Born Losers: A History of Failure in America
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In the early 1800s, Sandage argues, the buying and selling of goods on a large scale offered Americans unprecedented opportunities to go broke. And for the first time, large numbers of people were failing spectacularly, all at once. The panic of 1819, the first such crisis precipitated not by war or crop failure but by fears of inflation inside the economy itself, ushered in a national depression and instilled in many a profound fear of failure. But the increase in commerce also brought new, tantalizing opportunities to succeed. Any white man with a little extra money–farmers, lawyers, shopkeepers–could become an entrepreneur and hope to see returns, possibly enormous ones, on his investment. The average citizen could become that great American archetype: a self-made man. And in this context, not jumping at such opportunities, not striving to increase your capital, was its own form of failure. “If a man could fail simply by not succeeding or not striving,” Sandage writes, “then ambition was not an opportunity but an obligation.”
Nineteenth-century Americans didn’t know what to make of the new proliferation of debtors–not just drunks and gamblers but “honest men,” friends, neighbors, and family. So, according to Sandage, they clung to traditional explanations for failure, blaming moral shortcomings in the person who had failed. “The merchant evidently believes the State street proverb that nobody fails who ought not to fail,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. “There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune, and so in making money.” We may know more now about market economics, but the idea that losers have brought misfortune upon themselves persists. Coming down squarely on the side of the losers, Sandage laments that today “the logic of ‘the reason, in the man,’ extends not only to white males but to all citizens, shaping opinion and policy not only about bankruptcy but also about poverty, unemployment, welfare, affirmative action, and education.”
Henry David Thoreau, a man who did escape the mad scramble to some extent and whom Sandage much admires, wrote in 1857, “The merchants and banks are suspending and failing all the country over, but not the sand-banks, solid and warm, and streaked with bloody blackberry vines. Invest, I say, in these country banks. Let your capital be simplicity and contentment.” Thoreau’s contemporaries thought of him as a failure; even Emerson, speaking at his funeral, criticized him for his lack of ambition. The irony, of course, is that few today would consider Thoreau anything of the sort. Not only did he grow rich in self-knowledge, he achieved some measure of worldly success too: he died in 1862, but Walden hasn’t been out of print since. Few of us, however, are able to opt out as Thoreau did. In fact, Sandage begins Born Losers with an account of Thoreau’s funeral and likens his passing to the death of the American dream. Describing the children sitting in the pews, he writes, “Someday they would rise and fall in the world the sermon presaged, where berry picking was a higher crime than bankruptcy.” When they buried Thoreau, “part of the American Dream of success went asunder: the part that gave them any choice in the matter.”
