Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography

Ragged Dick, and indeed all of Alger's rags-to-respectability works, would not have been possible without the help of Benjamin Franklin, or rather, without the help of his famous Autobiography. Now, I have to confess right off the bat to being rather disappointed in the Franklin's attempt at life writing. The introduction warned that it was choppy (having been written over the course of a couple decades, 1771-1790), incomplete (only covering Franklin's life up to 1759), and uneven (written first as a personal work for his son, then slowly morphing into a document for publication), but I confess I was still unprepared for the cobbled-together feeling of the thing. Still, it is a terribly important work, and therefore worth reading, and I'm sure some of his other writings are more enjoyable.

But why you ask is it important to Ragged Dick, and indeed to all of Alger's rag-tag bunch of orphans and drunkard's sons? Because of Franklin's careful construction of the self-improving self, the boot-strapping American achiever. What Franklin gives us in the Autobiography is a portrait of the quintessential American: practical, inventive, ambitious, successful, hard-working. It does not matter where you come from, Franklin tells us; all that matters is what you do.

And what you do makes you who you are. Franklin's course of self-improvement involves scheduling your time into bracketed periods for particular tasks (for instance: 5-8 am "Rise, wash and address Powerful Goodness! Contrive day's business, and take the resolution of the day; prosecute the present study, and breakfast.") and developing 13 identified moral virtues one at a time all the while charting your progress on a grid. In this way a man may become organized, successful, and virtuous. I'm telling you, Stephen Covey has nothing on Benjamin Franklin.

But what does all of this have to do with the con man? The confidence man is the counter-narrative here; he is what happens when otherwise gifted individuals ignore the exhortations of their parents, their mentors, their community, and their nation and instead choose the easy way to wealth. And yet the narrative of the con man is also Franklin's, for what is the Autobiography but a skilled self-presentation, a symphony on surfaces. When Franklin finds Humility a particularly sticky virtue to acquire he celebrates that he has at least attained the appearance of it.

And can't one pursue a life of crime in much the same way that one pursues a life of virtue? Franklin's plan of personal development inspired boys' advice books by the hundreds as well as Alger's works, but it's also clear that he also inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald's vision of the young Jay Gatsby. Fitzgerald is clearly taking a swipe at Franklin's course in the virtues when he has his hero follow a similar plan, with results that are more bootleg than bootstrap. Here we see the con man and Franklin's ideal American collide, blurring all the lines in between and touching on that theme familiar to readers of con man literature: the statesman and the con man have everything in common.

Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick

{ Long absences equal lots of reading. }

Today marked my first encounter with the great Horatio Alger, Jr., through the kind offices of one Ragged Dick. Despite Alger's rather considerable body of work I had somehow managed to miss him in my studies, a feat somewhat like dodging an elephant. After all, over the course of his decades-long writing career, Alger published an impressive 110 books, most aimed at improving the moral character of young boys. The fact that the vast majority of these were really basically the same book just with different names or that they were written by a man whose own moral character was somewhat marred by accusations (probably justified) of some early episodes of pedophilia, shouldn't diminish our view of his accomplishment too much. After all, I have yet to get even one book published, and I don't have the excuse of being distracted by the altar boys.

Published in 1868, Ragged Dick was Alger's first real success; it can be (and often is, since most of us can't be bothered to read the whole of his work) taken as a fair representation of the rags to riches model on which Alger built most of his novels: young boy, poor but honest, bootstraps his way to respectability with the help of benevolent strangers and a little good luck. This was precisely what the secondary literature had led me to expect; what I hadn't expected was Alger's considerable skill as a writer. Ragged Dick is FUN. The dialogue is brisk and lively; the characters have some genuine charm. And the story itself is sweet. I get the impression that scholars are supposed to be unmoved by the sort of gentle sentimentalism Alger employs, but I have to confess that I kind of like it.

I was delighted to find that not only is Ragged Dick an enjoyable read, it also provides a couple great con-man moments to add to the pot. Dick encounters a real live con artist on the streets Manhattan performing what Alger calls the "drop game," a famous swindle in which a con man pretends to find a wallet thick with bills lying in the street. Appealing to his mark, the con man desires that he would find the owner and return the wallet; the con man would do it himself only he must this instant board a train/boat/plane and cannot wait. Of course, a considerable reward should be expected for the return of such a valuable wallet, but the con man can find no bills in the wallet sufficiently small to pay himself the portion of the reward he can rightfully expect. Perhaps the mark could give him that amount from his own pocket, since he is sure of recovering the full reward from the original owner? Money in hand, the con man makes good his escape; it is only upon closer examination that the mark discovers the wallet is a dummy, packed with worthless paper. This con is such a classic Poe mentions it as one of the representative diddles in his essay on the subject. Dick is, of course, far too street wise to fall for such an old trick.

But a tearful country bumpkin is not so lucky in another episode. In the confidence trick played here, the mark, preferably an out-of-towner, is convinced to exchange his cash for a check of greater value on a dummy bank. The con man plays on the mark's ignorance of local banks, his greed, and often on his charity, since the mark can be told that the switch is necessary because the cash is desperately needed and the banks are not yet open. Once again Dick's street savvy defeats the con. Recognizing the con man from the bumpkin's description, Dick convinces him to hand over the money by pretending to have inside information regarding police movements.

For Alger, the con man is not quite the harmless figure of fun that he plays in some of the other literature; nor is he a terribly brilliant character, being outwitted on two accounts by a 14 year old bootblack. Rather, he represents the dangerous alternate course for poor but somewhat clever boys, one which Alger wishes to discourage them from taking. Alger emphasizes patience and hard work as the keys to respectability, even Dick's work as a bootblack is preferable to a life of scheming and swindling. It is Dick's strict honesty that prevents him from becoming a confidence man, and it is that same quality that Alger's reader's were to emulate.