He convinced me that striving for a middle-class existence through humility and hard work is a terrible thing. “Bootstraps were a typical feature of boots that you could pull on in the act of putting your boots on, but of course bootstraps wouldn’t actually help you pull yourself over anything,” Zimmer told HuffPost.
Horatio Alger made a living telling such stories. “G. More from the link at r27: According to “Brewster Revisited” by Bill and Mary Roach, church officials said Alger was accused of engaging in unnamed sex acts with 13-year-old John Clark and 15-year-old Thomas Crocker, which the church said were “too revolting to relate,” but which many scholars have since interpreted to likely mean he was accused of performing oral sex on the teens. Instead, it’s clear that we all need to pull ourselves down by our bootstraps. Before people would have to work hard for what they had and work even harder to keep it. That phrase—“the musical’s bootstraps premise”—caught me by surprise. (RNS) — Instead of capitalizing on the unrest, Greg Glassman espoused the values of the wellness movement's masculine wing, where Horatio Alger does pull-ups with his bootstraps. Brint Ryan is an individual who, at a young age, was forced to pick himself up by his bootstraps and fight for the life he wanted,” said Terrence J. Giroux, executive director, Horatio Alger Association. The Horatio Alger myth is still central to North American politics. Now a days people get things passed down to them. In his day, Horatio Alger, Jr. (1832-1899) was one of the most-famous authors in America. I was just a reader of Horatio Alger stories when I was a kid (my father's urging) and am certainly not a scholar.

Building a perpetual motion device, perhaps, or heaving oneself over a river or fence by yanking up on your bootlaces. Ragged Dick never needed to pull himself up by his bootstraps — he was already mighty high to begin with.

In " The Death of Horatio Alger" Paul Krugman argues "That the time for true class mobility has passed, and that the "bootstraps" ideology no longer holds" (224). Some early computers used a process called bootstrapping which alludes to this phrase. A more explicit use of the phrase comes a little later, from Kunitz & Haycraft's British Authors of the 19th Century: "A poet who lifted himself by his own boot-straps from an obscure versifier to the ranks of real poetry." Horatio Alger failed in his mission.

But I’m not so sure it’s the story at its core.
First, let’s get the most obvious objection out of the way: We all know people who have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.