Ash's "In Search of America," highlights the same two golden principles our country's work force has long lived by: hard work as their only sense of agency, and their American dreams that push them to continue. These two principles are never separated they work in collaboration to ensure corporate slavery will always be in existence, where one might see pitiful blue collar workers, Ash sees the heart of America.
Ash's work is divided in this fashion. In each place he visits he begins by explaining the hard work expected from the workers in that community, and in explaining this process highlights what these workers dream of, what forces them to continue despite the deplorable conditions of their working environment. How this hard work brings them closer to their dreams which gives them a sense of purpose, their only agency. He summarizes his purpose when trying to convince the manager of the lumber company to let him live in one of their lumber camps, "I'm from New York. I've been traveling all over the country trying to find our what makes things run" (298).
Ash find that these two principals are in fact what make things run, not just the labor force, but the labor forces determination to someday overthrow the oppressive system they strain every day for. Among the sharecroppers in Texas, the workers can only afford to dream of the small things they might be able to afford after the credit they accumulated to feed their families have been settled out of the share their owner decides to give them. A black man whose family was waiting on the lawyer who owned their land to show up to establish their share for the year, dreamt of having enough money "to buy the children a pretty for Christmas" (288). Among the oil rigs in Oklahoma, Ash finds workers who are striving to dig deep enough in the ground to find a spring of oil in order to pay for their next bottle of Bourbon (290). In northern Colorado, among the primarily mexican beet labor force, the common dream of not being deported and being allowed to stay and work is their only dream incentive, but it is powerful enough to keep them at work at a job " no natives in America wanted to do" (294). And finally in the lumber towns the workers dream of saving enough money for their families, or at least making enough money so that they can afford to get drunk and stay up at a hotel on the weekends when they are forced to leave the lumber yards (302). Each of these dreams are fairly small, but without them there would be no sense of agency among the work force in America, nothing to keep our country running. The American Dream is played out in every hollywood movie, it is a cliche embedded so deeply in our culture its source can is traced down into the lowest of our societies' income brackets. By the end of Ash's piece "In Search of America" we find it staring back at us from the pit of our labor forces dreams, on which this country feeds, nourishes, and continues flourishing.
1 comment:
While I agree with your analysis, I think Asch is really trying to describe the complexity of the relationships between the workers and those for whom the work is done. As he goes along, Asch gives us snapshots of various working conditions throughout America. While many of these stories share similarities in the desperation of the workers and deplorable working conditions, the circumstances for each is different. For example, in the case of the Mexican beet farmers he writes "Yet the growers were as much victims of the situation as the Mexican workers were"(294). This is in direct contrast to the sharecroppers who were being visibly taken advantage of by the landowners.
It seems that Asch tries to find out what makes America run but then again, while talking to the receptionist for the lumber company, he says "I don't know. And the further I'm traveling the less I'm finding out"(298). None of the workers are searching for the "American Dream" where one can work hard and soon live comfortably off the fruit of their labor. They are simply looking for a little joy to escape from the pain of their lives as workers. It seems that Asch is revealing the workers lack of agency and his search for why this is produces varied results. In essence, Asch is looking for unifying conditions that help explain labor in the United States but each condition he examines is so vastly different from the other that he has trouble delivering a neat systematic analysis of labor. It seems, then, that Asch's article aims to demonstrate the complexity of labor relationships in America and that there is no unified "heart" of America, rather, there are snapshots of various people in various conditions who are but parts of the heart of America.
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