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Born Losers: A History of Failure in America. By Scott A. Sandage. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. x, 362. Cloth, $35.00.)
Building on recent histories of business failure in the United States, Scott Sandage probes the cultural underside of the American Dream in the nineteenth century-or, to be less anachronistic, the efforts of the era's middle class to make sense of all the financial wreckage in its midst, wreckage largely strewn by its own relentless embrace of speculation, entrepreneurial drive, and general "Go-Aheadism." Sandage is concerned equally with the meanings of pecuniary failure for prominent Americans like P. T. Barnum, Lydia Maria Child, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and for the mass of ordinary "strivers." Focusing mostly on the period from the Panic of 1819 through the emergence of large-scale industrial corporations, he adds a brief epilogue that considers understandings of failure in the twentieth century.
Methodologically innovative and superbly written, Born Losers engages an impressive array of nineteenth-century conversations about bankruptcy. The obvious domains of political debate, periodical commentary, fiction, and private introspection receive attention, but so too do commercially inspired slang and particularly modern forms of commercial communication, such as the credit report and the begging letter. Throughout the book, Sandage emphasizes-and in the end, overemphasizes-a key transformation in the American meaning of failure: a "shift from ordeal to identity" (4), from seeing bankruptcy as a traumatic event to viewing it as an enduring social identity associated with marginality and worthlessness.
Sandage sets up this argument by exploring the social and cultural elevation of risk-taking and the search for profitable innovation in antebellum America, which increasingly became badges...