Ambition as a four-letter word

Scott A. SANDAGE, a professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, has written a book on the interesting subject of commercial failure in 19th century America that is commonplace in its assumptions and predictable in its conclusions. Sandage’s argument is that cruel capitalism was even crueler in the 19th century, imbuing the many who failed under it with a sense of moral unworthiness. He illustrates this at tedious length -- the text, minus scholarly apparatus, is actually a mere 278 pages, though while reading it one feels as if permanently in the middle of a bad fiscal quarter -- with quotations from diaries, credit-agency reports and letters featuring the self-abnegation of failed businessmen.

The book’s hero is Henry David Thoreau, the man who refused to sign the Social Contract. He also, you will recall, suggested that men of spirit march to “a different drummer,” and the vast herd of university-trained independent minds in America has been marching along in goose step to that same different drummer almost ever since. Professor Sandage marches with them.

After the Panic of 1857, Thoreau noted that while merchants and banks were failing all over the country, “sand banks, solid and warm, and streaked with bloody blackberry vines,” were not. “Invest, I say, in these country banks,” he advised. “Let your capital be simplicity and contentment.” Would you want to take this man on as your broker?

If Sandage’s book has a villain, it is Thoreau’s neighbor in Concord, Mass., Ralph Waldo Emerson. Throughout his writings, Emerson lauded ambition; he thought that “[t]he counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the universe. The merchant’s economy is a coarse symbol of the soul’s economy.” This is stupid, of course, like lots that Emerson wrote, but his true ignominy, in Sandage’s view, derives from a single utterance: “There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune.” This common-enough sentiment fixes the blame for success or failure in the world on individual behavior. Sandage prefers to find and fix it elsewhere.

When it comes to explaining personal failure, some people tend to blame systems -- Wall Street, Madison Avenue or capitalism, most commonly -- and others individual failings: want of planning, perseverance, energy or desire. Sandage is a systems man. He features the cruelty built into capitalism throughout his book. Not that subtle evidence is needed, but his unbounded admiration for Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” set out in his final pages, clinches it. I myself have always liked the comment on this lumpishly sentimental, falsely poetic play said to have been uttered by one of two salesmen dragged to see it by their wives. On the way out of the theater, one remarked to the other, “This guy Miller knows what he’s talking about. That New England territory was never any damn good.”

But of course systems and individual human flaws are usually involved, and in endlessly varying proportions, in the explanation of business (or, for that matter, any other kind of) failure. One cannot blame someone for losing his business during the Great Depression of the 1930s, though my otherwise gentle father, looking at the wretched job I had done mowing our small lawn one afternoon when I was 11, announced that come another Depression I was exactly the sort of guy who would get laid off first. Yet during times of general prosperity, failure becomes tougher to explain outside of personal weaknesses, except perhaps by bad timing or sheer wretched luck.

Dickens’ Mr. Micawber, that most lovable of all business failures, put the proposition of success and failure with untoppable concision: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditures nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” It’s as simple as that and, yet, given an entrepreneurial spirit and a credit economy, more complex too.

The gravamen of “Born Losers” is that in 19th century America, failure had been given a cruel moral twist, so that those who failed not only lost their money but also felt themselves deficient in the eyes of God and their families and fellow businessmen. To make his case, Sandage offers copious citations from the diaries of 19th century American businessmen; the reports (chiefly) of the Mercantile Agency, precursor of Dun & Bradstreet, on the credit ratings and moral failings of businessmen; and the letters of failing or failed businessmen (and sometimes their wives) asking for help to get back in the game from John D. Rockefeller (who at one point received as many as 15,000 such missives weekly) and other highly publicized successes. Everywhere, Sandage is at some pains to demonstrate that business failure in America was viewed as a moral disease, rendering the victim the financial equivalent of a leper.

In some ways, the enemy for Sandage, in tandem with capitalism, is ambition, that scourge driving men and women beyond natural human limits in the attempt to succeed. As for capitalism, now that Marxism has run its bloody course, a record of unparalleled murder and suffering in its wake, can’t all intelligent people at last agree that capitalism, the economic equivalent of democracy, is the best of all bad systems? The answer, of course, is no, at least not around American universities they can’t.

At the funeral of the great kvetch of Walden Pond, Emerson spoke with regret of Thoreau’s want of ambition: “He seemed born for great enterprise and ... I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition.” A bit difficult to see how one might say that Thoreau was without ambition when, having died at 44, he left so much writing behind. It wasn’t that Thoreau was without ambition but that he was sufficiently bullheaded to want success on his own terms, and posterity, which isn’t always as smart as it’s supposed to be, has long since given it to him.

Here I must insert that I once received 1,000 pounds from the Johnny Walker spirits company in England for the right to reproduce in one of its advertisements a sentence I wrote, which read: “Ambition is the fuel of achievement.” The sentence comes from a book I had written because I thought ambition was on the run, thought to be pushing and vulgar everywhere among the college-educated. I didn’t see how the world could get on without the useful achievements for which ambition provided the ideological inspiration and thrust, and so wrote a book in its defense. Soon after its publication, Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States; schools issuing MBAs began to do a land-office business; the hero of the age became the investment banker (“Masters of the Universe,” in Tom Wolfe’s phrase from “The Bonfire of the Vanities”); and ambition, now on the loose, threatened to get completely out of hand. Much of it was empty ambition, sheer getting ahead, which wasn’t at all what I had had in mind. If Sandage’s book is a fair indicator, ambition apparently goes in and out of fashion.

But choosing between a life filled with ambition and a life utterly without conventional ambition is rather like choosing between married and single life -- neither, let us agree, is a quite satisfactory arrangement, yet they are all we have. I happen to be an ambition man, having from an early age worried about arriving at my deathbed with the dreary feeling that I didn’t get anything near the best out of my slender abilities. The ambitious life carries its own penalties: the feeling that one is never quite on schedule, has never done all one should, is never quite good enough at what one does. In the unambitious life, at least as advertised, one gets to smell the roses, savor the brie, live entirely in the here and now -- and have lots of time on one’s hands to put out of mind that oblivion awaits.

“Born Losers” is, in this sense, a misnomer. As long as mortality rates remain up there at 100%, we’re all born losers. Sandage would doubtless reply that there are losers and there are losers, and he seems to think that until such time as we have greater equality in our social arrangements, from the playground to the stock exchange, America is in peril, especially now that the loser in American life is no longer the bankrupt speculator but the average plodder who never really makes it. The very notion of “loser,” Sandage finally suggests, must be rooted out of the national consciousness. Yeah, as the kids say, right, sure! *