Born Losers: A History of Failure in America

by Sandage

What makes somebody a Loser, a person doomed to unfulfilled dreams and humiliation? Nobody is born to lose, and yet failure embodies our worst fears. The Loser is our national bogeyman, and his history over the past two hundred years reveals the dark side of success, how economic striving reshaped the self and soul of America.

From colonial days to the Columbine tragedy, Scott Sandage explores how failure evolved from a business loss into a personality deficit, from a career setback to a gauge of our self-worth. From hundreds of private diaries, family letters, business records, and even early credit reports, Sandage reconstructs the dramas of real-life Willy Lomans. He unearths their confessions and denials, foolish hopes and lost faith, sticking places and changing times. Dreamers, suckers, and nobodies come to life in the major scenes of American history, like the Civil War and the approach of big business, showing how the national quest for success remade the individual ordeal of failure.

Born Losers is a pioneering work of American cultural history, which connects everyday attitudes and anxieties about failure to lofty ideals of individualism and salesmanship of self. Sandage's storytelling will resonate with all of us as it brings to life forgotten men and women who wrestled with The Loser--the label and the experience--in the days when American capitalism was building a nation of winners.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Psychology, Cultural, Sociology, Economics

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Kressel Housman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before reading this book, I always assumed that the reason the term “loser” became such a catch-all insult was because of the influence of sports. What other human endeavor divides people up into “winners” and “losers” so clearly? As it turns out, though, the source of the term is from business. In the early 19th century, when business was unregulated and market failures could result in panics, bank runs, and the uprooting of thousands of people’s lives, “loser” simply meant someone who lost money due to circumstances beyond his control. But by mid-century, as capitalism grew and the myth of the self-made man began to take hold, financial failure was seen as a fault “in the man.” As the author puts it, that is how the language of business came to be applied to the human soul.

Because the author stays mostly in the 19th century, the book is rather a heavy read. Failure is a tough subject to tackle in any style, but the old-fashioned language of the newspapers of the period made the first few chapters especially hard to get through. The book picked up in the middle with the story of Lewis Tappan, founder of the first credit rating service. Now, there’s a lot to admire about Tappan. He was the abolitionist who paid for the attorneys who represented the escapees in the Amistad case. He even paid for the escapees’ passage back to Africa when they won. But his business (credit rating) was ugly. In this digital age, we’re all worried about how our computer use is being tracked, but what went on before computers was at least as bad. It may even have been worse because it was all based on the subjective judgment of human informers. Eventually, someone brought suit against Tappan and won. Beardsley vs. Tappan may have been the first Supreme Court case to test the legal concept of the right to privacy.

Later chapters include the post-Civil War fight for bankruptcy laws and a sampling of “begging letters” sent to John D. Rockefeller, but the very best part was the epilogue because that is where the author went into the world we live in, mentioning such diverse sources for the term “loser” as Willy Loman, Bob Dylan, and Columbine High. Brilliant as the first sentence of this book is, ("The American Dream died young and was laid to rest on a splendid afternoon in May 1862.") I think the author should have put more from our modern world into the beginning. People like to read what they’re familiar with, and since much of this book covers the lives of “losers” we’ve never heard of, mixing more from the world we know would have made the first part of the book less of a chore to get through. Having said that, the book is definitely worth the effort. I learned plenty and I completely agree with the author. Failure is the flip side of the American dream, and as long as we continue to demonize it, we are damaging ourselves and others.

[Shirley Cahyadi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well illustrated/written history of failure in America especially in relation to how capitalism leads you to believe that your financial successes are a measure of how successful you are as a person. But should be noted it is a history of the white man’s failure in America and fails to be inclusive of other histories.

[Mary Overton]

"'The great American Assumption,' noted W.E.B. DuBois, 'was that wealth is mainly the result of its owner's effort and that any average worker can by thrift become a capitalist.' But the post [Civil] war transformation of the corporate and industrial economy made this ideal harder than ever to attain.... Yet 'the great American Assumption' promoted the idea that men who were failures simply lacked ability, ambition, or both; what had once been said of the captives of slavery now belittled the misfits of capitalism. The new birth of freedom was an ideology of achieved identity; citizen and slave gave way to success and failure as the two faces of American freedom. That ideal depended not only on the chance of success but on the risk of failure." pg. 18

