Where Clarence Thomas Became Elite and Opened the Court
Where Clarence Thomas Became Elite and Opened the Court
After a brutal confirmation campaign that left him alienated and disillusioned, Clarence Thomas won a narrow win on October 15, 1991, which allowed him to secure his position on the Supreme Court. This victory allowed him to secure his place on the court.
Within a few of months, the new judge had a far-warmer acceptance to a second elite society. This club was named for the Gilded Age novelist Horatio Alger, whose rags-to-riches writings represented an aspirational version of judge Thomas’s own bootstraps origin story. The Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans welcomed the new justice with open arms.
If the events of Justice Thomas’s life had transpired in the way that he had envisioned, he would have been inducted into the Horatio Alger Society to celebrate his achievements as a successful lawyer rather than as a judge. However, according to his account, after graduating from Yale Law School, he was rejected by a series of prominent law firms. He blames these rejections to the notion that he was only a symbolic recipient of affirmative action. After decades of struggling to make ends meet financially, he reluctantly started his route towards a judicial career at this point, which gained him considerable reputation but only moderate monetary fortune.
When Justice Thomas joined the Horatio Alger Association, he entered a milieu whose defining ethos of meritocratic achievement was that anybody can attain the American dream with hard effort, pluck, and a little luck. This was the expression of Justice Thomas’s own life philosophy, and it was also a basis for his jurisprudence. Justice Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1991. As he explained from the bench in his concurrence to the recent judgement that struck down affirmative action, the court should be “focusing on individuals as individuals,” rather than on the assumption that Americans are “all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society.”
At Horatio Alger, he went into the inner circle, which was a cluster of extremely rich members who were predominantly conservative and who lionised him and everything that he had accomplished. In spite of the fact that he has never served in an official leadership capacity, in many respects he has emerged as the association’s most influential member. He has provided the organisation with unprecedented access to the Supreme Court, and on an annual basis, he presides over the organization’s main event, which takes place in the courtroom and consists of a ceremony in which he presents Horatio Alger medals to new lifetime members.
The honour has been described by one businessperson as “the closest thing to being knighted in the United States.” At the same time, Justice Thomas has played the role of the organization’s most effective communicator. He has met with and mentored the students who have been awarded Horatio Alger college scholarships worth millions of dollars annually. Many of these students come from similar backgrounds as Justice Thomas.
“The Horatio Alger Association has been a home to Virginia and me,” Justice Thomas stated, referring to his wife, as he was presented with the most prestigious honour that the organisation has to offer in the year 2010. He continued by saying that the organisation “has allowed me to see my dreams come true.”
Because of the acquaintances he developed via his association with Horatio Alger, he now finds himself in close proximity to a lifestyle of unfathomable monetary riches. Over the course of his life, his friends who were inspired by Horatio Alger have given him access to V.I.P. areas at sporting events, hosted extravagant parties for him, and given him a place at their vacation homes. In 2004,
he attended a party in Montana to celebrate the entrepreneur Dennis Washington’s 70th birthday among other celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Ed McMahon. The party lasted for three days. In the aftermath of an HBO film that had revived Anita Hill’s sexual harassment charges against Horatio Alger during his confirmation, some friends of Horatio Alger helped finance the marketing of a hagiographic video about the judge. The documentary was about the justice.
David Sokol, who was at one point the heir apparent to Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway, has been one of his Horatio Alger pals who has played a prominent role. Mr. Sokol refers to the justice and his wife as “close personal friends,” and in 2015, the Sokols welcomed the Thomases to their expansive Montana ranch for a vacation. Mr. Sokol defines the justice and his wife as “close personal friends.” Additionally, the Sokols have welcomed the Thomas family to their waterfront estate in Florida on several occasions.
In the past few months, Justice Thomas has been the subject of scrutiny as a result of new revelations made by ProPublica regarding his relationship to Texas billionaire Harlan Crow. Crow’s largess over the course of more than two decades has included luxury vacations aboard a superyacht, private school tuition for the great-nephew the justice was raising, and the purchase of his mother’s home in Savannah, Georgia. The justices did not record any of this information, and the discoveries have led to increased calls for more stringent ethics regulations for the Supreme Court.
