Pantheon
Review by George Yatchisin
A few weeks into the oligarchical hell of “Trump II: This Time We Leave the Country Stripped on Blocks,” Adam Chandler’s 99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life can seem downright roseate in its desire to consider what work means and how we might re-invent it. One way to think of Chandler’s engaging, thought-provoking book is to compare it to a Last Week with John Oliver: your narrator/host will make some funny jokes at his own expense, will bring the receipts for all the facts and figures carefully chosen to enlighten and not overwhelm, and will follow a pattern of how did we get here/where can we go from this unappealing here. “Writing this makes me feel a bit like the most stoned kid on an ultimate Frisbee team, but America isn’t what we’re told it is,” he confesses in his intro. “I’m not saying anything that you don’t already know.”
Chandler’s false modesty aside—he tells us plenty we don’t know, or perhaps haven’t quite considered via his long-view perspective—no doubt many of us feel snookered by what he bills the “American abracadabra,” that hard work always brings big rewards. As he says, we are meant to believe “anyone who fails to make it here in the Land of Opportunity must not be trying hard enough.” But as he also points out, citing a 2022 study, “35 percent of families in the United States with full-time workers don’t earn enough to cover basic needs such as food, housing, and childcare.” (And that’s all before the current crony capitalists further strip-out Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP, and then painfully tax everyone’s necessary goods with tariffs.)
But this review is way out over its skis, something Chandler doesn’t do. He takes us through the building of the American myth, running through Columbus, the Puritans, Ben Franklin, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Frederick Jackson Turner, the Tulsa Race Massacre, Thomas Edison (the supposed utterer of his title “genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration”), to Route 66. He certainly lays out the big lie that this nation that so values work built much of its wealth on the backs of others, nailing telling facts like this one, quoting historian Tiya Miles: “The original wall for which Wall Street is named was built by the enslaved at a site that served as the city’s first organized slave auction.” He’s also sure to point out this happened well north of the Mason-Dixon.
A former staff writer at The Atlantic, and a widely published journalist, Chandler wields those skills well, finding examples of people suffering in the current economy or even oddly part of its boom—such as second-generation Indian immigrant Arshad Lasi, helping pioneer his family’s cannabis super-business in a very red Oklahoma. (We are a land of contradictions, aren’t we?) While Chandler is kind to Lasi, he does get to lash out at the state of enterprise in today’s USA. “As the average life span of businesses has grown dramatically shorter, the once-foolproof methods of success and growth have come to defy earthly logic,” he writes. “In more and more cases, a company hasn’t needed to turn a profit (see: Uber), serve its immediate community (see: Airbnb), improve its service (see: airlines), or safeguard its consumers from harm (see: social media platforms) to navigate successfully.”
The better world Chandler would like to build is all about community, and not America’s beloved rugged individualism. A good chunk of the book compares America’s attitude to work with France’s, even using the far-from-serious Netflix hit Emily in Paris as a hook—he pulls it off, partially because he takes a tour in Paris himself for more details. (And by making his own research/work/tax deduction such a lovely one, earns a huge nod from this jealous reviewer.) Turns out the French labor code has strictly legislated déjeuner; “the lunch break custom is designed to improve workers’ lives, building rapport among coworkers for creative collaboration later or, barring that, to allow workers to take some time for themselves.” As for the U.S., we learn the Chipotle in-house music curator discovered it was best to play songs with higher BPM to move customers along. We learn that even pre-Covid, 62% of Americans ate lunch at their desks.
Don’t worry, though, Chandler also goes after the current American business trend of “we’re all friends” culture, too: “Imposing a work environment in which hierarchies are intentionally obscured and natural disagreement is replaced by passive aggression feels like a cosmic felony.” The book made me feel even more justified thinking a UC chancellor can’t buy off my stagnant wages by serving me ice cream at Staff Week once a year.
Chandler’s book points toward better directions rather than being fully programmatic. In addition to his hope for more community, he makes a great case for universal basic income (UBI). Of course we’re a nation of grumblers, ever bitter someone else is getting something for free—yes, he explores the myth of Reagan’s welfare cheat mother, and its inherent racism. (Why we don’t believe it’s the super-wealthy that get the most for free I’ll never know—maybe an over-reaching Musk can finally get us past that hang-up?) But UBI also pays for work we deny is work, for as Chandler says, “About 40 million caregivers in the United States—mostly older women—provide a staggering half-trillion dollars’ worth of unpaid adult care each year.”
And, surprisingly, he makes a great case for national service. He doesn’t pen an i-dotted, t-crossed white paper, but does argue well for a year or two after high school for every American to take on “work experiences that don’t fit neatly or strategically on a résumé.” To do things for others, in community. Pointing to our “irreparably broken society” (true, that— the January 6th guy won an election), Chandler says, “These separations have collectively robbed us of a basic responsiveness to one another and a collective good; moreover, we’re in danger of losing the perspective and empathy needed to understand our problems and fix what’s broken…. And it’s why we need national service—a mechanism of renewal to pull all the disparate threads of American life together through a variety of meaningful work across the country.”
