JW Powell and Wallace Stegner

"Beyond the Hundredth Meridian" is a biography on legendary John Wesley Powell (also, Wiki link) by the legendary Wallace Stegner (also, Wiki link). A must read book, has some paragraphs, where Stegner quotes Powell; and is pretty relevant why an ordinary construction workman’s life could be as important.

As following –

By the division of labor men have become interdependent, so that every man works for some other man. To the extent that culture has progressed beyond the plane occupied by the brute, man has ceased to work directly for himself and come to work directly for others and indirectly for himself. He struggles directly to benefit others, that he may indirectly but ultimately benefit himself. This principle of political economy ... must be fully appreciated before we can thoroughly understand the vast extent to which interdependence has been established. For the glasses which I wear, mines were worked in California, and railroads constructed across the continent to transport the product of those mines to the manufactories in the East. For the bits of steel on the bow, mines were worked in Michigan, smelting- works were erected in Chicago ... Merchant houses and banking houses were rendered necessary. Many men were employed in producing and bringing that little instrument to me. As I sit in my library to read a book, I open the pages with a paper cutter, the ivory of which was obtained through the employment of a tribe of African elephant hunters. The paper on which my book is printed was made of the rags saved by the beggars of Italy. A watchman stands on guard in Hoosac Tunnel that I may some time ride through it in safety. If all the men who have worked for me, directly and indirectly, for the past ten years, and who are now scattered through the four quarters of the earth, were marshaled on the plain outside of the city, organized and equipped for war, I could march to the proudest capital of the world and the armies of Europe could not withstand me. I am the master of all the world. But during all my life I have worked for other men, and thus I am every man's servant ; so are we all — servants to many masters and masters of many servants. It is thus that men are gradually becoming organized into one vast body-politic, every one is striving to serve his fellow-man and all working for the common welfare. Thus the enmity of man to man is appeased, and men live and labor for one another ; individualism is transmuted into socialism, egoism into altruism, and man is lifted above the brute to an immeasurable height...

After this note, Wallace categorically states –

He (JW Powell) did man more honor than he deserved. Not everyone was yet willing, at least in 1878, to work for the common welfare or even agree what the common welfare was. Not everybody in the west, not everybody in congress.