Born Losers
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Scott A. Sandage - Born Losers A History of Failure in America (2006) - libgen.lc
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- The One about the Rat Hole
- Misinformation and Its Discontents A
When in Doubt, Speculate A credit report was a tip sheet, which advised clients to risk their money on this fellow but not the other guy. “If your sub[scriber] asks the advise of this office,” wrote one agent, “the best you can give is to let him severely alone.” If those who maintained credit ledgers and published ratings directories were not quite bookies, surely they were identity brokers. Was a given individual “worth naming on paper” or not? Trivial queries might bring curt replies from the field, such as this 1848 note from Chenango County, New York: “A sm[all] 3 cent concern, not w[orth] reporting.” Combining money talk and moral codes sorted people into use- ful, if offhand, categories of worth and worthiness: “plausible men” and “doubtful char[acters],” “fast livers” and “steady fel- lows,” “small fry” and “Large Dealers.” Such labels communicated present and projected value, both being indispensable “unless those giving Cr[edit] want to be fleeced.” 28 Credit narratives commodified identity so adroitly that infor- mants grew querulous if they encountered an enigma who de- fied estimation. Theodore B. Guy of Charleston, South Carolina, owned an ice house and sold other goods on commission from the mid-1830s until the Civil War. A reporter picked up his trail in 1847. “Is of v[er]y little ac[count],” an 1850 entry guessed. “Cannot be w[orth] anything tho has the strange faculty of being always in bus[iness] & yet doing nothing.” An update in 1852 repeated, “it is a Mystery how he gets along from year to year Owns no p[ro]p[ert]y & paid no tax last year.” Reporters seemed to try var- ious master plots about Guy—“Appears to have no energy,” “He is a clever, lazy fellow”—but none fit because he kept going. “Have hunted all over Charleston & can find no Man who can tell me abt. Mr. Guy,” the agent carped in 1856. “He has been here 20 yrs with a store, doing nothing apparently & always has a roll The Big Red Book of Third-Rate Men 149 of money in his pocket. My rule would be to sell for cash, & every body will say the same.” Apparently, “every body” knew that a sphinx could not succeed. “I have known him 16 yrs & nobody can get head or tail of him,” the entries for 1857 began. “As much a wonder as ever. No Body k[no]w[s] how he lives. V[er]y quiet Steady man. Never Seems to do anyth[in]g or be intimate with any body. Smokes his Cigar as usual & Keeps a sign up over his store, in wh[ich] you will find a pile of B[il]ls & Boxes, but whether they contain anyth[in]g is problematical as [nothing] is seen to go in or come out of his Store.” Always in the money and yet a bad risk, the man simply was not a known commodity. 29 In a similar way, profitable reprobates vexed reporters by defy- ing their predictions and moral assumptions. “Indus[trious] & money making, but somewhat inclined to dissipation tho not so much as formerly,” read an 1849 entry about Isaac Thorne, a baker in Rahway, New Jersey. Six months later, agents warned of trouble brewing. “Has been in good circums[tances] but is intemp[era]te as yet he is able to pay his debts but don’t know how long he will be so.” A year later, the baker’s hearth stayed hot while informants kept saying it would cool. “A poor drunken fellow,” an 1850 up- date began, “has been a drunkard for 10 yrs & has made money all the time.” The subject hardly fit the mold of “a poor drunken fel- low,” but the entry frontloaded the stereotype before conceding, “wor[th] prob[abl]y $5 or $6 [thousand], a wonderful fellow al- ways has money, very shrewd chap but he must run out.” And he did, finally, eighteen months later. “Used up with Rum, cr[edit] & reput[atio]n gone,” the reporter gloated, as if all were again right in his moral universe. 30 Moral imperatives helped to gauge integrity and predict achievement. “Pays now, but must fail . . . drinks . . . think will fail sometime.” Such formulas closed inscrutable or incorrigible cases. In 1855, word came that Virginia planter J. N. Phelps “promises to break off gambling and drinking.” A year later the agent huffed, “Drinks pretty generally.Cr[edit] getting v[ery] low, he still boasts of hav[in]g ab[ou]t 20 Negroes. I suppose he is good for what he 150 The Big Red Book of Third-Rate Men owes and perhaps a g[oo]d deal more; but any man that gambles and drinks, you know how far he ought to be trusted.” Informants applied everyday morals, not high ideals; the evil in this case was not slavery but debauchery. The update for 1857 recommended discipline. “Generally drunk & gambles . . . better make him pay, lest he fail without doing so.” Same story in 1858: “good for his debts now, without a reformation he cannot reasonably be ex- pected to hold out.” The last prewar entry read, “drinks liquor yet I understand. he has astonished me that he has not failed yet, if indeed he has not. I understand he has yet a few negroes.” The notes resumed after the war and Phelps was broke by 1868, ruined by postwar recession, not personal dissipation. 