gat

Later we chatted with the lady in a quiet moment. The truck sits there eight hours a day, seven
days a week, 364 days a year (the island is warm year round). It averages 100 to 150 shrimp
sales a day, but has sold as many as 300. When the owner-proprietress isn’t there, one of her
three daughters takes over. Each is only a high school graduate. For all I know, the only thing
saleable any of them knows how to do is cook shrimp and rice, but they do that very well. The
family earns in excess of a quarter million dollars a year selling shrimp plates out of an old
truck. They have no interest in expanding or franchising the business. Another thing I noticed:
all the customers seemed pleased; many were friendly and joked with the lady, myself included.
She looked happy to be alive.
Mudsill Theory
A prophetic article entitled "The Laboring Classes" appeared in The Boston Quarterly Review in
1840 at the very moment Horace Mann’s crowd was beating the drum loudest for compulsion
schooling. Its author, Orestes Brownson, charged that Horace Mann was trying to establish a
state church in America like the one England had and to impose a merchant/industrialist
worldview as its gospel. "A system of education [so constituted] may as well be a religion
established by law," said Brownson. Mann’s business backers were trying, he thought, to set up a
new division of labor giving licensed professional specialists a monopoly to teach, weakening
people’s capacity to educate themselves, making them childlike.
Teaching in a democracy belongs to the whole community, not to any centralized monopoly, 2 said
Brownson, and children were far better educated by "the general pursuits, habits, and moral tone
of the community" than by a privileged class. The mission of this country, according to
Brownson, was "to raise up the laboring classes, and make every man really free and
independent." Whatever schooling should be admitted to society under the auspices of
government should be dedicated to the principle of independent livelihoods and close self-reliant
families. Brownson’s freedom and independence are still the goals that represent a consensus of
working-class opinion in America, although they have receded out of reach for all but a small
fraction, like the shrimp lady. How close was the nation in 1840 to realizing such a dream of
equality before forced schooling converted our working classes into "human resources" or a
"workforce" for the convenience of the industrial order? The answer is very close, as significant
clues testify.
A century and a half after "The Laboring Classes" was published, Cornell labor scholar Chris
Clark investigated and corroborated the reality of Brownson’s world. In his book Roots of Rural
Capitalism, Clark found that the general labor market in the Connecticut Valley was highly
undependable in the 1840s by employer standards because it was shaped by family concerns.
Outside work could only be fitted into what available free time farming allowed (for farming took
priority), and work was adapted to the homespun character of rural manufacture in a system we
find alive even today among the Amish. Wage labor was not dependent on a boss’ whim. It had a
mind of its own and was always only a supplement to a broad strategy of household economy.
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