Hierarchy and Complacency

When reading Nathan Asch's In Search of America I noticed a repetition of sentiments among the different classes of workers interviewed. One commonality Asch mentions is that the workers do not hate those who employ them. He says, "It wasn't the purchasing agent the men hated so much. It was the fact that the pay was small, and the week had been shortened to five working days, and the season was short, only a few months, and there were too many loggers for the work to be done..." (303). Early in the piece Asch explains that while the beet growers seemed to be disenfranchising the Mexicans they hired, they too were victims of the larger sugar companies who they worked for.

It seems that Asch went out in hopes that he would be able to show the rest of America a picture of the hard working class that would cause outrage and change in their treatment. The workers hated their bosses because they were evil, greedy men out to get theirs, and America needed to rally behind the poor. What Asch found, however, was more complicated than that. The reality of the situation was not only that corporations were stealing rightfully earned money from the poor (they were) and government intervention would save the people from poverty, and it wasn't that the people needed to be reminded of the fact that they are at the bottom of a food chain that does not have their best interests at heart.

One worker, a black man, helped illustrate this point when he said, "'I was trained by Southern white folks, and I know my place. Maybe if I had been trained up North, I'd have been different. but I'm here, and I know my place and I keep it," (Asch 288). The reality that Asch was confronted with shows how difficult it is for people to rise out of disadvantaged positions, and how difficult it is for outsiders to truly appreciate this.