Sovereignty, Entrepreneurship, and the American Spirit

What Our Ancestors Did

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[AUDIO] Reject the American Dream, Embrace the American Spirit

One reason the American Dream is so pernicious as a concept is what it codifies as being stereotypically “American”. No, not materialism or consumerism. Having a job.

That concept was an outgrowth of the “American Dream’s” development in the highly regimented, conglomerated, and corporatized 1950s. Everyone—or so it seemed—came back from the war and got a job at some factory or office, and then was happy enough living in the suburbs. Perhaps they went to college on the GI Bill to get a better job, or joined a union to get a more stable job. Maybe they even became an executive!

The problem is that such a “dream” would have been remarkable to any white, Heritage American of the pre-Depression period. Sure, the immigrants typically had jobs. Carnegie’s steel mills employed Hungarians to shovel coal,¹ JP Morgan’s coal mines in Appalachia employed freedmen and migrants to cart it around in terrible conditions, and Irish or Chinese day laborers built the railroads that carried that coal and the products it made around the country.² Such was typical of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and part of the accepted—if also somewhat disdained—order of things.

But that’s not what Americans whose family lines were here for the Revolution or who arrived shortly afterward got themselves up to. They worked—and worked incredibly hard, it should be noted—but for themselves, not others. When they did have a job, it was a temporary thing that enabled them to build capital so they could strike out on their own.³ Englishmen, Scots, and Scots-Irish never saw it as a permanent thing, and would have been horrified at the idea that a lifetime in thrall to a boss was a desirable outcome. The American Spirit was a spirit of independence—personal as well as political—the economic manifestation of which was self-employment or capital ownership that allowed for the employment of others.

And so when the 19th century became the 20th, about 50% of Americans were still self-employed or employers.⁴ Even that understates things significantly, as much work not counted as being self-employed would generally qualify as being self-employed in a contractor role today.

Take coal mining. While carting the coal around was hellish and poorly paid wage work left to generally non-Britannic employees, the actual mining of coal was relatively well-paid piece work. The miners showed up in the morning, mined an agreed-upon amount of coal for a fair piece rate (when their day rates are translated into ounces of gold, they generally earned annually somewhere around $100,00 in today’s inflated currency),⁵ and generally left in the mid-afternoon when they were done. It was tough and sometimes dangerous, but they were independent men earning a good living who directed themselves while on the job, set their own pace, developed their own skills, and worked as they saw fit. They weren’t the stereotypical wage slaves of the period, didn’t really go on strike, and saw themselves both as earning a good living and being relatively independent. They were also all mostly of English descent, particularly from the Cornwall region, which has a long history of mining. This was very different from the other jobs in the mines, which paid little, were more dangerous, had far worse hours, and were done by other ethnicities. These are typically the “striking miners” of the period, at least in America, and weren’t really miners.

Such was characteristic of the Heritage American types. They would work themselves to the bone, but were exceedingly unwilling to do wage work or be someone else’s employee. Even if it meant making less and taking more risk—which is typically the case, at least in the short term, with self-employment—Americans who arrived from Britain preferred independence to wage work throughout our history. Such was integral to the American Spirit, as I’ll discuss below.

And then the “American Dream” mythos and the sort of society that led to it destroyed that, and only 7% of Americans were self-employed or employers by the late 1970s.

As a result of that, we’ve seen a gradual bending of the will of the American people to the desires of the state and the corporations that back it. Independent men, great and small alike, can and will resist a regime. Those employed by the various tentacles of the regime generally don’t, or at least don’t do so in the open—as we’ve seen throughout the now years-long cancellation saga.

Remember Who You Are

Such was on my mind as I have read about Colonial Virginia for my Old World Show history videos on it, particularly episodes like those on Bacon’s Rebellion or John Rolfe that cover the period before the rise of slavery.

America was born in Virginia, and it only came about because both indentured servants and men of means arrived in the colony so that they might have an eventual chance at independence. Whether indentured servants barely clinging on to life in a desperate hope of making it through the Seasoning period and to their 50 acres, or relatively prosperous merchants like the Lees, Carters, and Byrds arriving with a bit of capital and using it to amass great fortunes, they arrived in the hope of becoming independent. They struggled mightily so that they could be their own men rather than somebody else’s.

And to do so, they braved great dangers and privations. First was the months-long journey by sea that often ended in disaster, as was the case with John Rolfe’s family. Then came arrival in Virginia itself, which was no easy or pleasant thing: roughly 80% of arrivals died within the first year or so from the bugs, fevers, climate, and work. And, of course, there were the “merciless Indian savages” with whom they were in a near-perpetual state of race war until the late 17th century. All for the chance at a farm—not a job. They could have that back home.

Minus the Indians and particularly the malarial hell that was Jamestown, this attitude and spirit continued to characterize America for many years on. The Mellon family is a tremendous example, as David Cannadine covers so well in Mellon: An American Life.

Thomas Mellon’s parents were Scots-Irish weavers with little to their name other than a desire to escape the precarious yoke of employment in a dying Irish town. So they accumulated what little they could, sailed for America, and bought a farm near some other family members—Thomas’s grandfather had come over a few years before. That generation and the next worked at a feverish pace to rise above being members of an already dying yeoman class, eventually getting one nostril above the water, then another, then their full heads, as they used prudence and thrift to accumulate the origins of a great fortune. By Andrew Mellon’s day, the family was primed for immense success in banking, industry, and real estate. But at each step along the way, they were propelled forward by a drive greater than that of riches. They wanted to become independent, to become sovereign.

Though the Mellons were more successful than most, they were by no means alone. What they represented was the American Spirit as recognized in North and South alike, though in various way—using self-employment, diligence, thrift, and familial nepotism to become independent.

Sovereignty and Independence

That has been on my mind since I read this post on X⁶ from my friend The Black Horse, who was posting about the job market and entrepreneurship:

The reality is that the jobs market is broken and will not serve Zoomer men. You can cry about that, you can laugh in the face of dispossessed Zoomers - none of that matters. The only way a solution is formed is through a culture of entrepreneurship.

He is correct. What’s more, all Americans born before FDR tried to destroy the country would recognize why he is correct: entrepreneurship is not just the path to riches, though it can be for a special few, but is the path to the independence and sovereignty that once lay at the root of what it meant to be an American. Such remains the case, and is of immense political importance.

Independence and Sovereignty Created America? Yes.