Posted on: Sunday, March 13, 2005
Paying homage to those who fail
By Bob Thompson
Washington Post
A year before his grandmother died, Scott Sandage sat down with a tape recorder and asked her to talk about her life. She told him how she used to hear her husband crying at night.
Sandage's grandfather was an immigrant kid whose parents pulled him out of school to work in the brickyards in Mason City, Iowa. Surviving the Depression as a traveling salesman, he then started making mattresses, one at a time. He made mattresses for 35 years, taking custom orders in a small shop, scraping by. He would tell his wife he felt like a failure — I'm not smart enough to keep the family together; you graduated from high school, I didn't even graduate from grade school — and she would always try to buck him up. Still, she would hear him weeping.
After telling this story, Sandage says, his grandmother was quiet for a long time.
Then she said: "He was a darn good man."
Sandage was 19 at the time. He went off to college, part of the first generation in his family to do so, and ended up as a historian at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. His book "Born Losers: A History of Failure in America" is out this month from Harvard University Press. A serious work of cultural history, built on a decade of research, "Losers" uses the stories of forgotten Americans to offer a new perspective on our conventional national narrative of striving and success.
Strip away the academic trappings, however, and "Born Losers" starts to look like something very different.
It's a self-help book for stressed-out Americans. The problem Sandage is trying to help us with is: Why are we never satisfied with the life we've got? Why do we always want more?
Or to put it another way:
What made that good man, his grandfather, feel so bad?
Sandage is talking losers over breakfast at Washington's Tabard Inn. A tall man of 40 with an understated goatee, he's driven in this morning from Frederick, Md., where his mother lives. The traffic was bumper to bumper on Interstate 270 and he watched with astonishment — his Pittsburgh routine doesn't involve commuting at rush hour — as drivers bulled their way in and out of lanes to gain a five-car-length advantage. Americans, he says, have developed the mentality "that you have to move all the time, that you have to inch your way ahead, and if you don't, you're going to be left behind."
Where does this sense of urgency come from? To provoke discussion, Sandage sometimes asks Carnegie Mellon students to consider the following proposition: "Your life is controlled by a rotting corpse five hours east of here." He's talking about Benjamin Franklin, who's buried in Philadelphia. Franklin's maxims include the ultimate self-help mantra: "There are no gains without pains."
"Born Losers" started out as Sandage's dissertation, and self-help is part of what got him going on it. In graduate school at Rutgers, he noted with astonishment that the biggest section in Borders always seemed to be "this wall of books on 'The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.' " Success literature, he knew, had helped shape American psyches since Franklin's day — "if at first you don't succeed, try, try again" might as well be our national motto — yet surely there was a less visible flip side.
Losers have stories, too. What if he tried to run some down?
Defining history
Sandage began his research with what he calls a "needle in a haystack" strategy, in which he looked for revealing details in archived 19th-century diaries and letters. Eventually he homed in on several mother lodes of "loser" material. One was a collection of character sketches prepared by the pioneering credit bureau that was to evolve into Dun & Bradstreet.
The Mercantile Agency, as it was then known, employed informants all across America (Abraham Lincoln was one) to file reports on the creditworthiness of their neighbors. It was like "a national bureau of standards for judging winners and losers," Sandage writes, and it led him to one of the most fascinating stories he encountered in his research.
William Henry Brisbane was running an apothecary shop in Cincinnati in the 1840s. An agency informant reported that Brisbane had failed in every occupation he'd tried, including farmer, publisher and physician, and predicted that he'd likely keep failing for the rest of his life. The crowning evidence was the fact that this "loser" had inherited $100,000 — a huge fortune in those days — and run through most of it in a very short time.
After Sandage poked around a bit, a somewhat different story emerged. Brisbane turned out to have been a successful South Carolina plantation owner. He'd decided that slavery was wrong, sold out, moved north, then felt guilty about leaving his slaves behind.
The hundred grand went to buy them back and set them free.
The conscience-stricken Brisbane was an exceptional case, of course. To see how more typical Americans struggled with financial failure and the loser label that came with it, it helps to consider another evidentiary bonanza Sandage turned up: a collection of "begging letters" sent in the late 19th century to Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller. Dear Mr. Rockefeller, supplicants wrote by the thousands, if you could give me just a little help, just enough to get me on my feet again.
The prevailing American assumption by this time was that losers deserve to lose, that economic failure is due, inevitably, to flaws in a person's character.
"I have been Struggling incessantly trying to re(g)ain a little foothold," one man wrote, explaining that his problem was not that he was "shiftless" or "lazy" but that "I have no capital with which to make a start, & it is utterly impossible to make something out of nothing."
The letters feel at once surprising — we're not used to getting so up close and personal with history's also-rans — and extremely familiar. For as Sandage points out, the notion of failure as personal choice pervades cultural and political discourse to this day. Privatize Social Security, for example, and those who strive and save will accumulate substantial nest eggs, while those who don't ... Well, that's their problem, isn't it?
Despite our glorification of risk-taking entrepreneurialism, Sandage believes, failure remains "the worst crime an American can commit," and the fear of it makes us perpetually anxious.
Putting it to use OK, but where does the self-help part come in?
Suppose we buy Sandage's thesis that we've been culturally brainwashed to see life as a psychic dog-eat-dog affair in which just doing OK is never good enough. What does the historian of failure think we're supposed to do about it?
"Awareness is always the first step in any 12-step program," he says. "Admitting that you have a problem is always the first step. Americans think so much about 'Am I succeeding?' and 'How am I going to succeed?' and 'What shall I succeed at?' that we don't very often look failure in the face and say: You can't control me."
As a result we lack what sociologist David Riesman called the "nerve of failure," defined as "the courage to face aloneness and the possibility of defeat in one's personal life or one's work without being morally destroyed."
Oh fine. Like that's easy. Thanks, guys.
This kind of courage is especially hard to come up with in a society where the successful entrepreneur is a universal role model and not aiming high enough is considered a mortal sin. Henry David Thoreau, who had the "nerve of failure" in spades, was one of the first to understand this.
"He complained that people called him 'a loafer' for taking daily walks in the woods," Sandage writes. "Yet were he to spend the day as a timber speculator, denuding the landscape, he would be 'esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.' "
Sandage hasn't really written a self-help book, of course. But he does hope it will make readers more aware of how fear of failure can rule their lives.
"You are not what you do," he tells his students. "Your career is rightly part of who you are," especially if you choose work you love. But believing it's the whole enchilada makes failure a deadly thing: "If your achievements implode, there is literally nothing left of you."
