Nathan Asch's In Search of America is different from many of the polemical essays I have read from turn of the century authors because he gives attention to understanding why workers are being treated as poorly as they are.
One point I found insightful was his hypothesis that "The worse you exploit somebody, the worse you hate him. You have to. Your conscience wouldn't let you alone," (Asch 286). He puts the complex nature between people within a hierarchical system in simple terms, which makes it hard to argue against. When his audience reads that there are people living in houses without roofs in order to help the burgeoning capitalism of America they are going to want answers, and this explanation, in part, gives it to them. A common thought among those in support of capitalism is that there are always the haves and the have-nots, and this is okay because if you work hard enough and long enough you can have your fair share of the pie.
Asch's insight complicates that assertion when he quotes one of the owners of a large farming plot as saying about his tenant farmers, "'Those sons of bitches can live through anything. They've got hides like hogs,'" (Asch 286). His attitude is not one of fairness, but of superiority. When the owner dehumanizes his tenants in this way he is justifying the poor treatment (hatred) in order to maintain what would otherwise be seen as his unfair share of the fruits of their cooperative labor.
Katherine -
ReplyDeleteI am wondering how agency plays a role in the observations you have made. It seems that agency in a lot of the situations in Asch’s piece have three participants (or groups of participants) – the oppressed, the oppressor, and the writer.
The quotation about needing to hate someone in order to oppress him/her – what kind of agency might this be? Is hate a sort of agency? Does it enable mistreating and constrain the agency of the oppressed?
The agency of the writer and the subject on which he writes is one addressed here that has thus far not been touched on in our other readings. The interaction between the narrator and the African-American family in the house with the door is particularly interesting (288-289). Campbell writes that agency “is ‘invented’ by authors at points of articulation” (2). Perhaps this applies here. A kind of agency that the oppressors in this piece probably did not anticipate was that of a newspaper reporter asking questions to the tenants and migrant workers, enabling them to communicate the injustices present in their lives. However, that family on page 288-289 refused the agency offered by Asch. They would not talk to him. The Black man says, “And I know my place and keep it.” A refusal of a new kind of agency might be the expression of another – the man has kinds of agency prescribed by Southern society. He may be afraid of losing this agency if he accepts the new kind offered by Asch. Or perhaps Asch’s agency is too symbolic: the opportunity to “talk” to a far-off audience in New York City is something that the sharecropper may not be able to imagine, and it has little practical, immediate value to him. The small amount of agency through which Southern society has both enabled and constrained him is material: he has accepted and negotiates (see Campbell 4) his prescribed subject-position (Black sharecropper) in order to survive.
What do you think?