Born Losers
The Kindness of Strangers
Download 1.6 Mb. Pdf ko'rish
|
Scott A. Sandage - Born Losers A History of Failure in America (2006) - libgen.lc
- Bu sahifa navigatsiya:
- The Political Economy of the Forgotten Man
- The Road to Nowhere
The Kindness of Strangers Beggars had to overcome a fundamental problem: Why should a millionaire help a stranger? “I have no claim upon you what- ever and am a total stranger to you,” wrote the wife of a failed businessman in 1891. Economic and social transformations in the nineteenth century increased contact and exchange among strangers, both in person and through long-distance transactions. The threat of deceit and distrust gave rise to diverse regulatory modes, such as legal contract and the rules of sentimental cul- ture—and both were crucial preconditions of the begging letter as a mass phenomenon. Correspondents tried to establish trust in two ways: by adopting a sentimental voice of utter sincerity and, more subtly, by reimagining the relations among the people they encountered in the market. “I am no imposter [sic] I assure you,” one woman wrote, “but come to you with a simple unvarnished story of my troubles.” Correspondents emphasized that they were plain speakers. “I have given you a full detail,” another wrote after seven pages. “I thought it to be the proper way to be candid, plain, & truthful.” Begging letters passed between strangers with no basis of mutual trust other than the conventions of sentimental expression. 26 Writing to a famous stranger was more than an act of faith; it was an act of imagination. Correspondents, many of whom were unschooled, collectively invented a genre that demanded sophisti- cated writing. To win the desired prize (be it a loan, a job, or just absolution) the writer had to construct two literary characters—a person worthy of being helped and a person capable of helping— and then proceed to imagine and inscribe an obligation between these two characters. The letter allowed these writers to narrate their own lives—to speak directly rather than letting their fail- 244 Big Business and Little Men ures be told by credit reporters or bankruptcy lawyers or charity snoops. “Let us go back,” a quarry owner began, “for such is the story-tellers privilege. . . .” A farmwoman in Ohio insisted upon Rockefeller’s “hearing the end of the story . . . to show you that if we had missed success we had still done well and failed only by a cruelly small chance.” Success and failure were arbitrary. “You have been fortunate, I have been unfortunate,” one man wrote simply. Beggars offered up their past to acquire a future. They knew that the difference between success and failure lay in who got to tell the story. 27 Most letters opened with some acknowledgement of the gulf between author and addressee. “You may consider this rather a strange letter comming [sic] from a stranger as it does, one whom you never met,” wrote a self-described “broken down” veteran in 1885. Missives from admitted strangers signaled a new awareness of anonymity in an era that fostered exchange and communica- tion between people who had no discernible connection, no com- mon ground, except for the act of exchange. One recognized a stranger visually, by noticing an unfamiliar face. But a stranger “whom you never met” was further removed—this person ap- peared only in a realm of interaction that lacked both place and opportunities for face-to-face recognition. This placeless realm of blind exchange was one of the venues of the nineteenth-century market, wherein debtors and creditors incurred obligations by let- ter and telegraph over long distances without ever meeting. Such was the conceptual arena of the begging letter. Not just the hard- ship of failure but also, curiously, the logic of the market itself produced an epistolary genre that transformed strangers into inti- mates “whom you never met.” Stripped of its pathos, the beg- ging letter was simply a business letter, a facilitator of long-dis- tance exchange among strangers. Its basis was not benevolence but rather market relations. If the epistle succeeded, money or re- sources changed hands between strangers. 