Of course, Labor Day was Monday, but we were busy with the serialization of one of my somehow unpublished novels. The NEXT serialization will be a collection of long fantasy stories which was rejected several times in the 1990s by publishers who suggested the world didn’t need more fairy tales, or, if it did, did not need any from ME.
In any case, there should be time yet to show off how postcards back in the day were just as inclined to explain how dignified good honest labor was, just as my real or prospective employers always did. The golden age of postcards, remember, was also the great day of motivational poetry, and an age when writers urging you to give your job the effort it deserved could sell their pamphlets by the millions to eager readers. {postcard artists since have not neglected their historic role in promoting the proper image of labor.
Looking back, we see the worker explaining what a joy it was to be gainfully employed, to be given a chance to shove off their skills in an effort to bring a company’s ideals to fruition.
And everyone knew top management shared the concerns and worries of the rank and file. Unless everybody worked together with equal commitment and sacrifice for the success of an enterprise’s aims—be that a major manufacturing firm, a farm, or a law firm, there could be no progress or achievement.
The need for constant effort was omnipresent. The world of competition which drove innovation and production allowed for no break from giving at least one hundred percent of one’s potential to every task, mental or menial.
Vacations were accepted as a necessary evil: one did not, as mt band director often told us, drive a nail without pulling back on the hammer now and then. But the truly dedicated employee yearned not for such things. The opportunity for hard work and achievement offered by one’s employers was too exhilarating to stay away from for long.
The goal of all this labor was the culmination for which every staff member strove; small gratifications offered by idleness or freedom from labor were transitory, and counterproductive. The job was what mattered.
After all, every employee had an equal chance to achieve, through unremitting attention to work, promotion and improvement. Postcards reminded you of everything that could be learned from the “lives of great men”.
In fact what would one do with one’s life if one didn’t have the intense joy of working with your colleagues on a back-breaking, panic-inducing, sweat-producing effort? The greatest reward in life was that pat on the back from one’s superiors, and the knowledge that the constant effort had resulted in a success which you would be expected to repeat every day until finally forced into retirement. (And those editors back in the 1990s claimed I didn’t know how to write fairy tales!)
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