Happy Horatio Alger's Birthday.

I’m not sure exactly where to place Horatio Alger in my esteem. Not a hero or martyr, not exactly, or neatly, anyway. I’ve been a little obsessed with him ever since I read The Lost Life of Horatio Alger (Gary Scharnhorst and Jack Bales) about 20 years ago, a book which sets out to find the real story of Alger’s life separate from the myths that have grown around him and his books, and ends up being about the impossibility of such a task.

I won’t try to sketch out a biography here (besides the Scharnhorst book, which is great, there’s a very good Wikipedia page), but three facts keep drawing me back to his story: 1, his status as a hero of conservative politics, regarded as the originator of the so-called rags-to-riches American Dream myth (which is mostly based on a mischaracterization of Alger’s books), 2, his early and brief career as a Unitarian minister during which he was accused of molesting teenage boys, driven out of town by his congregation, after which the national Unitarian organization persuaded the church to cover up the scandal, and Alger moved to New York and began writing novels for boys, and 3, after he died, Alger’s sister, following a directive he left in his will, destroyed all his personal and professional papers, including all his correspondence. (This last fact is an extremely common occurrence after the death of queer people, making for one of the bigger challenges for historians of gay life and gay lives.)

In the first conception of the musical, Jack—which I put on the back burner at the beginning of the pandemic but will return to when I finish the book I’m writing now—I was weaving Alger’s story together with the story of my own teenage years. After changing my mind back and forth a dozen or so times, I finally took Alger out. It was cumbersome and too clever.

But I am determined to return to Alger’s story. I still feel compelled to make a case for sympathy for all the millions of queer people who had to daily negotiate crushing repression at every turn and figured out lives for themselves that may have brought them happiness or fulfillment or love but likely didn’t, workarounds that most people now would judge harshly by standards that queer people even today have only very tenuous access to and could not possibly have adhered to, that they were specifically excluded from, 150 years ago. Or 25 years ago. Or 10. The challenge of making that argument using the biography of a conservative hero and lover of teenage boys is for some perverse reason impossible to resist. (And my favorite song I wrote for the show is the one from Horatio’s sister Augusta’s POV.)

Alger was born in 1932, and Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Bootblacks was published in 1868. It was a big hit, and he followed it with at least a hundred more books for boys with roughly the same plot: a scrappy, smart boy (or, in at least one book, a girl) living on his own, has a chance encounter with an older, successful man who takes an interest in him, becomes the boy’s patron and introduces him to the world of business, where he flourishes and rises to some version of middle-class success. Even before the success of these books, Alger was devoted to the welfare of homeless boys (huge problem in mid-19th century New York), gave many of them room and board and other support, adopted at least one boy, and supported the work of various charitable organizations devoted to the welfare of boys that sprang up at that time, like the YMCA, the Children's Aid Society, and the Newsboys’ Lodging House. He spent the rest of his life writing for, socializing and living with, and helping boys in need, and there was never another complaint or even a hint of inappropriate behavior.