Born Losers: A History of Failure in America.
Brown, Jeffrey S.
Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, by Scott A. Sandage.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2005. xii, 362 pp.
$16.95 US (paper).
While the space occupied by genial losers in American popular
culture may be larger now than it was a century ago, there is little
chance that everyman slacker-hero Homer Simpson will supplant Bill Gates
or Oprah Winfrey in the sober estimations of their fellow citizens
anytime soon. Indeed, the power of the American ideology of individual
success, an ideology "fully formed," according to Scott A.
Sandage, by the turn of the twentieth century, remains extraordinarily
formidable at the beginning of the twenty-first (p. 265). Sandage's
Born Losers: A History of Failure in America is an absorbing account of
the consolidation of this ideology between, roughly, 1819 and 1893. The
years are significant, for they mark the first and last of the great
financial panics of the boomand-bust nineteenth century. And it is
"bust"--its experience, its interpretation, and its cultural
meaning--that provides the vehicle for Sandage's astute exploration
of the success ideology in its formative years. An apt specimen of what
might be termed "bottom-up" cultural and intellectual history,
Born Losers aspires not only to illuminate the trials and tribulations
of the forgotten "misfits of capitalism," it seeks to place
their stories at the center of the new configurations of morality and
identity that attended the tumultuous rise of the American market
economy (p. 5). For Sandage, failure is "intrinsic, not
antithetical, to the culture of individualism," and the
"broken man" as essential to its expansive authority as his
self-made counterpart (p. 68).
Sandage begins by considering a familiar development--republican
ideals of selfless public service and economic independence giving way
to liberal values of ambition, enterprise, and accumulation--from the
unfamiliar standpoint of those who were casualties of the economic
revolution that drove the process. As a metastasizing market hemorrhaged
losers, failure became a "national dilemma" that Americans
regarded through the moral lens of seventeenth-century Protestantism and
eighteenth-century republicanism (p. 26). "Going bust in the age of
go-ahead" seemed, from this perspective, to have less to do with
economic volatility than with the "imprudence, iniquity, or
inadequacy" of the "busted" man himself (p. 36). Sandage
is particularly sensitive to inconsistencies in the application of this
logic. Republican admonitions against avarice, indebtedness, and
extravagance, for example, were ignored when crowned with success, but
invoked to account for failure. By mid-century such contradictions were
tightly woven into an extensive patchwork of "master-plots,"
all of which confirmed the conventional wisdom that, as Emerson put it,
"there is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad
fortune" (p. 46). Failure thus became a category of identity, the
result hot of transitory external circumstances, but the inevitable
plight of the "deficient self" (p. 2).
No wonder outbreaks of bankruptcy were accompanied by outbreaks of
suicide. The achievement of financial success signified the achievement
of masculine identity itself. Failure, as such, could be both materially
and existentially devastating. It was the fear of it, the dread of
living the American nightmare as much as it was faith in the possibility
of living the dream, which spurred the anxious striving of
nineteenth-century men. Sandage marvellously captures the vicissitudes
of this striving in the biographical vignettes that intersperse the
narrative. Pieced together from the private diaries and correspondence
of businessmen and their wives, and from the legal, business, and credit
records that documented their affairs, Sandage's tales of failure
give powerful and often poignant testimony to the personal costs
of"intense individualism" (p. 251). More than simply effective
examples, however, these "failure stories" are critical
components of Sandage's attempt to show how "ideologies mature
in a process of continuous flow" between the private and the
public, the vernacular and the official, the personal and the cultural
(p. 46). In this respect, the book is as impressive in its methodology
as in the depth and cogeney of its research.
Born Losers is at its best in its three-chapter study of the
institutionalization of the credit bureau as a mechanism for minimizing
risk at a time of escalating debt and speculation. The conflation of
self and economic worth is nowhere more vividly illustrated than in the
dry ledgers of these agencies, where men's histories, assets, and
prospects were evaluated in moral as well as financial terms. Here,
identity became a commodity assembled from the observations and opinions
of a shadowy fifth column of credit agents and sold as objective fact to
confidence-seeking lenders and associates. Ironically, however, the sale
of security in one form intensified insecurity in another, as strivers
scrambled to manage the impressions on which success depended, in a
market culture increasingly defined by anonymity, surveillance, and the
exchange of dubious information.
Eloquent, rigorously researched, and analytically sharp, Born
Losers is a significant contribution to the historical literature of
capitalism and culture. It is also a methodological milestone, of
interest to anyone fascinated by the intricacies of the production of
attitudes, convictions, conventions, and identities. Finally, this is a
highly topical study, offering a lucid explanation for an ideological
system that continues to pervade our lives and shape our selves.
Jeffrey S. Brown
University of New Brunswick
