As all who’ve tried it and been quickly embarrassed will know, it is physically impossible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You’ll find yourself remaining firmly on the dusty ground, tugging at your feet and looking hapless. The phrase’s origin is disputed, but what is clear is that its original meaning was a sarcastic way of saying something was impossible to do. It’s more than a little ironic that, over time, it came to mean the opposite: something everyone can do, and in fact should—it’s an ethos and a virtue. It’s not rare for an idiomatic phrase to change meaning over time, but this total symbolic inversion—from shorthand for the completely infeasible all the way to the reverse, with connotations that such a feat is not only possible, but laudable, necessary, moral—is a microcosm of the arc of the American entrepreneurial work ethic itself.
That ethic and its historical arc are the subjects of Make Your Own Job, a new book by historian Erik Baker. Baker follows the entrepreneurial work ethic from its emergence in the late 19th century as a reaction to prevalent notions of the time (the related but contrasting “industrious” work ethic), through to its popularization by self-help gurus, its eventual utility for union-busting corporations like Walmart, and up to its present state, codified as a bit of wisdom and virtue in the American imaginary.
Baker composes and evidences this narrative analysis with an astutely chosen corrective focus in his sourcing: he makes more reference to pop psychologists and business leaders than he does economists and academics, arguing that the latter are “overemphasized… relative to other actors who have influenced much more profoundly how ordinary people have thought about their working lives.” Though Baker’s writing elsewhere has taken up a more polemical mode to great effect, here, he lets his research, buoyed by occasional well-placed jabs at racist thinkers, delusional consultants, and other like figures, do most of the talking.
The ethic of entrepreneurialism that Baker has identified “enjoins us to work more intensely than we need to and leaves us feeling devoid of purpose when we don’t have work, or the right kind of work, to do… [It] focuses on the advantages that accrue to people who create work for themselves,” seeking to “transcend the distinction between capitalist and worker.”
This ethos, Baker contends, came in reaction to its predecessor, the governing fin-de-siècle ideology of work, which could be described as the “industrious work ethic.” Instead of plucky self-reliance and -actualization on the job, industriousness emphasized “duty and the virtue of persevering without questioning assigned tasks or expecting much reward.” But the immiserations of the industrious status quo would exceed that servile ethic’s carrying capacity. Industrialization and technological advancement left many workers unemployed, and the production-optimizing “scientific management” principles of Frederick Winslow Taylor, instituted to punishing effect on factory floors, ensured that those did have a job were often entirely miserable.
This was fertile ground for comforting illusions to take root. A strain of so-called “New Thought,” a metaphysical-spiritual movement that grew as an offshoot of Christian Science, was touted by various self-improvement and business gurus of the time, who “preached that individuals in the right mental state could connect with a reservoir of infinite cosmic energy” and therefore “conjure opportunity out of thin air and transcend any obstacles.” It’s a nice idea—that all you need to succeed is to think about things in the right way.
Once writers like Orison Swett Marden, a hotel magnate who took to advice-giving after failing as a businessman, stripped New Thought of some of its more traditional religious overtones, it really took off. Even without the aid of cosmic forces, Marden repeatedly told readers that “scarcity of opportunity was an illusion,” as Baker summarizes it. This coincided with an increased emphasis on work as an extension of the self. Elizabeth Jones Towne, who published Marden in Nautilus, a magazine associated with New Thought, wrote that people should do what they love, “something in which you can express yourself.” Plenty of the tenets of New Thought would not sound out of place in the woo-woo self-help trends that came later in the 20th century (The Secret, perhaps fittingly, lifted its manifestly successful concept from New Thinkers), and have continued to thrive, among other places, on Instagram—and increasingly, among the reactionary right.
Refrains like these are in fact so common today they persist as a kind of background white noise. At the dawn of the 20th century, hearing that the answers to one’s socioeconomic struggles might be found within came across as a relative novelty, and a galvanizing idea.
At this point, the more intrepid aspects—like starting a business and setting out on your own—were less central to the doctrine than they are today. In his introduction, Baker describes the work ethic as “transcending the distinction between capitalist and worker.” But any transcendance of class position was a mirage. Existing businesses sought to harvest the new energy from their already-employed workforces; the capitalists espousing this gospel weren’t exactly eager for competitors to enter their markets.
