Why do we attach such importance to our jobs? From the first question at a cocktail party (“so what do you do?”) to welfare work mandates, Americans hold employment status in very high regard. Even though the belief in a job’s ethical and moral value predates the American state—from the theology of Martin Luther to Benjamin Franklin’s doctrine of industriousness—something about our contemporary culture seems to fetishize work above all else.

In his book, Work Requirements: Race, Disability, and the Print Culture of Social Welfare, Todd Carmody argues that between the Civil War and the New Deal work acquired a sense of imperative purpose in American life—people must work. Despite the “increasingly fragmented nature of industrial production” especially during the Fordist era, “the work ethic’s anachronistic hold only grew stronger” (8). In those decades, America manufactured the assumption that work, “even the most patently debasing and plainly productive, is inherently meaningful” (16).

Beyond just meaningful, work is required of all who can. Much of the intellectual and emotional labor necessary to produce that conceptual common sense—like the physical labor necessary to build America’s literal infrastructure—came from those on the economic margins. Not only did poor people and people of color literally build America, but they also built the assumption that labor makes people worthy, a punishing, disciplinary cultural norm.

Building the assumption of work’s meaningfulness happened across many different institutions and types of media. Carmody’s first chapter studies the claims made by Civil War veterans seeking government pensions. At nearly 40% of the federal budget, Civil War pensions anticipated social welfare programs like Social Security, including corresponding debates over government so-called handouts and deservingness (33). 

Black veterans in the late nineteenth century faced particular difficulties receiving benefits, often because formerly enslaved soldiers lacked prior records. Contemporaneous Black uplift narratives—success stories from postbellum Black figures, like Booker T. Washington—also offered a cudgel with which opponents of pensions could lambast veterans as lazy. If poor, formerly enslaved Black workers could make it in America, antagonists argued, why did veterans need government assistance. While Black veterans struggled to get their benefits, stories of Black bootstrapping success were used to dismantle the program itself.

Even though Carmody rarely discusses literature in the traditional sense, his training as a scholar of print culture helps guide the reader through the changing paper forms he discusses. In the case of Civil War pensions, we see how written narratives of wartime disability transform into fill-in-the-blank affidavit templates. And in the second chapter, on charity giving, Carmody demonstrates how as social workers standardized their paperwork, so too did those who asked for money. At the Piney Woods school in Mississippi, for example, Black students “worked” for their tuition by sending form letters soliciting donations. Alongside social work, which disciplined itself through procedures like fill-in-the-blank templates, fundraising was similarly professionalized through form letters and solicitation programs by student workers. 

The project of making work central to American culture occurred not only on the page but in other media as well. Film scholars have discussed how experiments in moving photography began with studies of animal and human bodies. As Carmody writes, it is now a “truism of film history that popular cinema was made possible” by Etienne-Jules Marey and Edward Muybridge’s “study of movement” (125). Early forays included films of “pathological location” which captured the motion of people with disabilities (130).

But Carmody tells a new story about the mutually beneficial relationship between early filmmakers and business consultants (often one in the same). Rather than merely producing academic experiments in movement, these early cinematographers worked closely with (or were themselves hired) to employ film to make labor more efficient. In fact, filmmaker-consultants like Lillian and Frank Gilbreth followed not only from “the ‘efficiency craze’ of the early twentieth century or the entrenchment of the Fordist economy,” but also from “the labor ideology of social welfare provision”: all people, including disabled people, should work (138). So, though the project to use film to standardize the movements of disabled workers often failed, such as the Gilbreths’ work with epileptic patients, it did bolster that ongoing assumption that everyone—even disabled bodies—ought to work, and to work as efficiently as possible.

For some of the industries Carmody studies, the imperative to put people to work seems obvious. That strategy consultants like the Gilbreths aimed to maximize the labor of their clients’ employees makes sense—that was their job after all. But some of these institutional histories tell less predictable stories about emerging sectors, such as Carmody’s chapter on the academy’s interest in African American work songs. Early twentieth-century sociologists of music captured the sounds and rhythms of songs not only to preserve and study culture, but because the songs “compelled workers to labor more efficiently”; songs could help academics explain and reproduce efficient labor. Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that disciplines which emerged alongside colonial projects were also complicit in exploitative capitalism.

 

 

 

Even across this broad sweep of institutions and genres bent on making work a cultural mandate, some people turned to more liberatory projects. An early postbellum movement for slave reparations copied the Civil War pensions, down to the very blank-form templates; activists like William R. Vaughn in his “Freedman’s Pension Bill,” argued that formerly enslaved people had earned benefits just like veterans. And despite their quest for efficiency, the strategy-consultant Gilbreths ultimately used “motion study to find the best fit between a specific working body and a specific working environment” (145).

That question of “fit” also guided the PhD sociologist Annie Marion MacLean, who studied work songs not with an ear for maximizing labor but for catching unity, collaboration, and contentment. MacLean serves as an example of someone who resisted the exploitative mission of the academy both to maximize others’ labor and as a workplace itself. A disabled teacher, MacLean resisted the rhythms of university life, turning to correspondence courses, which better allowed her and her students to “encounter one another in mutual recognition” (195).

Carmody’s rich discussion offers a convincing, if quite dense, book-length argument. Though he draws on theory as wide-ranging as New Historicism, print culture, Marxian analysis, and feminist labor history, Carmody’s points are usually more formal and historical than theoretical. Carmody shies away from conceptual battles despite a series of long, informative, discursive footnotes on subjects like Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Afro-pessimism, and Charles Richmond Henderson. As he himself writes in an early footnote, “my goal, however, is not to develop a cohesive social theory” (226n10). Given the preponderance of archival richness and formal analysis, one wishes Carmody had thrown elbows a bit more and marked out with more confidence how his own story changes our understanding not just of the history, but of the theory, of work.

Because if we can understand that the assumption we all must work—and that we must work as efficiently as possible—is itself a historical construction only about 150 years old, how should we change our approach to this activity where we spend so much of our lives? Should we work slower and less efficiently? Is finding value in our labor always exploitative? 

Carmody’s turn in the book’s coda to government-funded basic income is instructive. Whether we find work meaningful or not matters less than the fact that it is required—a requirement built up by decades of cultural representation that Carmody explicates with great skill—and a requirement that programs like basic income might ease. When we let go of work as a requirement we might be led away from racist tropes, ableist efficiency standards, and punishing societal expectations. We might also move towards a safety net built less around employment than around common humanity. We might labor less because we find it necessary and instead find motivation in collaboration and in craft.

 

Further Reading:

For a bit of the long history of scholarship on labor under capitalism, consider Karl Marx’s Capital, Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977), Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism including the new edition’s introduction by Robin D. G. Kelley (2020), and Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back (2021), among many others. Elizabeth McHenry’s Forgotten Readers (2002) and Meredith McGill’s American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (2003) serve as useful guides for print culture in this and an earlier period of American history. For some of the touchstone primary source texts explored in this book, see Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery (1901), Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life (1903), and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903).

 

This article originally appeared in April 2025.

---

Max Chapnick is a research fellow at the New York Historical, having recently served as a Postdoctoral Teaching Associate at Northeastern after earning his PhD at Boston University in English and American literature in 2023. His scholarly work appears in American Periodicals, J19, New England Quarterly, and elsewhere.