The Mudsill Theory and Karoline Leavitt

Education and manual work aren't opposed, and Republicans ought to know it.

I’ve mentioned that I’ve been helping out at an after school outreach, teaching children history and geography lessons this school year.

At the history club meeting about the Civil War, I showed the children a slideshow on Abraham Lincoln. I showed them the tiny cabin he grew up in and said that before food stamps and child labor laws, poor children like Lincoln had to work on farms instead of going to school. Most of these children are poor and on food stamps, and most were seven or eight years old. I saw their eyebrows go up.

I told them he grew up with an abusive dad and a stepmom who was kind to him, because I knew a lot of these children were growing up in difficult families and families with stepparents. Again, the eyebrows went up.

I told them that Lincoln taught himself to read and write in the evenings after work even though he was exhausted. I said that when he was a man, he couldn’t afford to go to college, so while he studied his borrowed law books, he did all kinds of manual labor jobs and worked in a general store. “If your mom or dad or any of your family work at Walmart or Kroger, they’re doing the exact same important work Abraham Lincoln did.”

After we watched part of a reenactment of Pickett’s Charge, I showed them a performance of the Gettysburg Address. But I stressed that the person reading the speech wasn’t doing it the way Lincoln did it. “People made fun of Lincoln because he had a squeaky voice and a hillbilly accent,” I said. “They thought he sounded funny. But this speech went on to be one of the most famous speeches in American history.” A lot of people in Steubenville have a particularly squeaky, Pittsburgh-flavored version of a Mountain Talk accent.

At the end, we sang “Glory, Glory Halleluiah” and the children seemed to like it.

I don’t know if I changed any minds forever, but I wanted to get through to them that Lincoln was a real American like us poor nobodies. And that any child can grow up to be a Lincoln.

There’s so much wrong with the government now that it’s hard to keep track of the scandals. But I didn’t want to let the week go by without noting that, in response to a question about the Trump Administration’s feud with Harvard, Karoline Leavitt scoffed, “The President is more interested in giving that taxpayer money to trade schools and programs and state schools where they are promoting American values, but most importantly, educating the next generation based on skills that we need in our economy and our society. Apprenticeships, electricians, plumbers—we need more of those in our country and less LGBTQ graduate majors from Harvard University, and that’s what this administration’s position is.” I don’t know what LGBTQ has to do with anything. And I think if she was better educated, she would have said “fewer LGBTQ graduate majors.” But also, Leavitt was pitting craftsmen and people who work with their hands against educated people who study books— while, at the same time, implying that plumbers and such don’t deserve an education. They should just learn their trade. Those people exist to unclog our toilets and not to read or think. Most people only need to stick to their labors, not learn things. Our economy and society depend on that.

This notion, that there always has to be a large underclass of people who aren’t well educated and just do manual work for the rest of us, is called “Mudsill Theory.” And Abraham Lincoln was adamantly against it.

I bristled yet again at what the Party of Lincoln has become.

I completely agree that our country needs lots of people who work with their hands instead of at a desk. Plumbers, construction workers, mechanics, electricians, carpenters, people who work on farms, people who know how to pave a sidewalk: these are valuable jobs, and the training they need is important training. But to set up a dichotomy that people who work with their hands don’t need an education infuriates me.

Plumbers deserve to go to college. Maybe they’re not going to Harvard, maybe the local community college, but they deserve an education. They deserve to be able to pick up a text and understand what the writer is saying. They deserve to be able to look at a piece of art and appreciate it. They deserve to know how the Constitution works, and how economics work, and how the country that depends on their labor is run. They deserve to know the difference between good and bad information. These are things every human needs and ought to have.

A child growing up in poverty deserves an education they can use to escape their predicament, whether they end up doing manual labor, or working at a desk, or both.

A squeaky-voiced person with a hillbilly accent who comes from the middle of nowhere and works the cash register at a grocery store deserves a chance to study, and to get a postgraduate education if they want, and maybe become a lawyer or even run for president. And if they don’t go to grad school or become president, they can just be an educated person working the cash register. That’s a good thing to be, and it’s good for society.

There are no mudsills in America, just human beings, all created equal with certain inalienable rights. Among these rights are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Everyone deserves an education, so that they can stay free and pursue happiness.

No one deserves to be treated as unworthy of fancy book-learning because they work a trade.

Education and manual work aren’t opposed.

The second graders know that now.

I wish the people running the country did.

( Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

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