Regardless, these putatively self-empowering mantras had a suspicious imbalance that ran to the benefit of people in the upper tiers of the hierarchy. Baker quotes a “wealthy piano manufacturer” who, in 1922, told Forbes readers to “work for a business as if it were your own.” So around this time, rather than a boom in people going it alone, there was a rise in “entrepreneurial” management styles: the idea that “managers should motivate workers not through the financial incentives of Taylorism, but by inspiring them to see their work as meaningful—to express in their work what was often called the ‘creative’ impulse or instinct,” as Baker puts it.
This convenient way of thinking grew steadily in popularity through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but a major boost to the entrepreneurial mindset came when The Great Depression hit. As Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to lift Americans through the robust programs of the New Deal, his conservative opponents were searching for a way to oppose his plans—without hinting that, if it came down to it, they’d have little compunction about tossing workers to the wolves. (Or even, for some, democracy itself.) There were altogether too many charges being thrown around about how economic crashes were caused by investor panic—this laid the blame inconveniently at the moneyed cohort’s feet. Another explanation was needed.
In Austrian economist Joseph Schumpter’s economic theory of entrepreneurship, they found their answer. Schumpter argued “that the peaks and trough of economic growth were regulated by neither net investment nor consumer demand… but by cycles of innovation and industrial maturation.” This idea served the anti-New Deal coalition’s needs perfectly. Not only was it not the investors who got the country into this mess—neither would FDR’s social programs save the nation. Instead, the only way out was to innovate.
And indeed, there was an innovative boom of sorts—albeit one borne of desperation. Distribution jobs tended to have a more entrepreneurial bent (in media of the time, the door-to-door salesman—of encyclopedias, vacuums, Bibles—is a reliable figure). Work of that nature had already grown at three times the rate of manufacturing jobs between 1870 and 1930. Then, in the decade after the 1929 crash, direct sales volume doubled.
David McConnell, founder and president of California Perfume Company (the multi-level marketing company better-known by its current name, Avon) would send his sellers monthly mailers full of helpful chestnuts like, “When you join the ranks of the organization, your future success in your hands;” he would claim that the unemployment of the Depression was caused by sloth, weakness, a lack of do-it-yourself gumption. Powerful players in this line of business were swift to press their advantage, determined to keep their individualistically minded workforces as individual as possible—with a legal divide between company and worker.
Almost as soon as the right to unionize and Social Security were enshrined in law, the National Association of Direct Selling Companies convinced the Federal Trade Commission that their salespeople—as “independent contractors”—weren’t “company employees for the purposes of the major New Deal Legislation.” (Which is, of course, an all-too-familiar argument, heard from many app-based companies to this day.)
As the number of people who thought of themselves as entrepreneurs increased, bookshelves were flooded with treatises that purported to reveal the keys to success. James Ferdon, blurbed as “one of the best authorities on the pitchman and his business in America” in one magazine, argued that, when confronted with obstacles that cause others to quit, “the pitchman goes courageously on.” He certainly took his own advice; Ferdon, who also went by “The Great Pizaro,” had overcome his past as a convicted conman to become a successful motivational writer.
Though, given the histories of some of his peers, a criminal history may not have been such a tough hurdle to clear. Famed guru Napoleon Hill authored the 1937 smash hit Think and Grow Rich; he is credited by some with originating the titular Secret. In Think and Grow Rich, he always capitalized the word “ideas” to emphasize its “quasi-supernatural valence.” (Also worth emphasizing: Hill had an extraordinarily unseemly history as a brazen scammer and huckster who ran innumerable cons, including grotesque charity embezzlement; despite or perhaps because of that, his supporters and related organizations persist to this day.) Even this early in the development of the American Entrepreneur, the scams, theft, and fakery that prop up so many modern companies helmed by entrepreneurial figures were lingering just below the surface.
Baker’s research, again, centers on pop psychology and other materials that were meant for the masses—but that’s not to say the thinking disseminated by elite institutions never had transformative impacts on workers’ lives. Baker cites a 1964 paper written by Jay Forrester, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, suggesting that companies should position “each employee on a spectrum ‘from individual worker to entrepreneur… the most successful worker would finally end up ‘becoming an entrepreneur,’ capable of envisioning the relationship between ‘customer needs’ and ‘the abilities of the organization as a whole.’” Convincing workers “to unite the functions of management and labor, conception and execution, in one entrepreneurial individual”—without the benefits of actually not having a boss or earning the profits for themselves—was a coup for capital.
