About Those ‘Manly’ Jobs

There was more heavy industry than you might expect in Lubbock, Texas, in the 1970s and 1980s, when I was growing up there. It was pretty unglamorous stuff: things related to cotton processing, a dog food plant, etc. The crown jewels were a Frito-Lay factory, which could smell really good or really … not good … depending on what was being made at the time, and a Texas Instruments home-computer factory, which produced the once-ubiquitous TI99 at a rate of 5,000 a day. 

Horace was a family friend who had one of those “good factory jobs” we get to hear so much about right now. He was a supervisor at a cotton gin, where he was found dead and spectacularly mutilated one evening. As best as anybody could tell, he’d made the mistake of trying to do something to a piece of equipment while wearing a necktie, which got caught in the gears, twisting until it strangled him to the point of unconsciousness, after which he was pulled into the machinery. (I would have been about 10 years old at the time, and my memory of events surely is not perfect.) Cotton gins are still pretty dangerous places: In October 2020, an explosion at a cotton gin in Ackerly, Texas, seriously injured three people; the next day, a worker died a fairly horrible death at a Lubbock County gin when he was accidentally buried under a mountain of cotton seed. 

In the movies, cowboys die in gunfights; in real life, they die in work-related accidents. 

Where I am from, you don’t call yourself a “cowboy” unless that is your actual profession, and mine is far from that. But I have done a bit of work on ranches and farms, mainly as an occasional day laborer in my teens and early 20s, and that kind of work is a lot more dangerous than the pastoral fantasies of the suburban mind would imagine. Two or three Americans die every week, year in and year out, in tractor accidents. You are a little more likely to suffer an accidental death working on a farm (20.2 fatalities per 100,000 workers annually) than serving in the military (19.1 per 100,000). Loggers are accidentally killed on the job at about five times the rate of U.S. military personnel. Meat in particular is a tough business: “two amputations a week.” Jobs on farms and ranches come with an accidental death rate 10 times the national average. When Waylon and Willie sang about the cowboy who’ll probably just ride away “if he don’t die young,” they were speaking the truth. 

(Yes, I know: Ed Bruce originally recorded “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”)

The term “factory farm” is meant as opprobrium, but the fact is that modern farms and modern factories have a lot in common. Illegal immigrants are a much smaller share of the agricultural work force than most people imagine (most end up in large metro areas and are more commonly found in construction and in lower-wage jobs cleaning hotel rooms and washing dishes; less than 5 percent work in agriculture) because modern farming is much more capital-intensive and much less labor-intensive than agriculture was a generation or two ago. In the Texas Panhandle, it is not uncommon to meet very successful farmers who own only a small part of the land they farm, who instead of real estate have their money tied up in high-tech harvesting equipment. You don’t find a lot of illegal immigrants operating multimillion-dollar stables of farm equipment for the same reason you don’t find a lot of them working as commercial airline pilots. While we do have some high-touch “soft” crops that require a lot of manual labor (farms growing produce typically harvested by hand, such as tomatoes, are where you’ll most often encounter illegal farmworkers), the economic value of U.S. agriculture comes in large part from a relatively small number of highly mechanized commodity crops: cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans, etc. Modern cotton and corn farmers are a lot more like factory managers than homesteaders. 

My own humble jobs were mostly of a less-dangerous variety: I moved furniture, clerked at a 7-Eleven, and cooked and cleaned at a Burger King. These were not terrible jobs. (Telemarketing was one of two really terrible jobs I’ve had, and the other was working at the Bucks County Courier Times, where I preceded young Bob Costa by … many years.) But people got hurt from time to time, and there were other varieties of unpleasantness. Tell people you worked in fast food and they’ll want to hear about gross food-handling shenanigans, of which I am happy to say I saw very little at Burger King, where my coworkers were in the main respectful and responsible when it came to the customers’ food. But there was a reason I was required to wear a whole head-to-toe plastic suit with a face shield when I broke down and cleaned the flame-broiler at night. 

Bob Woodward’s Fear reports an amusing and illuminating exchange between Donald Trump and Gary Cohn, his chief economic adviser in his first administration:

“Mr. President, can I show this to you?” Cohn fanned out the pages of data in front of the president. “See, the biggest leavers of jobs—people leaving voluntarily—was from manufacturing.”

“I don’t get it,” Trump said.

Cohn tried to explain: “I can sit in a nice office with air conditioning and a desk, or stand on my feet eight hours a day. Which one would you do for the same pay?” Cohn added, “People don’t want to stand in front of a 2,000 degree blast furnace. People don’t want to go into coal mines and get black lung. For the same dollars or equal dollars, they’re going to choose something else.”

Trump wasn’t buying it.