28 The genre almost certainly owed something to the older prac- tice of political patronage letters, and some beggars imagined that Big Business and Little Men 245 a sort of cultural constituency existed between the famous and the obscure. “In reading your Successful career,” a Brooklyn insurance agent wrote to Rockefeller in 1889, “I imagined you might aid me in my struggle to prosperity.” A woman from Indiana began, “You will no doubt be surprised to receive this note from an entire stranger, yet I have seen your name so often in the Journal and Messinger [sic] that I feel like I might almost have the right of claiming kinship.” Many correspondents solved the problem of natural versus unnatural claims in this way. Celebrity itself autho- rized something like “the right of claiming kinship.” Market rela- tions sanctioned sentimental obligations among strangers. The begging letter was a genre whose most basic grammar was that of the archetype; merely by writing to a famous stranger, obscure correspondents asserted on some level that the categories of suc- cess and failure ordered the market and connected the people in it. 29 Even as they asserted sentimental ties, however, epistolary beg- gars employed the impersonal modes of human interaction that coincided with the integration of a national economy. Beggars traded sentimental capital, but they communicated by thoroughly modern and market-oriented means: by soliciting a geographi- cally distant stranger in writing. After all, the world in which the industrialist had become rich and famous was the first to make intercourse among strangers common and conceivable. Market conventions minimized the mortification of seeking alms. As the wife of a failed rancher explained, “Oh it is so hard to ask aid, and I could not go to any one and ask them it is easier to write.” Blaming the cold and cutthroat market for their humiliations, beggars retooled its conventions to purchase relief. 30 But distance did not remove all distinctions between business and benevolence. “I certainly ask again your pardon for trespass- ing on your time,” concluded a longtime office clerk who sought a small business loan in 1889, “& for laying before you my own per- sonal matters.” Importuning a stranger on “personal matters” was no routine transaction. H. B. Alvord of Jamaica Plain, Massachu- 246 Big Business and Little Men setts, admitted as much in 1894. “What prompts me to do this very unbusinesslike thing, requesting a favor of a person who has never heard of me and consequently could have no interest in me I cannot say,” he wrote. “I fully appreciate the ridiculous position in which I may place myself with you.” 31 Was the begging letter inherently “unbusinesslike”? By habit or calculation, the writers’ language drew as much on the idioms of business as those of sentiment. The word “favor,” which Alvord used, in his day could mean a business order or offer. Business let- ters typically began, “Your favor of Nov. 29, 1901, just received.” A favor was the privilege of transacting business with someone. Still, although Alvord offered bonds as collateral for a loan, he admitted that “it is very hard indeed to ask a favor and hard to find it necessary to do so.” He preferred to suggest a quid pro quo. “Much better than a loan would be a position which you might give me possibly. I would serve you to the best of my ability and . . . certainly with perfect honesty. Should you grant me the loan the details of the matter would be arranged as you would wish.” 32 Once again, a beggar deployed the “perfect honesty” of sentimen- talism to shore up a job or a loan that would be arranged by formal, rational procedures to benefit both parties. Saving face depended on deflecting charity by the pose of the transaction. Buying and selling was the ideal, but borrowing and repaying would do in a pinch. As J. W. Cleland of Kansas City explained, “Should you help me out of my present dilemma [it] will be the proudest effort of my life to honorably pay and discharge the debt.” Being in a position to borrow and repay a debt would en- able him to begin to redeem his failures and refinance his man- hood. Men begged for credibility as much as for credit. 33 The Political Economy of the Forgotten Man Probably no beggars were warming themselves inside the Brook- lyn Historical Society on 30 January 1883, when William Graham Sumner delivered his social Darwinist paean to the forgotten Big Business and Little Men 247 man, “the clean, quiet, virtuous, domestic citizen, who pays his debts and his taxes and is never heard of out of his little circle.” They were forgotten by reformers too eager, in Sumner’s view, to coddle “the shiftless, the imprudent, the negligent, the impracti- cal, and the inefficient, or . . . the idle, the intemperate, the ex- travagant, and the vicious.” Sumner railed against contemporary “glorifications of the good-for-nothing” because he viewed failure as the quintessence of natural selection. “A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be,” he thundered. “Nature is working away at him to get him out of the way, just as