"Onward and upward sloganeering [for the new 19th century ideals of manhood] drowned out the older ideal of yeoman competency, which valued the maintenance of current status and plenitude more than the cultivation of risky ambitions. The man with 'a competency' (in the language of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) sustained his independence by land ownership and contentment, providing for his family today and squirreling away necessary resources against tomorrow's troubles.... [By the new ideals,] 'I got along tolerably well' was a failure's epitaph." pg. 81

"In 1880, neurologist George Beard diagnosed 'American Nervousness' as a form of 'nervous bankruptcy.' He listed among its causes the phenomenal increase in 'business transactions' and 'the stimulus given, to Americans to rise out of the position in which they were born.' .... Ironically, chronic stress was becoming a mark of middle-class status, proof of one's relentless drive to succeed." pg. 234

"We would rather pay to ignore the advice of therapists and self-help books than freely accept what Thoreau advised after the panic of 1857. 'The merchants and banks are suspending and failing all the country over, but not the sand-banks, solid and warm, and streaked with bloody blackberry vines,' he wrote. 'Invest, I say, in these country banks. Let your capital be simplicity and contentment.'" pg. 271

"Over the past two hundred year in the United States, the image of failure has shifted from the overambitious bankrupt to the under-ambitious plodder.... in a 1999 interview [Arthur Miller, playwright of "Death of a Salesman" - the iconic story of a man's failure] explained why failure means oblivion. 'The whole idea of people failing with us is that they can no longer be loved.... People who succeed are loved because they exude some magical formula for fending off destruction, fending off death. It's the most brutal way of looking at life that one can imagine, because it discards anyone who does not measure up.'" pp. 276-7

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

You can tell he really thought he was cooking on a bunch of these sentences

[Valorie Dalton · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, author Scott A. Sandage points out that the nineteenth century, despite being an age of capitalism, industrialization, and promise, was also an age of great economic hardship and loss for men and women who together created a culture of failure that personally and morally defined them. Society and the government held people individually accountable for failure despite circumstance, and relief was hard to come by because the government did not have the systems in place to manage it. When failure occurred, it was “a reason, in the man.” The prevailing idea that “no one fails who ought not fail” identified men to such a point that failure was a matter of personal worth, morality, and virtue. That only a man himself could be blamed for failure no matter the cause created a multitude of dynamics: drive vs. risk, innovation vs. safety, and failure vs. the possibility of any future success. Once failure was stuck to you and became a part of your identity, it was a hard label to shake. Especially with the birth of Tappan’s very first credit report agency that sent out personal information to aid in assessing the possible risk and success of others.

Sandage’s greatest strength lies in his usage of primary source documents and the many stories and examples they provide his book. They, large in number, not only give creditability to the story, but they raise interest so that the book is enjoyable to read. It is an illuminating and fun look at something that is normally depressing in nature—failure and stigma placed on personal identity. It is obvious by the number of sources used and documented that Sandage has put a great deal of research into the book. In the sense that it is well researched and documented, it is a reputable piece of scholarship for something paid little attention to. Sandage also suitably links the identity of failure to today by tracing how ideas and perceptions formed into what modern people think and feel. There is a clear connection between past and present, which gives the book modern day relevancy.

I would have liked, though, a section to provide a less narrow focus. Perhaps not for the whole book, because the subject itself makes it necessary to focus on specifics, but a chapter to help place failure within the larger scheme of things. While Sandage provides a great number of failure stories, his success stories are few and far between such that it is hard to get a grasp of whether failure was as prevalent and powerful as made to seem suggested by primary source evidence and first hand accounts. It is impossible to tell from the book if failure, while still being a serious issue of self identity and crisis, was a small percentage as compared to relative successes. The evidence given begs the question: would the government have acted faster to aid those in need if failure was truly so prevalent? The answer is: I don’t know. Nevertheless, the question and answer could have been addressed to further illuminate the culture of failure and its political ramifications. It would have also helped to frame the larger scope of American life and identity to pay more attention to the successes and contributions of women, the poor, and laborers. While not as numerous or as devastating as riches to rags middle class male business failure/success stories, as culture defined these things, it would still serve to paint a more complete image of the situation experienced by all of America, not just business men. This would also include black men and a more in depth look at how failure and success came to define them during the Antebellum and Reconstruction years.

Sandage does not try to define, “what is failure?” That is not the point of the book or his reasons for writing it. The book is about how failure was perceived and how it came to define people and their worth. Failure is simply what it is: a lack of success. Born Losers was written to tell the other side of America in an age of trumped success and unlimited possibility.