On paper, evaluating your employees’ skills and assigning them accordingly wouldn’t seem so bad. But in this context, Baker shows, it leads to Jack Welch at GE forcing his managers to perpetually lay off 10% of their staff and “process owners” at Koch Industries so desperate to maintain their aura of profitable efficiency that they, in an illustrative example, stopped inspecting oil infrastructure for signs of decay, preferring instead to just wait for equipment to fail. Across 300 incidents, Koch pipelines leaked three million gallons of crude oil, gasoline, and other oil products, catastrophically polluting water sources and killing off local ecologies.
Constant layoffs—and potential massive crises and fines—obviously create high-stress working environments. Corporations also saw fit to angle for an advantage by deploying misogynist gender standards. Entrepreneurial managers weren’t ignorant of this, though it might have been better if they were. In the 1980s, Walmart, which initially claimed “the physical work burden required by managers could only be borne by men,” hired a Director of Marriage and Family Living, who would remind male managers to thank “their wives for their domestic labor and sacrifice for the Wal-Mart mission.” That same decade, multi-level marketing company Amway approached marriage a little more bluntly: “The most important way for wives to encourage their husbands to ‘take control’ in the business was to submit to them sexually.”
Baker also documents the way that racist thinkers used a myopic vision of the proper way to work to justify their bigotry. Abraham Maslow, famous for his Hierarchy of Needs, was disappointed in French-Canadians whom he deemed, along with “Mexicans & sometimes with Negroes,” to be insufficiently ambitious. Assessing whole communities in this racist and reductive way made things easier for Cold War intellectuals, economists, and policymakers, who preferred not to confront the claim advanced by Walter Rodney and other radical thinkers “that growth in the capitalist core depended actively on the underdevelopment of peripheral regions, on plunder as well as productivity.”
After the passage of the Civil Rights Act, racist conservatives pathologized Black workers who didn’t move or change jobs even though they were “at long last regarded as worthy of consideration for jobs at all levels.” In truth, this perceived lack of ambition on the part of Black workers could be explained by the fact that the entire premise of the charge was flawed. Baker points out that, given “the yawning gap between Black and white unemployment… [in all likelihood] Black workers were not, in fact, regarded as worthy of consideration for all jobs.”
Racism and sexism obviously predate the entrepreneurial work ethic—but Make Your Own Job deftly elucidates how an outspoken emphasis on success being within everyone’s reach served to reinforce the most malevolent tendencies in American society. Business owners and managers couldn’t be blamed if all the deserving candidates for jobs or promotions happened to look like them. And this system perpetuates itself—not only because everyone wants to believe they’ve earned their success, but also because of its longstanding ideological utility; as Baker describes, an aggressive New Right determined to break the New Deal order emerged in the 1970s.
Influenced by thinkers like Peter Drucker and Christopher Lasch, companies swept in to the Midwestern and Southern states that had lost factories in the economic downturn and started spreading the good word. Employee training drew a direct line “between the entrepreneurial firm and the patriarchal family,” framing “the entrepreneurial work ethic as an expression of faith in God and country,” writes Baker. And of course, if a company was to throw their support behind the Republican Party, they could be confident they wouldn’t be stuck on a one-way street. McDonald’s mogul Ray Kroc’s advocacy (and a $255,000 donation) was repaid many times over when “Richard Nixon swore to veto any minimum-wage bill that didn’t set a lower standard for teenage workers, who comprised the majority of McDonald’s line cooks.”
Make Your Own Job’s stories of wanton graft and subterfuge are memorable and enlivening to the narrative. But throughout, Baker takes pains to remind readers that the structure of capitalism is at the root of the problem; the warped incentives of the profit motives persist regardless of how virtuous a boss tries to be. In an illuminating section, Baker shares the example of Erewhon Trading Company, the upscale health-food grocery store founded in the 1960s. The founders, Aveline and Michio Kushi, believed in “the Buddhist concept of ‘Right Livelihood’” and “assumed an intrinsic synergy between the values that imbued their products and the values that animated the firm’s work environment.”
Yet the Kushis’ values, sincerely held though they may have been, did not supercede the necessity of profit. The result was “an uncaring and unresponsive management willing to exploit [workers] just as any ‘straight’ business might.” The founders heard their workers’ concerns—and promptly responded that on-the-job issues could “be solved only through our own self-reflection and our own improvements of spirits.” The workers, in a 42-19 vote, clearly thought that a union might be a little more effective than introspection.
