Horatio Alger

You fooled us all in the teacher's pool and went nowhere.

Marty, I guess you can say I went west, you know, the way of Horatio Alger, Davy Crockett, the Donner Party.

Miss Kitten, thank you.

Thank you.

You know, this is one of the things.

Now, I'm not going to say it's a Horatio Alger story because the son of the president becoming the president isn't exactly a come up by your, you know, pull yourself up by your own story.

I'm not delusional.

That's not true.

Right.

At a rather pivotal moment, too.

That would have been a different story had he been, you know, if that was the janitor who then became the president, that would be the Horatio Alger story.

But I still thought it was.

Isn't this, uh, isn't this the great, uh, nation and the great enterprise, the free enterprise that we have? The, the ability for the, uh, for the young man to, uh, to grow in stature and, uh, in surrounding? Isn't this what we all are in the business for, any business?

The United States is famous for its Horatio Alger-type stories, uh, rags to riches, this type thing, and I think if you'll investigate most athletes, they come from humble beginnings, which is wonderful because from these beginnings, they know that through athletics, they have a chance to make something of themselves, perhaps do something for their family, uh, in gratitude for the way that, uh, they sacrificed perhaps in bringing you up.

And through athletics, you have a chance to better yourself.

You have a chance to, to perhaps wear nice clothes where you weren't able to before.

There are some comedians who read, and I still respect them.

Look at someone like Groucho Marx, dropped out of middle school, but he was reading Horatio Alger and all these fancy authors.

Groucho is one of the goats.

I don't think that's a controversial thing.

In 1966, sociologist William Peterson observed that, quote, barely more than 20 years after the end of the wartime camps, this is a minority that has risen above even prejudiced criticism.

Even in a country whose patron saint is the Horatio Alger hero, there is no parallel to the success story.

Of course, white people's perceptions of the Nisei is a fractured view through a broken lens.

Few Japanese Americans were able to attain the highest levels of their professions, no matter their education or performance, and many never recovered from the trauma, disruption, and violence of internment.

We have the opposite now, right? The whole purpose of life is to get away from the village.

become a genius, whatever that means, and then you start a new family out there somewhere and you start a new life out there somewhere and you become, it's the Horatio Alger story.

It's the literal fundament of American culture since its inception.

Go west and reinvent yourself.

...

in some ways, Ted is like Horatio Alger.

He's like the American dream.

He's like, he's really bought into-

Um, and because here's what we do, and I mention this in the book, and this is like the false choices.

On the one hand, we have the Horatio Alger story.

Yeah.

Up from the bootstraps, blah, blah, blah, you can do it.

And that's something, you know, that's a...

I mean, that's what gets me is that, you know, people aren't reading anymore Horatio Alger, you know, all those stories about rising to the riches.

And we're so busy, you know, destroying this country, talking about how terrible it is.

Nobody can make it in life.