Respectable Mediocrity: The Everyday Life of an Ordinary American Striver, 1876-1890

This article explores the everyday life of Michael Boyle, a social climber who failed to ascend the ladder of American success. Although he rose from day labor to white-collar work, Boyle acquired neither an important managerial position nor a business of his own. He never owned a home, and mobility through marriage eluded him. Regardless, at the end of his life, he did not regard himself a failure, because he had re-imagined himself as a successful bachelor, consumer, and salaried employee. Historians have produced a voluminous literature on economic elites and the working class, and America's "managerial class" has received considerable attention over the past decade, but fewer scholars have examined the rank-and-file office workers and economic strivers who bolstered capitalist expansion by eschewing working-class politics despite their failure to achieve mobility through entrepreneurship, property ownership, marriage, or the emerging professions associated with the rise of big business. Boyle's surviving diaries (1876—90) thus provide a rare opportunity to glimpse the world of ordinary Americans who adjusted to, rather than challenged, their descent into respectable mediocrity. They also suggest that we need to know much more about the complexities of salaried life, and the spending (rather than investment) mentality that energized expansion and fueled demands for credit and more affordable goods during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.