Apostles of the Self-Made Man: Changing Concepts of Success in America (review)

184CIVIL WAR HISTORY motives, attached themselves to mihtary encampments and includes those who disguised themselves to enlist as soldiers. "Risked Everything" is an interesting account of the women who participated in espionage. Other chapters review the domestic responsibilities and hardships with which women on both sides were forced to cope and the challenges facing those whose lives and fortunes felt the direct thrust of invasion. In her last chapter, Miss Massey sums up late nineteenth-century gains for women in civil service, industry, education, nursing, lecturing, and in other fields. It is an important chapter in that it apparently represents Miss Massey's effort to offset the absence of continuity in the book and in that it carries women's accomplishments down through the 1890's, in fulfillment of the purpose of the series, The Impact of the Civil War. It is, however, by no means the most interesting or the best organized of the sixteen chapters in Bonnet Brigades. One feels that Miss Massey's interest is beginning to flag and that the pressure of drawing conclusions within the framework of the impact of the Civil War is proving a bit wearisome. Certainly it does seem bold to ascribe to the Civil War a leap forward by fifty years for women, particularly in view of the economic developments before, during, and after the war which were to sweep women along, Civil War or no. Miss Massey's study is so thoroughly professional, as always, that it may be carping to mention that she was inclined to remain on the beaten path of repositories, researching in the National Archives, Library of Congress , Huntington Library, University of North Carolina, Duke University, and Smith College, to the exclusion of many states' collections of manuscript material. And in fairness one must recognize that there is a citation from the University of Virginia collection, as well as one from the Virginia State Library, the South Caroliniana, Tulane University, and two or three from the Louisiana State University Department of Archives and History. _.XT . . May S. RiNCOLD Clemson University Apostles of the Self-Made Man: Changing Concepts of Success in America. By John G. Cawelti. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. Pp. xiv, 279. $6.95.) Dr. Cawelti's book is a contribution to the historical literature about the success theme and the self-made man, along with volumes by Irvin Wyllie, The Self-Made Man in America, Kenneth Lynn, The Dream of Success and the recent anthology edited by Moses Rischin. These were preceded by an earlier study of the success theme by A. Whitney Griswold and the English translation in 1930 of Max Weber's The Protestant Eihic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Wyllie's emphasis is upon the proscriptive literature of self-improvement; Lynn's on the success theme in the work of selected novelists. (The Winter, 1966, issue of the American Quarterly has an interesting article by Lewis O. Saum on "The Success Theme in the Great Plains Realism.") BOOK REVIEWS185 The scope of Cawelti's book is broader, but not deeper, than the studies by Wyllie and Lynn. The emphasis is upon development and change in the concept of success. His treatment draws upon a variety of sources—literary, sociological, economic—as well as the self-help books themselves. The result is an overview from many different angles. Sources ranging from Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard to David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd indicate the numerous facets of the subject. Dr. Cawelti's main concern is with changing concepts of success in America; the evolution, in time, of the idea of success. Until after the American Civil War, the dominant formula for success, expressed typically by Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard and Freeman Hunt in Worth and Wealth, was to work hard, save money, and live a moral life. Success as an end was subordinate to the kind of morality that engendered success. In the gilded age, it was the goal and glitter of success that counted, more than morality. At present, according to Dr. Cawelti, success is measured in terms of the ability of the self-made man to adjust to the environment in which he works. Thus...