Alger’s fictions served the same purpose as Plato’s myth of the metals, not via state-sponsored tyranny but out of something much harder to identify or oppose, namely a generalized wishfulness. In a democratic society, the privileged have as large a stake as anyone in the idea that their wealth and position have been earned, not granted by mere luck or, worse, a skewed social structure. Everyone wants to sign on to the story. But we make a mistake if we read the American dream as a narrative, even a subtle and rich one. It is rather a matrix of all possible stories, an incubator of individual dreams and a tangle of meanings, where sense is distorted by the layering of word and image. One measure of success for any ideology is its narrative fecundity. I mean the ability to accommodate a variety of individual paths—your story and mine—within its universe of significance. The American dream does not specify a narrative arc; its genius is to accept your own personal tale as an expression of itself.

Here is one ironic shard of meaning. Alger himself was not able to claim that America had allowed him to live the dream and end up better off than his father. A Harvard legacy—that is, the child of a graduate and granted admission because of it—he squandered a comfortable job as a Unitarian minister over charges of sexual misconduct and turned to writing in desperation. His personal narrative fecundity produced, in the late 1800s, a string of make-good novels from Ragged Dick to From Canal Boy to President, but without limning a success story in his own terms.

hey say George W. Bush went to Yale and I am prepared to believe it. I wonder if he ever found his steps wandering toward the Sterling Memorial Library. Not to the labyrinthine main stacks, said to be the inspiration for the maze-like bibliotower of Umberto Ecos The Name of the Rose, but to the sleepy drawing room of deep leather-covered armchairs and shelves of old novels named for someone called Livonia and her brothers. Here, on long afternoons, many a slack undergraduate has whiled away the hours with slumber and popular works of a long-gone era. The shelves are chocked with the heroic class fiction of the early 1900s—Frank Merriwell at Yale, Andy at Yale, Stover at Yale—all of them making it to New Haven with hard work, steely determination, and their football-stiffened spines.

In cultural terms, these books, mostly published between 1910 and 1930, are the necessary second wave after Alger. For the lucky or the smart, university plots the transition from home to working life. Truly self-made people may be admirable and worthy of emulation, but they are scarce; these books and their wide audience understand that collegiate jockeying for position is far more to the point in American life, especially if by “life” we mean who makes it and who doesn’t. Then as now, getting in means getting on. They are as familiar in their lessons as they are unfamiliar in their slang.

Nevertheless, it is impossible, at least for a university professor, to read these books with anything other than astonishment. Two things stand out—neither of them to do with such obvious relics as mandatory chapel, celluloid collars, or cigar smoking in dorm rooms. First, no one appears to do any academic work, and when characters discuss the curriculum at all, it seems to consist mostly of work on the order of high-school Latin. Second, the students—or “men” as they prefer to call themselves—are highly polished, sporting smart suits, silk ties, and businesslike attitudes presumably modelled on their fathers. They writhe in agonies of uncertainty over making the Lit or cracking the first eleven. While today’s Yalies probably worry about stds and the lsat, a century ago all thoughts ran to whether or not one had made the right moves, from freshman orientation forward, to be tapped for Skull & Bones or Scroll & Key.

The resulting social conditions are homoerotic to a degree that sails well past the routine levels found in any all-male cult—football team or frat house, regiment or priesthood. Upperclassmen are the nexus of crushes and rumour, inspiration and awe. Football captains are legendary figures, newspaper editors the shapers of world opinion. “Isn’t he a king” Dink Stover marvels of a sophomore he meets on the train to New Haven in his freshman September. “He made the crew last year—probably be captain; sub-tackle on the eleven. I played against him two years ago when he was at Andover. Isn’t he a king, though!” The first third of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise gives a striking poignancy to this collegiate comrade-love. In one scene of Fitzgerald’s novel, freshman Amory Blaine and his friends rush to their rooming-house window merely to glimpse a celebrated junior-class poet as he passes by on his way to dinner.

In the Boltwood and Andy books, this hero-worship is tempered by a pervasive doctrine of moral hygiene, the suggestion that admiration and emulation are the reliable route to probity and success. Even in the racier Stover volume, the moral compass is reliable. Protagonists may, like Dink Stover, lose themselves briefly in drinking binges or ill-advised outings with swift townie girls. They may even, for short horrific periods, doubt the legitimacy of the rigid class system they are asked to perpetuate. But invariably they return to their right minds, to the innate tight-ship virtue and upright posture characteristic of the good Yale man.

