Mark, J.J.: I share Mark’s worry that the U.S.A. will be spiritually poorer, in an important way, if we lose the notion that is is socially good for well-born people to do dirty menial work at some point in their lives. And I agree with Mark that we’d be losing that notion a lot less quickly–likely not be losing it at all–if not for uncontrolled illegal immigration.

If my son were to tell me, at age 19, that he had two options for summer employment, an internship at Goldman Sachs or a spell in a logging camp in the remote northwest, I’d beg him to accept the second. And this would be un-Roveian of me, since his chances of a cushy & lucrative Wall Street job after graduation would be diminished thereby. I’d beg anyway, since I think the second option would do far more to make him a man than would the first. I have actually worked on Wall Street alongside summer interns. Nice kids–every one of whom would have been much improved by a few weeks’ logging, dishwashing, or stacking shelves.

Rudyard Kipling thought so highly of this principle he wrote a novel about it: Captains Courageous.

In Hedrick Smith’s 1976 book The Russians, Smith’s portrait of the Brezhnev-era USSR includes a scene where, after an official banquet, some apparatchik stands up and makes a speech thanking the organizers and the Party for making the event possible. Delivering a response, Smith suggested that thanks were also due to the cooks, waiters, bartenders, and kitchen staff, who had also contributed to the evening’s pleasure. This suggestion was greeted with a baffled silence from the nomenklatura present. Waiters? Kitchen staff? Who cared about them?

Smith’s point was to note the gulf of indifference that had opened up between the people who ran the Worker’s State, and the actual workers. He came from an older generation of Americans.

Those nomenklatura would be right at home in today’s Washington, under any administration–certainly under this one.

Interested to hear of your kitchen work experiences, J.J. From my own adventures in that line I can report that NY-area kitchen help in 1973-74 was around 40 percent African American, 40 percent Puerto Rican, 20 percent other. I was only once in a kitchen where no-one else spoke English–the cafeteria of Charles Pfizer & Co. in NY city.