by May, Rollo
First presented in a serial in a magazine aptly entitled Ways to Success, this story sold 50 million copies in paperback and was read by millions more. The story begins with a typical American competition, namely an ice-skating race. Randolph Duncan, whose father was Prince Duncan, a banker, having all the characteristics of European aristocracy including the name of his father, Prince, is matched against Luke, a poor boy, the son of a carpenter’s widow. Luke makes his way by being janitor of the school. He is presented as “eager to work, reliable, generous,” and his face has a “pleasant expression, a warmhearted, resolute look.”
Luke is tripped up by an accomplice of Duncan and so loses the race and the Waterbury watch, which was the prize. When Luke comes up to congratulate him, Duncan remarks patronizingly about the watch, “You are a poor boy. It doesn’t matter to you.” And Luke replies, “I don’t know about that, Randolph. Time is likely to be of as much importance to a poor boy as a rich boy.” The implication here is that time is money to the corporations and their offices; everything runs on the exact time, whereas to the farmer or janitor a watch is a luxury.
Luke is then saved from conviction for a crime he did not commit by a “tall, dark-complexioned stranger” who takes him to New York City, where he meets Mr. Armstrong. The latter remarks that Luke is “a thoroughly good boy, and a smart boy too. I must see if I can give him a chance to rise. He seems absolutely reliable.” One notes that important word “rise”—success meant rising indefinitely.
The upshot of the story is that Luke discovers that the banker, the father of Randolph, has stolen some bonds from Mr. Armstrong, and the tale concludes with Luke’s discovering the theft and achieving success in New York, while Randolph and the Duncan family are required to move to the west to recuperate their integrity. What is fascinating here is that the west is “healing,” as we have pointed out; it is the place where people get their strength and their integrity. Then this power from the west—which I take to be the power from absorbing the American myths—is absorbed by the individual and he is transferred back to the east, where the myth is used for the climb to success in the great corporations.
This dark-complexioned, tall stranger mentioned above is a curious figure. He brings to mind the “strange traveler” in Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt, a man who is crucial to Peer Gynt at last finding his own integrity. The “tall stranger” is parallel furthermore to Mr. Cody, the rich man who gives Gatsby his first job and a yachtsman’s costume. There is also the omnipresent element in the story of being taken care of by someone who likes you; it reminds us of the myth presented in Death of a Salesman, where Willy Loman puts so much stake on being the “best liked.”
These Alger stories gave a powerful sanction to the individual and sustained each person working in the great corporations. It helped persons to accept their station, meet their anxiety, and quench their guilt and gave a structure to their sense of morality and their identity. We have our great examples of such success: the chief hero of the Horatio Alger myths was Andrew Carnegie, who came to this country as an immigrant boy, worked his way up to president of American Steel, and sold his interest in it for four hundred million dollars. He wrote a book called Road to Success and made lecture tours around the country on how to succeed.
The myth of success consoled us in the difficulties of struggling to “rise” to higher and higher positions. When we were anxious with such questions as, Did I reach too far? Or too high? we could console ourselves: only a bold person would reach the top. When we had a pang of guilt at exploiting our fellow men, we could whisper to ourselves that we need not take the responsibility for others, that they must learn on their own, and this expression of individualism then relieved us of our guilt.
Luck, in “Luke Larkin’s Luck,” is unpredictable, something over which we have no control. How is one to be certain that his endeavors will yield the vaunted “success”? No wonder physicians researching ulcers and heart trouble in contemporary people state that the “pervasive Horatio Alger myth is a prime cause of type A behavior.”* This describes the syndrome of the person in our day who is driven, always in a hurry, tense, lean, competitive, and prone to stress-related diseases. This, rightly say the researchers, is “fed by the Horatio Alger Myth.”†
That word “luck” in this story of Luke Larkin is a repetition of the myth of the Renaissance goddess Fortuna, which in turn comes down from the Greek mythic figure Tyche, who traveled everywhere at the side of Zeus. She is pictured on a constantly revolving wheel, and in her journeys around the world she “scattered with careless hands her numerous gifts, lavishing with indifference her choicest smiles.” In our culture it is still a matter to a great extent of “luck”; Fortuna is unpredictable, dependent on the vagaries of the stock market and other things over which we have little or no control.
CONTEMPORARY EVIL IN PARADISE
Most dramatically of all, ex-President Reagan was the spokesman for the Horatio Alger myth. He affected the rags-to-riches style: he made a point in his news conferences of telling how he had to eat “oatmeal-meat” as a boy. He now has become a millionaire, an ideal he holds for every American. When pushed in one of his news conferences to state his bottom-line position on the question of whether he was for the rich or the poor, he stated firmly, “What I want to see above all is that this country remains a country where someone can always get rich. “** Here is the Horatio Alger myth to a syllable—the plea that this country continue to strive for the myth of Horatio Alger. President Reagan also took pride in the fact that in his judgment—and possibly also in reality—the great rise of the Dow-Jones average and the spending spree led to what he called the “greatest example of entrepreneurial success in history.”*
The stock market boomed to a height never dreamt of before. Money flowed freely, and armed with credit cards the nation seemed to be on a gigantic spending spree. We were inundated on television and radio by those living out an adage of Coolidge half a century earlier, “Advertising is the method by which the desire is created for better things.” Our new inventions in computer techniques and VCRs and travels by ship or plane presented new possibilities at every moment. Young people filled the business schools to overflowing, and the newspapers idealized the numerous millionaires in their twenties who were making it “big.” Reagan took partial credit for this “miracle of prosperity,” as he called it. It was the heyday of individualism in the business world.