Virtue and opportunity are here conflated. The College Entrance Examination Board, adopted by the Ivy League in 1905, was the principal test for admission; that’s why characters such as Boltwood and Tom Regan (in the Stover book), as much as a boarding-school hero like Dink, can aspire to Yale if they scrimp and save and work hard. But scrimping and saving are just the beginning of fitting into the college mould, and success is about more than just brains. Yale, says Regan stoutly, neatly articulating the conflation, is “a college where you stand on your own feet, all square to the wind.”

By the time George W. Bush began attending Yale, things were far different. An open admissions policy had led to a post-Depression influx of unsavoury but clever homunculi—which is to say, Jews—who seemed set to outnumber the four-square Boltwood Bootstrappers. Personal essays and interviews soon supplemented the standardized tests so that “athletic” and “upstanding” young men could once more gain ascendancy in New Haven and Cambridge. Bush is the clear wonder boy of that era, when brains were not an issue in American success stories, despite the mythology of Ivy League brilliance—a mythology unsustainable to anyone who has ever taught at one.

As a legacy—his father George Herbert Walker was captain of what Dink Stover would have called “the nine—“George W. could enter Yale without barrier and earn his gentleman’s Cs without censure. He benefited from an admissions system that cracked down on such traits as shyness and unmanliness—also, just to be certain, shortness. The popular novels of the early century imagined a meritocratic and virtuous Ivy League even as they lovingly depicted an exclusive jocky wasp heaven. They were nevertheless more honest than we are today, at least on one crucial point. Despite the board exams, they did not suggest that attending Yale or Harvard was about intellect, because they knew it was about class—and football. When intellect was briefly rewarded and reality met illusion, reality was altered to fit: if open admissions meant the Yale of old was being trampled by clever Jews from Brooklyn, then admissions standards had to change. Or if Jews still managed to get in by “passing” for normal, they must eventually, like Ben in Louis Begley’s The Man Who Was Late, transmute pursuit of the dream into alienation and, finally, suicide.

hat did not change was the idea that attending these schools correlates strongly with subsequent wealth and status. One analyst of the system recently went so far as to define preference for legacies as a luxury-brand loyal-customer reward: if you spend so much with the same carrier, you expect an air-miles payout at some point. But these and similar “honest” justifications for selection merely beg the obvious question—in fact, two of them. Why are athletic ability and aggressive friendliness so highly valued in American society that they are virtual guarantees of a dream position, especially if sealed with the indisputable approval of an Ivy League degree And why, if elite universities are really social-class finishing schools rather than brain factories, do they consistently maintain the reverse

The answer to the second question is clear enough: the legend of smart Ivy Leaguers is just part of the general dream mythology that sustains meritocratic delusion in American life. Intelligence, unlike socio-economic origin, is thought to be a virtuous divider, a legitimate basis for discrimination and reward. Therefore, smart people should be allowed to get into Yale or Princeton and enjoy its rewards.

But it isn’t smart people who get in; it’s well-groomed and well-funded people. Everyone acknowledges that an Ivy League sojourn is tantamount to a seal of social approval, yet the prevailing myth makes that emblem a merit badge rather than the family crest it most often resembles. The fiction of merit is maintained by the peculiar alchemy of elite universities, which magically transform inherited social privilege—first into brains (or the assumption thereof), and then into “earned” social privilege. College education is like income: there’s a lot more of it out there nowadays, but the upper percentiles are still getting more than their share. At 250 of the most selective universities in the United States, the proportion of students from upper-income families has grown, not declined, over the past three decades.

Even if elite colleges really did select purely for intelligence—say, as measured by sat scores alone—the assumption of virtuous division according to intelligence is debatable. Certainly intelligence is distributed in a different way than social position—there are poor smart people and dumb rich ones—but it is not obvious that that distribution is more just than the other. We prefer intelligence as a distributor because it is “natural.” But even without raising doubts about standardized tests and the sort of “intelligence” they reward, we could wonder why we naturalize this particular human trait. After all, isn’t that more or less a gold, silver, and brass story The hidden issue is that there is no point in lauding meritocracy if nobody examines what counts as merit, and why.

Social success is predicated on many factors that are both intangible and awkward. Tall politicians generally fare better than short ones. Gregarious executives are more successful than taciturn ones. Good looks are strong predictors of both social acceptance and wealth. These are natural traits, but ones we cannot, barring exceptional honesty, bring ourselves to consider as meritorious. There are honest moments. The mother of a friend of mine confesses that she has always considered handsome men better—that is, ethically more worthy—than plain ones. Not long ago I overheard a student from a selective Midwestern school being asked about his college. “I hear that’s a great school,” his companion said. “Oh yeah,” he agreed, “everyone is really good-looking.”