Word: algerisms
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...same hour on Capitol Hill, Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers raised their right hands to be sworn in before the House Un-American Activities Committee. And so the cold war's First Battle of Bull Run began, eventually producing divisions in America almost as dramatic as the racial ones. That word indivisible is a handsome thought, which we rally to in wartime and generally preserve as an ultimate ideal, but it has rarely described American history as it is enacted on the ground. America is more interesting than the pietisms it lavishes upon itself...
...nothing new. During the 1920s, America’s mass media helped transform certain groups of brutal outlaws—namely, ethnic Irish and Italian hoods that operated within highly structured criminal syndicates—into pop culture icons. For many impoverished European immigrants, the rags-to-riches, Horatio Alger-like tales of powerful mobsters such as Big Jim Colosimo and the infamous Al Capone seemed to epitomize the American Dream. As historian David Ruth has written: “The central theme of the Capone narrative was an individual’s escape from obscurity to wealth, power...
That being said, we must never forget exactly who John Gotti was. His Alger-esque rise to fame and fortune shouldn’t blind us to the reality that the Dapper Don was a really just a depraved gangster. He may have been New York’s favorite criminal, but he is definitely not a New York hero...
...survived by his wife Joesphine and daughters Roxanna Geffen and Cristina de Marigny Alger...
...Alger concentrated in history at Harvard and earned his M.B.A. from the University of Michigan...