Class and Community

Class and Community Book Review
The shoemakers of Lynn were constantly battling for equality of the classes and the struggle of the life working in factories. Dawley states how the people of Lynn should stand up for their rights and fight for equality for everyone. All of the people would put aside all of their differences and unite together so that they could fight the factory owners who treated them so horribly. They would strike the factory, but that wouldn’t always work because then the police would come out. It was a vicious cycle that these people went through. The conditions in which they worked and the way they were treated was too awful for them to bear on a daily basis.
The shoemakers struggle for equal rights makes them a “microcosm of the industrial revolution” because they basically were a symbol of what everyone else in the US was going through at that time. Their small voices were heard when they decided to strike against the big factory owners. Breed, Pratt, and Newhall all strived to succeed in life and move up statuses. They all wanted to improve their way of life and worked very hard to do so, but failed dramatically at it. Before the factories were built, many of the shoemakers didn’t work together and didn’t share anything in common, but after, however, all of the shoemakers endured the same hardships and united together for a common cause. So, the community was strong in the town of Lynn because of this inequality they all shared.
When Hood was elected mayor of Lynn, the people felt like they had a foot in the door so that they could have more of a voice since a commoner, like them was mayor now. Democracy does not mean political control because the politicians collectively have the power and not so much the people. The factory system was introduced in Lynn because that was the prime place for a factory to be built especially since shoemaking was high in the statistics and they were in need of economic development. The development of...