19th Century's biggest Industrial Magnate, turned Populist?

[NotATool]

$50 million, that’s $1 billion in 2005 dollar value, two wineries, a 55,000 acres wineyard, and the Palo Alto stock farm; such was the great wealth of Leland Stanford, one of the biggest names of the Gilded Age. He made a fortune as a business tycoon, he encouraged Chinese immigration as a source of cheap labor, he governed California as a Republican for 4 years, and he presided over the Central Pacific Railroad Company at one point in his life.

I found out some very interesting stuff in casual researcH:

On March 13th, 1884, Leland Stanford Jr., Leland Stanford’s only son, died of typhoid two months before his sixteenth birthday. Stanford was devastated. A few hours after his son’s death, Stanford claimed that his son told him, through a dream “father, serve humanity.”

A couple years later, stanford wrote "Co-operation of Labor", some of the things it states:

What I believe is, the time has come when the laboring men can perform for themselves the office of becoming their own employers; that the employer class is less indispensable in the modern organization of industries because the laboring men themselves possess sufficient intelligence to organize into co-operative relation and enjoy the entire benefits of their own labor.

When you see a man without employment, ... the contemplation is necessarily saddening. The fault is with the organization of our industrial systems. ... The hirer of labor uses other men in the employed relation only to the extent that his own wants demand. Those therefore, who having productive capacity, remain in poverty, belong to the class who constitute the surplus over and above the numbers required to satisfy by the product of their labor the wants of the employer class. The numbers belonging to this surplus class would be constantly diminished, and would eventually disappear under the operation of the co-operative principle.

Stanford even founded Stanford University with hopes of it extending his vision of a cooperative society!

Wow! Hopefully I am not the one absolutely amazed by this.

 

[theotherguy]

sounds a bit like Marx.

 

[gick]

Sounds a bit like the philanthropists who ran mills and factories in victorian Britain. People like John Cadbury would provide housing, schools and hospitals for their workers. It was a great system - the businessmen would have a ready source of labour and a market, and the workers would enjoy a standard of living that was very high for the time. Its a pity things don't work like that today....

 

[Solaris]

Co-operative buissness's are the way forward, the workers must seize the tools of production for themselves.

 

[kirovman]

Co-operative buissness's are the way forward, the workers must seize the tools of production for themselves.

You sound as though you were abused down a coal mine before by the Fat Cats.