Even 13 years after the end of WWII, when most of the manufacturing in the rest of the world hadn't been rebuilt, we only had 30% of our workforce in manufacturing.Which is a complete non-sequitur to the discussion. Take your ritalin and read the thread again.
Listening to most protectionists, I thought a much larger % of our workers were able to drop out of high school, get manufacturing jobs and instantly buy a house, new car and support a wife and 3 kids. Now I find that only 29% of our workers were in manufacturing in 1958. Not as high as I thought, considering the anecdotes I see thrown around here.