Linton’s Week’s long-ish article on NPR, “Lazy In America: An Incomplete Social History” (1 July 2011), does a nice job of demonstrating how the tension between being productive and industrious versus having leisure time (or how one spends his/her leisure time) has continuously been used to promulgate the idea of one type of American over another:
But always there was a parallel American voice that was alarmed by donothingness. In 1973, the rate of increase in American productivity had slowed down so much, the Department of Commerce launched a $10 million advertising campaign to encourage Americans to be more productive. “Americans didn’t get rich by goofing off,” was one of the ads.
Lady Lazy leisurely lounging.
Namely, Weeks does an nice job (in a short space) of letting us hear the official voices of American identity formation–government and the media–so as to get a sense of how direct their message of either do-more/make-more or donothingness was being wielded, at specific times, to create a national sense of “Americaness.”
What Weeks doesn’t do is indicate how much of this discourse was used to Other entire groups who were resistant to do-more/make-more ideology.* Ultimately, wanting to work less and be lazy more kept plenty of people outside of ”American” for quite some time.
___________________________
*Usually, these minority groups were resistant to 12-hour, six-day work weeks. See the rise of unions.
