Word: algers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...everyday reality, the old myths die hard. The widespread beliefs that America is an open society where everyone has an equal chance and that failure is because of individual weakness and not system bias greatly impede working-class development and militant action. Thus is the system constantly reinforced. Horatio Alger has been replaced by John Wayne, but the concept still remains. If you're tough and resourceful, you will succeed. Failure is your own fault...
...fact is that though he tries all these things and does most of them well, this is no Horatio Alger story. Because in the end all the Indians are dead and Jack Crabb is going to die in an old-age home, surrounded by plastic and human garbage...
Nixon Agonistes, by Garry Wills. A book about "the idea of Nixon" turns out to be a stringent accounting of Horatio Alger ideals and supply-and-demand marketplace ethics...
Died. J. Parnell Thomas, 75, seven-term Congressman from New Jersey, who gained national prominence as chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers controversy; in St. Petersburg, Fla. Thomas played a major role in the conviction of Hiss in 1948, but by then he had come a cropper himself for padding his congressional payroll, an offense that earned him nine months in federal prison...