John G. Cawelti

Luke Walton is not puffed up by his unexpected and remarkable success. He never fails to recognize kindly, and help, if there is need, the old associates of his humbler days, and never tries to conceal the fact that he was once a Chicago Newsboy

Today his books are read more often by cultural historians than by children, and such erstwhile classics as Struggling Upward and Mark, The Matchboy are no longer on the shelves of libraries, but the name of Horatio Alger has become synonymous with the self-made man. American businessmen who commission brief biographies often are described in the following manner:

The Horatio Alger quality of William J. Stebler's rise to the presidency of General American Transportation Corporation makes one almost pause for breath.

There is even a Horatio Alger award presented annually by the American Schools and Colleges Association to eight Americans who have reached positions of prominence from humble beginnings. In recent years, this award, a bronze desk plaque, has been presented to such leading industrialists and financiers as Benjamin F. Fairless, retired chairman of the United Sates Steel Corporation; James H. Carmichael, chairman of Capital Airlines; and Milton G. Hulme, president and chairman of a large investment banking firm in Pittsburgh. The creator of Ragged Dick has become a familiar idol to Americans concerned about the decline of what they refer to as "individualistic free enterprise." Advertising Age in December, 1947, tired of "government interference" in business, begged for a new Horatio Alger to inspire American youth with the independence and enterprise of their fathers.

Many of those who parade under Alger's mantle know little about their hero beyond the fact that he wrote books about success. they would probably be startled if they read one, for Alger was not a partisan of "rugged individualism" and only within limits an admirer of pecuniary success. For a patron saint of success, his life was rather obscure. Born in 1832 in Revere, Massachusetts, he was trained for the ministry at the insistence of his domineering father. He soon gave this up when he found he could support himself by writing children's books. He published a collection of sentimental tales in 1856, and his first widely popular juvenile, Ragged Dick, was published serially in Oliver Optic's (William T. Adams) Student and Schoolmate magazine, and as a book, in 1867. Alger moved to New York about 1886 and, aside from an occasional trip West and to Europe, spent most of his life in and around the Newsboys' Lodging House, an institution which figures in many of his stories. Its superintendent, Charles O'Connor, was one of his few close friends. Alger, whose books made fortunes for several publishers, died a relatively poor man. He sold most of his books outright for small sums, and spent what money he received in acts of spontaneous and unflagging charity to help almost anyone who applied to him. His amazingly rapid composition of books like Grit, the Young Boatman of Pine Point and Jed, the Poorhouse Boy was interspersed with occasional efforts at a serious novel, desultory participation in reform movements - New York Mayor A. Oakley Hall, member of the Tweed ring, once named him chairman of an anti-vice commission - and brief forays into education (he sometimes tutored boys in Greek and Latin to supplement the income from his books).

Alger's death in 1899 did not put an end to the publication of Alger books. Publishers hired ghosts like Edward Stratemeyer, later the author of the Rover Boys series, to capitalize on Alger's popularity. Inevitably, there were signs of a reaction. Parents began to protest against what they considered the false values and unreality of the Alger stories, and a number of libraries removed his books from the shelves. They were republished less often in the second decade of the twentieth century, and after World War I, sales declined rapidly. At the centennial of Alger's birth, in 1933, a survey of New York working children showed that less than 20 per cent of the "juvenile proletariat" had ever heard of Alger; only 14 per cent had ready an Alger book; and, even more threatening, a "large number" dismissed the theory of "work and win" as "a lot of bunk." A similar survey taken in the forties revealed that only 1 per cent of 20,000 children had read an Alger book.

Alger and His Predecessors

There was a marked difference between Alger's work and that of his most important predecessor in the field of juvenile fiction, Jacob Abbott, author of the "Rollow" and the "Caleb" books, beginning his extremely successful career as a write of children's books in the early 1830s with a long, rather heavily theological tome discussing the Christian duties of young boys and girls. A strong emphasis on evangelical Protestantism remained the central element in his work. Alger, on the other hand, was not so concerned with the role of religion in the lives of his young heroes. There were other important differences between the Abbot boy and the Alger boy. A firm believer in the ethic of industry, frugality, integrity, and piety, Abbott rarely made ambition itself a significant element in his stories. Rollo and Caleb were not poor boys but the scions of well-to-do middle-class families. The typical Abbot book concerns everyday events from which Rollo or Caleb learns an important moral lesson. In Rollo at Work, for example, the hero learns how to work through a Lockean course of instruction which instills in him a progressively greater capacity for sustained effort.