31 Credit reports imposed conventional moral imperatives to keep the “reason, in the man,” even when the master plot did not really fit. The system was not made for cheery drunkards like Phelps (or dreamy abolitionists like William Henry Brisbane); it preferred men “called g[oo]d pay & said to be punct[ua]l & . . . con- sid[ered] respon[sib]l[e].” Datelined St. Louis, July 1860, those words described “Corbin Thompson. Slave Dealer, 6th Street near Market.” Tappan’s successors had by then shelved his goal of “purifying the mercantile air.” If not entirely ineffectual, such an aim seemed immaterial to the service’s growth and profit margin. Nonetheless, credit ledgers never became mere balance sheets; the reform era had set the genre’s moralizing tone and standpoint. The tenor of an 1876 entry for hotelier Lewis W. Spencer of Old Bridge, New Jersey, differed little from that of earlier cases. “In bus[iness] here 25 yrs, m[a]r[rie]d, but too fond of a spree.” Un- able to reconcile a “h[ar]d drinker” and “a man who will make money anywhere,” agents cautioned, “you can’t tell where ‘Rum’ will take a man.” The facts were on Spencer’s side; he was worth $5,000 outside his profitable business and owned $3,000 in real estate besides. But subscribers needed more than material facts. They paid for estimation and prediction, even intuition—but not for intervention. The system need not reform drinkers, gam- blers, or even dreamers to label them commercially unredeemable. The Big Red Book of Third-Rate Men 151 Long after agents gave up on moral objectives, moral imperatives (“if it be true that he drinks he will fail”) remained the quickest way to commodify identity—to figure a man’s present and future value. 32 On the eve of the Civil War, after two decades at it, many agents sounded like soothsayers as much as storytellers. “He is steady and honest,” one wrote in 1858, “but unless I am mistaken he will make many bad debts.” He did. An 1860 case signaled, “The indications are favorable to their future prosperity.” They prospered. Another from 1860 read in full: “W[orth] but little: of bad habits & cant succeed we think.” He didn’t. “Parties here,” a Philadelphian reported in 1860, “have confidence that he will finally succeed & become well off.” He did, until he began “giving [too] much attention to spiritualism, being rather fanatic on the Subject.” Speculation of the more worldly variety was unavoid- able; credit reporting required an educated guess and a calculated gamble. Agents weighed available evidence and projected future performance, and subscribers took a chance by heeding the advice or not. Sellers and buyers of credit reports thus traded in the com- modity of identity. And for once, the speculators had morality on their side; moral codes and master plots figured value and pre- figured results. “Worthless, & always will be,” an agent reported in 1847, selling wholesale generalizations by the case. “Worthless pecuniarily & otherwise.” “Worthless & contemptible,” “worth- less but still here,” “a worthless cuss never was wor[th] any- thing.” 33 On the page as on the street, these were one-liners. Heard the one about the Cincinnati dry goods merchant? “[I]f he succeeds ’twill be contrary to the expectations of all I have heard speak of him,” an informant cracked in 1852. How about the blacksmith from Chenango County? “Don’t think w[orth] anyth[in]g never heard of any one that ever had any suspicion that he was,” came the 1876 reply. Unfair or inaccurate in some cases, such quips aided a high-volume and high-risk service. Every man, even a “worthless cuss,” had a story with commercial value, if not to 152 The Big Red Book of Third-Rate Men himself, then to an enterprising narrator who knew how to tell it. What was a speculator anyway, if not a storyteller, who wrote the ending before the beginning? Popular scenarios and moral plati- tudes helped creditors hedge their bets. 34 The One about the Rat Hole Failure becomes fact when it becomes a story—when somebody makes a rumor stick. “Can’t say that he has failed & presume it is not so,” an Ohioan hedged in 1854, “but we repeat such was the current rumor as utter[e]d by a thousand tongues.” A week later came an update: “Confidential. I think he will fail before long if he has not already.” He had not—but did within the year. If a town had “a thousand tongues,” how many did an agency have? As a narrator, it liked to give away the end of a story. Six months be- fore a Virginia druggist’s last report in 1869, the informant wrote, “it is concluded that he is going down hill and it is best to stand from under.” Another shut the book on an Illinois case in 1873. “Am satisfied that they will go under soon & think it is only a matter of time,” he wrote. Years passed. “It is a mystery to the bus[iness] community here how this conc[ern] gets along & Keeps going,” he wrote in 1875; “no one seems to know how they stand, but it is believed they are not wor[th] a cent.” Systematic investigation and communication could stop—or spread—rumors efficiently. A Cincinnati agent wrote in 1862, “the impression here is that they are bound to go under, for the present would say ‘hands off.’” Among the market’s invisible hands, how much power did this one wield? 