Analysis of The Power of Words: Documents in American History Book - Essay Example

Ideology in Words By Devangini Mahapatra Chauhan As a nation, the United s of America has paid a heavy price for attaining civilization. This seems to be the basic premise upon which author T.H Breen has built the ideologies that shapes the nation, in his book titled, The Power of Words – Documents in American History. The paper you are about to read is based on an important aspect of American history which starts just as the civil war ended in 1860. History is still often seen as the presentation of facts from the past, so that learning involves the mere memorization of the facts. What makes history so interesting and stimulating, however, are the debates that emerge over the facts. From an early stage, the middle passage inspired moral outrage among those opposed to the slave trade, who often treated it as the most horrific part of the whole slave experience. Recently some scholars have argued that such moral outrage has led to a "melodramatic" rather than a "historical" account of the middle passage. I have tried to present an argument that we need a more balanced and less moralistic account of the middle passage from the perspective of the changing values and challenges thrown up by industrialization. (Breen T. H; 1997) In the course of this paper, I have examined a plethora of facts, chosen the ones that are important, and determined their meaning. In the study of history, one has to make choices, develop explanations, and find meaning in whatever records of the past they can find. One also evaluates and challenges the choices, explanation and meanings developed by other historians. Making and debating interpretations, finding new sources, deriving new meaning from documents that others have used, all make the reading and writing of history challenging and exciting. The books used by me are in context of the documentation of various issues and acts pertaining to American history, especially in the timeframe spanning from the 1860s to the early 1900s. While Power of Words is an important piece of literature from the research and scholarly point of view that requires ample proof of issues in order to challenge the perspectives on the same, the second book we have used is Unto a Good Land by a team of highly qualified historians. This team has been led by David Edwin Harrell Jr, and Edwin S Gaustad, this book contains a narrative history of American as recorded from the first contact of this great nation with its distant European settlers, to the current situation. I have attempted to understand the uniqueness of the great American dream through an understanding of the role of religion in the social, cultural, economic and political context. It was believed that the nation had passed through perhaps the single most significant transformative period in its history by those who lived through the Civil War and Reconstruction. The great questions of slavery, sectionalism, and national supremacy that had plagued the Americans for nearly eight decades had been resolved through a combination of the force of arms and the constitutional and legal change made possible by military victory. Irrespective of the fact that most Americans believed that these issues had been permanently resolved, this period posed new challenges to American values and assumptions. Three intertwining themes define this period: (i) industrialization - the rise of the industrial economy and of accompanying issues of law, governance, and public policy; (ii) urbanization - the dramatic growth of the nations cities as focal points for population growth and demographic change, and as centers of commerce, culture, education, news, and politics; and (iii) immigration - the effects on American identity, politics, and culture of the great waves of immigration from eastern, central, and southern Europe and from Asia. The interaction of these themes added richness and complexity to late nineteenth-century American history. (Harrell et al, 2005) Even in the years before and during the Civil War, the nations growing mastery of technology had opened up vast possibilities for material success. The war dramatically confirmed that it was possible to run large enterprises (e.g., armies, transportation systems, manufacturing enterprises) on a national scale to fulfill national demand. Various technological changes came to leave a deep imprint on the lives of millions of ordinary Americans, by transforming the conditions of work and the range of available occupations. More and more Americans, faced with a choice between the always-uncertain life of farm farming and the prospect of more certain industrial employment, chose certainty and flocked to cities and towns to find work. Yet the conditions of industrial labor were often appalling, and at times life-threatening. Further, negotiations concerning salaries and working conditions were not entertained. These people slowly came to question just how wise their choice of work had been. Further, American technological and industrial growth had other social and political consequences owing to the development of the railroad, the steamship, the telegraph, and the telephone. This was followed by the linking of the nations raw materials, manufacturing centers, and markets. Further, people realized that a few well-positioned, shrewd, industrious men could build lucrative financial empires for themselves in the process of fulfilling this great national prospect. Similar realizations gave rise to great manufacturing enterprises such as United States Steel and Standard Oil. While these enterprises have been regarded as the lengthened shadow of Andrew Carnegie, in the case of U.S. Steel, or John D. Rockefeller, in the case of Standard Oil, this period was the golden era of the large-scale business corporation. Although businessmen had experimented with corporations in earlier epochs, it was between 1865 and 1900 that the business corporation became the model for how a large private organization should be run. This was also the period in which the financial component of business - providing the money to finance the development of new technologies, or the creation of new enterprises or the expansion of an existing corporation - assumed overwhelming importance. The same models of large-scale organization that made it possible to create a manufacturing corporation or a railroad corporation to