Unlike Alger, Abbott chose to write about younger boys from well-established families for whom social mobility was not a significant problem and his stories reflect the more conservative social views of the upper middle-class audience for which he wrote. As he presents American life, there are rightful and fundamental class distinctions, each class has its particular role, and there is relatively little movement between classes. At the same time, there is no conception of a leisure class in the Abbott books, and, in terms of worldly luxuries, the gulf between the higher and lower ranks is not great. According to Abbott, since every rank has its proper work, there should be no idlers.

In Alger's stories, on the other hand, rising and falling in society are characteristic henomena. This is not the first appearance in American children's literature of the idea of mobility. Even in the period of Abbott's dominance, some juvenile authors began to write tales, anticipating those of Alger. An interesting halfway house can be seen in the works of Mrs. Louisa M. Tuthill in the period 1830-50. Like Abbott, Mrs. Tuthill generally wrote about boys from well-established families, not the street boys who were Alger's favorite subjects. As an adherent to the Jeffersonian ideal of natural aristocracy, Mrs. Tuthill believed that American institutions properly encouraged the rise of talented and virtuous young men to whatever positions of eminence their merits entitled them. In her I Will Be a Gentleman for example, she attacks the idea of hereditary distinction:

Having no hereditary titles in the United States, there can be no higher distinction than that which belongs to moral worth, intellectual superiority, and refined politeness. A republican gentleman therefore need acknowledge no superior; he is a companion for nobles and kings, or, what is better, for the polite, the talented, the good. Since such are an American's only claims to distinction, it becomes the more important for him to cultivate all those graces which elevate and dignify humanity. No high ancestral claims can he urge for his position in society. Wealth he may possess, and there are those who will acknowledge that claim but if the possessor have not intelligence and taste to teach him how to use his wealth, it will only make him a more conspicuous mark for ridicule. Those glorious institutions of new England, common schools, afford to every boy the opportunity to acquire that intelligence and taste, and his associates there are from every class of society. There is no insurmountable obstacle in any boy's way; his position in society must depend mainly upon himself.

Mrs. Tuthill puts the same limits on rising in society as the didactic novelists of the same period. The candidate for distinction must be talented, virtuous, and refined, although he need not spring from an aristocratic family tradition. This emphasis on gentility and refinement, however acquired, also has an important role in the Alger books. Alger constantly emphasizes neatness, good manners, and the proper clothes, and yet his conception of gentility is far less elevated than Mrs. Tuthill's. In spite of her frequent protestations that the way was open to all, Mrs. Tuthill's heroes spring from respectable families who have the means to educate their children.

Most of the children's literature of the pre-Civil War period deals with the offspring of secure, middle-class families, but the orphaned boy of the city streets is not without his bards. As early as 1834, a putative autobiography of a bootblack who rose from poverty to be a member of Congress was published with the delightful title, A Spur to Youth; or, Davy Crockett Beaten. In the following year, Charles F. Barnard published The Life of Collin Reynolds, the Orphan Boy, and Young Merchant. In this tearful tale, dedicated to the pupils of the Hollis Street Sunday School in Boston, the hero is orphaned when his mother dies and his father goes to sea. Undaunted, he determines to support himself by peddling candy, peanuts, and sundries on the New York ferries. In good Alger fashion, he soon meets the wealthy Mr. J., who is impressed by the boy's history, his industry, and his enterprise and adopts him. Entering Mr. J.'s store, Collin is doing well when the opportunity to sigh forth a highly sentimental deathbed scene proves more attractive to his creator than the fulfillment of material promise. Poor Collin is disposed of in a fall from a horse.