Sandage is not only a great historian, but an excellent storyteller. There is no droning of dry, fact-by fact history here. Sandage paints a picture that reads as easily and fun as a novel, even more entertaining because he is speaking of something real and relevant. There is a lot of humor in the story, but none done out of disrespect. The book, while funny and fun, stays respectful to the people involved. You will definitely feel like you got something out of this book by the time you put it down, whether it be from the vast knowledge or the pure entertainment value. We all love to laugh at tragedy, after all, especially when it is not our own.

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those phenomenal books that gives me faith that academic writing can also be beautiful and moving. For what is essentially an economic history, "Born Losers" is a delight to read. Sandage deftly blends literature and poetry with economic concepts and bankruptcy law. The book closes with a wonderful meditate on failure in 20th century popular culture.

Sandage's book unpacks the idea of failure in the United States from about 1810 through the middle of the 20th century. The book is a cultural history of economics that foregrounds how identities shape and are reshaped by both social and economic forces. Sandage tells the reader that failure stories are everywhere and his source material certainly suggests that is true. He pulls on literature, diaries, credit reports, slang dictionaries, charity records, suicide letters, begging letters, and court records! "Born Losers" identifies how white men failed in America and the ways in which only white men could fail: women and people of color formed the inherent unsuccessful base on which white men's possibility of success (and, in turn failure) was based. As the only people who could enter into contracts of own property before the Civil War, white men's ability to go into debt/fail paradoxically proved their independence.

The book begins by outlining how the market revolution moved failure from an event outside the person into a personality trait. The book then discusses how failure is an essential part of the United States. For a nation founded on the promise of a merit-based system, someone has to fail. Even "not failing" becomes a kind of mark on a person's character because it suggests that under-achievement also reflects a lack in the person's character. A large portion of the book discusses early credit rating agencies and the ways in which these firms created new forms of surveillance. The credit report turned identity into a commodity through the process of collecting and narrating facts. Next, Sandage discusses how begging letters allowed men and women to narrative their own failure story. He stops short of suggesting this was an act of reclamation but his arguments about sentimentalism as a kind of capital suggest that people did not capitulate to the new order as quickly as economic histories may indicate.

Throughout the book Sandage attends to issues of gender and race. Readers familiar with The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class will find his arguments about race at once familiar and fascinating. Likewise, if you are familiar with From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation I think you will find his discussion of failure as a concept that inherently challenged the 19th century's "separate spheres" ideology interesting.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the 19th century, economic history, or social history.

[Sharon Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great historical long-view of the change of the concept of "failure" as one specific to business to one that became a description of an identify. Think "Death of a Salesman". I learned a tremendous amount about the white debtors during the 1800's as well as the birth of a surveillance network (very prescient to our current intelligence & surveillance concerns) related to credit-worthiness. I am still thinking about how these concepts affect my own thinking about my life and how I evaluate my life.

[Karen Adkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

The meat of the book is rather more narrowly focused than that grand subtitle (it's really just focusing on the emergence of 'self-made man' ethos of Americanness in the US, particularly with respect to money), but the book is terrific nonetheless.

[Frank Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a surprisingly entertaining book about failure. I thought this book would be a survey of different types of failure-financial, romantic, athletic. But Sandage focuses on a very specific kind of failure and what it means in American life.

The book covers the way that America has reacted to financial failure from the middle of the 19th century up through the early part of the current century. He details the origins of our credit system and how it created a national network of snitches. And he traces how each era of American life looked upon financial ruin. He devotes a chapter to "begging letters" that were sent by strangers to Rockefeller and other billionaires of the Gilded Age. And throughout he reminds us of how much of the American vernacular is grounded in the idea that people who go bust just aren't very good or worthy.

It's a thought provoking book filled with more than a few pointed laughs.

[Enthusiastic Reader]

I'm not giving this one a star rating, because my frustration is with the scope of it rather than the text itself. This focuses specifically on financial failure, although it does touch on the way that the use of the word "failure" shifted to include the personal as well as the commercial.

Ah well.

[Kristin · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best academic books I’ve ever read. A skillful and compassionate narrative about American individualism, capitalism, and how success and failure came to define us beginning in the nineteenth century.

[boxer_dogs_dance · Rating 2 out of 5]

History of Failure in the US

This book is highly specialized i. The author goes into too much detail for me. But a lot of it was interesting. He could have used a better editor.

