THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE "OTHERS"

As I read the Landes passages on the Protestant Ethic and the lower classes, I recalled reading that some US farm workers had a similar attitude about life & work because when their pay was raised, they also worked fewer hours.  (I don't have the page numbers but it was from the book cited here.)  I later recalled that most of the Appalachian poor are White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant and like the English workers, they also preferred leisure to income after a certain point.  As Herman Melville pointed out, the richer folks refused to believe that the poor had made a legitimate life style choice.