she sets up her pro- cesses of dissolution to remove whatever is a failure in its line.” 34 Sumner especially admired that the forgotten man never asked for help. “In a society based on free contract,” he explained, “men come together as free and independent parties to an agreement which is of mutual advantage. The relation is rational, even ratio- nalistic. It is not poetical. . . . There is no sentiment in it at all.” Rather, Sumner claimed that sentiment had been rightly pushed back into private relations and was a cause of great mischief whenever it escaped into the public sphere. “A free man,” he con- tinued, “cannot take a favor. One who takes a favor or submits to patronage demeans himself. He falls under obligation. He cannot be free and he cannot assert a station of equality with the man who confers the favor on him. The only exception is where there are exceptional bonds of affection or friendship, that is, where the sentimental relation supersedes the free relation.” This was a rigid interpretation of the contracting free agent, whose qualities of freedom and deal-making perpetuated each other. An Ohio wife understood these lofty principles intuitively when she appealed to Rockefeller for help in 1891. She sent her letter knowing that oth- ers “would say in the pride of their hearts dont do it, but I have seen the failure of human wisdom so mutch.” She knew that charity and dignity, like liberty and indebtedness, did not mix. “We have tried so hard not to owe aney boddy aney thing,” she wrote, but “the case grows more desperate all the time & I cry unto the Lord for deliverance from this bondage.” 35 248 Big Business and Little Men In their begging letters, forgotten men and women built their own platform for expressing their vision of a free market and their place in it. If any had heard about Professor Sumner’s brand of social Darwinism, they did not see fit to mention it. Nor did they seem familiar with Andrew Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth” (1889), which explained why great corporations “must either go forward or fall behind; to stand still is impossible.” Describing this new mode of freedom as “intense individualism,” Carnegie insisted that unbridled competition was “best for the race, because it in- sures the survival of the fittest.” The writers of begging letters hardly needed a Sumner or a Carnegie to tell them that their very survival was at stake. The holder of a $10,000 life insurance policy wrote to Rockefeller, “if I take my life now . . . my wife and babe though dishonored, God pity them, shall, at least, have bread.” Seeking employment for her husband, an Ohio woman wrote, “Mr. Gordon has been in business has failed is depressed and al- most discouraged. I fear for the result.” She felt badly about writ- ing a letter behind his back. “My only excuse is I do so long to save my husband.” 36 Although many beggars agreed that charity was worse than death—because it was incompatible with true freedom—unlike Sumner or Carnegie they understood that sentimental relations preceded, constituted, and outlasted all others—both at home and in the marketplace. They invited sentimental surveillance and conjured up tenuous transactions. “I’ve sat down time & time again to write you but my courage failed . . . ,” a decorated Civil War veteran wrote to John D. Rockefeller in 1888, “but the burden of being indebted to so many cramps my freedom of feeling and robs me of my sleep at night.” Having survived being a Confeder- ate prisoner of war, he was now a traveling evangelist who could not earn a living. “My Andersonville privations and sufferings were nothing compared with what I now am passing through,” he claimed. Proposing to sell his life insurance policy to Rockefeller, the writer concluded, “Now the question is will you stand by me and grant me freedom from that which is worse than my Prison Big Business and Little Men 249 life at Andersonville.” Rockefeller had once met the man at church in Cleveland and sent him a small check. The veteran wrote in thanks, “The amount sent will at least grant me a breathing spell.” Such men desired “a breathing spell,” not to es- cape the market but to stay in it and to recover the freedom that went with active manhood. Letter after letter claimed that if the tycoon would help just this once, the writer would be made fit to seek success again. “I am in alarm lest my all should be swept away,” a failed salesman wrote from New Orleans in 1891. “I will hold my grip however the best I can & feel I will come out all right yet[,] especially if some one would step up & give me a little boost & encouragement.” Beggars asked neither for alms nor abundance; they asked for a chance to strive again. 