Free The Very, Very Rich and How They Got That Way by Max Gunther

his pocket, went on to become the multimillionaire founder of U.S. Steel. John D. Rockefeller, the oil tycoon, began his career as an underpaid, half-starved clerk in a Cleveland shipping office. Joseph P. Kennedy’s father fled a potato famine in Ireland, landed in Boston with an empty belly and no worldly assets whatever, lifted himself by his own bootstraps into a comfortable middle-income bracket, saw his son go on to become a multimillionaire.
    Real-life stories such as these made Horatio Alger’s yarns seem believable. People read Alger’s books to reinforce their hopes and dreams. Alger was saying, “See, this is what can happen to people in America.”
    He was also saying something else that may have been still more interesting to some. For centuries the major Western religions had been trying to convince people that virtue is its own reward – that, in fact, poverty is preferable to wealth, since too much money inevitably leads to dissolution and damnation. Money was conceived to be the root of evil. A wise man didn’t work for money but for the sake of the work itself. Work was purifying. Sweat was holy in the eyes of the Lord. Millions of poverty-trapped people had been forced to swallow this philosophy, for it was the only consolation they had. A man could think, “I may be starving, but, by God, I’m holy!”
    And now Alger came on the scene with a different view. He suggested that money is fine in the Lord’s eyes. He went even further. He preached that the Lord will reward virtue with money. To get rich, he said, all you need do is combine virtue with a certain degree of ordinary business acumen. The payoff will be in cash.
    It was a grand new way to look at things. Alger wasn’t its originator, of course, only one of its key spokesmen. The originators were the very businessmen who were then building what was to become the world’s greatest economic power. Men such as Rockefeller, Carnegie and J.P. Morgan sincerely believed the accumulation of capital was a thoroughly righteous activity, something like prayer. In fact, some of them actually felt themselves to be divinely appointed custodians of the nation’s cash. Because of their upright characters, God had singled them out to be great gatherers of money. It was their job to watch over this money for the welfare of less prudent and less virtuous men.
    Horatio Alger, preaching this new financial religion, touched a nerve in millions of people. He gave them a heady dose of optimism. He assured them they could get rich simply by developing the attributes ordained in the good book, plus a few others such as thrift, pluck (the willingness to take a business risk) and perseverance.
    Alger himself, as it turned out, failed to apply his own formula with what could be called smashing success. His book royalties brought him a very big income but he never seemed to master the virtue of thrift. Some of the money went out in the form of generous gifts to the Newsboys’ Lodging House and to individual orphans and foundlings whom Alger unofficially adopted as sons in all but name. (He never married and is not known ever to have fathered a child of his own.) The rest of the money simply vanished in plain, old-fashioned profligacy. Alger savored wine and women in New York, Paris, San Francisco and other scarlet places where a man’s money could be drained away rapidly. Finally, old and tired, he crept back to the green tranquillity of rural Massachusetts and moved in with his sister. He died there in 1899, flat broke.
    The Magical PMA
    Clement Stone’s philosophy of Positive Mental Attitude is partly derived from, and would without doubt be wholeheartedly approved by, the old master Horatio Alger. Stone’s books counsel the aspiring tycoon to observe all the usual Alger-type and biblical virtues. Stone doesn’t explain clearly just what these virtues have to do with PMA, but he leaves no doubt that he considers them absolutely necessary for business