Word: algerism
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Poor Family. Not being overshadowed is a relatively new experience for Flip, who might stand as the model for a black Horatio Alger character. Born Clerow Wilson in 1933, one of the 18 survivors among 24 children in his family, he was "so poor even the poor looked down on me." His father was a carpenter and sometime tippler who was always looking for work. "Occasionally he'd just stand on the corner with his hammer and saw, waiting for someone to come by who needed a job done," recalls Cornelius Parker, whose family ran a funeral home across...
...their own problems and the problems they see around them. It is possible, indeed, to see the comics as an art of the people, offering clues to the national unconscious. Superman's enormous popularity might be looked upon as signaling the beginning of the end for the Horatio Alger myth of the self-made man. In the modern world, he seems to say, only the man with superpowers can survive and prosper. Still, though comics are indeed a popular art form, it is going a bit far to compare, as Critic Maurice Horn does, Gasoline Alley to Goethe...
...through the checkered career of the unsinkable Richard M. in an indefatigable attempt to discover what makes this public man run. There is the 1964 congressional campaign in which the Bank of America quietly assists young Richard in his smear attacks on Congressman Jerry Voorhis: Nixon's prosecution of Alger Hiss, along with his clever use of closed congressional hearings ("I am holding in my hand a microfilm of very highly classified secret documents."); the 1950 Senatorial campaign with its "pink sheet" attacks on Helen Gahagan Douglas; the side-splitting Checkers speech in which every cheap rhetorical device which Nixon...
...collapse of Chiang Kai-shek gave them an excuse. Exploiting a confused and distressed public, Senator Joseph McCarthy seized the issue to denounce the "Red Dean" and demand his resignation. Illustrating what Halle called a "moral courage that sometimes amounted to recklessness," Acheson came to the defense of Alger Hiss, the onetime State Department official who was exposed as a Soviet agent. "I will not turn my back on Alger Hiss," he told a stunned press conference...
Looking Up. The book has the quaint fascination of an Horatio Alger tale. Walter Joseph Hickel was born at Ellinwood, Kans., in 1919, the son of a German-American tenant farmer. As a four-year-old, he scrambled to the top of the farm's windmill to get a better view of the world. Rushing to rescue Wally, his father shouted, "Keep looking up! Keep looking up!" The advice stuck...