Born Losers
Confessors and Storytellers
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Scott A. Sandage - Born Losers A History of Failure in America (2006) - libgen.lc
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Confessors and Storytellers Self-reliance and self-criticism went hand in hand. Hill and oth- ers in similar good repute tormented themselves, dissecting “mis- takes that originate in personal character” before such flaws led them to ruin. Virginia planter Charles Dabney used the genteel “we” to rebuke himself on New Year’s Day 1838. “We want very much, a habit of energy and application—a habit without which there can be no success,” Dabney wrote in his diary. “We still pro- crastinate, still neglect things, and still idle our time.” These were “the causes of all my failures. . . . I have been more inconsider- ate and selfwilled than ignorant—rather careless indolent and selfindulgent than unlucky.” Henry Hill’s deadly sin was sloth. In 1841 he contemplated suicide and berated himself for “indecision and misspent time.” He wrote, “Misfortune & Poverty stare me in the face at every turn and keep alive these feelings & . . . without a remedy I am condemned to suffer the consequences.” 5 Such confessions echoed the abasement rituals and testimonies of early American Protestantism. Like evangelicals bearing wit- ness to their own depravity, some men overstated their vocational sins in the hope of salvation. Henry Hill’s shame hardly com- pared to the humiliations seen in his office; eternal damnation was no literary metaphor to a prostrate merchant whose past lay in ruins and whose future remained in doubt. “Henry this is a Sit- uation I never meant to be placed in,” Timothy Whittemore wrote from New York in 1832 to his brother in West Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Now have got patiently to wait till deliverance comes, and am sure shall look out for the future.” Conventionally, men reassured failed brethren that “a new beginning in life” was A Reason in the Man 47 nigh, as attorney Henry Van Der Lyn wrote to a bankrupt friend in 1839. But there was good reason to fear that commercial and social redemption would never come. Van Der Lyn observed many cases of irretrievable ruin in sleepy Oxford, New York. Part scribe and part pharisee, he kept smug accounts in his diary of neighbors who fell from grace. He wrote of a lifelong friend in 1835, “It is now understood that this busy, meddling, unprincipled & immoral Man has failed.” In 1837 he wrote, “These two extin- guished stars are now wandering about our streets shorn of their influence and false consciousness.” In yet another entry, he noted, “Dodge’s case is hopeless. The mad fellow, built a large new House on his farm, of 2 stories & painted it last summer & was a Bankrupt at the time. . . . He is gone in toto.” 6 Henry Hill’s diary revealed even more clearly how public imag- ery colored private attitudes about failure. Six months after the Emerson lectures, an old associate turned up at Hill’s door, bank- rupt. “When he stepped in to the office this morning with his bloated face, staring eyes & careless appearance,” the diarist re- marked, “I could scarcely believe that it was the same elegant la- dies man that we had among us only two or three short years ago. How sad the change!” Did the man really look so bad? Even if he did, was Hill inspired by sketches from contemporary fiction? “Who has ever seen a man when his affairs are becoming desper- ate, and has forgotten the picture?” asked the writer of an 1841 short story; “his form shrinks, and his coat hangs loose upon him; his cheeks grow lank, and his eyes stick out.” In the 1830s and 1840s, stock fictional characters rose and fell; certain sins meant certain failure. Conventional plots and characters helped to con- tain failure and reinforce the idea of achieved identity. Didactic narratives understood by all fixed blame and made every dilemma seem crystal clear. 7 Henry Hill used these cultural conventions in his diary. Given to brooding over his own vague sense of failure, Hill portrayed his friend’s breakdown as an open and shut case. The two had “read law” together as students in a senior attorney’s office, but the 48 A Reason in the Man other man went into business. “’Tis the case of a young Merchant of this Town,” Hill began. “What this reverse in his fortunes arises from I know not save what every body in the community conjectures as they ever assume the right to do in every case.” Hill had always disliked him. “He was of a prepossessing appearance, well educated & accomplished withall, who was handsome, well- educated, [and] married to a young lady of princely estate.” For- merly a wild bachelor known for fast horses, the fellow was un- done by his marriage to a rich girl. Hill explained, “His was a temperament which easily gives way at the presence of prosperity. He could not endure it. . . . Dissipation stepped in—liabilities were incurred thoughtlessly—& his step has been