1. Dobie Dobrejacak in Out of This Furnace by Thomas Bell makes the following qu
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Question
1. Dobie Dobrejacak in Out of This Furnace by Thomas Bell makes the following quote on pages 410-411. If I'm anything at all I'm an American, only I'm not the kind you read about in history books or that they make speeches about on the Fourth of July; anyway, not yet. And a lot of people don't know what to make of it and don't like it. Which is tough on me but is liable to be still tougher on them because I dont have to be told that Braddock ain't Plymouth Rock and this ain't the year 1620." Explain what he means in your own words. Dobie is making a powerful statement about the prejudice that eastern European immigrants faced in industrial America of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Why does he make the reference to Plymouth and what does he mean? Obviously you must know something about the historical reference to Plymouth in 1620 and the kind of people who arrived there to answer this. What does he specifically mean when he muses that, a lot of people dont know what to make of it and dont like it. Which is tough on me but is liable to be still tougher on them... In the nearly seventy years since this novel first appeared could a second generation immigrant in Houston relate to Dobie's family's experience and also muse that I dont have to told that Houston ain't Plymouth Rock and this ain't the year 1620.
Explanation / Answer
ANSWER:
The original Plymouth Rock was estimated to have weighed 20,000 pounds. It now is about one-third that size, and today there are pieces in Pilgrim Hall Museum as well as in the Patent Building in the Smithsonian. “This Rock has become an object of veneration in the United States. There are Americans whose families were here from before the Civil or Revolutionary War. They never have to prove their Americanism and have no cultural heritage other than American. Many Immigrants start out in less than desirable neighborhoods and try to work their way out..definitely not the place the Pilgrims first landed in 1620 (Plymouth Rock MA). Recent immigrants have strong cultural ties to another heritage and are are trying to assimilate and not lose all of their ethnicity in doing so. They are often judged, scorned and told to go home for keeping ethnic traditions and language. There is an interesting but sometimes nasty debate about this called "Dropping the Dash". It was started by a man who resents being called an African-American and wants all Americans to drop the dash. African-Americans have their own not so voluntary immigration story as we all are painfully aware.
Thomas Bell, author of Out of This Furnace, grew up in the steel mill town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. In the late nineteenth century, many European immigrants traveled to the United States in search of a better life and good fortune. The unskilled industries of the Eastern United States eagerly employed these men who were willing to work long hours for low wages just to earn their food and board. Among the most heavily recruiting industries were the railroads and the steel mills of Western Pennsylvania. Particularly in the steel mills, the working conditions for these immigrants were very dangerous. Many men lost their lives to these giant steel-making machines. The immigrants suffered the most and also worked the most hours for the least amount of money. Living conditions were also poor, and often these immigrants would barely have enough money and time to do anything but work, eat, and sleep. There was also a continuous struggle between the workers and the owners of the mills, the capitalists. The mills had filled in the shore line for miles up and down the river, destroying trees, obliterating little streams and the pebbly beaches where as recently as the turn of the century campers had set up tents in summer, burying the clean earth under tons of cinder and molten slag. The banks no longer sloped naturally to the water's edge but dropped vertically, twenty-foot walls of cold slag pierced at intervals with steaming outlets and marked by dribbling stains.
Primarily the small group of upper class capitalists and the politicians that they kept in office to protect their financial and industrial interests made the country's decisions at this point in American history. Many of the workers who produced the steel for the Brooklyn Bridge were the same workers that had little or no political freedom or voting rights. Workers were not encouraged to vote, and if they decided to vote, the company forced them to vote for the politicians that would favor the company. This type of political injustice and manipulation of a man's rights were one of the biggest problems in the steel mills and other large industries during the late nineteenth century.
The Brooklyn Bridge opening was "a day to celebrate Progress". It is important to remember that capitalists and workers strove toward different ideas of progress in Out of This Furnace. While progress for the capitalists meant the further supremacy of man over nature or the unchecked accumulation of wealth, progress for the workers simply meant an improvement in their way of life and an opportunity for equality. The organization of labor became a tool that the workers used to combat the tyranny of the capitalists. The early goals of organized labor were better working conditions and pay, and political insurgency. Amalgamation was perhaps the only way that the workers could begin to improve their lives.
The mill workers organized themselves and eventually overcame the capitalists to provide better lives for themselves and hope for generations to come. It also shows the improvement in living conditions, equality, and political freedom experienced by the last generation of Bell's characters, which was a great victory for the working class. One character stated his view of the changes in this way: About the uses to which wealth and power could honorably be put, and about honor itself, honor, integrity, self-respect, the whatever-you-wanted-to-call-it that determined for a man which things he couldn't say or do under any circumstances, not for all the money there was, not even to help his side win.
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