Two Young Men Who Went West Analysis

Defection is the desertion of one's country or cause in favor of an opposing one, but it can come in many different ways. Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America writes a novel about America’s first emigrants who defected from Europe and successful created New England townships to display their ideas of defection. In “Two Young Men Who Went West”, Tom Wolfe shares a success story of a young man who also also found success through defection. In both these works, defection builds the pathway for success.
Defection, in it most literal term, is used to describe when one abandons thier country to join another. People do not just get up and leave their homeland for no reason. The inhabitants of the United States of America defected from Europe …show more content…
The first inhabitants of the New World were European defectors who came to New England and formed these towns for the purpose of spreading their defection ideals. One of these ideals was administrative decentralization, opposite to administrative centralization. Tocqueville explains how “in America you see written laws; you perceive their daily execution; everything moves around you and nowhere do you discover the motor” (67). This was a major cause of European defection and these defectors sent up there communities to represent that. These towns were successful because all its citizens had this passion that caused them to defect. They built their towns own their own passions so it rang like the church bells throughout the township. In “Two Young Men Who Went West”, the town of Grinnell, Iowa compares to those New England townships that Tocqueville describes. Josiah Grinnell formed the congregationalist town of Grinnell, Iowa out of passion as well. He defected away from a system of religious hierarchy “to create nothing more than the city of light” (Wolfe 60). In the early New England townships, these “emigrants had no idea of any superiority whatevers of some over others” because that is how they choose to develop their own townships based on their ideals of defection to America.(Tocqueville 30). Josiah Grinnell did the …show more content…
Robert Noyce grew up in the town of Grinnell, Iowa and gained the passion that lived in Grinnell. Robert Noyce is known for being an extraordinary inventor and scientist, but is also known for his management strategy. He defected away from East Coast bureaucracy, following the footsteps of Josiah Grinnell and even the first emigrants to the new world, to implement his own strategy in the growing Santa Clara valley. Robert Noyce’s management strategy of administrative decentralization demonstrates his social defection from east coast big-business as “Noyce realized how much he detested the eastern corporate system of class and status” (Wolfe 39). Instead of this eastern corporate system of class and status, Noyce was a management strategy pioneer out west due to a “a certain instinct noyce had about this industry and the people who worked in it began to take the outlines of a concept” (Wolfe 38). This concept was the lack of social hierarchy. Back east, business “didn’t have the foggiest comprehension of the Silicon Valley idea of a corporate community” (Wolfe 47). The young businessmen who attended the likes of Harvard Business school were taught principles were “greed and strategy were all that mattered.They were trained for failure” (Wolfe 47). Noyce hated this bureaucratic system and therefore defected and formed his own system of management. At Fairchild Semiconductor in California, Robert Noyce