{"id":1530,"date":"2026-07-23T20:44:17","date_gmt":"2026-07-23T20:44:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1530"},"modified":"2026-07-23T20:44:17","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T20:44:17","slug":"how-office-work-became-part-of-the-american-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1530","title":{"rendered":"How Office Work Became Part of the American Dream"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through <\/em>The Atlantic\u2019s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n

Read more The Fear of Missing \u2018The Odyssey\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

One of the most gruesome murders in 19th-century America happened in a New York City office, just across the street from city hall. In 1841, Samuel Adams, a printer of no apparent relation to the famous Revolutionary, paid a visit to John Colt, the author of a popular bookkeeping manual and brother to a famous gunmaker. Adams had gone to see Colt about the $1.35 he believed he was due. In the argument that ensued, it\u2019s not clear why Colt reached for a hatchet\u2014he claimed self-defense\u2014but he did, and he used it to bludgeon Adams to death. To hide the deed, Colt cleaned up the blood, stripped the corpse, and stuffed it into a large wooden crate in the room. The next day, he had the crate loaded onto a ship bound for New Orleans. The stinking body was soon discovered in the hold, and Colt was arrested not long after that.<\/p>\n

Twelve years later, in 1853, Herman Melville was still thinking about the murder. Curiously, his sympathies rested with the killer\u2014the man he called \u201cthe hapless Colt\u201d in his great tale of office work and alienation, \u201cBartleby, the Scrivener.\u201d The story\u2019s narrator theorized that the crime would not have happened if the men had met anywhere but in an office. It was that setting, \u201centirely unhallowed by humanizing domestic associations,\u201d that drove Colt to such \u201cirritable desperation.\u201d<\/p>\n

What is it about the office? From its beginnings, it\u2019s been a place of anxiety and conflict, if not usually of the murderous variety. It was, in Melville\u2019s time, a novel space born out of the growing scale of capitalism. Industrial production, steam-powered transportation, and ever more trade required a new realm of work managing and tracking the massive volumes of information being produced. Young people, mostly men from the countryside, flooded into cities to meet the demand, and perhaps to make something of themselves. They kept accounts, tracked commodities, copied correspondence, and recorded legal documents. In the process, they complained a good deal about this tedious and odd kind of work, even as it became a pillar of modern economic life.<\/p>\n

In the 19th century, \u201cclerks\u201d quickly became a sizable portion of the urban workforce (already the third-largest category of laborers in New York by 1855). Writing in The Atlantic<\/i> in 1861, Thomas Wentworth Higginson explained the attendant shift in human labor concisely: \u201cAll hand-work is constantly being transmuted into brain-work.\u201d In a world that had long equated labor with the physical act of making things, such a shift was seen as not terribly manly, and potentially dangerous to society as a whole. In an essay endorsing a robust program of \u201cgymnastics\u201d for clerks, Higginson lamented that these \u201cdandies of the desk,\u201d these \u201cartisans of the brain,\u201d would wither away, creating a nation of weaklings.<\/p>\n

But the problem went beyond the body. Repetitive mental work in such unhallowed spaces also punished the mind and the soul. After sitting all day, Higginson said, the average clerk \u201cleaves his place of business at nightfall with his head a mere furnace of red-hot brains and his body a pile of burnt-out cinders.\u201d Not everyone went slowly insane under such circumstances, as Bartleby does in Melville\u2019s story, but the experience was disorienting all the same. The misery of what Higginson described as \u201cover-writing one\u2019s self\u201d was not just a literary idea; as the scholar Thomas Augst has shown, the diaries of this first generation of clerks record a similar sense of self-negation. \u201cEverything is at its highest pitch of dullness. No life in anything, but all seems as inanimate as lifeless matter,\u201d one entry states.<\/p>\n

Read more Is the Age of Reading Over?<\/a><\/p>\n

The inefficiencies of early office work drove developments in information technology and modern management practices. Adding machines, cash registers, mimeographs, punch cards, and eventually computers maximized productivity while creating stricter office systems and carefully prescribed processes. Beginning in the late 19th century, the office also produced a new gender division of labor, as more of the repetitive work\u2014typing, filing, stenography\u2014fell to a secretarial class of women with limited prospects for advancement.<\/p>\n

The quiet struggles of the office never quite went away. The modern capitalist economy continued to expand, and the machines and systems developed to manage it all didn\u2019t reduce the work: Generating and processing more information seemed to only generate more information to process. In Sinclair Lewis\u2019s 1917 novel The Job<\/i>, the heroine, Una, sees it all quite plainly. \u201cShe knew that the machines were supposed to save work,\u201d Lewis wrote. \u201cBut she was aware that the girls worked just as hard and long and hopelessly after their introduction as before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although many workers chafed against the confines of office life, demand for these jobs only grew. For men, what we now call white-collar work has become the route to social mobility, affluence, and a measure of status. For women, despite the exploitation and the very real limits on advancement they have faced, office work has offered them more financial independence and public standing than ever available before. Today, the white-collar workplace is often seen as the most reliable pathway to middle-class comfort and standing.<\/p>\n

This model of progress was evident even in the games played at the time. In 1889, Parker Brothers released the board game Office Boy, which had a simple premise: You began on the margins, with one small act of initiative\u2014Apply for Situation as Office Boy<\/span>\u2014and moved toward the center, Head of the Firm<\/span>. Positive qualities\u2014promptness, diligence, cheerfulness\u2014sped up your ascent through the ranks; negative ones\u2014laziness, dissipation, late mornings\u2014slowed it down. The lesson was plain. Your future was in your hands, and with a little bit of luck and pluck and a good roll of the dice, you just might be the boss.<\/p>\n

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When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/em>The Atlantic.<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n

Read more Gen Z\u2019s \u2018Jolene\u2019 Is Here<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the 19th century, \u201cartisans of the brain\u201d flooded to white-collar jobs to prove themselves, but found it wasn\u2019t that easy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1529,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-time-travel-thursdays"],"yoast_head":"\nHow Office Work Became Part of the American Dream - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1530\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How Office Work Became Part of the American Dream - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In the 19th century, \u201cartisans of the brain\u201d flooded to white-collar jobs to prove themselves, but found it wasn\u2019t that easy.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1530\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-23T20:44:17+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1530#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1530\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"How Office Work Became Part of the American Dream\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-23T20:44:17+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1530\"},\"wordCount\":1035,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1530#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/59aee0ac9433b4680fc2c25f5d7140b0.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Time-Travel Thursdays\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1530#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1530\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1530\",\"name\":\"How Office Work Became Part of the American Dream - 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