Clarence Thomas' American Dream with a little help from his friends

If you live long enough to see your heroes deposed from their former glory by the exposure of long-hidden truths, it can make you feel as though, maybe, you have lived too long

- Clarence Page

I had heard of Horatio Alger but not the Association of Distinguished Americans that was named after him — until I heard that their honored members included Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas. And that would not have mattered a lot to me if Thomas had not spent recent weeks making headlines for his membership in the Alger association and similar well-heeled groups.

As you may know — or, at least, should know — Thomas benefited personally from being a member of that exclusive association of wealthy and influential Americans, which has its philosophical roots in the Gilded Age, an era roughly running from 1877 to 1900.

The era’s name comes from a novel co-authored by Mark Twain; it’s a reference to the way serious social problems were thinly masked, in Twain’s view, by the gold gilding of economic expansion. A new mechanized and industrial America emerged in that period as wages grew in the Northern and Western industrial belts, along with wages and demands for labor, skilled and unskilled.