S. S. McClure's My Autobiography: The Progressive as Self-Made Man

Abstract

school German teacher had just read March 1914 installment of famous publisher's My Autobiography, then being serialized in McClure's Magazine, and she wrote across years to congratulate her former pupil upon his well-earned success. Its [sic] a certain writer says viz 'The greater difficulty more glory there is in surmounting it.' she continued. 'Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempest.' 1 McClure's German teacher had, no doubt, been following editor's life story since it began in issue of October 1913. What she had been reading was romantic tale of a young Irish immigrant whose persistence through poverty and hardship had at last led him to success. McClure had arrived near Hebron, Indiana at age of nine just that community was preparing to celebrate Independence Day in 1866 with lemonade and appropriate oratory first of either that McClure had ever tasted. A local politician spoke on the land of freedom, of popular institutions, and unbounded opportunities. McClure remembered that as I sat in grove listening to this speech, I could see off across country, far my eye could reach, a great stretch of unfenced prairie in place of little hedge-fenced fields I had always known. My heart swelled with swelling periods of orator. I felt that, he said, here was something big and free that a boy might make his mark on those