Word: algerisms
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Wills' Nixon is a metaphor for "an older, and in many ways noble, America, made up of much sacrifice and anger." Yet Nixon's ascension to power, says Wills, is precisely a measure of the nation's failure, the bankruptcy of the Horatio Alger virtues and the supply-and-demand marketplace ethics that built this country...
...then, after 600 pages, to find him in a mood of mild conciliation. "There are signs that history, having made ours a great nation, may now be in the process of unmaking us-unless we can tap some energies for our own renewal." Having damned the Horatio Alger society from the pulpit, Wills ends by taking up a collection for self-improvement...
...earned what he has, and earned it the hard way. But Wills believes that this smugness is really a cover for an inner self contempt. The self made man, he says, are really "cramped full of pretense, diminished things- Dick Nixons." Men who have lived the Horatio Alger myth and found that they are just as hollow as they were before...
...work for the League of Nations, and later became wartime European head of the Unitarian Service Committee's relief activities. Fired from that post because of allegations that he was sympathetic to Communists, Field went to Prague, and three weeks before the beginning of the Alger Hiss trial was abducted to Hungary by Communist agents. He was stigmatized by assorted Iron Curtain regimes as a wartime spy for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, but for reasons not made clear, he was never brought to trial. Until his death he worked as a copyreader for the government...
Meanwhile up in Thoreau's, William James '02 (Matthews 41) and Arthur Schiesinger Jr, '38 (Thayer 7) are listening to Oliver Wendell Holmes 1829 (Stoughton 31) tell Horatio Alger 1860 (Holworthy 7) and William Randolph Hearst 1885 (Matthews 46) about the time he played a trick on Wendell Phillips 1831 (Holworthy 24). Not listening are Rush and Pete Seeger '36 (Harvard Union) who are trading songs, and Norman Kingsley Mailer '43 (Grays 11) who sits in a corner writing about...