On 2 June 1933 at the 40th Anniversary of the Scranton Public Library and nearly the nadir of the Great Depression, a crowd assembled on the lawn of the library to hear Dr Henry Crane, local Methodist minister and long-time member of the board of directors of the library. At a time when the situation in Scranton was desperate (school teachers had been on strike that year because they had not been paid in over six months), Crane's words were intended to celebrate the library, bolster the confidence of the citizens of Scranton and encourage the city's leaders to increase public support for the library's shrinking budget. After describing the history and founding of the library, Crane told his listeners:

Crane's comments are part of a long tradition in America of encouraging the economically oppressed to believe that through hard work they have the power to change their situation. Significantly, however, the hard work Crane advises is reading, a type of work with no clear productive potential; the reward is truth, a thing that has no tangible value or quantitative measure. No doubt Crane's choice of mining as the metaphor for work was deliberate. The city's wealth had been built through mining and the local economic crisis was due in part to the fact that coal had been largely mined out. His speech remade the Horatio Alger myth for hard times, constructing a new myth for a group of town fathers no longer as wealthy or powerful as they once were and a group of citizens no longer as certain of their ability to achieve the American Dream.