[Servabo · Rating 3 out of 5]

You lose yourself, you reappear. You suddenly find yourself got nothing to fear.

[Clark Hays · Rating 4 out of 5]

Failure: the American Nightmare

Born Losers is an exquisitely researched tour through the dark side of the American Dream: failure. The author plumbs a treasure trove of historical documents (court documents, letters, diaries and news and fiction) to deconstruct the rags-to-riches story of pulling oneself up by the boot straps to achieve dazzling levels of business success and prosperity. It’s a belief that has fundamentally defined the cultural identity of the “go-ahead” American. As he shows, bleakly and definitively, the notion we cleave to may simply be a response to a much grimmer reality: America is, by and large, the land of the loser.

He weaves together the usually first-hand, and occasionally second-, accounts of average folks failing, struggling to rebuild and often failing again, and set them against the slowly crystallizing — and seemingly mistaken — notion that success and failure were internal qualities. People began telling themselves, perhaps as a tonic against the dampening truth, a story that failure was the product of moral shortcoming and the inability to tap into the assumed natural resilience, energy and business sense of Americans. Lost in the headlong race to fail was the recognition that internal attributes were no match of systemic issues related to personal vs. corporate debt, credit (or the lack thereof) and the power of the emerging banking and business interest weighted against the average human.

Sound familiar? It should. The blueprint for the growing gulf between winners and losers, writ so large today, was already being sketched out 200 years ago. This is a fascinating treatment of a the dirty little secret that powers our country: failure is not only a byproduct of the capitalist system, it’s necessary — and in vast amounts — so that a few may prosper. Also required: a national narrative that conveniently glosses over the harsh reality, replacing it with a misguided notion that if only you try hard enough, and if your heart is pure enough, you too can be a success.

The author focuses on several fascinating segments of failure including the rise of the credit reporting agency, the preponderance of “beggars letters” during the Great Depression, the evolution of bankruptcy laws and the interplay of national conversations about slavery and even the linguistic underpinnings of how we talked about, and still talk about, failure. He also manages to weave in historic figures – Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, Twain, Barnum — and more.

This is an important and well-written (and researched) book and the only criticism I have is that, because it was published in 2006, the many images didn’t show up on my Kindle — which was a total fail (and cost it an ironic star).

[Ellen Pierson · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the early market economy at the dawn of the nineteenth century, the relentless pursuit of success began to emerge as a central tenet of a still-developing American identity. Maybe we can even trace it to the get-rick-quick mentality behind the original settlement of Jamestown. I’m not a historian. Scott Sandage is, though, and much of his work is focused on studying ways in which many American cultural phenomena often associated with the twentieth century actually had their roots in the nineteenth. Born Losers is an exploration of businessmen who lost it all in the raucous boom & bust economy of their day. I could probably remember more about his specific discoveries if I’d waited less than a year to write my review, so I’ll focus instead on how much I like this concept.

Everyone likes winning (and winners), but in some ways failure may have more to teach us. It can force us to be humble and empathetic. We recognize that the world doesn’t revolve around us and we won’t necessarily be able to do all the things we may have hoped we would. I really kind of think that not having failed at something – something of relative personal significance – is kind of the equivalent of not having had really lived. Of course, that’s not exactly what this book is about, although Sandage does wax poetic about the enduring pathos of Bob Dylan songs and Willy Loman in the conclusion.

For a lot of the men in the book, like for Willy Loman, failure was not an early learning experience from which they emerge better. Instead, it dealt a blow that was ultimately crippling both economically and psychologically. Sandage also emphasizes that the structure of the economy left the cards stacked against the little guy in a variety of ways. The odds of success may have been long, but when what was always the most likely outcome actually occurred, many if not most of these men suffered in the belief that the failure was theirs alone – and worse, that it might somehow be intrinsically connected to them as individuals – an indelible part of their makeup as human beings (thus the title: BORN Losers).

Personally I have a lot of respect for those who take responsibility when things go wrong, and very little for the great number of people who do not. However, we also need to be realistic and forgiving of ourselves when we decide exactly what to feel responsible for. A lot of things are beyond our control. Realizing that and coping with it in the most productive way possible, while controlling what we can, may be what divides the winners from the losers more than any more objective measure of success.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

cultural history of financial 'losers' in the 19th century. Not the seasonal wage laborers and slaves of Scraping By, but the people who engaged with developing American capitalism and went bust. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the dominant republican paradigm equated debt with dependency, incompatible with public virtue. After the panics of 1819, 1837 and 1857, people had to come to terms with the possibility that financial failure was not necessarily moral failure. Particularly interesting are Sandage's section on the development of credit agencies (which he considers in a knowledge-power/surveillance state/panopticon kind of way), and the way that ideas of financial emancipation (through bankruptcy laws) became intertwined with you know, actual emancipation. Also it's entertaining.

