Spadeworker

1942, Lewis Mumford, article on Constance Rourke first published in Saturday Review, Volume 25, 15 August, 1942, cited in Dorothy Nyren Curley et al. (editors), Modern American Literature, New York: Frederick Ungar, 1960, p. 109, She was equally at home in music, literature, painting, drama, and the crafts; and she would run down an obscure picture, ferret out a local tale, or rummage through heaps of faded letters with the relentless patience that marks the useful spadeworker.

Like master like man. The peasants and artisans follow their neighbors; the spade-workers voting with Bismarck and Falkenstein, the hand-workers with Jacoby and Rosenkranz.

[…] potato-growing can evidently be more profitably followed by producers on a large scale, having all the advantages of labour-saving appliances, than by market-gardeners, allotment-holders, and other spade-workers on comparatively small line.

“Where I think you political spade-workers are so silly,” said the Duke, “is in the misdirection of your efforts. You spend thousands of pounds of money, and Heaven knows how much dynamic force of brain power and personal energy, in trying to elect or displace this or that man, whereas you could gain your ends so much more simply by making use of the men as you find them. […]”

Say I am less an artist than a spadeworker but one who has no aversion to taking his spade to the head of any who would derrogate his performance in the craft.