35 Etched into the master ledgers, could a rumor become a revela- tion, a prophesy that fulfilled itself? On 31 October 1848, a final entry from upstate New York confided, “It looks dark.” Some- times correspondents protested inaccuracies filed by others. “The rep[or]t is a false one without any foundation,” a Philadelphian wrote in 1850; “he has been a victim to a number of reports & by g[oo]d managem[e]nt has entirely outlived them. . . . he is entirely The Big Red Book of Third-Rate Men 153 safe but such rep[or]ts must injure him.” A telegram came ten days later. “The rumor here is that he has suspended.” The cor- rection was evidently too late. Correspondents were in a bind, neither able to ignore gossip nor always to verify it. “People have taken the liberty of talking ab[ou]t them for some time past,” a New Yorker wrote, sending news that proved untrue. Fortunately, the victim blamed others: “‘Mr. Edwards’ says that he never thought the report of the failure of his house came from this office.” Wherever the story started, “Mr. Edwards” broke a week later. Another case had a happier ending—that is, no ending— when the all clear sounded. “Have emerged from the cloud in which they were represented by us as being enveloped a fortnight Since & now [stand] out bright.” Wary businessmen learned to be more guarded, and critics raised questions about the system. 36 “The man who objects to such investigation,” warned Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine in 1851, “gives, in doing so, prima facie evi- dence that the result would be unfavorable to himself.” But not only tricksters and losers feared the system; prominent critics sus- pected bias and error. “What man whose credit is his bread, does not feel anxious to know whether he has been misrepresented or not?” asked Edwin T. Freedley in A Practical Treatise on Business (which went through twenty-eight printings from 1852 to 1854). “It is a system that is fraught with danger,” he warned; “the credit of the mercantile community, which is its life and soul, would be in the hands of a few men, self-constituted umpires, and their un- known and irresponsible agents.” New York’s Independent dis- agreed. “They should know everything that can be known about everybody in trade. They should point out wrong-doing in every quarter. They should act as a detective police.” The Independent was an abolitionist weekly with ties to Lewis Tappan, but Hunt’s seconded its view in reprinting this piece. 37 Part umpire, part detective, and part soothsayer, credit agencies and their informants did police the market. Sometimes acting as enforcers but usually as lookouts, correspondents sent all news, great and small. “I think there is some shuffling here,” advised an 154 The Big Red Book of Third-Rate Men 1855 report; “such may win for a while but cant succeed. such men will bear watching.” Shufflers aroused extra vigilance, but the sys- tem’s premise was that everybody in the new economy bore watch- ing. A Massachusetts jeweler looked “Good for a reas[onable] am[oun]t. still sh[oul]d be watched a little.” A source in Cleve- land wrote, “he is p[roba]bly g[oo]d for sm[all] am[oun]ts well looked after.” A St. Louis saloonkeeper’s 1860 entry read, “Dunning & watching dont hurt him.” Everybody kept an eye out for rascals, but credit agents watched even upright and pros- perous traders. Filing an update about a grocer who seemed too successful, an Illinois informant vowed, “Will be watching, as there is something mysterious about this house.” 38 The Mercantile Agency booked nearly three decades of reports before formally instructing informants about “what to look for.” Tappan’s antislavery comrades submitted the company’s first re- ports, but the agency soon lined up lawyers, bankers, aldermen, and veteran merchants. Until 1869, the firm presumed that the sa- gacity of its correspondents would suffice. “They dont look like men who could carry so big a load as they have to shoulder,” be- gan an 1855 report from Cincinnati, about the manufacturers of “a New Patent Steam Engine on the Chronometer Principle.” The writer conceded, “they are strangers here & therefore I k[no]w [nothing] of their means,” but added, “I predict the concern will fizzle out tho no one has expressed that opinion to me.” They fizzled. To defenders, the agencies’ profitability proved the accu- racy of their reports and the perspicacity of their reporters. 