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Essay: She Gave Me A Good Character Essay by Anthony Henry Smith
(Ruthy Rosen of Brooklyn Heights, New York has sent an article from the
Wall Street Journal by Cynthia Crossen, titled "Deja Vu" "Real
Horatio Alger Is a Tale of Failures, Bans and Accusations." Ms. Rosen
wonders: "Does this mesh with your ethics forum?" "They
told me you had been to her, "... If there's no meaning in it," said the King, "that saves us a world of trouble, you know, as we needn't try to find any. And yet I don't know," he went on, spreading out the verses on his knee, and looking at them with one eye; "I seem to see some meaning in them, after all. '- said I could not swim-' you can't swim, can you?" he added, turning to the knave. The knave shook his head sadly. "Do I look like it?" he said. (Which he certainly did not, being made entirely of cardboard.)" -Lewis Carroll, 1865, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" One's "character" in the above suggests a reference, the kind someone might provide to a potential employer regarding the quality of a job candidate's behavior, morals, ethics, habits, and manners. In Lewis Carroll's Victorian England the matter of "character" was taken very seriously and regarded somewhat differently from what it is today. The
concepts "character," "manners," and "ethics"
were often closely related if not synonymous during the 18th, 19th and
early 20th century. What we now call "ethics" is what in the
1920s the British jurist John Fletcher Moulton called "manners".
He described "manners" as "obedience to the Manners, or obedience to the unenforceable as Lord Moulton understood it, has to do with all those decisions we make in choosing to do what we believe to be right, even when no one could force us to do the right thing or punish us because we dont. It will no doubt come as a surprise to many that we are obedient (or not) to the unenforceable in every decision we make, excepting two areas: things we are compelled to do by law and things in which we have complete freedom to do as we wish, such as choosing whom to marry, or which religion to follow. Obedience to the unenforceable is largely a matter of voluntary good conduct; of choosing, either consciously or out of custom or habit, to act in support of the common good. In Lord Moulton's day, a person who acted in obedience to the unenforceable was considered to be a person of good character. Paul Langford has described the traditional view of English character: "Character
expressed itself in what was called manners... . Explaining an individual's
manners was a matter of describing his upbringing, education, and At one time, character was considered to have been either a gift from God or something you inherited genetically. By the 18th century attitudes began to change. "Increasingly it was individual choice that counted.... Character in this sense could itself be a synonym for virtue ... in the sense that an individual who chose the path of virtue could be said to possess it." (Langford, "Englishness Identified" pg. 299) Nowhere was the English character more pronounced or more valued than it was among the English speaking occupants of England's American colonies. As a young man living in the Royal Colony of Virginia, George Washington carefully copied out 110 precepts governing conduct under the title "Rules of Civility." The facts of Washington's life stand in testimony as to how very seriously he adhered to these precepts. I'd be willing to bet he could rehearse them from memory as easily as an Eagle Scout could recite the Scout Law. The
110th precept helps set all the others in perspective: "Labor to
keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called At
the close of the Revolutionary War, the Continental Army was encamped
on the Hudson River at New Windsor Cantonment while waiting for the peace
treaty to be signed. It was a critical time. The British Army was preparing
to evacuate New York City, but they were still present and threatening.
Washington not only had to keep his army in readiness, but also had to
prevent his army from rebelling against Congress It is a little known fact that this manorial system and the landed aristocracy existed in the Hudson Valley where it was legally permitted. It continued to exist until long after the American Revolution and only came to an end after the New York State constitution was rewritten in the 1840s. When my great-grandfather was a child, it was still possible to have been born on a manor and to have owed allegiance to a feudal Lord of the Manor, right here on the banks of the Hudson River. At the same time, it was also possible in some parts of the country to legally own another human being as a slave. Washington's troops needed to be kept occupied during the long encampment. Accordingly, Washington ordered that a large log meeting hall be constructed. He named the hall "The Temple of Virtue." The choice of name appears to have been deliberate. Washington might have called it the "Temple of Victory," or the "Temple of Liberty," but instead chose "Virtue," synonymous with "character," or "the common good." When I was a child, I was very impressed and I suppose somewhat influenced by another hero of the Revolution. At the age of 17 years, Benjamin Franklin had run away from his brother's print shop in Boston where he was an apprentice, and sailed to Perth Amboy, New Jersey. He then walked from Perth Amboy to Philadelphia, where he spent his last pennies on some loaves of bread. And yet he somehow survived! That rags to riches story may have been somewhat embellished, but here's the unvarnished reality regarding Franklin's ability to succeed as reported in The New York Times, April 21, 1990: "B. Franklin's Gift of L2,000 Stirs Squabbles in 2 Cities" by Scott Butterfield Boston, April 20 - As the author of Poor Richard's Almanack, Benjamin Franklin advised: A penny saved is a penny earned. Now,
