Analyzing Perspectives: Crafting POV Statements

Read each of the following documents and write a POV analysis of each source.

Source: Pamphlet from a women’s organization in Mississippi, circa the early 1900s

“The Southern woman of the ante-bellum regime [was] the gracious, charming hostess, the sheltered wife and mother. . . . This is the ideal which the Southern people have been slow to give up. . . . “. . . Southern women saw homes burned, estates pass to strangers, fathers and husbands dead upon the battlefield. . . . “. . . The old-time idea that a lady must not earn her livelihood had to go down before stern need. . . . Many women faced the terror of family displeasure and went to work, choosing personal independence rather thanthe misguided approbation of relatives and friends. “. . . Southern women have come to see that public policies and private conditions are interdependent and cannot be separated. . . . “. . . The woman who takes absolutely no interest in any public questions is no longer the typical or the ideal Southern woman. No support will be won by standing apart from the strain and struggle of life and merely demanding political rights.”

Write a POV analysis of the above source.

Source: Sojourner Truth, speech given at the meeting of the American Equal Rights Association, 1867

My friends, I am rejoiced that you are glad, but I don’t know how you will feel when I get through. I come from another field—the country of the slave. They have got their liberty—so much good luck to have slavery partly destroyed; not entirely. I want it root and branch destroyed. Then we will all be free indeed. . . . There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, . . . it will be just as bad as it was before. . . . I want women to have their rights. In the Courts women have no right, no voice; nobody speaks for them. . . . I have been forty years a slave and forty years free and would be here forty years more to have equal rights for all. . . . There ought to be equal rights now more than ever, since colored people have got their freedom

Write a POV analysis of the above source.

Ida Tarbell, journalist, The History of the Standard Oil Company, 1904

“[The Standard Oil Trust] is the most perfectly developed trust in existence. . . . The perfection of the organization of [it], the ability and daring with which it has carried out its projects, make it the preeminent trust of the world. . . . So long as the Standard Oil Company can control transportation as it does today, it will remain master of the oil industry. . . .

“. . . The ethical cost of all this is the deep concern. We are a commercial people. . . . As a consequence, business success is sanctified, and, practically, any methods which achieve it are justified by a larger and larger class. All sorts of subterfuges1 and sophistries2 and slurring over of facts are employed to explain aggregations3 of capital whose determining factor has been like that of the Standard Oil Company, special privileges obtained by persistent secret effort in opposition to the spirit of the law, the efforts of legislators, and the most outspoken public opinion.”

Write a POV analysis of the above source.

Source: Frank Triplett, “The March of Destiny,” 1883

Write a POV analysis of the above source.

Source: President Theodore Roosevelt, speech at Providence, Rhode Island, 1902.

The great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts are the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them, but it is in duty bound to control them wherever the need of such control is shown. There is clearly need of supervision—need to possess the power of regulation of these great corporations through the representatives of the public—wherever, as in our own country at the present time, business corporations become so very powerful alike for beneficent work and for work that is not always beneficent. It is idle to say that there is no need for such supervision. There is, and a sufficient warrant for it is to be found in any one of the admitted evils appertaining to them.

Write a POV analysis of the above source.

Source: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), letter to President Woodrow Wilson, 1913.

Dear Mr. President: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, through its Board of Directors, respectfully protests against the policy of your Administration in segregating the colored employees in the Departments at Washington. It realizes that this new and radical departure has been recommended, and is now being defended, on the ground that by giving certain bureaus or sections wholly to colored employees they are thereby rendered safer in possession of their offices and are less likely to be ousted or discriminated against. We believe this reasoning to be fallacious. It is based on a failure to appreciate the deeper significance of the new policy; to understand how far reaching the effects of such a drawing of caste lines by the Federal Government may be, and how humiliating it is to the men thus stigmatized.

Write a POV analysis of the above source.

Source: Jerry Falwell, television evangelist and founder of the Moral Majority, Listen, America!, 1980.

We must reverse the trend America finds herself in today. Young people between the ages of twenty-five and forty have been born and reared in a different world than Americans of years past. The television set has been their primary baby-sitter. From the television set they have learned situation ethics and immorality—they have learned a loss of respect for human life. They have learned to disrespect the family as God has established it. They have been educated in a public-school system that is permeated with secular humanism. They have been taught that the Bible is just another book of literature. They have been taught that there are no absolutes in our world today. They have been introduced to the drug culture. They have been reared by the family and the public school in a society that is greatly void of discipline and character-building. These same young people have been reared under the influence of a government that has taught them socialism and welfarism. They have been taught to believe that the world owes them a living whether they work or not.

Write a POV analysis of the above source.