Baker quotes political scientist William Clare Roberts, who characterizes this as “the impersonal domination of the capitalist market—the force of structured causality that compels capitalists, whether they like it or not, to act like capitalists.” Make Your Own Job excels at portraying two ideas that might, on their face, seem to be in conflict. On the one hand, powerful individuals regularly make conscious, knowing choices that make people’s lives worse, when they might, with more compassion, maybe, have done otherwise.
And yet simultaneously, a meaningful amount of agency on the part of the bosses, whether kind or malicious, is circumscribed by the underlying relations of private ownership and the incessant, ever-escalating demands of profit. Capitalism as a system is both the primary cause and catalyst of our deepest social problems, compelling owners to act in the interest of returns above all else, externalizing social harms in an incentive structure that discourages or neutralizes any efforts to the contrary.
It is this strong throughline of structurally grounded critique that separates Make Your Own Job from similar—and ultimately lesser—books on the same subject. Another book released early this year, Adam Chandler’s 99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life, centers its argument on the negative consequences of what Chandler calls “the American Abracadabra.”
At first glance, his concept sketches out roughly the same ideology that lies along the continuum of the industrious/entrepreneurial ethics; Chandler defines this ideological incantation as “a swaggering bit of magical thinking that asserts that through hard work, self-reliance, and heroic grit, each person determines their own fate.” But his decision to name it after a magic spell is a little too fitting, since the formulation of the concept itself—along with Chandler’s analysis framed around it—is amorphous and idealist, unwilling to concede or conceive of deeper pathologies born of capital.
Materialist anti-capitalism remains beyond the grasp of the liberal commentator, no matter how astute a chronicler of injustice they may be. It is not merely ideology, however pernicious and delusive, that ultimately defines the social order. Both the material reality of class society and such ideologies themselves spring from the prerogatives of capital.
Chandler, laudably, does expend a lot of righteous energy and anger on the plight of the American working class, how the rich and powerful have trod on them for centuries. But his effort to insist that his book’s central conceit is itself catchall diagnosis, a key source of American social maladies, rather than a symptom of deeper relations leads him to persistently misread the story he’s telling. In a characteristic example, Chandler attempts to explain why elected officials might wish to allow benefits programs to lapse. He quotes Senator Lindsey Graham, who said “If a person is making $23 an hour on unemployment, it’s going to be hard to get you to back to work for a $17 an hour job.”
Chandler criticizes Graham for paternalistically suggesting that receiving benefits promotes a bad work ethic. But this reading does not breach the surface of things. The logic that Graham is really endorsing isn’t about worker attitudes at all. Benefits raise the cost of labor above what capital wants to pay for it, and Graham sees it as the government’s job to use economic force to keep wages low. This is characteristic of the liberal focus on the individual, to the detriment of structural critique.
Changing hearts and minds is hard work, but it’s a lot easier than transforming the capitalist economy. Chandler’s prescriptions seem to rely on the former as an escape route—and more likely, the requisite tidy solution that so many writers feel obligated to offer at the end of their texts, however badly they must contort their analysis to fit it. The book, while it does capture significant truths in its demoralizing picture of the United States, does so while maintaining a naïve sense of optimism about how we might struggle through to the other side. At the end, he explains that we need a “new patriotism” and “to construct a new American Dream, one that’s actually attainable.” These are little more than gaseous aphorisms, weightless and intangible—an “abracadabra” in their own right.
In truth, even if Chandler’s diagnoses were well-defined and achievable, they would leave the actual problem unsolved. Arriving at the easy answer here is the consequence of effacing deeper functions, and a lack of willingness to allot historical agency to the material efforts of organizing and mass action. The specious, lightweight thinking is reminiscent, more than a little ironically, of the early purveyors of New Thought, who so fervently believed that salvation was only one powerful idea away.
Baker, on the other hand, does not stoop to offering sweeping, packaged solutions. There is a clear acknowledgment that this ship turns very slowly, and that we have a long way left to sail. There is no false promise of a comprehensive, winning plan. Instead, he concludes by focusing on the difficult small efforts that can add up to meaningful intervention—for instance, giving the examples of unionizing rideshare drivers and the committed people doing the work of mutual aid: those who are, little by little, rejecting the present system’s perverse incentives and building a better one. Baker’s lucid treatment of our predicament rightly concludes that there will be no map provided to us—but when we need something to follow, there is, at least, a kind of north star. ♦