Character is Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America by Judy Hilkey (review)

Book Reviews 139 observations of the similarity between the institutions of slavery and marriage were painfully reinforced when "she suffered a fate similar to that of so many slave women she pitied" when her husband separated her from their children (122). One of those children, her daughter, twenty years after public;ation of fourmzl wrote a countering book that ,1rgues for the benevolent institution of·sLivery and the affectionate bonds between blaL~ksand whites. Roberts balances historical and social analysis with critical readings. She brings together a great deal of material that has not before been examined 111 the context of current readings of race and gender. The richly detailed historical context, the highly intelligent readings and cross-connections, and the substantially informed theoretical (from Spillers, to Sundquist, to Bahktin, to Morrison, to Said) argument make a cogent, and significant contribution to American historical and literary studies. Both the lively theoretical treatment of her authors and their social positioning and her intense discussion of the re,1Iand materi,11condition of enslaved blacks ,md the subsequent haunting of American life by its origins in slavery make Roberts's discussion of the texts engaging and provocative. Jeimne Perreault Uniz,ersity of C1lgary Judy Hilkey, Chim1cter is Capital: Success M111111,ds and !vfanhood in Gilded AgeAmericc1.Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. 210 and bibliography and illustrations and index. Labour historians in recent years have shown how industrial workers attempted to resist the powerful economic forces that transformed American life during the Gilded Age. By the close of the nineteenth century, however, the steamroller of the new industrial order had nearly flattened both the labour movement and working-class culture. Their way thus smoothed, the corporate juggernauts rocued into the twentieth century, driven by exuberant robber barons and maintained by legions of attentive org.rnization men. But why did the first generation of white-collar workers fine-tool the machinery that would crush the small-town values and individualist ethos m which they had been reared? Following Antonio Gramsci, who attributed to culture itself a central role in the triumph of capitalism, Hilkey proposes that 140 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadierme d etudes americaines the popular "how to succeed" books of the late nineteenth century were "part of the cultural apparatus that helped legitimize and establish the hegemony of the new industrial order that emerged in the Gilded Age" (7). Such books gave rise to a manliness ethos that deflected young men's anxieties away from the economic system itself and thus helped accommodate them to the emerging corporate-industrial order. Here is how: During the last third of the nineteenth century, as the burgeoning industrial networks were undermining independent farmers and small-town professionals, parents in the declining rural sections of the North and Midwest were alarmed over the prospects of their sons, who might either succumb to the blandishments of the modern world, or, perhaps even worse, be left behind as the new industrial order passed them by. Sensing these collective anxieties, a handful of professors and ministers wrote scores of "how to succeed" manuals which were sold door-to-door by subscript10n. Parents bought the books as gifts for sons, or perhaps as a general moral reference, like the Bible, whose truths could be apprehended if the book were left lying around the parlour. Parents found the message of the books reassuringly familiar. To succeed, young men need not abandon the countryside or its values, nor acquire new forms of knowledge. All that truly mattered was character: frugality, sobriety, diligence, virtue, perseverance and, encompassing all of these, manliness. Those who possessed the requisite manliness would prevail in the fearfully competitive economy of the late nineteenth century; those who lacked this attribute would likely fail. This advice, Hilkey points out, was poor. The best job opportunities were in the cities. Moreover, the emphasis on individual grit and pluck, though relevant to an antebellum economy dominated by individual proprietors, had little applicability to the wage-earning economy of the late nineteenth century . The "success" books seemingly anticipated the insufficiency of their nostrums. "Be content," one such book advised (125). And another: "It must be the lot of...