what I see — I run this organization that Barbara Ehrenreich and I created, Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and we get these — we got these letters and comments that would be sort of blaming our writers for the poverty they experienced and the difficulties they experienced. And I wanted to get to the bottom of it. What was this about? And the more I looked into it, it seemed like it was just this story of shame and blame that has followed people who struggle in this country since the 19th century. And I really — I see it in the early writings of people like Horatio Alger, etc.
Horatio Alger wrote over a hundred novels, and they were all these stories of these young men. They have names like Tony the Tramp or Ragged Dick. And they’re very young, I mean, teenagers. And when you look at the stories, though, supposedly the Horatio Alger story is about luck and pluck, about a young man, through hard work, making it in America, coming from nothing. In truth, he always meets an older gentleman who is rich, who saves him, basically, and makes him into a success story.
Horatio Alger himself was a — committed pedophilic acts, had been a minister, had been chased out of the church in Massachusetts. And I think we need to look at these stories — we need to look at the people who created them — to see some of the hypocrisy, and also the complexity. You know, these young men were not doing this — teenagers were not taking themselves into success stories from nothing by themselves. They had the help of wealthy older people. And that’s really how things work in this country.
— source democracynow.org | Mar 29, 2023