Even closer to Alger formulas is J.J. Ingraham's Jemmy Daily: or, The Little News Bernder published in 1843. Ingraham, a hack writer of astonishing fertility, made sentimental romance out of almost any subject. Ingraham's treatment of the newsboy foreshadowed both Alger's characteristic, material and his method of treating it. Jemmy Daily and his noble mother, reduced to starvation by a drunken father, are saved when, in a chance encounter, the lovely daughter of a wealthy merchant gives Jemmy food and a sixpence. As a newsboy, Jemmy manages to support his mother. When father becomes intolerable, Jemmy and his mother leave him, a shock which happily reforms the drunkard. The rest of the story concerns Jemmy's fight with a bully and his foiling of the quack Dr. Wellington Smoot's lascivious designs on his mother. Once reformed, the father is granted a convenient death, and Jemmy takes over the family, becoming a clerk under the benevolent tutelage of Mr. Weldon. Jemmy's reward is the promise of a junior partnership and the hand of Mr. Weldon's daughter, the girl who had originally befriended him.

The difference between Ingraham's tale and the typical Alger story is largely a matter of emphasis. The plot and the characters are essentially the same, but Ingraham stresses religious conversion and "the great moral temperance reform, which is without question one of the agents of God in ameliorating the condition of fallen man." Jemmy Daily's rise in society and his gradual acquisition of respectability are not as important to him as they were to Alger.

In the 1850's, as urban phenomena became of increasing interest and concern, newsboys and bootblacks were common figures in popular fiction. A. L. Stimson's Easy not includes an Alger-like street boy adopted by a benevolent farmer, and Seba Smith's wife, a sentimental novelist of considerable popularity, published a long novel, The Newsboy’s> in 1854. This is a typical romantic adventure, containing as one of its many plots the narrative of a poor newsboy's rise to some prominence, through, as usual, the patronage of a benevolent merchant. One writer in the 1850s went so far as to proclaim the newsboy the symbol of a new age:

Our clarion now, more potent than the Fontabrian hor, is the shrill voice of the news-boy, that modern Minerva, who leaped full-blown from the o-er-fraught head of journalism; and, as the news-boy is in some respects the type of the time - an incarnation of the spirit of the day, - a few words devoted to his consideration may not be deemed amiss.

Alger had considerable precedent for his dramatization of the street boy's rise to social respectability. Nor was he the only writer of his time to employ this subject. In fact, Alger neither created the Alger hero nor was he his only exponent. A flood of children's books by such authors as Oliver Optic, Mrs. Sarah Stuart Robbins, Mrs. Madeline Leslie, and the Rev. Elijah Kellog dealt with the rise to moderate security of a poor boy. Alger, however, outsold them all. Somehow he was able to seize upon just those combinations of characters, and plot situations that most engrossed adolescent American boys of the nineteenth century.

Alger's Message

Alger's contemporary position as a symbol of individualistic free enterprise has obscured the actual characteristics of his stories. A number of misconceptions must be cleared away before we can get to the heart of the Alger vision of what constitutes success. Here, for example, is a typical interpretation of the Alger hero in a recent book:

Alone, unaided, the ragged boy is plunged into the maelstrom of city life, but by is own pluck and luck he capitalizes on one of the myriad opportunities available to him and rises to the top of the economic heap. Here, in a nutshell, is the plot of every novel Alger ever wrote; here, too, is the quintessence of the myth. Like many simple formulations which nevertheless convey a heavy intellectual and emotional charge to vast numbers of people, the Alger hero represents a triumphant combination - and reduction to the lowest common denominator - of the most widely accepted concepts in nineteenth-century American society. The believe in the potential greatness of the common name, the glorification of individual effort and accomplishment, the equation of the pursuit of money with the pursuit of happiness and of business success with spiritual grace; simply to mention these concepts is to comprehend the brilliance of Alger's synthesis.

This passage illustrates several important misconceptions concerning Alger's books. In the first place, Alger's heroes are rarely, "alone and unaided," and do not win their success entirely through individual effort and accomplishment. From the very beginning of his career, the Alger boy demonstrates and astounding propensity for chance encounters with benevolent and useful friends, and his success is largely due to their patronage and assistance. In the course of his duties Fred Fenton, the hero of The Erie Train Boy, Nor did the Alger hero rise "to the top of the economic heap." Some years ago a writer for Time, in a mathematical mood, calculated that the average Alger hero's fortune is only $10,000. Usually the hero is established in a secure white-collar position, either as a clerk with the promise of a junior partnership or as a junior member of a successful mercantile establishment. None achieve anything resembling economic or political prominence. Moderate economic security would best summarize the pecuniary achievements of the typical Alger hero, in spite of such tantalizing titles as Fame and Fortune, Striving for Fortune, and From Farm to Fortune. For example, at the end of Fame and Fortune, the hero is in possession of a magnificent income of $1,400 a year, plus the interest on about $2,000 in savings. In Alger's mind, this was "fame and fortune."