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been trying to read Born Losers for a while. Very glad I did. It is a wonderful discussion of the role of failure in American Society. Sandage finds the period that separates when Americans saw failure as a stepping stone to success to a society that saw failure as an inherent flaw in ones character. For me, Sandage's book shows the failures of contemporary American society with ease of self esteem: all children are smart and receive awards for student of the day, week, month, year, trophies for participation,for showing up. Sandage's book incredibly well with Carol Dwerk's Mindset. The change in American perceptions of failure have created a society of fixed-mindsets - there is only one way to do anything and nothing is going to change the way do things. What happen to creativity? The rejection of failure as a growth attribute has created the crosses in education at all level.

[Jim Firestone · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a depressing book. But it is an important book. It driving theme is that there is no success without its complement, failure. And we don’t pay enough attention to the failures.

He traces how the idea of a failure as a person evolved, in America, as the economy moved from farming to manufacturing and merchandising, and the to large industrial institutions. The development of bankruptcy law helped address some of the ills of the 19th century.

The 21st century is only touched upon in the last chapter but it speaks mostly to the existential question of what is a valuable life. Why do some many feel they are failing in achieving it? Of course, he has no answer to that question.

Still, there is value in pointing out the need for one.

[Gerald Prokop · Rating 3 out of 5]

With a great subject and some good nuggets of insight, I think what bothered me about this book was the writing. It definitely has that history-text feel to it, and I ended up wanting more to tie all the facts and anecdotes together. It was also really distracting the way the quotations were presented. The book is littered with brackets, [sic], etc. It would've been nice if there was simply a disclaimer somewhere saying that the quotations were edited to correct spelling and then have them presented in readable form. Not a huge deal in the end though.

All in all the book made me think, but I can't say I couldn't put it down.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for work on a story (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05115/.... The theme is fascinating: this Carnegie Mellon history professor explores how failure in America went from being something that happens to you to something you are, and he also reveals how the credit rating business got started, as a way of evaluating someone in an expanding marketplace where you could no longer know all your business partners face to face. As a book, however, I think it badly needed to be boiled down, and felt like a thesis that had been expanded beyond its normal boundaries to make a book.

[Ellen · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book, and for a better reason than my fascination with failure and hilarity. It started out with a great foreword in which Sandage introduces the philosophical shift in the definition of failure throughout American history. In colonial America, failure was strictly a business term. Then the term started to be used more and more in regard to morals and virtue in the 19th century (ah, temperance...).

However, this book was just a very dry and chock full of less than interesting business failures, and why they were deemed so. Foreword, you deceived me. Fail.

[Benson Hawk · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book received a good deal of fanfare from professional academic journals when it came out, and I was anticipating that it would contain quite a lot of new insights into the intersection of economic, gender, and the ideology of success. I was disappointed to find that this was relatively less developed than I hoped. Beautifully written, with some really compelling primary research, Sandage's work backs away from some of the theoretical leaps that could have made this a classic in the field.

[Andrew Sternisha · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book does a great job of illustrating how the idea of failure changed from being a “breaking in business” to becoming an idea that a failure is “in the man”. He makes a strong case that the idea of failure is the foundation of the American Dream. Just as that dream can make successes, we all have the chance to be a born loser.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extraordinary history, a work of art in the true sense: crafted deliberately, even delicately, each sentenced honed and balanced, connections made between the famous and the plain that are so sharply pertinent, so perfectly apt that they seem like fiction. This is a rare, rare feat of historical imagination and skill.

[Amber · Rating 4 out of 5]

The introduction and conclusion were brilliant and had some great insights into the American psyche regarding wealth. The whole book tackled a serious issue and dispensed with so much of the self-made-man myths.

[Joe Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great history book addressing the concept of failure in America and its evolution during the 19th Century.

[Sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite a history lesson. Insightful and interesting. A tad repetitive. Overall, good.

[Jacob Dunning · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding histories from the Great Depression and its impact on the economy and the working class.