downward till the present.” Hill admitted he was guessing; “perhaps the key of the present transaction, perhaps not. One thing is certain, that the failure has come,” he added; “another is probable, that ’tis a bad one.” 8 Hill’s diary told a fable of extravagance by fitting actual events into a familiar plotline: the spoiled rich boy finally gets his come- uppance. Hill tossed in some literary flourishes (“’Tis the case of a young Merchant,” “accomplished withall,” “a young lady of princely estate”), enhancing the semblance of a morality tale. Hill’s story resembled Strive and Thrive, a British novel by Mary Howitt (1799–1888). Hill read the American edition in 1841 and reviewed it in his diary. “Mr. Walingham is a young man,” he wrote, with “a classical education & refine[d] and elevated taste, but gay and reckless withal perfectly disgusted with any thing like business.” But the protagonist is duly punished. “He finally (Mr. W.) marries,” “plunges into every extravagance,” and becomes bedridden. His wife must find employment, and when he finally dies he leaves nothing to support their children. “The story is pleasantly told and illustrates with much force and beauty the val- ues of perseverance,” Hill concluded. “Indeed I have seen nothing of the kind for a long time which has so much pleased me in its perusal.” 9 The affinities between Howitt’s novel and Hill’s diary reflected A Reason in the Man 49 the continuous flow of ideas among public and private idioms. Extravagance was only one “reason, in the man,” one variant of achieved identity, that was circulating in the antebellum public domain. Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine noted similarly in 1848 that “most men fail in business not through overwhelming . . . misfor- tune, but generally through disregard of the simplest principles of morals.” A typical litany followed. “In most cases . . . the ruined man has brought his affairs into hopeless condition by his grasp- ing spirit involving him in ruinous extensions and speculations; or by his overreaching disposition, which, becoming notorious, has driven off his customers; or by his meanness, which has disgusted them; or by some other ingredient in his moral mixture.” 10 De- spite its brevity, this indictment not only specified three reasons, it glanced at three stories about achievement and identity. Character and plot, such as an “overreaching disposition” or driving off one’s customers, told how men became hopeless, notorious, or disgust- ing. In private communications, people borrowed from popular culture and rewrote formulaic plots to narrate failure in real life. These “master plots” lent a generic shape or outline to organize bewildering experience into an intelligible story. “The past Season has unfolded a pretty general bankruptcy on the West side of this Village,” Henry Van Der Lyn wrote in his diary in 1827. Among the wounded were three blacksmiths who had opened a mercantile shop in partnership: “industrious & thriving Mechanics but not content it seems with their station & business.” The diarist concluded, “The idea of being elevated to the superior rank & profits of Merchants led them astray & in an unguarded moment, They entered into this untried & per- ilous undertaking.” Ten years later, in 1837, Charles Russell of Boston penned a consoling letter to his niece Sarah Gilbert, whose husband had been ruined in the panic. “I am sorry to learn that the severity of the times should have reach’d in any man- ner your peaceful dwelling,” he wrote. “Scarcely any one however has escaped—The calamity which has prevailed thro the Country for the last ten months seems to have fallen upon all in a greater 50 A Reason in the Man or less degree. Yours I hope will soon be succeeded by the bright sunshine of future prosperity & may past events teach us all a moral lesson which will be suitably improved.” During the panic of 1857, Caroline Barrett White of Roxbury, Massachusetts, re- layed to her diary worries expressed by her husband. “Frank came home with a sad story of ‘Hard Times’—new failures every day— He that trusteth in riches, trusteth vanity, nowadays.” 11 Master plots shaped even firsthand accounts, but abstract les- sons fell short in real life—where failure was anything but ab- stract. The trouble with blaming “a reason, in the man” was that “the man” was always a unique human being and usually some- body’s loved one or neighbor. These three observers upheld “a reason” generally, yet all bent the rule to some degree. The uncle’s blessing (“Yours I hope”) and Frank’s reports to Caroline about men in their circle empathized more with family and friends than the mass of ruined men. Van Der Lyn showed the least pity, but even he hedged, holding veteran merchants and upstart mechan- ics to different rules. In the abstract, he wrote, “This spirit of speculation will undermine the Religion & Morals of the people of the U.S. [and] upset the Government or totally change its character.” But in the aftermath