Clarence Thomas has milked relationships with the rich he made through the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, a scholarship association, to benefit himself and his wife, according to the New York Times:
Within months, the new justice enjoyed a far-warmer acceptance to a second exclusive club: the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, named for the Gilded Age author whose rags-to-riches novels represented an aspirational version of Justice Thomas’s own bootstraps origin story.
If Justice Thomas’s life had unfolded as he had envisioned, his Horatio Alger induction might have been a celebration of his triumphs as a prosperous lawyer instead of a judge. But as he tells it, after graduating from Yale Law School, he was turned down by a series of top law firms, rejections he attributes to a perception that he was a token beneficiary of affirmative action. So began his grudging path to a judicial career that brought him great prestige but only modest material wealth after decades of financial struggle.
When he joined the Horatio Alger Association, Justice Thomas entered a world whose defining ethos of meritocratic success — that anyone can achieve the American dream with hard work, pluck and a little luck — was the embodiment of his own life philosophy, and a foundation of his jurisprudence. As he argued from the bench in his concurrence to the recent decision striking down affirmative action, the court should be “focusing on individuals as individuals,” rather than on the view that Americans are “all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society.”
Just as an aside, I've been waiting to use this piece of trivia for a really long time. Because wealthy Republicans are so entranced with these Horatio Alger stories, but the truth is a lot murkier:
In letters now housed at the Harvard Divinity School, Brewster church officials wrote to church higher-ups in Boston, complaining of Alger’s “abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys,” according to Swarthmore College professor Carol Nackenoff, who has studied Alger. Alger’s father, himself a Unitarian minister, promised that his son would resign and never again work in the church.
“I believe the complaint was not baseless,” Nackenoff said.
Yep. Those inspiring stories about rich men taking worthy young boys under their wings? Written by a probable pedophile. Oh dear!
His friendships forged through Horatio Alger have brought him proximity to a lifestyle of unimaginable material privilege. Over the years, his Horatio Alger friends have welcomed him at their vacation retreats, arranged V.I.P. access to sporting events and invited him to their lavish parties. In 2004, he joined celebrities including Oprah Winfrey and Ed McMahon at a three-day 70th birthday bash in Montana for the industrialist Dennis Washington. Several Horatio Alger friends also helped finance the marketing of a hagiographic documentary about the justice in the wake of an HBO film that had resurfaced Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations against him during his confirmation.
It's good to be the right-wing king. Now what are we going to do about it?