Several times Cohn just asked the president, “Why do you have these views?”

“I just do,” Trump replied. “I’ve had these views for 30 years.” 

“That doesn’t mean they’re right,” Cohn said. “I had the view for 15 years I could play professional football. It doesn’t mean I was right.”

But Trump is stuck. Last week, he said: 

One thing I learned about the coal miners is that’s what they want to do. You could give them a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and a different kind of a job and they’d be unhappy. They want to mine coal, that’s what they love to do.

The difference between a Fifth Avenue penthouse and a blue-collar job is that Donald Trump has had a (ghastly) Fifth Avenue penthouse but never has been within smelling distance of a blue-collar job. (Before you send me that email tut-tutting that Trump’s apartment was not actually a penthouse—please don’t bother, and see below.) People who work in coal mines do not, for the most part, dream of having their children work in coal mines. They don’t write gut-wrenching songs about how much they love mining coal and hope that they never have to do anything else–they write gut-wrenching songs about getting out. 

We don’t have many coal mines where I’m from—we have cotton farms. My father, his sister, and their mother picked cotton in the 1940s and 1950s—after school for the kids, after another job for her—and I guarantee you that none of them ever had a good word to say about picking cotton. They lived on beans and cornbread and the occasional hamburger not because this was an authentic “real American” diet but because it was all they could afford. They lived in a house with no indoor plumbing. They went shoeless for part of the year. When I hear rich dorks like Scott Bessent sneer about low-priced imports—“Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream”—I want to pull their $2,500 John Lobb oxfords off their soft little feet and shove them down their goddamned throats. Trump and the rest of these idiotic little fantasists don’t know the first thing about that kind of life and that kind of work. It’s no more real to them than the hardscrabble lives in the novels of Émile Zola or Charles Dickens, not that Trump has ever read a book. 

(And don’t tell me that he’s getting inside info from hillbilly whisperer J.D. Vance. As Vance reports in his own memoir, he grew up in a household with an income exceeding $100,000—back in the 1990s, when that meant something. His mother was an educated professional—a nurse, not a line worker in a garment factory. His problem wasn’t that his family was poor—his problem was that his father abandoned him and his mother was a drug addict.) 

If you want that postwar, golden age standard of living, you can have it—cheap. You can buy a little house like the one my parents lived in—and both the houses on either side of it, too—for less than the price of a really nice pickup. If you want to eat like they ate, you can probably get by on less than $100 per head in the monthly food budget, and even have it delivered—Jeff Bezos is ready when you are. Cornmeal is about 80 cents a pound if you buy in bulk. You won’t need to add any oil–you’ll save the grease from your hamburgers and bacon in an old coffee can. 

Much of Texas was still pretty rustic when my parents were growing up, but they did have paved streets and sidewalks. Do you know how hot those get in the summer? You know what those children—those children who worked in cotton fields—really could have used? Some shoes that didn’t cost their parents a whole week’s grocery money. 

There is a lot of stupid talk about how the kind of jobs these nostalgists want to bring back are “manly.” And Trump himself is very big on masculine archetypes: 

I didn’t know either of my grandfathers very well. One had an industrial job, working as a groundskeeper at a petroleum plant in a company town that no longer exists, Phillips, Texas. Eventually, he became a supervisor, which was a step up, economically and socially. What that means is that he didn’t have air conditioning but did own cufflinks. (I wear his from time to time.) The other one held traditional blue-collar jobs, too, and … moved his family to a new town in the middle of the night because he probably would have been arrested if not lynched, and not without reason, if he’d stayed where he was. (Long story. I’ll tell you about it, someday.) They both did old-fashioned work, knew how to plow a field, that sort of thing. 

And if I had to say who was the more manly, I’d say: the one who didn’t let his children go without shoes. 

Because of the kind of life I’ve had and my background, people have at times tried to get me to position myself as a spokesman for the white working class, to be a kind of tribune or mascot. I’ve refused to do so, for many reasons. For one thing, I’m not a very good representative of that class of people, or of any class of people. It isn’t necessarily a boast to think of yourself as sui generis. Part of it is generational and geographic: If you really want to know the roots of that world, you’d do better to consult someone who grew up in the 1940s in a more rural area, not someone who grew up in the 1970s in a college town about the size of Des Moines. A few weekends here and there and the odd job notwithstanding, I am a generation removed from farm and factory work: My mother was a secretary at a college, and her husband (she had a few of them; here I mean the relatively long-serving third) was a janitor at a high school. 

Other than my affection for the music of the era and the Reagan administration—which sometimes are in tension!—I have no nostalgia at all for the circumstances and way of life in which I was raised. And neither does anybody else who knows anything about it. My father, who did not exactly have a heart filled with grace or live a graceful life, knew enough to spit at the notion that there was something character-fortifying about the laborious poverty in which he had been raised—he was deformed by it, and, whether he intended to or not, he passed on some of that deformity. 