of the 1837 panic, he remarked, “My friend Sidell has been somewhat damaged by his specula- tions, which have disordered his finances & given a cast of care to his lively & gay countenance.” In addition to writing such formu- laic, literary flourishes in his diary, Van Der Lyn immediately sent John A. Sidell a letter of condolence. “I cannot omit the perfor- mance of a sacred duty which one friend owes to another in mis- fortune, to send you my heartfelt grief & sympathy,” he wrote, as- serting “that the best of men (of whom I consider you one) are exposed to such misfortunes,” adding, “To look misfortune in the face, is the way to rise above its depressing and blighting influ- ences.” Wives, uncles, and even lawyers wavered between univer- sal censure and particular sympathy, between generic plots and extenuating circumstances. “To look misfortune in the face” was much easier if the face were anonymous. 12 A Reason in the Man 51 Losers, Monsters, and Squatters All eyes were on the man who failed. By the 1850s, a visual culture of failure illustrated the master plots that circulated in private and public writings. Beginning with the panic of 1819, caricaturists taxed their cleverness to depict this new American, the broken man. Thomas Kensett’s engraving “Brother Jonathans Soliloquy on the Times” featured a character resembling a young Benjamin Franklin, with a sheaf of unpaid bills fluttering from his hand and a bankruptcy notice jutting from his pocket. The country cousin of Dame Columbia and Uncle Sam, Brother Jonathan was the early republic incarnate. A homespun Yankee, he wandered a vil- lage square lined by broken banks and sheriff ’s sales, while shady brokers (according to Jonathan’s verse) “laugh in their sleeves at the loosers forlorn.” The “looser” got the short end of a bargain and ended up the scapegoat of those who robbed him. The com- mon man had always been poor, but the “looser forlorn” had known better days. He was a ghost who had lost his spirit, a fallen republican angel in a land of rising liberal entrepreneurs. Unlike eighteenth-century caricatures of frenzied gentleman speculators, this was the face of everyman. 13 Swept along in the course of events, the “looser forlorn” em- bodied a crisis at once civic and intimate. Satirists, more than other commentators, disputed the belief that achievement defined identity, that “nobody fails who ought not to fail.” The panics marked “the first time many Americans thought of politics as having an intimate relation to their welfare.” These forces oper- ated and proliferated every day, but the imagery in both the public press and private writings restored flesh and bone to the disem- bodied powers of the market and the state. “He is prone to the ground,” one congressman said of the “looser” after the panic of 1819, “and he is only viewed as a silent monument of grief when he surveys from a corner her desolate streets.” 14 The loser as “silent monument”—a national emblem wander- ing like Brother Jonathan in Kensett’s engraving—evoked well- 52 A Reason in the Man known master plots. The Debtor’s Journal printed this 1820 version of the familiar story: Do you see the poor bankrupt, who totters along, His countenance fallen, his spirits oppress’d? No pity he gains from the cold-hearted throng, While his deep-bursting sighs tell the throbs of his breast. Artistic imagination fleshed out the bankrupt, but people saw him in the flesh every day. Van Der Lyn opened the seventh volume of his diary with a mise-en-scène: “The appearance of Washington Square in 14th April 1853, 9 p.m. Commerce has de- parted from it &. . . . [t]he withdrawal of all business from this once busy mart of trade, has left several melancholy wrecks be- hind.” In his own soliloquy on the times, Van Der Lyn surveyed decaying buildings and derelict men, street by street. 15 A Reason in the Man 53 Fretting over his unpaid bills, circa 1819, one of the earliest personifications of the nation was also an early portrait of “the looser,” in this detail from Thomas Kensett’s engraving “Brother Jonathans Soliloquy on the Times.” (Courtesy of the American Anti- quarian Society.) [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.] Men who failed lost money and gained an identity: the broken man. “He seemed like a bow which had been kept bent too long & thereby lost its vigour & Elasticity,” Van Der Lyn wrote about a friend in 1855; “I fear he has been overtaken with business.” Art- ists rendered such men in tattered finery, with beaver hat respect- fully doffed, and they appeared in political cartoons and dime novels, on posters and song sheets, and in sentimental prints for the home. The rise of the penny press and chromolithography af- ter 1840 heightened demand for fresh pictures of vivid places and characters. Old anecdotes inspired new engravings and woodcuts, like “The New Orleans Sock-Seller,” a much-published render- ing of a real case, in which speculation reduced a merchant to street-peddling. “The