Some historians told Sandage that a lack of source material would doom his project: "You know, unless you succeed, the Library of Congress doesn't want your papers." Still, with encouragement from his adviser, well-known cultural historian Jackson Lears, he started poking around in archives of 19th-century material.
He was tracking a cultural shift as well as individual stories. At the beginning of the 19th century, he says, failure was separate from personal identity. Americans used constructions like "He made a failure" -- meaning "his enterprise failed" -- that sound awkward to us today. By the beginning of the 20th century, we were saying things like "I feel like a failure" or "My sister is a failure," language that turns identity and achievement into the same thing.
Scott Sandage, the author of "Born Losers," explores America's hangup about failure.
(Bill O'Leary - The Washington Post)
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Why the change? Chalk it up to the expansion of business and business culture that came with the Industrial Revolution. "People began using business models to assess themselves," Sandage says. This meant that if your dry goods store went under, you, personally, were a failure -- and never mind if the Civil War or the financial panic of 1873 precipitated its demise.
It's an item of faith in America that we're a risk-taking nation, one that thrives on the pursuit of the main chance, and that this is a big part of what makes us successful. The entrepreneurial culture associated with Silicon Valley -- that failure is fine, because hardy entrepreneurs will pick themselves up and try again -- is a recent manifestation of this belief, and it's not all myth. Yet as Sandage points out, not all who fail get off the floor and try again, let alone succeed.
Sandage began his research with what he calls a "needle in a haystack" strategy, in which he looked for revealing details in archived 19th-century diaries and letters. Eventually he homed in on several mother lodes of "loser" material. One was a collection of character sketches prepared by the pioneering credit bureau that was to evolve into Dun & Bradstreet.
The Mercantile Agency, as it was then known, employed informants all across America (Abraham Lincoln was one) to file reports on the creditworthiness of their neighbors. It was like "a national bureau of standards for judging winners and losers," Sandage writes, and it led him to one of the most fascinating stories he encountered in his research.
William Henry Brisbane was running an apothecary shop in Cincinnati in the 1840s. An agency informant reported that Brisbane had failed in every occupation he'd tried, including farmer, publisher and physician, and predicted that he'd likely keep failing for the rest of his life. The crowning evidence was the fact that this "loser" had inherited $100,000 -- a huge fortune in those days -- and run through most of it in a very short time.
After Sandage poked around a bit, a somewhat different story emerged. Brisbane turned out to have been a successful South Carolina plantation owner. He'd decided that slavery was wrong, sold out, moved north, then felt guilty about leaving his slaves behind.
The hundred grand went to buy them back and set them free.
The conscience-stricken Brisbane was an exceptional case, of course. To see how more typical Americans struggled with financial failure and the loser label that came with it, it helps to consider another evidentiary bonanza Sandage turned up: a collection of "begging letters" sent in the late 19th century to Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller. Dear Mr. Rockefeller, supplicants wrote by the thousands, if you could give me just a little help, just enough to get me on my feet again.
The prevailing American assumption by this time was that losers deserve to lose, that economic failure is due, inevitably, to flaws in a person's character. Rockefeller's correspondents had an uphill fight to counter this belief.
"I have been Struggling incessantly trying to re[g]ain a little foothold," one man wrote, explaining that his problem was not that he was "shiftless" or "lazy" but that "I have no capital with which to make a start, & it is utterly impossible to make something out of nothing."
Wives often wrote behind proud husbands' backs. "Did you ever realize," one asked Rockefeller, "what a terrible thing it is for a man of good mind, to feel that he is entirely left out of all the great and good work, that is occupying the busy men of the world. It is not only a matter of money, but it affects a man's entire nature."
The letters feel at once surprising -- we're not used to getting so up close and personal with history's also-rans -- and extremely familiar. For as Sandage points out, the notion of failure as personal choice pervades cultural and political discourse to this day. Privatize Social Security, for example, and those who strive and save will accumulate substantial nest eggs, while those who don't . . .