We may admit that Alger's representation of economic reality was highly sentimentalized, but it is unfair to call him an uninhibited adulator of wealth who equated spiritual grace with business success. The true aim of the Alger hero is respectability, a happy state only practically defined by economic repute. Nor was Alger unaware that many men were successful as the result of questionable practices. He may have lacked knowledge of these practices, but Alger frequently reminded his readers that many wealthy and successful men were undeserving of their fortunes. One of his favorite villains is the wealthy, unscrupulous banker who accumulates wealth by cheating widows and orphans. On the whole Alger's formula is more accurately stated as middle-class respectability equals spiritual grace.

Alger was no more an unrestrained advocate of the "potential greatness" of the common man than he was of the uninhibited pursuit of financial success. His heroes are ordinary boys only in the sense of their lowly origin. In ability and personal character they are far above average. Many boys in the Alger books are unable, in spite of their earnest efforts, to rise above a lowly position. Micky McGuire, a young slum boy who is a secondary character in the Ragged Dick series, is reformed at last through the efforts of Dick and his patron, Mr. Rockwell. But the old maxim "No Irish Need Apply" still held for Alger.

Micky has already turned out much better than was expected, but he is hardly likely to rise much higher than the subordinate position he now occupies. In capacity and education he is far inferior to his old associated, Richard Hunter, who is destined to rise much higher than at present.

Who, then is the Alger hero, and what is the nature of the adventures in which he is involved? Alger ha stwo types of heroes. The first, and probably the more popular, is the poor, uneducated street boy - sometimes and orphan, more frequently the son of a widowed mother - who rises to moderate affluence. The second is a well-born and well-educated middle-class you whose father dies, leaving the sonto fend for himself, in some cases a villainous squire or distant relative attempts to cheat the hero out of his rightful legacy, but, in the end, the hero is restored to his inheritance or succeeds in rising to his proper place.

Alger made desultory attempts to vary the character of his hero in each story, but such achievement was beyond his skill, and the reader could be certain that, whatever the situation, and whether the hero smokes or uses slangy language, the same solid core of virtue is present. Alger's heroes, who range in age from around twelve to eighteen, are in the tradition of the didactic novels of self-improvement. One must give Alger some credit for making his young paragons a little less earnest and more lively than the placid prigs of T. S. Arthur. The Alger hero might begin an intemperate spendthrift like Ragged Dick, but soon becomes a master of the traditional virtues of industry, economy, integrity, and piety. He is manly and self-reliant - Alger's favorite words - and, in addition, kind and generous. Never is he a boy of above-average intelligence, particularly in the field of mathematics, and is also a strenuous devotee of self-culture. The Alger hero is never snobbish or condescending; indeed, he is the veritable apotheosis of modesty. Thoroughly democratic in his tastes, he befriends other poor boys and is uniformly courteous to people of all classes. The Alger hero demonstrates to a high degree those traits that might be called the employee virtues: fidelity, punctuality, and courteous deference. It is upon these latter traits that Alger places the greatest stress.

Against his hero, Alger sets three types of boys who serve as foils to the hero's sterling qualities. One of these may be called the lesser hero. He is usually a slightly younger and less vigorous edition of the major figure. The lesser hero often has greater advantages than his friend, but lacks the enterprise, the courage, and the self-reliance of the hero, and frequently depends on him for protection against the harsh urban world, enabling the hero to demonstrate his courage and generosity. Another boy who appears in almost all the Alger books is the snob. Insisting that he is a gentleman's son, the snob looks down his nose at the hero's willingness to work at such lowly trades as that of bootblack or newsboy. Sometimes the snob is the son of a rich but grasping relative of the hero's, envious of his greater capabilities and endeavoring to get him into trouble. The young snob shows the obverse of all the hero's virtues: he is lazy, ignorant, arrogant, and unwilling to work because he considers it beneath his station. He is overtly contemptuous and secretly envious of the hero's successes. Alger delights in foiling this little monster, usually by arranging for his father to fail in business, thereby forcing the snob to go to work at a salary lower than the hero's.

