“Going by the Old-fashioned Rules”

Rule #9: “Any employee who smokes Spanish cigars, uses liquor in any form, gets shaved at a barber shop, or frequents pool halls or public dance halls will give his employer every reason to suspect his integrity, worthy intentions and his all around honesty.”

That’s just one of the demanding conditions of employment specified on a widely circulated list of rules that people use in order to show what life was really like in “The Good Old Days.” These lists are usually claimed to date between around 1860 to 1870. I’ve seen modern copies—never nineteenth-century ones—posted in businesses and published in articles to illustrate how tough things were for the working person way back then.

Here’s another item from a typical version of the rules list:

Rule #6: “Men employees will be given an evening off each week for courting purposes, or two evenings a week if they go regularly to church.”

The eight to ten other items specify workdays of up to thirteen hours (except the sabbath, when employees are expected to be in church), and they assign office-cleaning chores—everything from a weekly window washing to whittling ones own pen nibs.

After working a long, hard day, it was suggested that employees should spend their evenings “reading the Bible and other good books.”

What a life! It makes you glad you didn’t have to work for a living in our great-grandparents’ time under those slave-driving bosses.

But these lists cannot be proven to be a century old. They exist only in typewritten, photocopied, or professionally printed versions. Could there have been so many nearly identical sets of rules in different parts of the United States? Where, then, are the original copies of the rules?

I also wonder why Spanish cigars were considered worse than those from other places, or what was immoral about a barber-shop shave. And, if bosses gave only their male employees a night or two off for courting, how did female workers cope?

Very likely, these lists are modern inventions simply projected back in time by means of archaic-sounding language and vague references to sweatshop conditions. A genuine set of such rules from the past may exist somewhere, but I’ve not seen one.

A couple of years ago, the Deseret News in Salt Lake City published an article about school discipline of the past. The same rule list was included, said to date from 1872. The list contained the usual rules about shaves in barber shops, whittling pen nibs, church attendance, and saving for retirement. There was even a rule promising dismissal of “women teachers who marry,” which seemed a very odd attitude for a Mormon pioneer society in which marriage was strongly encouraged and polygamy was still common.

(I did not realize that schoolteachers’ marriages were once frowned upon by local authorities until I heard from Mrs. Elizabeth H. Minson of Salt Lake City. She wrote to me, describing her experience while teaching in a small town in Idaho in April 1935, when she decided to get married. She commented, “I did not go on bended knee to the school board or the principal. I really didn’t even think of it.”

But here’s what the principal said to her when she came back to teach two days after the wedding: “I came to tell you that the school board called a meeting Monday night to decide if they would allow you to continue teaching. Since there are only two months left in the school year, they decided to let you finish out the year.” Thus, Mrs. Minson learned that “my contract was not worth the paper it was written on!”)

Rule #7 in the Utah list was this: “The teacher who performs his labor faithfully and without fault for five years will be given an increase of 25 ½ [cents] per week in his pay, providing the board of education approves.” This item was identical to one in sets of rules I’ve collected that supposedly applied to office workers, except that these usually conclude, “providing profits from the business permit it.” Again—as with other details of the rules list—the merit raises of American businesses a century ago seem to have been remarkably consistent.

The writer of the newspaper feature told me that her source for the published list was the principal of an elementary school whom she had interviewed a few years earlier, when the school was being closed. The principal had shown her a school scrapbook in which the rules were pasted. The list had been submitted for the scrap-book by a former teacher.

The principal pointed out that nobody had claimed that these were rules for this particular school, but they were believed to be typical of 1870s school rules.

The reporter told me that she had made a fruitless attempt to locate the retired teacher who had provided the rules. Then—like many other writers before her—she accepted it on faith and just went ahead and published the “Rules for Teachers” in order to show, as she phrased it, “what life was really like 100 years ago.”

In doing so, I believe she was circulating a piece of modern folklore that tells us more about our view of the past than about the past itself. (The following item is a very similar document of equally doubtful origin.)