Word: algerism
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...through the decades. The 1930s' Scottsboro Boys (race, sex, the myth of endangered white female virtue, which was always the Southern white man's reverse rape projection). The 1940s' Alger Hiss case (emergent cold war and its anxieties of communist infiltration). In the 1960s, the Chicago Seven trial (Vietnam, the crisis of American authority); in the 1970s, Watergate. In the 1980s, insider trading...
...disguised the fact that underneath he was an exuberant prairie yeoman--and proud of it. After a few sips of one of his fine clarets, Burger, who died last week at the age of 87, would lean back and reminisce about his rearing in the mold of the Horatio Alger stories, where young boys never rested, tried everything, excelled at much and took joy at each simple turn in a life on the land. He recalled the hot summer workdays near St. Paul, Minnesota, when he would cool off with a splash in the farm pond, then pick ripe, tender...
Before he was a villain, Robert Vesco was a Horatio Alger hero. Born in 1935 to lower-middle-class parents in Detroit, Vesco, according to biographer Arthur Herzog, had three youthful dreams: to become a millionaire, to head his own company and "to get the hell out of Detroit." He accomplished those goals rapidly. Largely self- educated, the teenage Vesco, who managed to complete only half a correspondence course toward a high school diploma, grew a mustache to look older and try to qualify for jobs in local auto factories. He quickly moved from low-level design work to engineering...
These competing icons--call them Horatio Alger and Lizzie Borden--have caught national attention because they question the assumptions of success that underly both our juvenile justice system and the Ivy League admission process...
...recent self-made millionaire with an unaffected social conscience--that explains a lot of Powell's electoral appeal. He is the perfect anti-victim, validating America's fondest Horatio Alger myth that a black man with few advantages can rise to the top without bitterness and without forgetting who he is. Powell praises entrepreneurship and worries about the Demo-crats' tendency to embrace victimhood. Yet he openly acknowledges his own large debt to government activism. The son of hardworking Jamaican immigrants, he grew up poor in the Bronx and benefited from the fine education available in public schools...