To understand America's insatiable need for labour in the seventeenth century, we need to start with a book. A perfectly innocent, well-meaning book, but whose fatal flaw led to a great deal of largely unnecessary work in the early years of colonisation.
The book in question was written by an Englishman of great ambition named William Humblebottom. Seeing the growth of migration to the New World, he reasoned that settlers must be in dire need of guidance - a ready market for the world's first self-help book. Despite never having travelled more than 10 miles from London, he endeavoured to publish a book to meet this demand: the aptly-named "100 Essential Items of Advyce, Comendations & Tips for a Traveller to thee NEW WORLD (number 11 will SHOCK you!)".
Humblebottom's book was a literary sensation, and many copies were given as gifts to those who embarked on the dangerous voyage to the New World, often lovingly enscribed by those they left behind. Soon, the book acquired an amazing reputation as a source for living life as a colonist, and many travellers swore by its contents. It reached the stage that by about 1640, it was considered absolutely essential that all of its suggestions be followed to the letter, such was the faith that colonists had come to have in its precepts. Now, to be fair to Humblebottom, the advice was actually quite good for the most part, despite his lack of any actual knowledge of the new colonies - it's hard to go wrong with suggestions like "Swimme nott for ane hour after feasting, lest ye get cramps". Yet neither he nor anyone else foresaw the calamity that would stem from a tiny printer's error in the third edition, in an otherwise unremarkable section on the best way to despose of plague-ridden corpses. While Humblebottom had intended to suggest that the settlers 'build a pyre, amid a clearing of the forest', the third edition instructed settlers to 'build a pyramid'.
Even then, this might not have been a huge issue, except that the third edition reached America jus as concerns about disease started to skyrocket among the colonists after a particularly virulent bout of plague killed up to a fifth of the entire population. Colonists were not only primed to discover new ways of dealing with future outbreaks, it was also clear that the original editions of 100 Essential Items did not provide foolproof advice for dealing with disease. So, the new edition - with its radical new approach to plague management - was immediately adopted ahead of its somewhat more sensible precursors. In short, the well-known American mania for pyramids had been born.
Now, I don't need to tell you that building a pyramid is labour-intensive. What may surprise you is just how many pyramids were actually built in the seventeenth century, as surprisingly few have survived to this day. Contemporary travellers noted that any settlement of any size had its own pyramid - usually the largest structure in town by a considerable margin. The largest towns, such as Boston, had pyramids that rivalled those of the Maya, though not quite on the same scale as those of the Aztecs. Some historians estimate that the labour resources devoted to pyramid building were roughly the same as those devoted to agriculture. Others even go so far as to claim that this represents the first, and to date only, effort to provide the American population with universal healthcare. Even if we don't allow this kind of revisionist claim, it's still easy to see just how much pyramid-building drove the high demand for labour in colonial America.
Nowadays, you can hardly spot any relics of the golden age of American pyramid-building. Many were lost as settlements expanded over them, levelled to make way for new buildings, or crumbling into hillocks. Some still remain: Rhode Island's third most-visited tourist attraction is a sizeable pyramid located half an hour out of Providence. The most famous American pyramid, of course, is one we look at every day: the Philadelphia Pyramid, which still adorns the reverse of the dollar bill.
Sources
If you're interested in the labour/economics side of things, I can really recommend Roger Ramses, Building the New World: From Pyramids to Railroads (New York, 2008), which provides a broad look at early American infrastructure projects. A more polemic take is Nicola Bird's National Treasures? The Shameful Neglect of America's Built Heritage (Boston, 1991) - this book decries the willingness of municipal authorities to just build over pyramids, to the extent that so few are left. Bird has been campaigning for decades, with mixed success, to ensure that all myramids receive heritage protections.