Another type appearing somewhat less frequently in the Alger books is the poor boy who lacks the intelligence and ability of the hero and is more susceptible to the corruption of his environment. Often he becomes involved in plots against the hero, but is usually won over when he recognizes his true manliness and forgiving character. Although sometimes reformed through the hero's efforts, the Micky McGuire type is doomed to remain in a subordinate but respectable position by his lack of intelligence an enterprise. Curiously enough, these dim-minded characters are Alger's most interesting and vivid creations, and foreshadow the "bad boy" heroes of later juvenile books. In addition, they frequently represent immigrant groups - Irish, Italians, Germans - who, not all bad, play a distinctly inferior role in Alger's version of America.

The adult characters vary no more than the boys in the typical Alger book. The central adult figure is the benevolent businessman whose chance encounter with the hero gives him his big opportunity. Like all adults in Alger, this figure is thinly characterized, his major traits being the ability to recognize and reward the hero's potentialities. He is allied upon to deliver long homilies on the virtues requisite to success. Generally, he is a merchant or a highly reputable stockbroker. In his business dealings he is honest and up-right, scorning all but the most elevated commercial practices. In effect his role is to serve as an ideal adoptive father for the hero.

The second most important male adult in the Alger books, is the villain, who usually has some important hold over the hero. Sometimes he is a mean stepfather, more often a grasping uncle or cousin who becomes the hero's guardian, and frequently a cruel, miserly squire who holds a mortgage on the family property. Whatever his mask, he invariably attempts to assert his tyrannical authority over the hero, and fails. One is tempted to describe him in Freudian terms, as the overbearing father-figure whose authority the adolescent hero rejects and overthrows.

Few of the Alger heroes are orphans; the majority have a widowed mother dependent upon them for support Here Alger differs appreciably from his predecessors. The Alger mother stands in a very different relationship to her doughty young offspring than do the mothers in the novels of T. S. Arthur. The "Arthurian" mother is pre-eminently a source of moral authority, an instructor and preceptor, whose gentle commands the young hero is expected to obey. In Alger, the mother rarely commands or instructs; although she presumably has some hand in her son's development, her authoritative function is mentioned only rarely. On the contrary, she is both a dependent and an admiring onlooker. Always gentle and supremely confident in her son's ability, she never criticizes or disciplines. Indeed, occasionally she is weak and indecisive, qualities which might lead the family into difficulty were it not for the manly self-reliance of her son. Characteristic of the Alger version of maternity is this interchange between Paul the peddler and his mother:

"You see, mother, Phil would be sure of a beating if he went home without his fiddle. Now he doesn't like to be beaten, and the padrone gives harder beatings than you do, mother." "I presume so," said Mrs. Hoffman, smiling. "I do not think I am very severe." "No, you spoil the rod and spare the child."

The benevolent merchant, the villainous father-figure, and the gentle and appreciative mother are at the center of most Alger books. They are joined by a variety of minor figures, all of whom can be traced to the traditional ste reotypes of the sentimental novel; the warm-hearted Irish woman, poor and crude, kind and generous, who helps the hero escape from the villain; the snobbish female with aristocratic pretensions; the "stage Yankee" who appears in an occasional novel as a friend of the hero; and a variety of minor villains, such as the miserly moneylender, the petty swindler, and, in the Western stores, the stagecoach robber.

From such material, together with carefully accumulated local color - the books are filled with detailed descriptions of New York City - Alger constructed his tales. Almost invariably, they follow the same formula: by an amazing series of coincidences and a few acts of personal heroism and generosity, the hero escaped from the plots laid by his enemies - usually an unholy alliance between the snobbish boy and the villainous father-figure - and attains the patronage of the benevolent merchant. In generating the action. chance and luck play a dominant role. Alger was apparently aware that the unbelievable tissue of coincidences which ran through his stories put some strain on the tolerance of his youthful readers. In Struggling Upward