200 years after his death on April 17, 1790, Boston and Philadelphia are
about to become beneficiaries of Franklin's 18th century wisdom. Franklin Today, what remains of Franklin's bequest is worth $6.5 million and the legacy has become a matter of no small dispute." The article goes on to describe Franklin's plan for the money: "Franklin, who was born in Boston but moved to Philadelphia at age 17, left the money in a codicil to his will. He specified that the 2,000 pounds be divided equally between Boston and Philadelphia for use as loans for young apprentices like he had once been. ... That 2,000 pounds came from the salary Franklin earned while serving as Governor of Pennsylvania from 1785 to 1788. Franklin believed that public servants in a democracy should not be paid. The article continues: "...Franklin
himself knew the potential for conflict. In his codicil he wrote: 'Considering
the accidents to which all human Affairs and Projects are subject in It always strikes me as remarkable that students of ethics pay so little attention to the importance of luck. Franklin, however, has thought the situation through. "Considering the accidents to which all human Affairs and Projects are subject..." is Franklin's reference to the intervention of fortune, or luck. In this case as in many others, Franklin was "lucky." It is worth noticing, however, that fortune often favors those who have taken as much trouble as Franklin did to prepare themselves for success. "Luck
can do more to sway the ways our lives go than virtue. Yet people are
curiously unwilling to acknowledge this; we relentlessly take responsibility,
as the myth of original sin shows. It seems we would prefer to be guilty
rather than unlucky." - Simon Blackburn At this point in the drama of shaping the American character, enter Horatio Alger! Alger is famous for his novels written for young boys. These stories emphasised the importance of working hard and maintaining high ethical standards. Even today a life may be described as "a real Horatio Alger story," especially when the subject has risen from poverty to security as the result of hard work and fair play. Alger's
private life was a different story; the kind that might have been invented
by his contemporary, O. Henry, whose short stories were famous for The
city was teeming with orphans. Many lost their parents as a result of
the Civil War. Some of the volunteer groups that were later to be so helpful
in rescuing some of these children were in their earliest formative phases.
Stefan Kafner tells of Social Worker Etta Angel Wheeler, who "...found
one answer, when she came upon a child wandering naked and unclaimed.
The legal authorities to whom she appealed refused aid. In desperation,
she turned to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which
determined that, 'the child being an animal,' it would grant shelter and
protection." Kafner's essay continues and describes Horatio Alger's moment of epiphany: "Why, Alger pondered, did individuals subjected to the same conditions turn out very differently? One boy might become a thief, a sociopath, even a killer. His neighbor, subjected to the same poverty and broken home, might aim to be a decent, upright citizen. What was the difference between them? What saved certain boys, he came to believe, was "character" a quality that gave them the strength to resist sloth and temptation. But was this inborn? In that case determinism won the day, and change was out of the question. Or, given the right opportunity, could a dispossessed lad win his share of the American dream simply by willing the change? The latter, Alger thought, but only if the boy stopped viewing himself as a victim and instead sought the proper advice." Alger started what was to become his life's true calling. He began writing about boys who set themselves high standards and lived up to them. He described their adventures as they struggled, rising ever higher above their former desperation and poverty with each new success. Alger's youthful heroes seldom became wealthy by the standards of their day, but they attained the security and comfort they sought. Cynthia Crossen, who is also the author of "The Rich and How They Got That Way," (Random House, 2000) points out that: "...Most of Alger's heroes don't succeed solely by persistence, but enjoy a stroke of luck: They are rewarded for saving a wealthy man's child from drowning, or they learn they have been kidnapped from affluent families when they were children." (Wall Street Journal, August 7, 2003) Was Alger naive? Groucho Marx didn't think so. Neither did Ernest Hemingway. Both found the stories inspirational. The book sales alone suggest that thousands of Americans would nod in agreement. Here's what Stefan Kafner has to say: "... Simplistic? To the jaded, perhaps. But to anyone familiar with urban poverty, the Alger novel was a blueprint of salvation a century before Martin Luther King stated his belief that what mattered was the not the color of one's skin but the content of one's character." (Stefan Kafner, Urbanities, Autumn, 2000) Accused of harming children, Alger became one of America's greatest positive influences for the improvement of children and our society. It was Horatio Alger who gave the English concept of "character" an American accent. Many
thanks again to Ruthy Rosen for remembering the Hudson River Valley Readers
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