Horatio Alger

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“The Mass Prosperity Machine Began To Grind To A Halt”

August 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Browser pointed me to “Saving Horatio Alger,” Richard Reeves’ excellent Brookings essay about American mobility, which is our national religion even though we currently trail Europe in this area by most measures. We boomed in our early days because of Manifest Destiny, busted once there was nowhere left to push our borders and had another rising-tide moment at the end of World War II. Great stuff like a tidy little explanation of how Alger would have made a poor character in his own books, since he was never ragged nor rich. An excerpt about the downward slope that set in starting in the 1970s:

“America’s decisive role in World War II and its subsequent emergence as a superpower gave rise to the Great Prosperity: a new surge of economic energy alongside sizeable government investments in infrastructure, the military, science, and Social Security, and a recommitment to education, not least through the G.I. Bill. Between 1950 and the mid-1970s, as the U.S. economy grew by an average of 4 percent a year, the economic expansion drove wages and employment up, and income and wealth gaps narrowed. High taxes—high by historical standards, anyway—were levied on those with the biggest incomes and greatest wealth, and the government provided more services and cash assistance to the poor as part of Lyndon Johnson’s vision for the ‘Great Society.’ Upward mobility may not have improved; but since standards of living were rising at about the same rate across the income distribution, most people were much better off than their parents had been, even if they remained on the same rung of the income ladder.

From the mid-1970s on, however, the mass prosperity machine began to grind to a halt; productivity stagnated and growth slowed as global competition intensified. Inequality trends returned to their pre-war trajectory, with those on the top rungs climbing ever further upward, helped along by Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts, while those at the bottom and in the middle lagged behind. George H.W. Bush broke his ‘no new taxes’ pledge, but did nothing to alter the growing fissure between the rich and the rest.

Bill Clinton’s electoral success presaged a period of strong economic growth and some restoration of the fortunes of the middle class. But U.S. politics soon veered to the right. With the election of George W. Bush as president and the emergence of a new strand of populism culminating in the muscular Tea Party movement, the rightward drift continued, and the carefully tied knots of financial regulation were quietly loosened, one by one. Mobility rates remained flat.

The election of Barack Obama fleetingly signaled a new, more optimistic mood, the promise of a more generous, post-partisan politics, and a renewed commitment to the upward mobility Americans believe in so fervently. Here was a president whose election seemed a testament to America’s progress, and whose personal story proved, so it seemed, that the Horatio Alger story could be rewritten for a multi-racial nation. The uplift was short-lived. Today, the nation is limping away from the economic car-crash of 2008. Politics remains deeply partisan. And yes, mobility rates are still flat.”

 

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Old Print Article: “Henry Clay Dean Is Dead,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1887)

May 8, 2011 in Old Print Articles, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

"His clothes differed in no respect from a 'wharf-rat's,' except that they were raggeder."

The nineteenth-century Pennsylvania-born preacher and orator Henry Clay Dean (not to be confused with the statesman Henry Clay) lived in roughly the same time frame as Horatio Alger, which made sense, since Dean was Algeresque, a poor and ragged lad who made his way in the world, though he never lost the raggedness.

Mark Twain, another contemporary, had this to say about Dean: “He began life poor and without education. But he educated himself – on the curbstones of Keokuk. He would sit down on a curbstone with his book, careless or unconscious of the clatter of commerce and the tramp of the passing crowds, and bury himself in his studies by the hour, never changing his position except to draw in his knees now and then to let a dray pass unobstructed; and when his book was finished, its contents, however abstruse, had been burned into his memory, and were his permanent possession. In this way he acquired a vast hoard of all sorts of learning, and had it pigeonholed in his head where he could put his intellectual hand on it whenever it was wanted. His clothes differed in no respect from a ‘wharf-rat’s,’ except that they were raggeder, more ill-assorted and inharmonious (and therefore more extravagantly picturesque), and several layers dirtier.”

"He was a man who put on a clean shirt every New Year's Day and didn't take it off until the 31st of December."

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle took notice of Dean’s death with an article in its February 10, 1887 edition. An excerpt:

“Who was Henry Clay Dean? According to a legend familiar in every newspaper office at the mighty West he was a man who put on a clean shirt every New Year’s Day and didn’t take it off until the 31st of December. But that does not fully describe him. Mr. Dean had a useful and honorable career. In the first place he was a preacher of the Gospel and expounded the simple and beautiful truths of the Sermon on the Mount with an unction never surpassed. It was said of him by a Chicago admirer that his fervid eloquence ‘was enough to make the pin feathers of an heretical rooster quiver.’ In the second place he was a political orator whose addresses from the stump often recalled the extemporary speeches of Tom Benton. In the third place he was chaplain of the United States Senate at a time when Senators feared God more than they do to-day, and when their hearts and minds afforded a richer soil for the seeds of divine knowledge. Lastly, Mr. Dean was a Democrat, pure and undefiled–one of the ‘old timers,’ who believed  that although Noah was justified in taking a Republican and Democrat into the ark, he ought to have thrown the former overboard before the waters subsided. He was a good man and true. Peace to his ashes.”

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