37 However artful the deals contained in begging letters may have been, the philosophy of the “little boost” was not an idle fantasy indulged by shiftless, vicious, “good-for-nothing” people. The writers were making a vernacular stab at political economy. Bit- ter experience had proved to them that only sentimental capital could sustain the capitalist market and those who spent their lives in the thick of it. The problem of failure was not the fall of drunken shirkers but of “clean, quiet, virtuous, domestic citi- zen[s].” Epistolary beggars hunted for bargains that would trans- form and redeem them. Once investigated, appraised, and pro- nounced both valuable and verifiable on sentimental terms, they could close the deal and they would no longer be beggars or fail- ures. A favor would be neither charity nor enslavement, but rather a liberating deal between equals in a sentimentalized market. That most beggars did not receive the favors they appealed for does not diminish the weight of their complex vision of a senti- mental market and the enduring obligations among its free trad- ers—a vision evidently maintained by thousands of ordinary folk long after economists, philosophers, and millionaires were con- verted to the religion of rationality. In John D. Rockefeller’s words, “rational, sane, modern, progressive administration was necessary to success.” Big business, he added, was “here to stay. 250 Big Business and Little Men Individualism has gone, never to return.” The kind of solitary striving that the writers of begging letters ached to resume had purportedly become obsolete. But to forgotten men and their wives, leveraging sentimental capital to buy back manly self-re- spect was a transaction that could tip the balance between failure and freedom. 38 In the culture of “intense individualism” that emerged after the Civil War, success and failure—not slavery and freedom—became the quintessential American axis. Few understood this better than Emma K. Tourgée, “a true, loving woman” who appealed to John D. Rockefeller for a substantial loan in 1890. She offered as collat- eral the life insurance policy she had kept up on her husband, “a proud sensitive man, battling with ill-health and ill fortune” and “the inability to retrieve himself.” She explained, “without his knowledge I have seen his creditors and learn that for $25,000, Big Business and Little Men 251 Like Brother Jonathan in 1819, Uncle Sam found himself a broken- down loser in Judge magazine’s cartoon after the panic of 1893. (“A Terrible Shrinkage,” Judge. Author’s collection.) [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.] I can settle with them all—and by removing this weight, make my husband a free man once more.” Rockefeller passed, and her plan failed. Her husband, Albion W. Tourgée, was a carpetbagger judge and author during Reconstruction and a civil rights lawyer. In 1896, he argued—and lost—the famous segregation case Plessy v. Ferguson in the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1898, Tourgée wrote an autobiographical novella. “There is no crime the world will not forgive sooner than failure,” he mused in the first chapter of The Man Who Outlived Himself, the tale of a bankrupt who contracts amnesia and forgets his own life story. “Who was I? I was sure I had been somebody, and ought still to be somebody,” the charac- ter asks, “but who? who? who was I?” 39 The Road to Nowhere “To what do you ascribe your failure in life?” the Chicago Tribune asked its vast readership on New Year’s Eve 1890, during the sea- son of annual inventories and resolutions. This was a hard-bitten reporter’s question that could not have been imagined, let alone asked, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1800, failure was a word that consumed businesses or fortunes but not entire lives. By 1890, millions understood the Tribune’s question. “Much of interest has been written about those who have battled success- fully with the world,” read a small notice in bold type that invited replies from “the unfortunates who are so much more numerous.” Respondents besieged the paper, and on the first two Sundays of the New Year it printed large batches of letters—“a chorus of wails from the slough of despond.” The paper framed the letters in direct counterpoint to the celebrity interviews that were hack- neyed even then; instead of asking how a tycoon made his first thousand, the journal would give “an Army of Unfortunates” a “chance to tell what was their stumbling block.” The confidential discussions in the begging letter had gone public. 