America, “land of the free; home of the brave;” where a little effort and effort will propel you to success, witness the Horatio Alger stories of the late 19th century where a poor boy started out with nothing and ended up with everything.
That this was more mythos than anything else as you still needed a leg up to succeed (witness, the invention of the phone by Alexander Graham Bell. His famed “Watson, come here, I need you!” is part of American lore, but what you may not know is that Bell was a scion of the Grovesnor family, one of the country’s leading families and he had powerful backing to “invent” the phone in 1879). In the dime novels of the time, Bell was portrayed as a poor inventor trying to create a new means for the deaf to hear.