It turns out the story of Clarence Thomas and his rich friends is wider and deeper than had been known. The NY Times has an article that shows just how extensive it is and how far back it goes.
(This link will allow passage through the Times paywall.)
When it was recently revealed that Thomas had failed to disclose vacation travel and other benefits conveyed through his and his wife’s relationship with a rich friend, it generated a certain amount of controversy — especially as Thomas had refused to recuse himself from cases appearing before the court in which this person potentially had an interest.
An investigation by Abbie VanSickle and Steve Eder has found that Thomas and his wife turn out to have a lot of rich friends through his long-running relationship with the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans.
The association takes its name from Horatio Alger, who became best known for cranking out story after story of humble young men who became wealthy through hard work and sheer force of character — and chance bits of luck.
Horatio Alger Jr. (/ˈældʒər/; January 13, 1832 – July 18, 1899) was an American author who wrote young adult novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of middle-class security and comfort through good works. His writings were characterized by the "rags-to-riches" narrative, which had a formative effect on the United States during the Gilded Age.
Horatio Alger’s works are a staple of conservative ideology because they ‘prove’ that poverty is the result of personal choices and lack of character, that government efforts to improve peoples lives are unnecessary, and that there are no barriers to the rise of anyone willing to work hard enough.
Less celebrated are the allegations that Alger was a pedophile and was expelled from a position as Pastor for ‘the abominable and revolting crime of gross familiarity with boys.’ This adds an interesting aspect to the right wing’s current obsession with ‘groomers’. Projecting, much?
[UPDATE: Since there seems to be some interest in what a Horatio Alger story is like, Project Gutenberg has quite a few online. www.gutenberg.org/...
From the Times:
...When he joined the Horatio Alger Association, Justice Thomas entered a world whose defining ethos of meritocratic success — that anyone can achieve the American dream with hard work, pluck and a little luck — was the embodiment of his own life philosophy, and a foundation of his jurisprudence. As he argued from the bench in his concurrence to the recent decision striking down affirmative action, the court should be “focusing on individuals as individuals,” rather than on the view that Americans are “all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society.”
At Horatio Alger, he moved into the inner circle, a cluster of extraordinarily wealthy, largely conservative members who lionized him and all that he had achieved. While he has never held an official leadership position, in some ways he has become the association’s leading light. He has granted it unusual access to the Supreme Court, where every year he presides over the group’s signature event: a ceremony in the courtroom at which he places Horatio Alger medals around the necks of new lifetime members. One entrepreneur called it “the closest thing to being knighted in the United States.” At the same time, Justice Thomas has served as the group’s best messenger, meeting with and mentoring the recipients of millions of dollars a year in Horatio Alger college scholarships, many of whom come from backgrounds that mirror his own.
...But a look at his tenure at the Horatio Alger Association, based on more than two dozen interviews and a review of public filings and internal documents, shows that Justice Thomas has received benefits — many of them previously unreported — from a broader cohort of wealthy and powerful friends. They have included major donors to conservative causes with broad policy and political interests and much at stake in Supreme Court decisions, even if they were not directly involved in the cases.
There is a certain Horatio Alger aspect to Thomas’s beginnings, coming from a very poor community:
At Yale, he was one of only 12 Black students in his law school class, admitted the year the law school introduced an affirmative action plan. His white classmates viewed him as a token, he felt — a belief in the corrosive effects of affirmative action that was only deepened by his failure to win the law firm job he had dreamed of.
“I’d graduated from one of America’s top law schools, but racial preference had robbed my achievement of its true value,” he later wrote. Separately, he described leaving Yale as a new father, with a “swirling combination of frustration, of some disappointments, of some anxiety about the future, and some anxiety about how I would repay my student loans, how I would feed a young child, where I would live.”
It’s interesting that Thomas has a problem with affirmative action as being taken by his classmates and law firms as a sign that he was unqualified — but fails to ask if that perception wasn't just more racism in action. It also shows his concerns about money go way back.
It’s also interesting that Thomas doesn’t seem to wonder that his rich friends might be his friends because it’s more about validating their own ‘virtue’ than it is about his own congeniality, sparkling wit, and winning personality. Unraveling that is likely to take a deeper dive than that of the recent ill-fated submersible.
Read the whole thing. It turns out Thomas has long been at the center of wealthy and connected people even before meeting his current wife Ginni Thomas, and he has benefitted from those relationships.
And so have they.
UPDATE: Watch for Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon on the Supreme Court when it goes up on Monday!