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Founding Morality

Not too much fun.

Calvinist vs. Normal Folk

“Typically, workers in the first industrial factories decided when they would show up and when they would go home. Long afternoon periods of eating, drinking, and sleeping were taken for granted. And the three-day weekend was the norm. Workers in many of the first major industries were normally paid for six days of work, but on Saturday they drank beer all day while on the job. The drinking usually continued through Saturday evening and into Sunday, so that on Monday the workers were usually unable and unwilling to work. This created a wonderful but now forgotten American tradition called “Blue Monday” – a workers’ day of rest following the Lord’s day of rest. Most importantly, simply by being lazy, early American workers established the idea of the weekend. Few things bothered the Founding Fathers more than the belief that leisure was a good thing. “Of all the cankers of human happiness, none corrodes it with so silent, yet so baneful a tooth, as indolence,” Thomas Jefferson told his daughters. “Determine never to be idle.” Benjamin Franklin told Americans that they should work all hours of the day in order to be virtuous. He wrote in Poor Richard’s Almanack: “It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.” Benjamin Rush recommended the banning of all activities that led to “habits of idleness and a love of pleasure.” “