merchant, broken in fortune,” read the cap- tion, “mutters to himself, and smiles, half insanely, as he praises his wares to his real or pretended customers!” The commonest motif showed the ritual meeting of a lean debtor and a stout cred- itor. Drawn and redrawn for decades, this power play could be seen in the flesh on many a village green. In a student essay about 1835, Virginian James Holladay depicted a debtor facing his credi- tor on the day of reckoning: “The man that once appeared so gay in the eye’s [sic] of the world is, now thin pale and his spirit’s sunk to the lowest pit’s of despondency, and wretchedness.” The stigmata of failure were so familiar that even a schoolboy knew them. 16 Such tableaux made it easier to see how failure connected the public square, the family hearth, and the political scene. In 1841, a self-described “broken merchant” ventured to tell his own story. Born in western New York in 1800, at twenty Milton Bucking- ham Cushing ran away to become a merchant on the Ohio fron- tier. He prospered and acquired land, but overconfidence and overextended credit broke him by 1833. He freely admitted these “reasons, in the man,” but he also blamed “Genl. Jackson’s ‘experi- ment,’ upon the Currency & business of the country.” As Cushing described the bank war’s impact on him, “the compass was un- shipped from the binnacle, the vessel ceased to mind its helm, 54 A Reason in the Man and darkness that could be felt came over the face of the deep.” Holding on, “at last I was driven upon the huge and jagged reef of Broken Banks, and my vessel became a complete wreck.” Ship- wreck was a common metaphor of financial distress in popular fiction. Cushing’s writing exemplified rhetorical exchanges be- tween the public and the private spheres. 17 Cushing had nearly recovered from the bank war when the panic of 1837 flattened him again. “Late in the fall of 1837,” he re- called, “I gathered up my little all, a lovely wife & four children, and paddled up the great lakes.” Their new start in the remote “Wiskonsan” territory ended when hard times trailed west after them. “[A] stranger in a strange land, there seemed no alternative for me but to ‘dig, or starve,’” he recalled. “I followed the example of others in like circumstances, and became a ‘Squatter,’ on the public lands.” Squatting was widely denounced as akin to specula- A Reason in the Man 55 The motif of the obsequious debtor facing his pitiless creditor, one gaunt and the other corpulent, conveyed the power relationship be- hind failure and success. (Lithograph by W. W. Chenery, Boston, circa 1841–1853. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.) [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.] tion, the pursuit of something for nothing. Eventually, he got title to the parcel and settled his family “in a ‘Log Cabin’ built with my own hands.” Their life was hard. Cushing’s wife proudly de- scended from “the Adams & Hancock families of Revolutionary memory. In the veins of my children,” Cushing boasted, “flows the blood of Patriots, heroes & Statesmen, whose memory is dear to every true American.” He hated to see his “buds of promise” grow up unschooled, “like wild flowers of the country we inhabit.” Out of money but not out of ideas, he sat down to rewrite the master plots that held him down. 18 The squatter’s tale filled four pages of a dense round hand in an 1841 letter to congressman Caleb Cushing (no kinsman, but a fel- low Whig). Invoking the Gospel of Luke, Milton Buckingham Cushing prayed for commercial resurrection. “I am as unfortunate as the Poor Widow in the gospel,” he wrote, “and with your aid . . . I hope to be alike successful.” Brazenly asking to be made head squatter, he begged a lucrative patronage job: Register of the Land Office. 19 Cushing’s epistle to Cushing was the sort of yarn critics ascribed to “the pencil of fiction,” but the writer foiled the master plots by inserting his personal story into the nation’s. He confessed his sins but refused to be the scapegoat for economic or political crises. Instead, he framed a panorama of manifest destiny with himself as trailblazer, surrounded by vivid characters and plots, including Old Hickory, the Monster Bank, Bible stories, shipwrecks, the blood of patriots—even a log cabin, the political symbol that won the 1840 election for old Tippecanoe. Cushing posed as a monument, but not a “silent monument.” Escorted by the stalwart icons of history and current affairs, “a broken mer- chant” was as valuable an American character as any other famil- iar face. Articulate losers like Cushing hardly fit the part of the ragged, stooped beggar of contemporary writers and illustrators. A car- toon parody of Andrew Jackson’s bank war showed the “Poor fel- low!” extending his hat toward two matrons in black veils, finan- 56 A Reason in the Man cial widows without a penny to spare: “Alas, We were ruined with the Bank!” Behind them, Jackson rides roughshod over the Con- stitution, in a cart hauling money