As one writer on the takeovers put it: “It is the American dream: for a kid from the Bronx or a boy from rural Wisconsin to sit at the very center of the turbulent takeover wars that are transforming Wall Street and corporate America, and make millions by the age of thirty-five.”†
Parallel to the financial boom was the rapid growth of gambling. “In Pennsylvania the lottery prize reached the giddy height of $115 million…. Once upon a time, mass irrationality was considered a menace to democratic government. But in this age of lotteries … mass hysteria is an important ingredient of public finance.” It is well known that gambling fleeces the poor more than the rich. Gambling capitalizes on the myth of Fortuna—that we can get rich through “luck.” And we can then live the life which those laughing rich people on television screens present so vividly to us.
Twenty-six states at this writing have state-sponsored lotteries, and the number is increasing. Newsweek reports, “America’s gambling fever … is part of the weekly, even daily routine of tens of millions of Americans.” Lottery earnings have been growing an average of 17.5 percent annually. George Will points out rightly, “Gambling is debased speculation, craving for sudden wealth…. This age of lotteries” is a mass hysteria.*
In gambling and lotteries several powerful myths are expressed. The first is the mother’s breast: one needs only to open one’s sucking mouth and, magically, the breast falls in. Another is being fed by some great goddess who takes care of him or her in her hidden ways. In this sense the stated aim of this nation—to increase production—is powerfully undermined
by gambling. The stronger the hope to win big on the stock market or lottery or betting on a football game, the less effort one will put forth in honest work. Then work becomes irrelevant: one will live, so goes the myth, by manna dropping from heaven, or more fittingly one lives by the effluence from the world of demons.
This is George Will’s statement on gambling:
Gambling fever reflects and exacerbates what has been called the “fatalism of the multitude.” The more people believe in the importance of luck, chance, randomness, fate, the less they believe in the importance of stern virtues such as industriousness, thrift, deferral of gratification, diligence, studiousness. It is drearily understandable why lotteries—skill-less gambling; gambling for the lazy—are booming at a time when the nation’s productivity, competitiveness, savings rate and academic performance are poor.
THE AGE OF MELANCHOLY
Underneath and covered over by the gleeful noises of the lotteries and the shopping sprees in America is a widespread psychological depression. This was uncovered by two far-reaching studies extending over two years by the National Institutes for Mental Health. Something has happened since World War II. Psychological depression is now going on at a rate ten times as high as before World War II.* Martin Seligman, one of the psychologists who performed the study, sums up its results: “If you were born in the last fifty years, you have ten times as much chance of being seriously depressed as you would if you were born in the fifty years before that time.”†
The inquiries in this study went on over two years; 9,500 persons were interviewed. The questions studied were whether the person had prolonged low moods, suicidal thoughts or actions, loss of interest in usually enjoyable activities, lack of motivation for extended periods, loss of appetite, and the psychological depressions for which lithium or similar drugs are prescribed.
This widespread epidemic of depression, Dr. Seligman indicates, has gone hand in hand during the past fifty years with a loss of psychological and spiritual guidance. The family influence has evaporated in a culture which has little belief in God.
There has occurred a bankruptcy of sources to which one, particularly the youth, could turn for solace or direction when he or she has had a personal failure. The person has only him or herself as the court of last appeal, and that, says Seligman, is a frail court indeed. We have already cited the rise in suicide in youth in the 1970s, and these studies put that dismal figure into its context.
As a scientific check against their own prejudices, Seligman and his colleagues studied two primitive cultures. One was the Amish of Lancaster County in Pennsylvania, who have no automobiles and have preserved an island of early nineteenth-century community with no influence from what we could call modem American society. The other was the Kaluli of New Guinea. The investigators found that in these societies a person goes through well-established social structures, consisting of myths and rituals when he or she has a failure or some personal loss. The breakdown in myths is made good so that the individual can pick himself up without inner loss.
The individual in our culture, however, when picking himself or herself up after a failure, has nowhere to turn except “to a very small and frail unit indeed: the self.” This again is one reason the profession of psychotherapy has grown so rapidly, though obviously this profession cannot be considered a sufficient answer to the epidemic of depression. American people, by and large, have few societal guides, as we have pointed out in earlier chapters—no rituals, no myths to give them solace in time of need.*
The sheer size of individual buying power, “the decline of the power of religion and the family and of commitment to the nation has weakened the buffering effect of faith against depression.”
