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Vidalina Alpuerto-Abadam

abadam.vidalina@bls.gov

Vidalina Alpuerto-Abadam is an economist in the 

Office of Employment and Unemployment 

Statistics, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

No time to play in the USA?

Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream. By Benjamin 

Kline Hunnicutt, Philadelphia, PA, Temple University Press, 

2013, 250 pp., $89.50/ cloth; $34.95/ paperback; $34.95 ebook

Three hours. That’s the most time in a day John Maynard 

Keynes predicted that his grandchildren would need to work 

to live comfortably. If everyone pitches in and does their fair 

share of productive work, the economy will produce more 

than enough, Keynes reasoned, and humanity’s greatest 

dilemma will be to figure out what to do with so much extra 

time. In an earlier era, Benjamin Franklin prophesied 

likewise, except that he said 4 hours, tops. Fast forward to 

the 21st century, and such visions are much closer to reality 

among European countries such as Sweden, France, and 

the Netherlands, where the average employee works less 

than 40 hours a week, than they are in the United States. 

American busyness and chronic high levels of work-related 

stress have become news fodder of late, as the United 

States seemingly continues to earn its moniker of the most 

overworked nation among the developed Western 

countries. Despite steady advances in automation and 

technology that have raised productivity to record levels, 

Americans face what could be called a “time famine” in 

terms of leisure hours.

Several explanations have been put forward in the 

literature, ranging from economic (slow recovery from the 

recession, high unemployment, rising prices of goods and 

services, stagnant wages) to psychological (working hard is 

a badge of honor; busyness is a status symbol; work 

defines one’s identity and purpose in life; jobs are less 

routinized and more enjoyable). In Free Time: The 

Forgotten American Dream, historian Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt provides a different take. Per Hunnicutt, Americans 

have long been suffering from a “nationwide, intergenerational amnesia” and, as a result, have largely come to 

equate progress with perpetual economic growth, power, material abundance, and consumerism. Hunnicutt 

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theorizes that Americans have forgotten an important part of the American dream, Higher Progress. Hunnicutt 

adopted the term Higher Progress from the author Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas and understood it as 

referring to “extraeconomic, nonpecuniary quality of life enhancements.” For the purposes of this book, Hunnicutt 

defines it as the “democratic advance of freedom beyond political liberty and economic struggles.” He believes that 

such progress offers workers a “practical way to capture the traditional American dream and to make real the 

freedoms promised by the Declaration of Independence.” Hunnicutt wrote this book for what he felt was a 

necessary first step to reawaken the original dream, to resurrect the movement for shorter hours, and to 

reintroduce Higher Progress to mainstream consciousness.

Hunnicutt began his research to solve the busyness puzzle after stumbling upon a 1976 Monthly Labor Review

article reporting that Americans had no increase in leisure time since the Great Depression. In the intervening 

nearly 40 years since 1976, he combed the literature extensively, and at times carried out personal interviews, to 

provide a collation of “voices” from a wide range of personalities on the subject. Among those quoted in the book 

are labor leaders, workers, theologians, journalists, politicians, businesspeople, professors, and economists. 

Hunnicutt’s goal was to chronicle the rise and collapse of the shorter-hours movement amidst the key economic 

and political turning points in the United States. 

Hunnicutt posits that the “amnesia” wasn’t always there. Quite the contrary, he argues, going to great lengths to 

clarify that it was the very vision of Higher Progress that sustained workers’ campaign for shorter hours for 

decades and helped usher in the 10-hour and then 8-hour day in the 19th century. Summarizing the works of wellknown 18th century theologians, Hunnicutt traces the religious origins of Higher Progress to church sermons in the 

pre-Revolutionary American colonies, in which pastors used shortening the workweek as one of the metaphors for 

removing the curse of work dating back to biblical times. Hunnicutt differentiates Higher Progress from economic 

progress, using Whitman’s essays on stages of freedom in Democratic Vistas, a work that expresses Whitman’s 

belief that economic progress is not an end in itself, but merely a steppingstone to Higher Progress. When 

attained, Higher Progress allows an individual to spend more time with families and communities, enjoy nature and 

culture, and achieve education and enlightenment. 

