Capitalism and Its Discontents

Scott A. Sandage. Born Losers: A History of Failure in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. x + 362 pp. Thirty-two black-and-white illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00.

Seldom has a book that began as a doctoral dissertation been so eagerly awaited than Scott Sandage's history of the men whom he terms "America's unsung losers"—sad individuals "who failed in a nation that worships success" (p. 3). Economic historians and cultural historians alike have desperately wanted to see this book in print for close to a decade, consoling themselves in the interim with copies of the original dissertation passed from hand to hand, samizdat-style. Delays in its appearance fanned fears that Sandage, like many of his characters, might himself fail in his undertaking. Now the long wait is over, and in the final reckoning, one thing is certain: Born Losers is a winner of a book. Haunting, eloquent, and deeply unsettling, Sandage has written a tale that will forever change the way historians write about capitalism in the United States.

Though ostensibly an account of the place of failure in American life from the colonial era to the present, Born Losers focuses on what Sandage terms the "other nineteenth century: the rough ride between the panics of 1819 and 1893" (p. 3–4). It was an era, Sandage argues, that witnessed a redefinition of business failure "from the lost capital of a bankruptcy to the lost chances of a wasted life" (p. 4). Once used exclusively in reference to entrepreneurs who reached too high, too quickly, failure gradually became a category of identity that encompassed garden-variety ne'er-do-wells, plodding middle managers, and feckless salesmen.

Why study failures, however defined? Until recently, it was not a subject that attracted much scholarship. Business historians of an earlier generation saw no need to attend to the casualties of capitalism, while social historians had little interest in unsuccessful (or successful) entrepreneurs, whom they dismissed as oppressors of the working class. Cultural historians, while intrigued by the entrepreneurial or middling classes, took far greater interest in bourgeois consumerism than the alarming rate at which many of these men and their families went under in times of financial distress. Yet, as Sandage observes, "the age of the self-made man was also the age of the broken man" (p. 17). By scrutinizing how "failures" or "losers" have been perceived, categorized, and criticized, Sandage seeks to illuminate the peculiar moral economy of capitalism in this country.

Born Losers begins with the panic of 1819, which left debtors by the thousands gasping for credit. At the time, the panic had no tangible cause, no obvious culprit. Panics seemed to originate in the very furnace of entrepreneurial energy that gave rise to the prosperity preceding the collapse. The myth of the modern-day Icarus was born: men speculated beyond their means, stoking the economy to a white-hot heat that inevitably consumed high-flying financiers. This narrative of the failure—the overreaching speculator awash in undeserved credit who got what he deserved—would be refined and reanimated in the wake of every financial panic of the antebellum era. Such stories served a purpose. "The rhetoric of moralists and business leaders quarantined failure like a plague," Sandage observes. "The whole community had sinned and must atone, but ruined men were the causes of pestilence, not its casualties" (p. 46).

Pity the failed merchant. Like the bankrupts of the late twentieth century, whose sins have been laid at the door of extravagant credit card purchases—in reality, divorce and illness are the principal catalysts—the failed man of the antebellum years became a touchstone for the projection of people's anxieties about the emergence of a liberal capitalist society.¹ "To a nation on the verge of anointing individualism as its creed," Sandage observes, "the loser was simultaneously intolerable and indispensable" (p. 27). Conventional wisdom at the time held that men failed because they deserved to fail&#x02014...