"Laboring men can perform for themselves the office of becoming their own employers"
About this Quote
Stanford’s line is a velvet-gloved pitch for self-help capitalism: the idea that the laboring man’s best exit from exploitation is to stop being labor, full stop. Coming from a railroad baron who helped build an economy on wage work, this is less an inspiring aphorism than an ideological pressure valve. If workers can be taught to dream of becoming “their own employers,” the conflict between labor and capital gets reframed as a personal project, not a structural fight.
The phrasing does a lot of quiet work. “Office” lends a bureaucratic dignity, as if upward mobility is a civic duty with a tidy job description. “Perform for themselves” makes self-employment sound like a simple reassignment of roles, not a leap that requires capital, credit, land, time, and freedom from risk - the very advantages Stanford’s class controlled. It also narrows the moral universe: the worthy worker doesn’t organize; he graduates. Collective bargaining, strikes, and political demands become almost impolite when the preferred remedy is individual entrepreneurship.
Context matters. Stanford’s career sits in the Gilded Age churn of industrial expansion, immigration, violent labor unrest, and widening inequality. Railroads were the bloodstream of that system, and their owners routinely faced public anger over monopoly power and working conditions. This sentence reads like preemptive damage control: a way to praise “laboring men” while steering them away from blaming employers. It flatters ambition, but it also launders responsibility - suggesting that if you remain a worker, you’ve declined the “office” you could have performed.
The phrasing does a lot of quiet work. “Office” lends a bureaucratic dignity, as if upward mobility is a civic duty with a tidy job description. “Perform for themselves” makes self-employment sound like a simple reassignment of roles, not a leap that requires capital, credit, land, time, and freedom from risk - the very advantages Stanford’s class controlled. It also narrows the moral universe: the worthy worker doesn’t organize; he graduates. Collective bargaining, strikes, and political demands become almost impolite when the preferred remedy is individual entrepreneurship.
Context matters. Stanford’s career sits in the Gilded Age churn of industrial expansion, immigration, violent labor unrest, and widening inequality. Railroads were the bloodstream of that system, and their owners routinely faced public anger over monopoly power and working conditions. This sentence reads like preemptive damage control: a way to praise “laboring men” while steering them away from blaming employers. It flatters ambition, but it also launders responsibility - suggesting that if you remain a worker, you’ve declined the “office” you could have performed.
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| Topic | Entrepreneur |
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