"When men are employed," wrote Benjamin Franklin, "they are best contented." America was one of the West's first nations where, for lack of a leisured aristocracy, everybody worked for a living.
After independence from Britain, the U.S. urban work force consisted of the gentry (merchants, lawyers, ministers), "mechanics" (carpenters, masons, shoemakers, tailors, bakers, butchers), and unskilled workers (day laborers, free blacks, and, in the South, slaves).
Because...