woman’s domain was religion (moral uplift) and the home. Education, self-cultivation and upward mobility were the hallmarks of Anglo Saxon values. The central theme of this value system was Progress (expressed in terms of material progress) versus primitivism.

According to Larry May in his book Screening Out the Past, immigrants presented a disorganizing element into American society because they brought with them other (less restrictive) value systems. In the view of the white Anglo-Saxon majority, immigrants needed to be Americanized in order to, “make no trouble for the right minded” (May, 15). The workplace was one area in which the immigrant must be bent to (industrial) discipline. The other area was leisure. The middle class wanted to control immigrant leisure, and as Roy Rosenzweig points out in Eight Hours for What We Will leisure became a battleground between groups with different value systems. 

For immigrants, amusements constituted an important counterweight to the rigors of industrial discipline. Movies were particularly appealing to multi-lingual immigrants. Because movies were silent, they were universally available as an outlet for romance and adventure and formed the ground pattern of social life for the young (May, 38). The movies provided immigrants with a form of acculturation into American life. Although the middle class frowned on the low themes of the earliest movies, in general movies were much less of a threat to industrial discipline than were other amusements such as drinking in saloons. Immigrants carved out leisure (and especially movies) as a public space apart from work where they could indulge hopes, dreams and aspirations. In embracing the culture of the movies (and its concomitant consumerism) so enthusiastically, the immigrant movie go-er accelerated the breakdown of old ethnic norms and the development of a more homogeneous society based on mass culture and consumerism. Consumerism offered the image of a homogenous population pursuing the same goals of living well and accumulating goods. The emergence of consumerism served to mask the transformation of the immigrant from person to commodity and tempered resistance to labor discipline.

The development of the movie industry itself was a tremendous social safety valve. The movie industry, in which immigrants were heavily represented, demonstrated that success could be had without a long laborious submission to the Anglo Saxon value system (May, 196). Success was democratized in the persona of the movie star who by talent and imagination could become an overnight success (May, 233).

In Eight Hours for What We Will, Roy Rosenzweig talks about alternative ethnic worker cultures as opposed to oppositional cultures. Rather than directly challenging the economic elite, the alternative culture passively resists. Initially immigrants found strength to passively resist industrial discipline within the traditions and norms of their ethnic communities, to paraphrase Rosenzweig’s book, “they found a different way to live and wished to be left alone with it” (Rozenzweig, 64). Mass culture appears to have taken the place of the immigrant neighborhood. The modern American citizen passively resists labor discipline by immersing in consumerism and the products of mass culture. Meaning is found in conspicuous consumption.

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Youngstown, Ohio: An American Tragedy

Youngstown, Ohio 1953

Youngstown, Ohio 2013



Youngstown and America

Between the 1920s and 1960s, Youngstown, Ohio was an important steel producing hub dominated by such companies as Republic Steel, U.S. Steel, and regional giant Youngstown Sheet and Tube.  Youngstown reached its’ zenith in the 1950s, with a prosperous population of 168,000.  The city’s 1951 Comprehensive Plan envisioned a city of the future between 200,000 and 250,000 people, with 1,700 acres zoned for heavy industry.

The city’s bright future was upended on September 19 1977, when Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company announced it would close the Campbell Mill. More than 5,000 jobs were lost immediately. Fifty thousand jobs soon followed, as Sheet and Tube’s Brier Hill Works closed two years later, and mill closings at U.S. Steel and Republic Steel followed.

Unemployed workers were left to fend for themselves. City leaders and the federal government, withheld support from an employee initiative to take over and run some of the defunct steel mills proposed by the Ecumenical Coalition of the Mahoning Valley. The coming of the free trade era witnessed manufacturing at major factories throughout America fall into rapid decline as corporations moved jobs overseas.

Since 1950, Youngstown’s population has fallen by two thirds and now stands at 66,000. Most industry is now gone, and many neighborhoods have more homes vacant than inhabited. The city has demolished at least 2,566 blighted structures since January 2006. There are 4,000 to 5,000 vacant houses in Youngstown awaiting demolition.  Many homes, however, fall to arson first.  Arsonists torched 158 houses in 2005 alone.

