Every Labor Day, Americans participate in a holiday whose meaning has gradually thinned out—stripped down to a three-day weekend, end-of-summer sales, and only a passing nod to “workers.” American thinking about work and freedom used to run much deeper than that. At the Founding, and for the decades that followed, working for wages wasn’t seen as a normal fact of economic life. Rather, it was widely regarded as a form of dependence, a glorified form of servitude. That suspicion of wage labor shaped one of the 19th century’s defining political movements. Today, on Labor Day, its logic is worth closer examination. I’m proposing that we go back to the future, reviving the “free labor” vision of Abraham Lincoln and fellow early Republicans.
The Traditional View: Wage Labor as Unfreedom
Let me start by turning back the clock to a time when our present situation—a world in which most people spend most of their adult lives working as employees—was widely regarded as a nightmare scenario. This is the only economic and social reality we know, and so it’s hard for us to imagine that things were ever otherwise. Yet before the brute fact of industrialization ultimately overwhelmed all resistance, working for wages was relatively uncommon—and generally considered to be a form of unfreedom. At the time of America’s Founding, wage earners were still scarce throughout much of the country, though they were becoming more common in cities. And in the status hierarchies of the time, they were relegated to the condition of dependent servitude—along with apprentices, indentured servants, and chattel slaves.
According to the classical republicanism that was so influential in shaping the thinking of the time, true freedom was rooted in independence from the arbitrary will of another. Thomas Jefferson exemplified such thinking when he celebrated yeoman farmers as the bedrock of a free society, people who “look[ed] up to heaven” and “their own soil and industry” for their subsistence and depended on no one else. Wage workers, though, were directly subject to the arbitrary will of their masters, required to follow their orders and dependent on their good will for a livelihood.
Americans saw their new country as blessed to be free of the Old World’s class divisions and savage inequalities. In their view, societies with a landed aristocracy and great masses of dependent poor offered unpromising conditions for free political institutions. Such institutions worked best in societies dominated by the middling classes, people who neither lorded it over others nor bowed and scraped before their betters. “Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example,” wrote Jefferson. “The mobs of great cities,” by contrast, “add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the human body.”
Jefferson’s thinking reflected classical republicanism’s premodern antipathy to commerce and the corrupting effects of luxury—attitudes that were rendered increasingly out of place as the United States moved into the 19th century. As the Jacksonian era’s market revolution transformed the young nation from an agrarian society into a bustling commercial powerhouse obsessed with upward mobility, a new conception of republicanism would emerge that sought to reconcile the traditional commitment to self-government in the public interest with the changed social context. This new synthesis took as its foil the very different vision of freedom and the American future taking shape in the antebellum South—a vision that regarded Black slavery as the necessary foundation for white freedom. What emerged in the 1850s was the new Republican Party, campaigning under the banner of “free soil, free labor, free men.”
The ‘Free Labor’ Innovation: Wage Labor as a Steppingstone
The new Republicans celebrated the burgeoning market society as liberating, lifting people out of the narrow constraints of subsistence agriculture and into a wider world of opportunity and progress. In their view, subjection to the arbitrariness of employers was frequently far preferable to subjection to the arbitrariness of Mother Nature. Wage work, offering an alternative to life on the farm, was thus a pathway to a new form of the independence that republicanism always prized. Unlike slaves or traditional servants, wage workers were not dependent on any one employer, because unlike true dependents they had the freedom to quit and seek work elsewhere. This critical distinction, in their view, made all the difference. Abraham Lincoln’s views here were shaped by his own life experience: He never forgot an early episode in his life when he rafted men out to a steamboat and received two silver half-dollars in return. “The world seemed wider and fairer before me,” he recalled. “I was a more hopeful and confident being from that time.”
Republicans retained their commitment to a middle-class society without stark divisions between rich and poor—the antithesis of which they saw in the South, which had now come around to the view that the only freedom worth having was the aristocratic sort that rested on the unfree labor of society’s “mud-sills.” And the Republicans believed that something very close to their classless ideal could be found in their party’s electoral strongholds: the small towns of New England, the Northeast, and the rapidly growing Midwest. In the Northern states, Abraham Lincoln maintained that
a large majority are neither hirers nor hired. Men, with their families—wives, sons, and daughters—work for themselves on their farms, in their houses, and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand nor of hired laborers or slaves on the other.
