Robert Ingersoll’s Warning to the Washington Clerk
The famous orator and freethinker warns young men against the soul-crushing nature of government bureaucracy in Washington D.C.
The following is an extract from a speech made by Bob Ingersoll: 'If there is a young man in this audience, I beg of him, never take a clerkship in the city of Washington. Don't you do it. Never do you put yourself in a position where you have to duck your head and take off your hat to everybody else. Don't put your happiness—don't put your fortune—in the power of another man's breath. You never will have any manhood; you never will have any vertebra; you never will have any real, square spunk. I beg of every young man, have the courage to take what comes, let it be feast or famine, but don't sell the gift that fortune may have in store for you for a petty salary of $60 or $70 or $100 per month. Go west! I would rather have forty acres of land and a log house with one room—yes, and the woman that I love, and some lattice-work over the window, so that the sunlight would fall checkered on the babe in the cradle—I would rather live there and die there than be a clerk of any government on earth.'
“I would rather have forty acres of land and a log house with one room... than be a clerk of any government on earth.”
Ingersoll’s 1877 critique of the 'clerkship' life captures the tension between the security of a government paycheck and the desire for autonomy—a sentiment that resonates deeply in modern Port Townsend, where the struggle to balance economic stability with the 'log house' dream remains a central civic conversation.
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