Word: alger
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...Kaplan success story is a combination of Horatio Alger hype and pure chutzpah. He grew up in Brooklyn, son of a plumbing contractor and a housewife. At James Madison High School, he became enamored to teaching, and recalls now that he used to bribe his stickball buddies to listen to him practice teaching. But while he was enrolled at City College of New York, the tables began to turn...
...dismal accoutrements go on and on: America's striking lack of an electoral labor party, and in its place, "business unionism," concerned only with wages hours, benefits; America's Horatio Alger myths of upward mobility, still pervasive despite the historical evidence that demonstrates much more rigidity than pluralists or consensus historians will admit. But spare us the hot tubs and razor blades. Leftists take showers...
...crash-padded dashboard, the egg would not break. He was wrong. Until last week, that was one of the very few times that lacocca came close to having egg on his face. After 32 years with Ford, the plain-spoken son of an Italian immigrant was a Horatio Alger-hero on wheels, a paradigm of upward automobility. Yet unlike others who have risen through the sober, polyester-clad ranks of America's most important industry, lacocca is perpetually outspoken, fashionably dressed in European worsteds and as obviously at ease in a barroom throbbing with used-Ford salesmen...
THROUGHOUT HIS CAREER, Richard Nixon remained a singularly bloodless character, an automaton with a five-o'clock shadow and an unerring ability to capitalize on the strong emotions he provoked but apparently could not feel. The classic opportunist, he was always running, always chasing after an Alger Hiss or running away from the Checkers mess, pursuing the phanton of "peace with honor" or retreating from the very real brown manila envelopes loaded with cash that his vice president used to collect every two weeks or so. As long as he was on the move-to China, to Russia...
Capitalism must recover its moral content, argues Kristol, if it is going to survive. This is what Horatio Alger provided in such abundance for generations gone by. A businessman did not become a success just by making money. Heaven forbid! He was successful because capitalism encouraged certain character traits that used to be admired and are now disdained as "bourgeois virtues." For decades, writes Kristol, "liberal capitalism has been living off the inherited cultural capital of the bourgeois era and has benefited from a moral sanction it no longer even claims. That legacy is now depleted, and the cultural environment...