Hunnicutt recounts the fight for shorter work hours, pointing out that it began as an offshoot of the Industrial 

Revolution and the ensuing laissez-faire capitalism that both interrupted the ancient work–life balance. Workers, 

including women and children, found themselves toiling under onerous factory conditions for up to 18 hours a day, 

6 days a week. To re-create the mindset that fueled the success of the 10-hour and 8-hour campaigns, Hunnicutt 

specifically targets the voices of workers, labor leaders, industrial feminists, editors, and advocates, sourced from 

newspapers, speeches, editorials, and circulars. The voices’ recurring theme was the ironic failure of the capitalist 

economy, mechanization, and modern work discipline to liberate workers from the drudgery of jobs and economic 

worries. This theme carries through to today, notes the author, with the typical workday still pegged at 8 hours and 

overworking considered acceptable, if not commendable.

In the second half of the book, Hunnicutt describes how the shorter-hours ideology of Higher Progress in the early 

part of the 20th century was eventually eclipsed by the contemporary American dream of “Full-Time, Full 

Employment,” courtesy of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt and succeeding administrations. Hunnicutt’s collection of 

excerpts from leading figures of the time provide context to just how pressing the economic and political realities 

and patriotic sentiments were during the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. In combination, these 

events sidelined the fight for leisure and replaced it with the “glorification of work.” He chronicles the paradigm shift 
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among labor leaders: instead of sticking to the century-long battle cry of “shorter hours as gateway to Higher 

Progress,” they viewed the fight for a shorter workday as secondary to retaining employment.

In the book’s conclusion, Hunnicutt acknowledges his belief in the traditional American dream and in Higher 

Progress as a better alternative than an American lifestyle that revolves around consumerism, wealth, power, and 

overwork. Nonetheless, he is objective enough to mention at least two of the arguments against the less work, 

more leisure school of thought: first, that critics view the Higher Progress ideology as quixotic and utopian because 

it runs counter to the tenets of a capitalist economy operating at full capacity and to human nature’s insatiable 

materialistic wants; second, that there is apprehension among some that a majority of people “would never make 

good use of free time” and will “always need the discipline of full-time work” to have a meaningful existence.

Hunnicutt’s arguments resonate, given the slow recovery from the 2007–2009 recession. The lack of political 

incentive to reduce working hours, and of workers to pursue such a reduction, is understandable in an environment 

preoccupied with job creation and a workforce with people bent on either keeping the job they have or looking for 

work. Still, Hunnicutt remains steadfast in his belief that no “inexorable political or economic reality” should prevent 

the nation from realizing the original American dream. He seems unwilling to accept the notion that priorities and 

rational choices are subject to change over time; in other words, he does not buy into the idea that the traditional 

American dream has become obsolete in the face of changing economic conditions. He appears to underestimate 

the fact that some people derive more happiness and freedom from work, money, and material things than they do 

from leisure. He also doesn’t factor in recent improvements, such as teleworking, that offer flexibility to workers, 

are family friendly, and eliminate commuting. Despite Hunnicutt’s dismissal of them as short-term solutions, the 

availability of these alternatives seem to imply that employers are cognizant of the negative effects of increased 

workloads and an unrestrained hard-working culture. Having these options at the workers’ disposal certainly 

should be considered bread crumbs, at least, in the right direction on the road to Higher Progress.

Hunnicutt’s supposition in the title of his book, that free time is the forgotten American dream and that Americans 

suffer from amnesia, really struck a chord with me. I particularly liked the way the early chapters are designed to 

bring readers up to speed on the seemingly abstract concept of Higher Progress. Nontechnical readers may 

initially find, as I did, that these chapters are not an easy read but are nonetheless important in laying the 

groundwork for the theme of the book.

I recommend this book highly to those looking for a fresh perspective on the longstanding issue of the work–leisure 

tradeoff. Although I found the volume dense and redundant at times, Hunnicutt’s thorough research and meticulous 

sampling of quotations serve as undeniable evidence that there once was a vision of Higher Progress that even 

the most hardcore skeptic can’t deny and that there could be one again. The book serves as a timely eye opener 

for any American worker to conduct a self-evaluation of the question “Am I living to work, or working to live?”