Made in America: Self-Styled Success from Horatio Alger to Oprah Winfrey

202 Pages·1997·0.67 MB·English

by  Jeffrey Louis Decker

M A D E I N A M E R I C A
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M A D E I N A M E R I C A
Self-Styled Success from Horatio Alger
to Oprah Winfrey
Jeffrey Louis Decker
University ofMinnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Copyright1997by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
Portions of Chapter 3originally appeared as “Reconstructing Enterprise:
Madam Walker, Black Womanhood, and the Transformation of the American
Culture of Success.” Reprinted from The Seductions of Biographyedited by
David Suchoff and Mary Rhiel. Copyright 1996. Used by permission of the
publisher, Routledge:New York and London.
Portions of Chapter 5originally appeared as “Gatsby’s Pristine Dream:The
Diminishment of the Self-Made Man in the Tribal Twenties,” in Novel:A
Forum on Fiction28:1(fall1994). Copyright 1994. Reprinted by permission of
the Novel Corporation.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN55401-2520
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Decker, Jeffrey Louis.
Made in America : self-styled success from Horatio Alger to Oprah
Winfrey / Jeffrey Louis Decker.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8166-3020-8 (hardcover : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-8166-3021-6
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Success—United States—History. I. Title.
BJ1611.D36 1997
302′.14′0973—dc21 97-19568
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
To Jenny
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xiii
The Rise of the Self-Made Man and the Triumph of
U.S. Nationalism
From Character to Personality to Image
Multicultural Narratives of Uplift in Twentieth-Century America
1 Class Mobility 1
Moral Luck and the Horatio Alger Formula: Andrew Carnegie
Hard Luck: John McLuckie
The Limits of Luck: James J. Davis
2 Gender Stability 15
Troubling the Horatio Alger Formula: Tattered Tom
True Womanhood in the Market: Harriet Hubbard Ayer
Domesticating Business: The “Emma McChesney” Trilogy
3 Racial Segregation 31
The Political Economy of a Lynch Mob: Tom Moss,
Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart
Free Enterprise: Booker T. Washington
Working Wonders: Madam C. J. Walker
4 Immigrant Aspirations 53
Out of America: Marcus Garvey
From Steerage to Self-Culture: Mary Antin
Oriental Yankees: Younghill Kang
vii
Contents
5 Individual Enterprise in the Postfrontier Nation 78
Not-Quite-White Enterprise in the Tribal Twenties:
The Great Gatsby
Inventing the American Dream in the Great Depression:
The Epic of America
6 The Ends of Self-Making 102
Image, Inc.: Howard Hughes, Lee Iacocca, and
Ross Perot
Downsizing: Susan Powter and Oprah Winfrey
Epilogue: The Return of the Self-Made Man 127
Notes 135
Index 161
viii
Acknowledgments
Although this book has many sources of inspiration, none is more
important to me than the life stories of my grandmother and my
mother. Both had circuitous, if not wholly atypical, routes to enter-
prising success for working women. I grew up hearing stories about
my grandmother, Mary Marinaro, an Italian immigrant who, at four-
teen years old, lied about her age to get a job as an operator with the
telephone company. By the time I was born she had climbed the cor-
porate ladder at AT&T into a midlevel executive position, which was
as far as familial obligations and the corporate glass ceiling allowed.
As I entered my teen years, a family crisis forced my mother, Cile
Decker, into the paid labor force for the first time in fifteen years.
She, like many women of her generation, turned to selling real estate.
Beginning as an independent broker, she moved into management
for a national real estate firm before starting her own company and
making a success of it.
I began working on this project as a graduate student in Ameri-
can Studies at Brown University, where I became interested in ex-
ploring the literature of the self-made man and the history of the
American dream. I owe a debt of gratitude to Brown’s Department of
American Civilization and to its Program in Modern Culture and
Media for allowing me the intellectual space to explore a well-worn
topic using nontraditional methods and materials. I thank my disser-
tation committee, Robert Scholes, Ellen Rooney, Neil Lazarus, and
David Hirsch, as well as Mary Jo Buhle and George Monteiro, all of
ix