Lifeboat Social Contract

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The social contract in the United States of America has alway had problems and will probably always will. The movie Lifeboat, directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1944, talks about the different problems with the social contract around the time of WWII. The movie was about a boat heading to England and gets torpedoed by Nazis, some of the passengers and crew made it onto to a lifeboat. The boat that was heading to England was also able to sink the Nazi’s submarine, a German Nazi survived and was rescued by the people on the lifeboat. The rest of the movie was about the people on the lifeboat discussing topics that deal with the social contract and what they were going to do with the German. Lifeboat conveys the problems with the social contract …show more content…

The upper class people did not treat lower class people as equals. Andrew Carnegie, was a rich factory owner in the book Out of this Furnace. He was able to become so rich, because he saved money by not paying his workers a lot. He also made them work long hours and did not spend money to make sure the factories were safe. He owned the land and buildings were most of his workers lived. He had the ability to raise their rent, making sure his worker stayed lower class with him on top (Adrienne 2/17/17). In the movie Lifeboat, Rittenhouse was very similar to Andrew Carnegie. Rittenhouse was rich, owned a lot factories and did not like labor unions. During the scene with Rittenhouse and Kovac gambling, Kovac talks about how Rittenhouse will end up owing him so much, that he will get one of Rittenhouse’s many factories. Kovac explains that he would have union meetings so that the workers could talk about how to make their conditions better. Rittenhouse gets offended, not wanting a lower class man to criticize how he runs his factories. Rittenhouse started to accuse Kovac of cheating, because Kovac kept on winning and it was his deck of cards. Kovac showed that he wanted equality between the workers and giving the lower class the chance to move up. Rittenhouse did not like Kovac telling him how to run his factory, Rittenhouse like keeping his workers in line and below

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