from the “monster” bank—pok- ing his oxen with a giant veto pen. A suicide hangs from a dead tree on the horizon. The era’s best-known engraving, Edward Clay’s “The Times,” likewise had no role for respectable families like the Cushings. “The Times” depicted the Fourth of July 1837, on the same square (based on Manhattan’s Five Points) Brother Jonathan had roamed in 1819. With the stars and stripes snap- ping overhead, idle mechanics mingled with rum-soaked men and women, begging mothers, a fat capitalist, and the hydra of panic: a bank run. In the gutter, a handbill quoted Jackson’s war cry against the evils of credit: “All those who trade on borrowed Capital, should break.” Individual and collective sins remapped America as a financial Sodom and Gomorrah. But hallucinations of a market society run amok did not look like the “dig or starve” efforts of a family man to save his “little all, a lovely wife & four children.” 20 Local and intimate disasters like Cushing’s made it easier to imagine the broader transformations going on in the commercial- izing society, easier to discern how buying and selling on cash and credit tightened the connections among family hearth, public square, and the highest echelons of national politics. But Cush- ing’s vivid imagination failed to conjure up the appointment he sought. In 1844, the “Wiskonsan” squatter moved his family to Chicago—where he resumed practicing medicine. Oddly, he failed to mention that calling in his long letter, although his claims about business losses and bloodlines were true. This is known because his youngest son grew up to be a Civil War naval hero: Commander William Barker Cushing. “Lincoln’s Com- mando” was not yet four when his father died suddenly at forty- six, while on a travel cure for his chronically weak health. His widow, Mary, took her husband’s body and their brood home to Fredonia, New York, where she made her way by living yet an- A Reason in the Man 57 other master plot: the broken man’s wife who survives as a school- teacher. At home, Mary taught her five children to revere their fa- ther and his admirable, if futile, quest to succeed. 21 We notice the clock most when it stops running, and so with broken banks and broken men. Here and there, a lone voice chal- lenged the master plots. “When a long life has been passed in a meritorious pursuit, and the result to the individual is not compe- tence, but poverty,” Hunt’s conceded in 1849, “there must be some great and fundamental error at the basis of the system.” Blame mongering impeded reform: “accusations of extravagance, impru- dence, speculation, &c., are always adduced in individual cases; but the effect, being general, not individual, the cause must also be general.” These causes, however, were harder to see than a bro- ken man. As much as the canals and railroads that plowed up the 58 A Reason in the Man Displayed above shop counters, this color lithograph discounted the reality that cash was often scarce, obliging merchants to sell on credit or not at all. (Warshaw Collection of Business Americana, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.) [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.] landscape, or the telegraph and mail system that consolidated it, or the new products that cluttered it, the “looser forlorn” was the market revolution’s impact made visible. To depict him was to ex- amine the face, hands, and works of the republic itself. 22 People like Milton and Mary Cushing understood all too well that sentimental master plots shaped their experience of failure, proving the rule that “nobody fails who ought not to fail.” In the public imagination, pictures and plots confirmed assumptions about achievement and identity faster than individual cases could challenge them. Back in 1819, Joseph Hornor needed hard money more than “any romance either in prose or poetry that this age has produced.” Recounting the miseries of failed men in 1822, a U.S. congressman added, “Sir, these are not pictures of the imagina- tion; they are scenes of real life. They are not singular, but are ex- amples of thousands.” Master plots wrote contingency out of the story, substituting fables and effigies of reasons “in the man.” Ty- coon Stephen Girard’s 1845 guidebook to New York City warned visiting merchants, “The freaks of fortune are at all times strange enough, but the last few years have witnessed some instances that would astonish even those who have dealt mainly in fiction. Wall Street has been the theatre on which have acted scenes that have surpass[e]d in interest the fabled days of Aladdin.” Always ready with corroborating testimony, diarist Henry Van Der Lyn pasted in an 1845 clipping from Cist’s Advertiser of Cincinnati. “What are the fluctuations of romance writers,” it began, “compared to some of the realities of human life?” Failure was ushering in an age of realism. 23 Download 1.6 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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