“Oh, but what we want isn’t laborious poverty!” our populist friends will say. They’ll say they want the labor without the poverty—not knowing, because they have never been made to learn, that those are not two entirely separate things. There have never been rich coal miners for the same reason there have never been rich people picking cotton. People do those jobs because they do not have a lot of other choices. Americans have lots of choices–one of the man nice things about being a rich country. 

The real Founding Fathers of our country were, of course, the people we call the pilgrims. They believed that the good life was to be found in contemplation and Christian community, and that these things were enabled—and fortified—by prosperity. Do you know what they did in 1627? They negotiated a trade deal with the Dutch colonists down the road in New Amsterdam, of course. They knew where prosperity comes from, because they had landed on the rocky shores of Massachusetts in the winter and had watched half of their party die trying to scratch a living out of the ground while rapidly depleting the supplies they had brought with them. They didn’t believe in autarky. They believed in thrift and trade, and they believed in being useful. 

It took their descendants a long time to make themselves rich enough to be this stupid. 

And Furthermore … 

Keith Kellogg, Trump’s man in Ukraine, is drinking the same Kool-Aid (vodka-fortified, I suppose) as the rest of the administration, and recently suggested that the country be carved up like postwar Germany. One could make a very long list of adjectives beginning with the letter i: insulting, ignorant, imbecilic … 

 “You could almost make it look like what happened with Berlin after World War II,” he said, “when you had a Russian zone, a French zone, and a British zone.” The Kremlin insists that Ukraine is run by a Nazi regime, and Kellogg implicitly endorses the view. 

Ukraine is a Ukrainian zone. If you’re looking for a Russian zone, try the Oval Office. 

Economics for English Majors

Did anybody ask the oil guys whether they thought “Drill, baby, drill!” was a good idea? Apparently not. 

The most pro-energy administration you ever saw is about to wreck the U.S. oil and gas sector, whose output will be in much less demand if there is a worldwide economic slowdown caused by an incredibly stupid—and completely unnecessary—trade war.

Words About Words

A penthouse is a separate structure built on the roof of a building. It is not simply the top apartment or—contra the salesmen of Manhattan—an apartment on the top floor. A proper penthouse is set back from the façade of the main building. Penthouses are not all that common, but every building has a top floor. 

Different words for different things. 

That which is sui generis is in a category of its own. “In a class of its own” sounds like praise, and it usually is praise, but lots of things are in classes of their own. AIDS, for example, was in a category of its own as a universally fatal sexually transmitted disease. (Among the many miracles of our time, we should count advances in the treatment of HIV as a testament to human achievement.) We tend to think of Adolf Hitler as in a class of his own, though I’d argue that he wasn’t. Like unique, sui generis is a binary, yes-or-no proposition: Nothing is a little bit unique or extremely sui generis. 

The above reminds me: It is a typographic convention to put foreign words and phrases into italics; another convention puts titles, including those of legal cases, into italics; a third convention demands the use of roman type instead of italics for words that would be in italics in normal circumstances but also are in an italicized title, hence Roe v. Wade, with Roe and Wade in italics and v., for the Latin versus, in roman. That’s one worth keeping, I think. 

Robert Bork, if I remember correctly, said “against” instead of “versus” in conversation: “Roe against Wade,” etc. Which sounds a little weird but does avoid the typographical issue. 

Elsewhere

You can buy my most recent book, Big White Ghetto, here. 

You can buy my other books here. 

Please subscribe to The Dispatch if you haven’t. 

You can check out “How the World Works,” a series of interviews on work I’m doing for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, here. 

In Closing

All this recent talk about “manly” work reminds me of all that “alpha male” stuff you see in a certain corner of social media. I tend to think of men who describe themselves as “alpha males” like people who describe themselves as intellectuals or as famous—if you gotta tell ’em … . And it is the nearly universal experience that the sort of men who actually are impressive (to women and in general) are rarely the sort who spend their time idling in piteous little clutches strategizing about how to seem more impressive. Esse quam videri. I don’t mean this as a sneer—it seems that a big part of a whole generation of men is gripped by a kind of neurosis, men who very much want to be men of the traditional sort but are for some reason paralyzed by the conviction that they don’t know how. And when the question is how to be more traditionally manly, nobody says, “Let’s consult the former theater critic with the miniature dachshund named Pancake and the fussy English-usage obsessions and strong opinions about dupioni.” But, if you are looking for an answer, I suggest looking in Oklahoma, the land where labor omnia vincit.

Or keep dancing along to the Village People, if that’s your thing.