Horatio Alger

Raised in rural Massachusetts, the son of a Unitarian minister, Horatio Alger Jr. (b. 1832–d. 1899) graduated from Harvard College in 1852 and from the Harvard Divinity School in 1860. Expelled from the Unitarian pulpit in Brewster, Massachusetts, after confessing to a charge of pederasty, Alger moved to New York in April 1866 to begin a career as a full-time writer of fiction for juvenile readers. He published a serialized version of Ragged Dick in 1867 and a revised and expanded book version of the novel, his only bestseller, in 1868. During his career he twice traveled to Europe (1860 and 1873) and to California (1877 and 1890); he was also active in the Harvard Club of New York. To supplement his income from writing, he tutored the children of several prominent Jewish families in New York, including E. R. A. Seligman (b. 1861–d. 1939), later a professor of political economy at Columbia University and a founder of the American Economic Association; Benjamin Cardozo (b. 1870–d. 1938), later an associate justice of the US Supreme Court; and Lewis Einstein (b. 1877–d. 1967), later a career diplomat. Alger was the author of dozens of essays, poems, and short stories, and 103 books for young readers, and toward the end of his career he estimated his total book sales at eight hundred thousand copies. Despite the persistent notion that his heroes rise “from rags to riches,” only a few of his characters earn fabulous wealth. His young heroes normally rise not to riches, but to a secure middle-class respectability. Beginning in the late 1870s, Alger’s juvenile stories came under fire from ministers and professional librarians for their alleged sensationalism. Of 145 libraries surveyed by the American Library Association in 1894, over a third proscribed Alger’s books. Alger died of congestive heart failure at his sister’s home in Natick, Massachusetts, in July 1899. Early in the new century, his popularity began to skyrocket. By 1910, cheap editions of his moral tracts were selling at the rate of about one million annually because, in their idealization of a preindustrial order, they appealed to a nostalgic desire to reform business through a return to principles of equal opportunity and fair trade. The phrase “Horatio Alger hero,” denoting an honest and successful entrepreneurial type, obtained popular if inflated currency in the language in the 1920s, with Alger’s popularity at its peak. Though Alger’s books largely lapsed from print during the Great Depression, the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, Inc., cofounded by Norman Vincent Peale (b. 1898–d. 1993), inaugurated the annual Horatio Alger Awards in 1947.

Wimmin in the Mass Media

Introduction to the 40th Anniversary Edition: Wimmin in the Mass Media and Centennial College, Looking Backwards • Mary Jo Deegan WIMMIN IN THE MASS MEDIA: Articles Collected at the Centennial Education Program, Fall 1980 Introduction: Wimmin and the Mass Media — Construction of the Self • Mary Jo Deegan and Terry Nygren Examining the Top Ten, or Why Those Songs Make the Charts • Jane Pemberton Images of Women in Rock Music: Analysis of B-52’s and Black Rose• Sheila M. Krueger Women in Sitcoms: “I Love Lucy”• Nancy Grant-Colson Horatio Alger is Alive and Well and Masquerading as a Feminist, or Where Are the Magazines for the Real Working Women? • Teresa Holder Freudian Tradition Versus Feminism in Science Fiction • Karen Keller Cover design by Becky Ross. I hope that reprinting this booklet will serve as a small material document of the educational community many of us enjoyed with this program. It is also a reminder of an era and political attempt to broaden the scope of traditional formats at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Centennial created a short, viable community that is remembered here

Isabelle

Isabelle is the sister of Delbert and the daughter of Sharmaine. She is also the mother of 10 children of her own: six biological children fathered by four different men in addition to the four children of her deceased younger sister. Having survived a succession of abusive relationships with various men, this mother hen has been the sole provider for her large brood for most of the time that the author has known her. In many respects, Isabelle can be called the “white sheep” of the Benally family. While the rest of her siblings have battled alcoholism and chronic unemployment for most of their adult lives, she has never imbibed alcohol and has been gainfully employed for the past 40 years. She is not unlike a Native American version of Horatio Alger: a girl from the rez who, through diligence and determination, vowed to raise herself up from her bootstraps and overcome any obstacles placed in front of her. This chapter introduces Isabelle.

Disorder in the Air

Newsboys proliferated after the Civil War as the newspaper industry flourished but then reemerged as a social problem during the depression years of 1873 to 1877. Writers and artists such as Horatio Alger and J. G. Brown portrayed them as symbols of the uplifting potential of industrial capitalism, while white southerners turned them into emblems of Republican misrule. The New York press celebrated real Bowery newsboys such as Steve Brodie. But authors of sensational urban guidebooks cast these youths as enfants terribles whose discontents threatened the social order. Swept up in the burgeoning labor movement, newsboys mounted noisy strikes in Cincinnati, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Nashville, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore. Catholic and Protestant philanthropists responded by founding homes for newsboys or advocating that they be licensed and supervised. Contrary to their mythic counterparts, real newsboys exposed and challenged the economic inequities of Gilded Age America.