Born Losers: A History of Failure in America

Abstract

Examining the market-driven conceptions of failure that evolved during the nineteenth century, Born Losers joins the growing list of monographs that illuminate the cultural dimensions of business enterprise. In brief, Scott A. Sandage argues that the “go-ahead” (p. 36) notion of success that emerged during the 1830s and 1840s was only one side of the market revolution. The other was a culture of losing that likewise redefined American notions of selfhood, generating a whole new set of terms drawn from business practices—for instance, “flat broke,” “hard up,” and “busted” (p. 25)—that spelled the economic and moral shortcomings of men who were unable to fulfill their potential, the so-called “misfits of capitalism” (p. 5). With poignance and insight, Sandage describes the costs of the American dream, showing how the “lives of quiet desperation” that Henry David Thoreau associated with entrepreneurial capitalism exemplify an “aesthetic of failure” (p. 265) that continues to mark the limits of the culture's obsession with success. In the epilogue, Sandage points to Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1948) as the definitive expression of this aesthetic in the twentieth century. But the majority of his book focuses on the nineteenth century, revealing a “hidden history of pessimism in a culture of optimism,” in which the “voices and experiences of men who failed (and of their wives and families) echo in private letters, diaries, business records, bankruptcy cases, suicide notes, political mail, credit agency reports, charity requests, and memoirs” (p. 9).

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