Word: horatios
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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...
...that he has 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...
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...
Eros and Violence. During the first of these interruptions, West wrote a capitalist Candide called A Cool Million (1934). Political in intent, the book puts a cute left spin on the old Horatio Alger story and burlesques the American Dream as a horribly funny fascist nightmare. West was never a Communist but in 1935 his radical sympathies were strengthened by the experience of being down and out on the seamy side of Hollywood. Supported by S.J. Perelman, who had married his sister, West lived in the Pa-Va-Sed, a scabby little apartment hotel in the lower depths of movieland...
...political climate of the thirties denuded the last of the Horatio Algers and radicalized intellectuals, but the middle class reached for alternative ways out. Holywood became their one-dimen-sional Mecca, dance marathons and polesitting were popularized, and newspapers began running columns of advice for lost souls. West's last three novels, Miss Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million and The Day of the Locust, use these vaudvillian antics not satirically, but with an eye to the deep pain that necessitated them...