40 Everything about this “story of rear guard,” as the Tri- bune’s headline put it, bespoke nearly a century of change in the 252 Big Business and Little Men meanings and jurisdictions of failure. Letters arrived from women and men, clerks and financiers, young and old, to whom failure meant dissatisfaction as much as disaster. Readers scribbled old plotlines about being ruined by “too much honesty,” “a desire for fine living,” or “lack of ability for making humbug.” They also penned modern gothics about being swallowed by “the almighty monster, Monopoly.” Some spouted the latest psychological jar- gon, having fallen by “one’s own egotism” or “because I was the round stick in the square hole.” A young woman cited “lack of beauty” that condemned her “to suffer wallflowerdom.” The Tri- bune suspended its rule against anonymous correspondence and published the unsigned majority over clever monikers devised, most likely, by smart-aleck newsmen: “A Fool,” “A. V. Ictim,” “A. F. Aultfinder,” “A Dead Failure,” “A Frank Chump.” Some appar- ently signed their real names, such as J. W. Radner, whose note read simply, “I ascribe my failure in life to the well-known fact that I have not succeeded.” Radner’s tautology embraced a profound change of mean- ing: failure was not just for bankrupts and drunkards anymore. Chumps and fools made good copy because the reading public had come to understand failure as a broad category of identity, not simply as the financial ruin of an entrepreneur. The Tribune’s query—“To what do you ascribe your failure in life?”—went straight to this point, asking not about economic endeavor but about life in toto, not about tragedy but about trajectory. In this context, Radner’s tautology made perfect sense: no great calamity need transpire for his life to be a failure. One might languish in stasis, simply never succeeding. One who answered the call had “always been at ‘sixes and sevens.’” At age forty-five, he felt “dwarfed in the monotony of office life and moss-grown in the north bedroom of a boarding-house, ever chafing against these fetters.” Here was the familiar debt slave in new digs, confined not in a damp, dark prison but in a dull, dead office. More than ever, failure was a name for the loss of freedom, but both of these American watchwords had taken on new meanings defined by Big Business and Little Men 253 the dread of stasis and stagnation, a moss-grown existence. “A Frank Chump” understood this, writing bitterly, “I have become a fixture in an office with persons whom I don’t know and never care to learn.” Neither charity nor bankrupt law could redeem dull, routine obscurity, a fate now shared by millions. Ironically, when the Tribune invited “the silent unfortunates” to speak, many realized that they had come to know a sort of failure that was difficult to articulate. One respondent—appropriately, a frustrated novelist—considered his own life a “significant story” but not a coherent one. Autobiography could not convey his fail- ure; he imparted “simply isolated incidents. . . . Here and there a solitary fact, portentous, vital, epochal.” A woman unhappy as a schoolteacher sighed, “Often I am tempted to write ‘failure’ and then lay down my pen forever.” It was as if their stories had disin- tegrated with their dreams. They walked neither the road to suc- cess nor the road to ruin, but rather the road to nowhere. Who would have predicted this at the beginning of the cen- tury? During the panic of 1819, New York merchant John Pintard had called for “not a reformation, but a complete revolution.” The American plague of restless ambition had begotten “numerous failurs,” he wrote. “A new race must arise on the broken fortunes of the present, who different[ly] educated may be content to plod & earn an honest living.” However many of Pintard’s posterity were “content to plod,” they did not necessarily elude failure. Sev- enty-five years later, in the wake of the panic of 1893, editor Ed- ward Bok condemned Americans as altogether too content. “The average young man in business to-day,” he scolded, “is nothing more nor less than a plodder—a mere automatic machine.” Bok and Pintard bracketed the greatest change in the American idea of failure, from the era of the debtor’s prison to that of the time clock. Both understood failure as a loss of freedom; but by the turn of the twentieth century, the culprit was not insolvency, but inertia; not ambition, but averageness. A half-century before Bok, Herman Melville had warned of Bartlebys toiling away “silently, palely, mechanically,” while Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine