The Out-Narrated
On why American workers stopped wanting what workers elsewhere still demand
Gary, Indiana. September 1919. The furnaces are cold.
For the first time in the history of American steel, they have been allowed to go cold deliberately. 365,000 steelworkers walked off the job in the largest coordinated labor action the country had seen at the exact moment the industrial machine was operating at full force. The strike spans fifty cities and crossed ethnic lines that the industry had spent decades exploiting as a management tool — pitting immigrant groups against each other to suppress organizing. For a moment, the extraction system that Carnegie, Frick, and their successors had built on the logic that some people produce, and others benefit faces something it had not been designed to absorb.
Organized, collective, and structural refusal. The response? The men who ran U.S. Steel understood immediately that this was not a wage dispute. It was a challenge to their order, and they responded accordingly.
The Playbook
Force was available — the National Guard, the Pinkertons, the full apparatus of state and private violence that had broken strikes before. But Elbert Gary, chairman of U.S. Steel, did not rely on force alone. He understood that suppression creates martyrs, and martyrs create movements. Breaking the strike meant discrediting the strike’s leadership.
The perfect candidate came in the form of William Z. Foster, the strike’s primary organizer. Foster had well-documented radical associations, which Gary’s publicity machine exploited by planting stories with a less than scrutinizing press, framing the workers not as employees demanding fair conditions but as agents of a foreign ideology threatening the American way of life. A labor rights argument, recast as a patriotism argument.
It worked. By September 1920 the strike was broken. Union membership in steel collapsed. The forty-eight-hour work week the strikers had demanded would not arrive for another decade and a half.
But suppression alone does not explain what happened next. Workers had been suppressed before and organized again. What the 1919 steel strike’s aftermath marks is not simply the defeat of a labor action. It marks the moment the aspiration machine and the suppression machine began operating in coordination — one breaking the immediate resistance, the other ensuring the cultural conditions for resistance were deemed unsavory and un-American.
The Machine Keeps Washing
The aspiration machine Bernays was building through the 1920s did not set out to destroy the labor movement. It didn’t need to. It simply offered a more compelling story.
The aspiration machine created the narrative that you are not a worker — you are a future owner. Your individual effort, ambition, and ingenuity are the variables that determine your outcome. The man at the top of the system is not your structural opponent. He is your aspirational endpoint. Study him. Emulate him. The distance between you and him is not a function of how the system is organized. It is a function of how hard you are willing to work.
This narrative operated alongside suppression, filling the cultural space that suppression opened. Rounding out the anti-union trifecta came the laws: Taft-Hartley in 1947 restricted what unions could do legally. Reagan firing the air traffic controllers in 1981 signaled that the state would not protect organized labor from consequences. Deindustrialization through the 1970s and 1980s dismantled the industrial base where union density had been highest. All of these are real and documented causes of the labor movement’s decline.
Together this trifecta explains why workers stopped wanting to organize. Why collective action became culturally coded as the choice of someone who had given up on individual advancement. Why the union card, which a previous generation had carried as a symbol of dignity and solidarity, became something the aspiring professional class viewed as a ceiling rather than a floor.
That shift required the steady, decades-long repetition of a story about who gets to be the protagonist.
Looking Out to Explain Within
France has advertising and the aspiration it fosters, its own manufactured consumer culture and its own mythology of individual achievement. What France did not do is allow collective action to be rebranded as the opposite of ambition.
French union membership in formal percentage terms is lower than American union membership — roughly 8 percent versus 10 percent. On that number alone, the American labor movement appears more organized. The difference is that France operates on sectoral bargaining agreements, which means union-negotiated terms cover workers regardless of whether they hold union cards. You do not need to belong to a union or pay union dues to be covered by union-negotiated protections. The infrastructure of collective bargaining extends to you by default. Collective protection does not depend on individual enrollment. It is built into the system itself.
When France’s government attempted to raise the retirement age in 1995, general strikes shut the country down. The government backed down. When pension reform returned in 2023, millions took to the streets across sustained months of protest. The French concept of acquis sociaux — social gains — treats hard-won labor protections as non-negotiable rather than perpetually subject to renegotiation. Not because French workers are more radical but because French political culture never successfully rebranded class identity as something to escape.
This distinction reveals that absence is not inevitable. If the decline of collective action were simply a function of economic development, technological change, or the natural evolution of labor markets, France and the United States would show similar patterns. They do not. The difference is cultural and political — constructed. And constructed things can be decoded and recoded.
What was constructed in America, across the decades following 1919, was a framework in which the worker who organized was implicitly someone who had stopped believing in their own potential. The worker who didn’t was aspirational. Hungry. The kind of person the system rewards.
And Here We Are
We now have the gig economy worker classified as an independent contractor — despite having no ownership stake, no negotiating power, and no protection against algorithmic termination. The aspiration machine’s contribution was making that classification feel like freedom rather than constraint. The structure came first. The story that made it acceptable came right behind it.
We also have the employee who defends the company that extracted from them — who attributes a layoff to business necessity, a pay cut to market conditions, a hostile culture to a few bad actors — and has been given no means to identify or decode the machine behind the individual event. The aspiration machine ensured that framework would not be widely distributed.
Both figures are products of the same construction. Not failures of individual perception but outcomes of a system that spent a century making collective analysis feel like a personal shortcoming.
What exists in American labor culture today is a fully furnished architecture of individual aspiration, entrepreneurial identity, and meritocratic mythology that leaves no conceptual room for collective action — because it has already explained away the conditions that make collective action necessary.
The machine didn’t wash away the need for resistance. It made resistance itself seem dirty.
The France comparison opens into a conversation larger than a single installment can hold — the relationship between political culture, historical memory, and labor is one I will be returning to on the podcast, where the format allows for the kind of extended structural analysis this topic warrants. More on that soon.
Next Sunday we arrive at the aspiration machine’s most sophisticated evolution — prestige television, the anti-hero, and the weekly practice of finding a destructive protagonist not just tolerable but compelling.
More next Sunday.
Further Reading
The Meritocracy Myth — Stephen J. McNamee and Robert K. Miller Jr.
The Tyranny of Merit — Michael J. Sandel
Propaganda — Edward Bernays
A People’s History of the United States — Howard Zinn
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