Youngstown’s issues are, in fact, American issues. A recent New York University-Harvard study provides an explanation.  Corporate profits have decoupled from corporate investment in America.  Today corporate profits account for 12 percent of Gross Domestic Product, while net investment has shrunk to 4 percent.  Investments can reduce companies’ quarterly earnings, to which most CEOs’ income is linked.  The current business paradigm holds that share price is the sole determinant of a corporation’s value and that corporate management’s primary responsibility is to shareholders, rather than balancing the interests of shareholders, employees and consumers.  The outsourcing of American jobs is another manifestation of this paradigm.  Between 2004 and 2009 American based multi-national corporations cut 2.9 million jobs in the United States, while outsourcing 2.4 million jobs to their overseas operations.

General Electric’s chief executive Jeff Immelt (former head of the Obama administration’s “jobs council”, who receives an annual compensation of approximately $15 million) acknowledges that the health and well-being of a company such as GE is now less connected to the well-being of the American economy (worker). Immelt says, “I’m a GE leader first and foremost. At the same time…I work for an American company.”

In 2000 some 54 percent of GE employees worked in the United States. In 2010 about 46 percent of General Electric’s 287,000 employees worked in the United States. GE laid off 21,000 American workers and closed 20 factories between 2007 and 2009.

The company, led by Immelt, earned $14.2 billion in profits in 2010, but paid no Federal taxes because the bulk of those profits, some $9 billion, were offshore. The year 2010 was the second year in a row that GE paid no taxes. General Electric states that it “pays what it owes under the law.”

Corporate focus on short term profits killed Youngstown, Ohio and is killing America.

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What’s good for General Motors is good for America

“What’s good for General Motors is good for America,” is a mis-quote from 1953 testimony given by Charles E. Wilson at his Congressional confirmation hearings to become Secretary of Defense in the Eisenhower administration. Wilson was defending his reluctance to sell millions of dollars of General Motors stock. When asked if he as Secretary of Defense could make a decision adverse to the interests of General Motors, Wilson answered that he could not conceive of such a situation, “because for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.”

The American economy in the Eisenhower 1950s was the envy of the world. Without significant global competition American corporations and workers prospered. America was the workshop of the world, and American exports were king.

No modern American corporate executive could make a statement like Wilson’s without irony. Between 2004 and 2009 American based multi-national corporations have cut 2.9 million jobs in the United States, while outsourcing 2.4 million jobs to their overseas operations.

General Electric’s chief executive Jeff Immelt (the head of the Obama administration’s, “jobs council”) acknowledges that the health and well being of a company such as GE is now less connected to the well being of the American economy. Immelt says, “I’m a GE leader first and foremost. At the same time…I work for an American company.”

In 2000 some 54 percent of GE employees worked in the United States. In 2010 about 46 percent of General Electric’s 287,000 employees worked in the United States. GE laid off 21,000 American workers and closed 20 factories between 2007 and 2009.

The company, led by Immelt, earned $14.2 billion in profits in 2010, but paid no Federal taxes because the bulk of those profits, some $9 billion, were offshore. The year 2010 was the second year in a row that GE paid no taxes. General Electric states that it “pays what it owes under the law.”


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Eugene Debs - Bigot

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The Gilded Age and Revolution

In the early 20th century, the premise of left wing radical Eugene Debs’ ideology rested upon identification of the labor movement with Anglo-Saxon male Protestants intimately familiar both with the prophetic strain in Christianity and with the traditions of American democracy. Immigrants, especially those of non-English or non-German stock, black and female workers did not fit into this conception. Debs wrote, “The Dago works for small, and lives far more like a savage or wild beast, than the Chinese.” These sentiments did not inspire universal labor solidarity.

Debs was not unique in his outlook. The American Protective Association identified Catholicism as the country’s most dangerous threat. Members took an oath never to vote for a Catholic, patronize Catholic merchants, or strike with Catholic workmen.

The objects of intolerance change over time, but the shrill voices of intolerance never seem to change.



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