Dreams and Reality
Hamilton Holt published the book The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves in 1906, but first they were published in his newspaper The New York Independent in 1900, which newspaper was well-known with its reformism. He strived for showing what was common between all people in the world and in how different ways they pursued their dreams.
In the introduction to the book, written by Edwin E. Slosson, the author describes the efforts to the books to be written in a new way for the new audience and he writes that it is time for “the spirit of democracy, the discovery of the importance of the average man”(Slosson, p. 9) to be added. It was an extremely original idea of him writing that the contemporary people realize that, for example, “a very good history of France could be written, better than most of the old-fashioned kind, without mentioning the name of Louis XIV or Napoleon.” (Ibid)
All stories in the book show the common feature between the people in the world, i. e. the pursue of freedom and better life including better education, well paid labor, and regulated working days and holidays. The stories included in the book belong to different ordinary people from all races and all parts of the world.
The book begins with the story of Lithuanian eighteen years old boy. The picture of life which is described through the boy’s eyes depicts bad future in the army for five years, slavery to the Russian political regime, bad education in Russian language, not Lithuanian. The shoemaker, who inspired him to go to America, said that there were also “man-wolves” as there were in Lithuania, but the difference was that you can struggle for “life, liberty and the getting of happiness.” (Holt, p. 15) The life story of this young man from Lithuania helps the reader to imagine the historical reality at that time in the United States and the lives of the ordinary people, particularly the new immigrants “Dem Grafters” and the role of the professional unions and their influence over the lives of the average people.
Pursue of freedom is vividly described in the Story of a Negro Peon where an young black man had the illusion that he was a happy man, working for a white employer and when the reality changed with the death of his master and the new conditions the workers met with the coming into authority of his son, the Senator, he understood that freedom was only illusive. He suffered many changes until he reached his freedom and the last came not as a fair development of his life story but because of his wife who was a mistress of a white man. Unfortunately when he gained his freedom he was unable to it because his body and more significant, his soul were not able to take any joy from life after the exhaustion of disappointments and disasters he went through.
Along with the nostalgia and other accompanying circumstances and feelings, the new immigrants experienced a cultural shock which revealed in the story of Japanese servant when, after his first working days, he thought: “What would the boys in Japan say if they found me out. I am thus employed in the kitchen receiving the orders from the maid-servant whom I have once looked down and thought never to be equal while I was dining at my uncle s house.” (Ibid, p. 261) the young man thought of how beautiful was the idea when it was only idea and he felt so sorry he ignored the honor, the sense of duty and responsibility he had at home and he realized that there was no personal liberty while someone’s manhood was ignored.
As a conclusion it could be generalized that great desires as the thirst for freedom and better life are common for all people in the world and they could make them suffer but still hunting them.
Works cited
Holt, H., 1906, The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves, James Pot & Company, New York, Web Accessed on June 14, 2016
