"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps:" How a joke about bootstraps devolved into an American credo

[marmar]

"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps:" How a joke about bootstraps devolved into an American credo
Being self-made means "denying that you're born from a mother": Alissa Quart on the enduring "bootstraps" myth

By MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS
Senior Writer
PUBLISHED APRIL 1, 2023 2:00PM (EDT)


(Salon) Thanks to his family's wealth, Donald Trump was already earning more annually when he was a toddler than many of us will ever dream of. Kylie Jenner grew up in a mansion. On television. Yet both have calculatedly peddled their images — like plenty of the born rich do — as industrious, self-made success stories. Why? Because America loves a good story of someone picking themselves up by their bootstraps. But it's all a myth. It's more than a myth — it's a joke.

In Alissa Quart's "Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream," the author of "Squeezed" and "Branded" explores the roots of our obsession with individualistic success; unpacks how it's helped give rise to everything from Trumpism, hustle culture and crowdfunding as ad hoc healthcare; and explains how the zeal for autonomy has undercut our humane impulse to interdependence.

Salon spoke to Quart recently via Zoom about how we got here, and how we might just be able to find a better way out — together. "Writing this has really changed me," she says. "I see myself as proud of the ways I'm dependent."

....(snip)....

Before I read this, I had not understood the origins of the whole "bootstrap" platitude and how, actually, it was meant to be a joke. Talk to me about what "bootstrap" was supposed to initially mean.

It was a joke. It was an absurdity. There was a guy named Nimrod Murphrree, and he was being mocked. "Probably Mr. Murphrree has succeeded in handing himself over the Cumberland river, or a barn yard fence, by the straps of his boots." In 1834, this was seen as totally outlandish, and the bootstraps were a metaphor for this. In the Racine Advocate some ten years later, they said the governor must be trying to pull himself up by the bootstraps. Again, like a figure of fun, because you can't really pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

....(snip)....

It also seems to be about feeling like you have agency. You point out that 60% of our wealth is inherited in this country. For people of a lower class, it feels like there is desire to believe a meritocracy does exist.

Today, two-thirds of American adults don't have four-year degrees. They encounter a lot of obstacles, and they're earning less than 1979 [they did] adjusted for inflation. That's something that I keep thinking about when I'm reading the numbers about the great resignation or about how sunny the job numbers are. I'm like, "Yeah, but they're earning less than in 1979." This is part of why they're obsessed with the Trumps of the world. It doesn't go the whole way. Obviously there's racism. There are people who said things to me that were racially motivated. These are white Americans talking about why they supported so-called self-made men like Trump — that they aligned him with the own survival of their own kind or something. It was very weird. .............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2023/04/01/pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-how-a-joke-about-bootstraps-devolved-into-a-libertarian-credo/

[Abolishinist]

1. Interesting, thanks!

This never made sense to me, but I never took the time to look it up. Also, every other mention of Nimrod spells his last name "Murphree", not sure why Salon apparently got it wrong.

[3Hotdogs]

2. Horatio Alger compounds this bullshit with his "rags to riches" books. People bought them as gifts

to inspire the 'utes at the turn of the 19th-20th century. These were stories about boys who had shit jobs in their communities, newspaper street vendor, shoe shine and so forth. Mostly orphans. They toiled and got nowhere UNTIL some benefactor saw a light in the boy and set him on the road to wealth.

One story was about a boy who saved the life of a wealthy man's daughter. "How can I ever repay you?" Next comes an offer of a job in an office at a desk, next to the company's owner.

"Oh no, sir, I could never accept that position. It is better than I begin in the mailroom......"

At the end of these, we are told that the boy, later became a man of influence in his community its.

[NullTuples]

3. I recall in the mid-00's when Bush Jr...

...who, I might add, famously admitted he didn't know any poor people growing up...vetoed the Children's Healthcare Initiative with the claim that Americans needed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. His dad, H.W., campaigned on the notion of working class Americans learning to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Interestingly, I can find no instance of Reagan using the term, but the media frequently applied it to describe him based on his "aw, shucks" public persona.

A bit of bootstrap trivia: We say that we "boot up" or "reboot" a computer based on the phrase, too.
Originally, a computer would be powered up and just sit there. An initial set of instructions for the CPU had to be hand-fed in using switches so that the computer would how know to load a program off a storage device to be able to accomplish a thing. In the 1950's, around the time the first operating system was created to allow more than one program to run at a time, the idea came about to hardwire those initial instructions to read a storage device. That hardwired code could be initiated at the press of a single button instead of arduous switch-flipping to set the bits for each step of the instructions and then execute them. This was known as "bootstrap" code since it allowed the computer to run the operating code by itself. Soon even the single button push was automated by a small circuit so that upon power up, the bootstrap code would automatically run, and the computer would "boot" itself into an operational state. By the 80's the term "boot" and "reboot" had entered pop culture & colloquial speech outside of the original computing subcultures. It's interesting how the timing coincides with the rebirth of use by modern politicians. President Carter even mentioned it in his 1980 debate with Reagan.