Jim Cullen considers its myth and mythos in American culture:
Today, even those who invoke the self-made man in politics almost always credential themselves as self-made in the realm of commerce (standard operating procedure for Republican politicians in particular, whose private sector credentials are often flimsy, since they have typically spent much of their careers in government service). Rare is the figure— [author Daniel Walker] Howe among them—who recognized this had not always been so. “Few expressions in our language have shriveled as badly as the term ‘self-made man,’” he noted in his chapter pairing Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln in Making the American Self. “Among intellectuals at least, it is widely regarded as the platitudinous expression of an obsolete individualism. Once upon a time, however, the self-made man represented a heroic ideal.”
Indeed, even a brief immersion in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, or nineteenth-century U.S. sources suggests that the conception of the self-made man was a good deal broader than business or politics. Yes, of course, John D. Rockefeller was considered an exemplar of the self-made man. But so was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Benjamin Franklin is widely considered the patron saint of American capitalism, but he was also celebrated by his contemporaries as a self-made scientist, diplomat, and writer. Self-made men came from other realms as well, among them the military (Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, George Patton) and the arts (Walt Whitman to Walt Disney).
(Hat tip: 3QD)
The Dish 