serve a national market also made it possible to create large-scale financial institutions that grew to wield immense economic power in a national or even international scale. Thus, the late nineteenth century became the "Age of Capital." The revolutions in corporate and financial organization went on to pose key challenges to law and government. Corporations are capable of wielding great power over their suppliers, their employees, and their customers. Investors, especially when represented by a large financial organization such as the House of Morgan, are at least as powerful as corporations. Indeed, unchecked power and widespread monopolies - whether of large business corporations or of the wielders of capital - seemed to threaten the authority of the government itself and the stability of American democratic society. American workers realized that the individual worker was no match for the emerging economic world of large-scale corporate employers. This marked the beginning of an attempt to organize themselves in order to meet the challenge posed by the employers increasing economic power. But, throughout the nineteenth century, workers organizations found themselves besieged by hostile forces - both employers and government (sometimes local, often state, and on occasion federal). The Age of Capital ushered an age of prolonged and bitter conflict between management and labor - the era of such great and terrible struggles as the "year of crisis" (1877), the Haymarket Riot of 1883, and the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892. Many labor leaders believed it was natural that organized labor would become a valuable nongovernmental response to the problem of corporate power. Further, labor leaders hoped that the rise of an independent labor movement might induce government either to restrain the power of capitalist organizations (whether corporations or financial institutions) or to mediate between capital and labor. To some extent, their hopes were realized die to the fact that state and local governments experimented with legislation to protect the rights of workers with, state minimum-wage, maximum-hour, and working-conditions statutes, as well as the interests of consumers as shown in the case of laws regulating railroad rates or the quality of manufactured products. Distrust of organized labor existed outside the court system and within the larger structure of American society. Many Americans, from whatever social, ethnic, or religious origins, came to believe that the broad general equality of conditions celebrated fifty years before had broken down, and that a class system was beginning to emerge, splitting Americans into three unequal camps: the wealthy few, the broad middle class (including professionals such as doctors and lawyers, and the independent small businessmen and tradesmen), and the working or laboring classes. In the eyes of most Americans (who were pained to see themselves as workers), this process of stratification of American society seemed foreign, even threatening, to American values. It was easier for the wielder of capital such as Carnegie to portray himself (or to hire it done) as an exemplar of American upward mobility and success than it was for the organizers of labor to portray the labor movement as consistent with American values. If labor organizations recognized this stratification, they ran the risk of appearing to harbor "un-American" ideas about the inevitability of a rigid class system. If labor organizations argued for the need for worker solidarity, they ran the even greater risk of appearing to embrace "un-American" ideas about class struggle. I believe that from the first settlements through the end of the Civil War, the United States was largely a rural, agricultural nation even though Americans did notice that, in the decades preceding and during the Civil War, the nations cities grew in pace with the grow growth of industry. My personal take and conclusion on the matter is that this extraordinary growth was the result of several factors. First, the nations cities grew because they became centers of industrialization. This was a process that combined extensive urban construction and development with the consequent growing demand for factory workers, which in turn spurred the growth of home, apartment, and tenement construction. Second, the growth of technology and technological innovation made the rapid territorial expansion of American cities at first technologically feasible, and then socially and economically necessary. This led to several unexpected changes. Starting with the capacity to transmit electric power, and moving onto the construction of relatively cheap, quick, and efficient transportation systems, these changes reshaped the demographic portrait of the nation. Thus, it was possible for urban areas to expand dramatically into their formerly rural surroundings - whether as a consequence of the building of railroads or streetcar lines, or of the stringing of electric transmission lines. Third, in a related though independent development, the nations rural areas in this period entered an era of decline as sources of individual opportunity. Because of the growing cultural emphasis on cities as the place to make ones fortune, the nation witnessed a large and growing population shift from rural to urban areas. Fourth, the massive European immigration that was one of the key facts of this period first inundated great cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Just as labors response to industrialization seemed threatening to prized American values of individualism, free enterprise, and social mobility, so, too, did urbanization seem to endanger the individuals ability to own his own home, the cherished doctrine of self-reliance, and the prospect of democratic government. But this anti-urban sentiment was only partly the latest outbreak of a venerable American intellectual tradition. Therefore, it can be seen that the sentiments that shaped the course of events during the period discussed above have been carefully embedded into literature pertaining to American history and it documentations. References Cited: 1. T. H. Breen. "The power of words" Documents in American History, Volume II: From 1865. Harper Collins College Publishers. 1997 2. David Edwin Harrell, Jr. and Edwin S. Gaustad. Unto A Good Land (A History of The American People) Eerdmans Publishing Co. 2005 Read More