NAWSA Subject File Alger, Horatio 131. [*fr*] HORATIO ALGER. Frustration snapped at the heels of Horatio Alger. He showed millions of boys the way to success. He died a failure. His written philosophy was "get." His personal philosophy was "make." While his millions of boy readers were pursuing the efforts he instilled into them, "get" he mourned his inability to "make" to the point of insanity. Horatio Alger wanted to make a book. He never did. He wrote 125 books, but he never made the book he wanted to make. He was continually starting to make it and continually failing to do so. At the end, when he was a shut-in invalid at his sister's home in South Natick, he ordered that the books he wrote be thrown out of his room. "Confusion," he shouted to his sister, "Throw them out of my sight onto the rubbish heap. Herbert H. Mayes has written a bitter and charming book about Horatio Alger and Macy-Masins of New York have published it in the style Alger would like to have the book he wanted to make printed. Frank W. Peers has illustrated it with a fine touch of burlesque. The title is "Alger, a Biography Without a Hero." Horatio Alger suffered the ultimate dissatisfaction felt by all creators. These set too high a goal. His characters, "Ragged Dick," "Dan the Newboy," "Tom the Bootblack," got what they went after and were happy. Their creator never got to Carcassonne. Mr. Mayes brings this out. He suffers with the artist in Alger, but he isn't beyond railing at Alger the author of "Adrift in New YOrk or Tom and Florence Braving the World." A derisive chuckle runs under Mr. Mayes' valuation of the author. From his birth in Chelsea, where his father was a Unitarian minister, to his death in Natick, frustration dogged him. In his college days at Harvard he fell in love. Frustration stepped in and thwarted his desire to marry. When he reached late middle life he fell in love again. Frustration grinned and got back on the job. His beloved was already married. In the end, after offering him some measure of toleration, she wrote to her brother: "Get him away. If Russell finds out---" (Russell was her husband.) This was her answer to his groveling plea. "See me, for God Almighty's sake." Previously she had written to her brother, "I have met men whose faith in an idea has made them wealthy--Yet never have I met a man with such faith in himself as Horatio Alger, and with such ridiculously little cause. His naviete makes me sorry for him." She was writing about his ambition to make his book.) She threw him aside with a tricky lie and fades into obscurity. Horatio Alger graduated from Harvard with the class of '51. His name is the first in the first Harvard Year Book. He got a job as assistant to a young man who had just established a periodical in Boston called "The New England Review." He hadn't been connected with the paper for many weeks when there was a chuckle outside the door of the publication offices and the paper died under him. His old companion, Frustration, was on the job. 132. Back he went to Cambridge. The Theological School knew him for three years and he graduated. Now he was a minister. That hadn't been his ambition at all. "The three years were wasted," he told his diary. But someone had won. That someone was his father who disdained scrivening. But Horatio Alger had his fling. When his parents came to Cambridge for his graduation he had lit out for Paris, no less, with two companions. His nemesis searched Cambridge for him, but for a time lost his trail. For who could expect Horatio Alger to be traipsing off to Paris with a pair of bon vibants? Even such an expert frustration as Alger's couldn't imagine that. In Paris two women fell in love with him. Wonders were occurring. They even fought over him. They courted him, paraded him about the cafes and boulevards, broke down his inhibitions and for six months led him a mad whirl of gaiety. One was a French dancer in a cafe. The other was an English girl---and art student. The second bullied him until he left the first. And he told his diary he had a wonderful time. In the end he had to run away from the English art student. He slipped out of their pension one morning, got aboard a ship bound for home---and there she was waiting for him on the ship. In New York he ran down the gang-plank and dodged through the nearest streets, leaving her to disappear into oblicion. (He had craftily arranged to get his baggage passed through the customs in advance of the other passengers.) Horatio had dodged Charlotte, but had stepped back into the arms of his life-time companion, frustration. His nemesis picked him up somewhere around City Hall Park and remained with him from then on. On December 8, 1964, Horatio Alger was ordained pastor of the Unitarian Church at Brewster, Mass. The ministry irked him. More and more it galled him. In the margins of the paper upon which he wrote his sermons he jotted down plots for stories. He outlined the story of "Ragged Dick" on a margin. He resigned his pulpit in March of 1856, and moved to New York. It cannot be denied, his father expressed contempt. He got a room in a lodging house. He never got out of lodging houses from then on until he came back to South Natick to die at his sister's home. He tried to enlist in the Union cause during the Civil War--and he broke his arm twice. His personal frustration chuckled. The younger generation came home from the Civil War. (Yes there was one even then) Read: The Civil War had scarcely cease to be before the city of New York became the haven of refuge (Mayes talking) for hundreds of youngsters who had run away from country homes to battle for Father Abraham--given a taste of excitement they grew hungry for more---. They had gone to fight for the country and now, having fought, they were going to see some of it. And where better than in the metropolis, they reasoned, was a better point of vantage? Many of these boys were still in their knickers and some of them were no more than 12 or 13 years old..