Martin Seligman proposes the tentative solutions from himself and his colleagues. One “frightening possibility is that we will rashly surrender the sweet freedom that individualism brings, giving up personal control and concern for the self in order to shed depression and attain meaning. The twentieth century is riddled with disastrous examples of societies that have done just this to cure their ills. The current yearning for fundamentalist religion both in America and throughout the world appears to be such a temptation.” The flight into cults, which was so prominent, particularly on the west coast, is another example.
But Seligman proposes a “more hopeful possibility: a balance between individualism, with its perilous freedoms, and commitment to the common good, which should lower depressions as well as make life more meaningful.”
We are here emphasizing that one symptom of the wholesale condition that Seligman describes is our lack of viable myths and rituals. It is imperative that we rediscover myths which can give us the psychological structure necessary to confront this widespread depression. Otherwise we will never be able to control the devastating use of drugs.
NARCISSISM, DRUGS, AND MONEY
Bill Moyers went into a section of New York City where one can at any time buy drugs, especially crack and cocaine, from boys on the street corner. There were no policemen around; the people told him that when one “cop” was shot several months earlier, there were a number of police force there for a few days, but they had left. Moyers was told by the boys themselves that they start selling cocaine and crack when they are about twelve years old. When there is a vacancy in their ranks, there is always someone waiting to take the missing seller’s place. This was the only job in the area. There were also several college students in the group gathered around Moyers. Later in the interview Moyers asked these boys point-blank why they sold drugs. Their answer was simple, “Money, money, money.”
They had learned that this was the aim of a considerable part of our society. On television they had seen Ivan Boesky, the in-trader, who was then in prison for embezzling many millions. Also they noted that those who get a million dollars are lionized and their pictures are saluted in the newspapers. These boys had noted that young people get their MBAs and make a million dollars before they are thirty; it does not seem to matter how they got it. Moyers tried to learn whether they had any role models. In denying any such persons, the boys mentioned the Watergate affair, Boesky, North, and other such persons around the country. These boys were aware that the lottery prize in Pennsylvania had risen to $115 million, that half the states in the union now have this form of gambling, and that the number is growing.
By happenstance, just after the report of Moyers’ interview, photos in the TV news were shown of ex-President Reagan and his wife landing in the airport in Japan. It was announced that on the next day Reagan was to receive $2 million for two twenty-minute speeches. One wonders whether the young people had been right when they repeated their goals of “Money, money, money!”*
We have traced the original myth of individualism, which was so central for the early settlers of America, through Whitman’s poetry and the myth of Horatio Alger. These influences have surely formed and molded the myths and the way of life of our present decades. We will seek to clarify the forming and reforming of life in America which, in our consciousness, can re-form these myths in ways that will form the basis for our living constructively in the twenty-first century.
EIGHT
Gatsby and the American Dream
His life had been confused and disordered … but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.
F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby
AFTER THE ENDING of World War I in 1918, there was in America a great deal of unleashed energy with no place to go. Everyone seemed full of free-floating passion to participate in the war effort, most of which energy was then left hanging in the air by the Versailles treaty. How was our energy to be expressed? A great deal of it was channeled into the amazing twelve-year phenomenon known as the Jazz Age.
THE JAZZ AGE
This age of the nostalgic whining of saxophones was a time of rebellion against almost everything. It was the time when Prohibition and the Vol
stead Act made organized crime pay richly and sired a contempt for all laws and ethics in general. “Puritanism” was a dirty word. The rebellion was most obvious in women’s styles: long hair went out and the French bob came in, and it is hard for us nowadays to recall the horror that first greeted this shearing of feminine hair. Women rebelled against ankle-length gowns, and suddenly dresses were above the knees, as in the John Held, Jr., cartoons. Along with the Charleston and ragtime, the flapper was in with necking and petting, the automobile furnishing a movable form of cover for this truncated sex.
Money flowed freely in the 1920s. In politics it was the age of Warren Gamaliel Harding’s presidency, which ended in utter disgrace, and the Teapot Dome scandal, which dwarfed the scandals to come until our present days. Blessed with President Coolidge’s proclamation “The business of America is business,” there was mad gambling on the stock market, the great extent of which was not recognized until that historic day, October 29, 1929, when the stock market crashed, the banks were closed, and the intense suffering of the Great Depression began.
In this Jazz Age we experienced a great surge of interest in “selling” everything, including ourselves. Books were published on how to sell your personality to employers and how to sell yourself to your lover and prospective mother-in-law. The distinction was never clear as to why selling yourself was good but selling your body on the street corner was not. Bruce Barton, a successful New York advertising man, wrote a book portraying Jesus as the Great Salesman, The Man Nobody Knows, which was read from coast to coast. Get-rich-quick schemes were spawned by the moment; almost everyone got burned purchasing Florida real estate which turned out to be soggy marshland. There were the cults: Aimie Semple McPherson, Father Coughlin, and so on.
I propose that the Jazz Age was the first throes of collapse of the American dream. The structure of myths on which America had existed for four centuries was now thrown into radical transition.