criticized 254 Big Business and Little Men “second rate men, your slaves of tape and routine . . . keeping up their monotonous jog-trot forever.” By 1884, a best-selling suc- cess manual advised, “Better to be dead than to live without an aim. Better never to have been born than merely to exist and live a calm, plodding, listless life.” The contented plodder of 1819 became the dull plodder of 1893. “Let him die,” Edward Bok sneered, “and his position can be filled in twenty-four hours.” Such a man shot himself to death in a Washington, D.C., hotel room in 1911. The young manager left one note for his wife and another for his employer, the Standard Oil Company, to whom he confessed, “I suppose I am a failure, and this is the only end that I can see before me.” Such men failed by being expendable, replaceable, interchangeable—or, in a common expression, “dull plodders with never a story to tell.” 41 Big Business and Little Men 255 After a half-century of one-on-one confrontations in commercial il- lustrations, American losers and winners finally met as categories of identity—“the ‘couldn’t-do-it’ and the ‘can-do-it’ men”—in this 1908 advertising spread for International Correspondence Schools. (N. W. Ayer Advertising Agency Collection, Archives Center, National Mu- seum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.) [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.] Why did it mean failure to have no story to tell—or to have a story so erratic as to be nearly untellable? Even Mark Twain had to abandon a novel called The Autobiography of a Damned Fool, based on his elder brother Orion’s hapless career as a lawyer, poli- tician, inventor, land speculator, author, proofreader, and chicken farmer. After giving up on Damned Fool, Samuel Clemens cruelly suggested that Orion himself write a memoir and call it Confes- sions of a Life That Was a Failure. Ironically, the novelist himself was an intrepid investor who famously went bankrupt in 1894, having sunk $190,000 into a typesetting machine whose 18,000 parts never quite meshed. To get out of debt, he let Henry H. Rogers (a founder of Standard Oil) manage his finances, and he also wrote Following the Equator (1897). Mark Twain had often penned his literary adventures in the red ink of Samuel Clemens’s financial misadventures, writing because he needed the money. Running short in 1891, he considered letting Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn grow up and meet again at age sixty in a new novel. “They talk of old times,” he wrote in his notebook; “both are desolate, life has been a failure, all that was lovable, all that was beautiful is under the mold.” Think of it: the all-American boys growing into all-American losers. Tom, the reckless specula- tor? Huck, the generous fool? Perhaps the story seemed as un- workable as The Autobiography of a Damned Fool, and Twain let the boys rest in peace. “There was never yet an uninteresting life,” he insisted in 1905. “Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.” 42 Failure had become modern, a low hum rather than a loud crash. It meant a fragmented life, not necessarily a shattered one. Anyone could be a failure if that identity reflected utter stagna- tion instead of outright misfortune. By the time Mark Twain imagined Tom and Huck fading away “under the mold,” the American idea of failure centered on problems recognizably our own: aimlessness, routine, stress, conformity, loss of individuality, the dead-end job, the disgrace of being “merely” average. Losers plodded their lives away in offices, factories, and boardrooms—in 256 Big Business and Little Men another country from the almshouses, chancery courts, and mer- cantile exchanges of old. Back there, back then, at least failure had not sounded dull. Speculators “exploded.” Investors “panicked.” Merchants “broke.” But plodders? They seldom made the pa- pers. “his last trip; Suicide of C. Wilmer Fulsom, the Well Known Traveling Man,” announced a death in Ohio in 1892. This salesman shot himself a week after coming home from the road; “he seemed to be affected with melancholy, and would at times appear a little wandering.” Wilmer Fulsom would be missed; “he was of a genial, sunny disposition, and universally liked.” In 1897, an unemployed Brooklyn button salesman exited less gracefully, gassing himself to death after two botched at- tempts with razors and poison. His obituary ran beneath the headline “succeeded at last.” 43 Big Business and Little Men 257 |
Ma'lumotlar bazasi mualliflik huquqi bilan himoyalangan ©fayllar.org 2024
ma'muriyatiga murojaat qiling
ma'muriyatiga murojaat qiling