---With neither friends nor funds (Stii Mayes) their situation developed to such a point that a few of them had to steal to eat---several of their numbers resorted to begging on the corners of important thoroughfares. 133. Charles Loring Brace founder of the Newsboy's Lodging House, invited the homeless youths to make their headquarters there. Observing the other occupants of the lodging house eked out a living by the sale of newspapers or by blacking boots, the newcomers took up these trades. Charles O'Connor, who, since its inception had been the superintendent, read "Ragged Dick." He sought out the author and invited him to use the Newsboy's Lodging House as a source of inspiration. From that time on the Newsboys' Lodging House became Alger's New York Home. "Fame and Fortune," Horatio's second book was finished in the lodging house. Copies were distributed among the boys and its acclaim was immediate and great. Boys on farms and in cities joined in the acclaim and Horatio became the best seller in America, a position he maintained for nearly 30 years, from 1870, on. Horatio wrote stories about what a boy ought to be. Frank Merriwell's creator, Will Patten, wrote about a boy that every boy wanted to be. But back to the story of Horatio Alger and his frustration. On Chatham square in the winter of 1873, Mr Alger first met Wing. (He was probably prowling about in a wig, a cape and an ambling gait, giving the "appearance of a male hag escaped from some Halloween," a practice he had adopted about that time.) A heavy snow had fallen (says Mayes) the night before and this inspired a mob of urchins with the idea of pelting all the Chinamen they could see. Their delight was boundless when they engaged in combat with a Chinese boy some 10 years old.---Horatio happened to see the object of their torture. Exhibiting an ardor that was rate in him, he rushed among the boys and valiantly effected the rescue of their victim. Wing became his child---a mean man said later Wing was already his child, but that was probably only meanness. Horatio brought Wing to the lodging house, and for several years played the father to the lad. Again, the chuckle of his Frustration. Wing was trampled to death under the feet of a horse in front of the German Thalia Theatre on Broadway, just below Spring, where Harrigan and Hart played. Horatio must now make his book. He walked over to the office of the Saturday Press and into the sanctum of Henry Clapp, the editor. Clapp invited Alger to sit down for a minute until he had finished a piece of work. In a few minutes he turned to Horatio and said: "If you have come to see me on business, I am in no position to hear you. Here, sire, he continued mournfully handing Horatio the placard upon which he had been making an inscription, "you will read the tragic news, I am just about to tack it on the door." Alger took the placard and read: "The Saturday Press is obliged to discontinue publication for the lack of funds; by a curious coincidence, the very reason for which it was started." A chuckle was heard. 134. Henry Clapp took Horatio to lunch in a candle-lighted cellar run by Charlie Pfaff, north of Bleecker street on Broadway. Here Horatio met Walt Whitman, "The Double W," Chester Foll, "The Great White Lie," Alden Hawley, narrator of obscene stories dubbed "Once-upon-a-Time," and other Bohemian writers. Much of fame he saw, says Mayes, but none of it did he speak. Frivolity slackened its pace when he was an onlooker. "Sink or Swim" he was finishing about this time. And he mused: "Patience is gone (Patience was his first love). Wing (his Chinse son) is dead. But there is something to live for. The novel --- the momentous novel. He had named it "Tomorrow." Later he expanded his ambition into calling the book he was to make "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow." It was to cover all time and space and all man's accomplishments and strivings. Poor Horatio. A man sold him a curiosity shop and two sailors went to sea and took his curiosities with them. He tried to write poetry. It was terrible. July, 1899, came. The Unitarian Church in South Natick was crowded. Those who had known Horatio stood about after the services murmuring to each other in tones appropriately subdued.---Occupying a pew in the rear of the church had been a stranger, a man whose identity none of them knew. Quietly he had appeared, and now, as quietly, he was about to go away. One of the townsfolk approached him. "May I ask if you were acquainted with Mr. Alger?" "I knew him well," the stranger replied, and he seemed an old, a very old man. "I knew him better than you. I published his first book." "Are you Mr. Loring?" "Yes, I am Mr. Loring." He went away. He had been frustrated in his efforts to arrive before Horatio passed away. The newsboys in the lodging house in New York gave a minstrel show that night. (Mayes is sorry for that). Transcribed and reviewed by contributors participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.