Success Quote by Leland Stanford

Stanford’s line has the tidy uplift of a promise and the careful engineering of a defense. “Fully persuaded” is doing quiet work here: it frames his belief as rational, settled, almost scientific, not ideological. Then comes the masterstroke of “co-operation,” a word that can mean worker solidarity or, in a businessman’s mouth, a safer, domesticated harmony between labor and capital. He’s gesturing toward the era’s hot idea of cooperatives - workers pooling resources to own the shop - while sidestepping the more confrontational language of unions, strikes, or class conflict.

The phrase “labor could become its own employer” is deliberately paradoxical. It flatters workers with the dignity of self-direction, but it also shifts responsibility onto them: if you want power, organize it yourself, don’t demand it from me or the state. That subtext matters because Stanford wasn’t a neutral philosopher of work. As a railroad magnate and one of the “Big Four” behind the Central Pacific, he accumulated wealth through a system built on harsh labor conditions and intense labor-management conflict, including anti-Chinese agitation that many industrialists exploited politically.

So the quote functions as a pressure-release valve: it acknowledges the moral force of working people’s aspirations while preserving the legitimacy of existing owners. It’s a vision of reform that doesn’t threaten property - entrepreneurialism for labor, not redistribution from capital. In the Gilded Age, that’s not just optimism; it’s an argument for a social order where the remedy for exploitation is always just one more dose of self-help, administered collectively.