Republicans did realize, though, that things were different in the Democratic-controlled big cities of the North. Wage work was surging there, especially among the poor immigrants streaming in from Ireland. Southern slavery apologists argued that the low pay, miserable working conditions, and job insecurity of Northern “wage slavery” compared unfavorably to what was occurring in their own “peculiar institution.” Republicans categorically rejected this false equivalence, but the argument still stung. Their “free labor” ideal had no place for a permanent class of downtrodden working poor, yet this blight of the Old World seemed in danger of spreading to the new.
They imagined, though, that the danger could be avoided. In their view, the role of wage work in a “free labor” economy was solely as a temporary expedient, a first steppingstone on the path of upward mobility. Here, once again, is Lincoln to explain:
The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This, say its advocates, is free labor—the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all. If any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune.
And the Republicans had a plan to maintain this limited role for wage work. In the words of Horace Greeley, New York Tribune publisher and editor and one of the founders of the Republican Party: “Go West, young man!” The idea, long championed by Greeley, was to give away free land in the Western territories to homesteaders, drawing urban workers out of dependence and penury and transforming them into property-owning farmers with a measure of independence. “The public lands,” Greeley wrote, “are the great regulator of the relations of Labor and Capital, the safety valve of our industrial and social engine.” The Homestead Act of 1862 sought to put this theory into practice.
‘Free Labor’ vs. Industrialization
Alas, the theory failed to pan out under the conditions of the time. Loopholes in the law allowed speculators and corporate interests to gobble up most of the land given away; only about a quarter of the total acreage went to actual homesteaders. And most of the urban poor lacked the farming skills, as well as the capital for tools and equipment, needed for relocation to the challenging conditions of the unsettled West to make sense.
Meanwhile, the decades following the Homestead Act’s passage witnessed the economic and demographic transformation of the country. America became the main proving ground for the radically new mass production/mass distribution economy, while millions of immigrants poured in from Southern and Eastern Europe to fill the nation’s booming factories. The early Republicans’ worst fears were realized: America became a country marked by stark inequality, with plutocrats enjoying unprecedented wealth and a large, impoverished working class. Meanwhile, the Republican Party itself fairly quickly gave up its solicitude for the urban poor (as well as for the formerly enslaved population) and sided with the interests of business.
Small-r republican concerns about wage work’s connection to dependence and class divisions did not yet vanish, though. Instead they migrated to the nascent American labor movement. The Knights of Labor, the largest American labor organization of the 19th century, fought for incremental gains such as an eight-hour day, but remained unreconciled to the wage system. They envisioned an industrial future based on worker-owned cooperatives, and sought, in the words of their leader Terence Powderly, “to forever banish that curse of modern civilization—wage slavery.”
But the logic of large-scale industrialization swept aside all objections. Except in a few, relatively marginal circumstances, cooperatives proved unable to compete with investor-funded enterprises in organizing production for the new economic order. By the 1890s, with the “pure and simple unionism” of the American Federation of Labor, the labor movement reconciled itself to wage work and sought merely to raise pay and improve conditions. “I know we are living under the wage system,” declared AFL leader Samuel Gompers, “and as long as that lasts it is our purpose is to secure a continually larger share for labor.”
Against all the old antipathy to dependence-as-unfreedom, the wage system held an unanswerable trump card: Industrialization, with reliance on mass employment of wage labor as one necessary element, offered liberation from the age-old curse of poverty. In exchange for submitting to the often brutal domination of foremen and managers and enduring dangerous and physically debilitating work, masses of ordinary workers enjoyed steadily rising living standards that ultimately lifted them out of grinding want and into suburban comfort. It was a hard bargain to be sure, as the 20th century history of class conflict, world wars, and the Cold War attests, but the gain in freedom was real and ultimately carried the day.
Happy Labor Day!
An earlier version of this article was first published in The Permanent Problem, the author’s newsletter.
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In this regard, I am a (Groucho) Marxist. In the movie Coconuts, Groucho, as a hotel manager, faces a group of his employees demanding their unpaid wages, which Groucho has no intention of paying:
"Do you guys want to be wage slaves?"
"No."
"Well, what is it that causes wage slavery? Wages."
The question is posed as though the answer were philosophical. It is contractual. Wage labor is freedom in the sense that the party may exit, and servitude in the sense that exit is priced. Both descriptions hold simultaneously and always have. What changes across eras is only the exit price, and that is set under conditions the worker does not participate in setting.