David Brooks...
writes in his editorial piece about previous floods that effected people such as the flood of 1889 in Pennsylvania in Johnstown. I have been to Johnstown and to hear the native people of the area, you would think this flood only happened a few years ago. This is how powerful a flood it was and how, like many flood stories, it is passed on down through the generations...sometimes picking up mythological proprotions. In other cases, mingling with and leeting loose peoples prejudices.
As Brooke writes, " Prejudices were let loose. Hungarians then were akin to today's illegal Mexican immigrants - hard-working people who took jobs no one else wanted. Newspapers carried accounts of gangs of Hungarian men cutting off dead women's fingers to steal their rings. "Drunken Hungarians, Dancing, Singing, Cursing and Fighting Amid the Ruins" a New York Herald headline blared." This so parelles what we are seeing on TV. All the bad and ugliness but little of people at their best.
Brooke writers further, "...David McCullough notes in "The Johnstown Flood," public fury turned on the Pittsburgh millionaires whose club's fishing pond had emptied on the town. The Chicago Herald depicted the millionaires as Roman aristocrats, seeking pleasure while the poor died like beasts in the Coliseum.
Even before the flood, public resentment was building against the newly rich industrialists. Protests were growing against the trusts, against industrialization and against the new concentrations of wealth. The Johnstown flood crystallized popular anger, for the fishing club was indeed partly to blame. Public reaction to the disaster helped set the stage for the progressive movement and the trust-busting that was to come."
Things to come? We shall see.
All I know is
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/opinion/01brooks.html
As Brooke writes, " Prejudices were let loose. Hungarians then were akin to today's illegal Mexican immigrants - hard-working people who took jobs no one else wanted. Newspapers carried accounts of gangs of Hungarian men cutting off dead women's fingers to steal their rings. "Drunken Hungarians, Dancing, Singing, Cursing and Fighting Amid the Ruins" a New York Herald headline blared." This so parelles what we are seeing on TV. All the bad and ugliness but little of people at their best.
Brooke writers further, "...David McCullough notes in "The Johnstown Flood," public fury turned on the Pittsburgh millionaires whose club's fishing pond had emptied on the town. The Chicago Herald depicted the millionaires as Roman aristocrats, seeking pleasure while the poor died like beasts in the Coliseum.
Even before the flood, public resentment was building against the newly rich industrialists. Protests were growing against the trusts, against industrialization and against the new concentrations of wealth. The Johnstown flood crystallized popular anger, for the fishing club was indeed partly to blame. Public reaction to the disaster helped set the stage for the progressive movement and the trust-busting that was to come."
Things to come? We shall see.
All I know is
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/opinion/01brooks.html
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