39 Yet neither experience nor a knack for minding other folks’ business ensured fair or uniform standards. Often local snooping turned up little. “Nobody can tell any thing ab[ou]t him. he is an energetic stave ahead fellow & may have p[ropert]y,” read a note from 1858. “The most that can be said in reference to such men, is they want close looking to.” Close looking uncovered all kinds of transactions. In Ohio, a druggist “became too well acquainted with a ‘Calif[orni]a Widow’” left behind during the gold rush; “her husband returning, made a fuss.” A few sources mocked their The Big Red Book of Third-Rate Men 155 own vigilance. “The way ‘S’ spells his name looks suspicious,” an agent in Cairo, Illinois, wrote of one Thomas Smyth; “afraid to acknowledge himself a ‘Smith’?” Maybe field correspondents made jokes as a fleeting gift, to relieve the inky tedium they shared with copy clerks who toiled in faraway New York City. “First of all, he has a wife and baby,” one allegedly wrote; “to- gether they ought to be worth fifty thousand dollars to any man. Secondly, he has an office in which there is a table worth one dol- lar and fifty cents, and three chairs worth, say one dollar. Last of all, there is in one corner a large rat-hole which will bear looking into. Respectfully yours, A. Lincoln.” 40 Prairie lawyer Abraham Lincoln really did furnish reports to the Mercantile Agency from Illinois in the 1840s and 1850s. But the rat tale looked mighty tall when it first saw print about 1885, and in the next fifty years Carl Sandburg and Dun & Bradstreet publicists gave it a good stretching through many retellings. As a purported scrap of Lincoln’s wit, it had the added charm of im- probable history: Honest Abe meets Dun & Bradstreet. Like any good yarn, it hinted at larger truths and winked at the new sys- tem’s ironies. In a nation beginning to doubt the rightness of slav- ery, the antislavery Tappan devised a new way to calculate human value. In a culture that exalted the separate spheres of men and women, agents ciphered a man’s wife and family into his eco- nomic worth. In an era that invented scientific and social surveil- lance (think of the asylum and urban reform movements), infor- mants peeped into bedchambers and rat holes because nobody quite knew what to look for. And in an industry that boasted of its facts, this, its most famous report, was probably a legend. Lin- coln used the “rat hole” metaphor often in his known writings, but if such a letter ever really existed, the original has never sur- faced, either at auction or in an archive. 41 A true relic of Lincoln’s services to the Mercantile Agency sur- vives in an Illinois master ledger: “This Office has had the honor of having Old Abe as a correspondent,” a clerk wrote after Lin- coln won the White House, near-contemporary proof of the fu- 156 The Big Red Book of Third-Rate Men Abraham Lincoln’s credit report from the 1850s (with a postmortem cross and weeping willow in the left margin) shows white space where several lines of ink were “systematically abraded,” as determined in April 2000 by the Paper Labora- tory of Straus Center for Conservation at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Mu- seum. (Courtesy R. G. Dun & Co. Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School.) [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.] ture President’s work as a field informant. The clerk jotted this above an entry about Lincoln, created because agency watch- men were themselves watched by others. Lincoln’s affairs would “bear looking into,” and the agency induced one of his neighbors in Springfield, Illinois, to do so. “Lawyers are ordinarily impu- dent but seldom ask for credit,” the informant wrote, adding that the subject was “w[orth] ab[ou]t. 12m/$ [$12,000] principally in R[eal] E[state].” Between January and July 1858, however, as Lin- coln prepared to debate Stephen A. Douglas, the shadow re- ported something else—which has been lost to history. Someone purged Lincoln’s credit report after his assassination, leaving only the passage just quoted and a black cross doodled in the mar- gin. Maybe the entry mentioned his extravagant wife or echoed Wendell Phillips’s unkind remark that Lincoln was “a first-rate second-rate man.” Whatever it once said, even a martyr’s blood was not thicker than waterproof ink. This job took a knife. Some- one pared the writing off the page, scraping the surface so clean that even ultraviolet and infrared scanning cannot raise the dead words. And yet the crime left more telling evidence behind. 42 History’s trickster holds up a nonexistent letter and a blank ledger, saying, Pick a story: the one about the rat hole, saved but maybe untrue; or the nosy neighbor’s report, shredded but per- haps all too true. What surfaces is not a revelation about Lincoln; like any other life, his was a mess of stories true and false, lost and found, told and untold. Whoever butchered the 1858 reports evi- dently erred on the side of “untold.” Yet that act itself acknowl- edged the power of narrative—not only Lincoln’s, but the whole system of reporting. Rateable souls accrued neatly on crisp pages. Nothing got buried in unkempt files or fell down any rat hole. No more the confidence game of pick a story, any story. Sturdy red books preserved an official story, rated and narrated, recounted and resold. A striver’s tale was no longer his own. 158 The Big Red Book of Third-Rate Men 6 Misinformation and Its Discontents A patch of woods still grows between two brooks that meet behind Main Street in Bridgton, in Maine’s lake region. Before the Civil War, some joker dubbed