Well I'm glad the last 100 years of business history can be summed up with a single strawman. It's such a relief that there was no nuance or complexity in history, now I won't have to do any of that nasty "thinking".
Sarcasm aside, you present an entirely simplistic view of history perfectly tailored to the point you're trying to make. The only people who are going to believe anything you're saying are the people who already agree with you, because people tend to be less than critical when it comes to their pet theories.
As a counter-point, here are some of those grey-suited company-men from the post-Teddy Roosevelt era:
Henry Ford
Alfred Sloan
Thomas Watson
Walt Disney
Will Kellogg
Warren Buffett
William Boeing
Gordon Moore
Henry Kaiser
There are more. So what exactly is your point? There were clearly self-made men after Roosevelt. Are you arguing that there were more self-made men before Roosevelt? I'd like to see some evidence to that. Or maybe you're arguing that the general "sentiment" was against self-made men. Again, I'd like to see evidence of that, and good luck finding it. First you'll have to define just what the national "sentiment" is, then find scientific studies of people both before and after Roosevelt that tried to discern it.
I don't think he was trying to say there were fewer nouveau riche post-Roosevelt, but that there were demonized in a new way, and that that stigma didn't really fully lift until the tech boom.
He's talking about fashion and sentiment, not the actual number of entrepreneurs.
Whether they were demonized or not would require some studies as I mentioned in the last sentences of my previous post. Who demonized them? How much of the population demonized them? How strongly did people feel towards them? And how did these sentiments compare with people prior to Teddy Roosevelt?
Without answering those questions we can't rightly draw any conclusions about people's attitude towards the self-made man.
Comments
Well I'm glad the last 100 years of business history can be summed up with a single strawman. It's such a relief that there was no nuance or complexity in history, now I won't have to do any of that nasty "thinking".
Sarcasm aside, you present an entirely simplistic view of history perfectly tailored to the point you're trying to make. The only people who are going to believe anything you're saying are the people who already agree with you, because people tend to be less than critical when it comes to their pet theories.
As a counter-point, here are some of those grey-suited company-men from the post-Teddy Roosevelt era:
Henry Ford
Alfred Sloan
Thomas Watson
Walt Disney
Will Kellogg
Warren Buffett
William Boeing
Gordon Moore
Henry Kaiser
There are more. So what exactly is your point? There were clearly self-made men after Roosevelt. Are you arguing that there were more self-made men before Roosevelt? I'd like to see some evidence to that. Or maybe you're arguing that the general "sentiment" was against self-made men. Again, I'd like to see evidence of that, and good luck finding it. First you'll have to define just what the national "sentiment" is, then find scientific studies of people both before and after Roosevelt that tried to discern it.
I don't think he was trying to say there were fewer nouveau riche post-Roosevelt, but that there were demonized in a new way, and that that stigma didn't really fully lift until the tech boom.
He's talking about fashion and sentiment, not the actual number of entrepreneurs.
Whether they were demonized or not would require some studies as I mentioned in the last sentences of my previous post. Who demonized them? How much of the population demonized them? How strongly did people feel towards them? And how did these sentiments compare with people prior to Teddy Roosevelt?
Without answering those questions we can't rightly draw any conclusions about people's attitude towards the self-made man.
Does it really matter? It's not like that was the point of the article.