the spot “Little Canaan,” since it looked like a promised land but stank to high heaven. Caustic breezes of sulfur, dung, and death stung the eyes. Rural people knew how money smells up close, and here it smelled like Horace Billings’s tannery. He started in 1842 and made a name by sweat, temperance work, and marrying the local tycoon’s granddaughter. Fifty men tended vats in his tanyard, which was crisscrossed with drying hides and stacks of hemlock. Bark mills turned by draft horses ground a thousand cords a year to brew a tanning liquor for the dark, red leather prized by shoe- makers and bookbinders. In time, Billings bought out rivals lo- cally and in Portland (forty miles southeast), built a corn cannery, and dammed Stevens Brook for power. Go Ahead! By 1880, the tanner reeked of a quarter million greenbacks and built his family a brownstone in Boston’s newly filled Back Bay. The home folks crowned him “Bridgton’s Business King.” 1 159 But even kings cannot count future blessings. Success still lay ahead of Billings in the autumn of 1854 when rumors began to swirl around him like the dry leaves of Little Canaan. Billings from Maine is in trouble. But the tanner knew his accounts to the penny, and by trade he knew an ill wind when he smelled it. Bill- ings is “getting ready to fail.” The word on the street led back to the Boston Mercantile Agency, Lewis Tappan’s first branch, opened in 1843. Horace Billings “is worse than nothing.” A friend of the tan- ner confronted the manager of the Boston agency, who allegedly replied in “High horse” tones that he would not be “dragooned” into altering his books, adding that he “w[oul]d go to his death before disclos[ing]” the name of his informant. 2 So the tanner got a lawyer: Richard Henry Dana, Jr., fresh from defending fugitive slave Anthony Burns. Dana was more fa- mous for his 1840 memoir Two Years before the Mast, part of which time Dana had spent tanning hides in California. Bringing suit for $10,000 damages, Billings appeared before the bar in an at- tempt to clear his name. Subpoenaed to prove the libel, the red- leather book hemmed and hawed. “I am not intimate enough with his bus[iness] affairs to go into any particulars, as to what he is w[orth],” Billings’s entry read in part; “I have no doubt, he is a man of handsome prop[erty] but it is impossible for me to name any Sum. I have no means, of knowing any thing about him.” Where was the alleged libel? On closer examination, according to the published decision, “it appeared that the unfavorable report had been erased, and a favorable report substituted in its place.” Defendant’s counsel conceded the point. After hearing from Bill- ings’s friend, the agency manager deleted the original entry and solicited another—albeit without notifying Billings or subscrib- ers. By agency policy, no duplicate books were kept; the erasure had destroyed the only copy of the disputed words. No proof of libel existed but what this or that trader said he heard at the agency or on the street. Hearsay was fair in credit reports but foul in court; the jury acquitted. Billings got neither apology nor rec- ompense, and after clearing his name he kept his own counsel. “Is 160 Misinformation and Its Discontents very silent about his own affairs,” the agency noted in 1856, “& very little is known by the Public about his worth.” 3 Anyone ever beset by a computer error can pity the tanner’s tale, but his frustrations were novel in 1854. Bureaucracy, surveil- lance, and information management had just begun to affect ev- eryday life. Agencies did not warn those whose commercial and private lives they watched. Sources enjoyed anonymity, and sub- scribers pledged not to leak reports. Richard Henry Dana sneered at unnamed agents and deleted files—“Never tell any one! Secret corrections!”—to no avail. Billings the “Business King” could nei- ther avoid becoming a subject again nor be sure they got his story right. Many other businessmen sued credit reporters to fight be- ing called a failure—showing how that label impinged on new concepts of privacy, ties between home and market, the value of life stories, and ultimately the value of the people who lived them. Such cases posed the first challenges to bureaucratic conceit and lack of accountability in the information industry. 4 The Mercantile Agency was an early information system, even if its moving parts were human and its only electric component was the occasional urgent telegram. Tappan, John M. Bradstreet, Robert Graham Dun, and others established networks to amass and transmit data, languages to value and encode it, and protocols to store and retrieve it. Central coordination of local informants was crucial, as were indexes to access, track, and update data. Each function enhanced case management—but as an integrated system they all supported an expandable database with millions of interlinked files. More than making old lines of business more efficient, the pioneers opened a new field of enterprise—and a new way of life. 5 Download 1.6 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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