While I have said, and maintain, that
the essence of the self-made man is plural and diverse at any given time, I
also believe that at certain moments in U.S. history some domains of the
archetype have been dominant and then have given way to others. In other words,
there is a story here. Insofar as
that story has been told to date, it has largely focused on tracing shifting
currents in the blizzard of self-help literature that blanketed the British North
America between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. In our time, however,
the discourse has been less a matter of formal exhortation than illustration
through specific (and sometimes fictive) characters and personalities whose
stories in effect become fables of success, which like all good fables, are
marked by countercurrents subject to multiple interpretations. I believe I can
trace this story, peopling it with a series of biographical sketches, and
explain how the self-made man emerged, proliferated, narrowed and appeared to
disappear. This will be the heart of the book, whose outlines I will now trace.
As virtually all historians of the topic
have noted, the origins of the self-made man in English North America are
fundamentally religious. In the colonial era, the concept was, paradoxically, a
godly imperative that emerged from the dialectics of Protestant Christianity.
Reformation era sects in England marked their distance from corrupt Roman
Catholic practices by emphasizing a personal relationship to God. While such
sects rejected notions of free will that were later central to the conception
of the self-made man, the primacy they placed on the individual conscience
proved pivotal in the emergence of what would become an increasingly secular vision
of the self in which moral considerations would long linger. Such dynamics can
be well illustrated in the career of Roger Williams (above), the essence of the
theological individualist and a man widely regarded as the founding father of
religious liberty in America. They call also discerned in the philosophy of
important evangelists like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield.
Religious
versions of the self-made man would remain important into the eighteenth
century. But the coming of the American Revolution opened the possibility of a
fundamentally political vision of the self-man, one vividly embodied by
Founding Fathers like George Washington and John Adams (who was fond of
describing himself as the son of a shoemaker). This model remained important
through the development of ratification of the Constitution, receding in
centrality thereafter, though there would continue be important figures
(notably Abraham Lincoln) who found their calling, sometimes after periods of
uncertainty and adversity, in politics.
The
very success of the founding generation cleared a literal and figurative space
in which millions of ordinary Americans could imagine new destinies for
themselves. Some of these people, like Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman,
flaunted their ordinariness even as their singular talents allowed them to
write themselves into history. Others, like the powerfully inspiring Frederick
Douglass, dramatized the way the concept could expand to encompass even the
most unlikely of prospects.
By the second half of the nineteenth
century, however, the durable link between the self-made man and economic
success had become apparent, dominant, and widely celebrated. A series of
figures born in the crucible years of 1835 to 1840 became the barons of their
age, defining the imagination of their peers and subsequent generations well
into the 20th century. Perhaps more than other self-made men, they
also dramatized the ambiguities, even contradictions, involved in such an
identity. Crucial figures here stretch from Andrew Carnegie (archetype of the
self-made man as immigrant) to Thomas Edison (the scientist as entrepreneur)
and Henry Ford (whose rustic sensibilities made him a somewhat ironic godfather
of consumer capitalism).
Over the course of the twentieth
century, the measures of success steadily shifted from outward achievement to
inner satisfaction, variously understood and achieved through a series of
sub-cultural movements that have come to be collectively known as “New Thought.”
In this psychological age, the terrain shifted back toward more cultural
ground. Particularly important here is the new phenomenon of the celebrity,
embodied by figures who ranged from Douglas Fairbanks to Clint Eastwood, who defined
the parameters of what came to be known as “the good life.” There was tension,
even paradox, built into a conception of an authentic self that was often
commercially purveyed. As a
result, there was a partial rebellion against this model in the iconoclastic
self-made men in the Beat era and the counterculture of the 1960s, both of
which rejected the avowedly economic conception of the self-made man as
hopelessly atavistic. The intentions of these iconoclasts notwithstanding, they
failed to alter many of its underlying premises.
Indeed, for all their variety, the various
iterations of the self-made man finally rested on a core premise that laced
through them all. That premise is agency: the self-made man was the master of
his own fate. Other societies had made similar claims – indeed, all societies,
from Confucian China the Imperial Britain had self-made men – but no society
had ever been quite so insistent on this point as the United States. As I began
by saying, we have difficulty today taking this idea seriously at face value.
And yet, in part because we are uncomfortably aware of the degree to which our
lives are determined by factors beyond our control, a presumption, if not an
obsession, with agency lingers even as it has receded from the foreground of
public discourse, apparent everywhere from colleges we attend to the beverages
we order at our local Starbucks.
This seems like a good moment to bring
back people who have been missing since the start of this proposal: women. In
an important sense, the agency of men was understood, even defined, when
juxtaposed by the lack of agency for women. Of course, men’s agency was almost
always partial by dictates of race, class, age and health, among other reasons.
But in an important sense manliness correlated to the degree a man could call
himself the master of his fate. Women, by contrast, were understood in terms of
the way their lives were tethered to others, male and female. Sometimes this
tethering was understood as chosen; sometimes it was imposed. Either way, it
was understood as natural, a gendered default setting.
And yet from the very beginnings of
American history there have been women who for various reasons found themselves
in situations of perceived self-making. The wealthy widows of colonial
Virginia, empowered by their inherited fortunes, are one example (though an
example that also illustrates the way their autonomy was still circumscribed by
the imperatives of marriage). Anne Hutchinson, articulating a libertarian
theological vision far more challenging than that of Roger Williams, was
another. The fictive Scarlet O’Hara, determined to maintain her family farm in
the face of Yankee conquest, carried the torch of Jeffersonian yeomanry into
the post-Civil War era. Madame C.J. Walker, an African American entrepreneur
who built a cosmetics empire, became one of the great success stories of
American business at the turn of the 20th century. These and other
examples will salt the text, providing counterpoint and context for
understanding the possibilities and limits of the self-made man beyond its
stated gender boundaries.
So while each chapter of the book will
have a temporal locus (Founding generation, Industrial Revolution, etc.) each
will include multiple examples of self-made men across a series of occupational
domains. They will also include examples of self-made women, and sometimes
discuss the legacies of these figures in subsequent generations. A particular
figure may also surface more than once to illustrate different aspects of
self-made man iconography (Washington, for example, was a self-taught military leader
as well as an exemplar of the rural gentry.) In so doing, the book will have a
clear sense of structure and a narrative arc, but also a sense of texture. In effect, the self-made man will
function as a kind of lens through which American history as a whole can be
seen in a new and prismatic light.
To what end? At the simplest level, the
purpose of this book is to recover a receding notion of our national identity
and to restore its vitality by broadening it. Yet one may plausibly wonder if
such recovery is all that useful, given the sometimes unsavory implications of
self-made man mythology, like its tendency to inhibit, if not actually prevent,
a communal approach toward solving communal problems and an impulse to blame
victims for their own misfortunes. Yet a broader look at the historical record
also shows that self-made men have been among the nation’s most imaginative and
stalwart social reformers in terms of creating personal or protecting
opportunity. (President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation with a
very conscious understanding that he was making it possible for many future
generations of self-made men.) A clear-eyed look at both the advantages and
drawbacks of the self-made man mythology may become a useful instrument for
charting a future course for ourselves and the nation at large.
Of course, because I’m
still at an early stage of writing and research, there are as yet many unasked
questions, let alone foreseeable answers. I will say, however, that I embark on
this undertaking with a general sense of unease about the direction of the
country. To some extent this is a matter of perceived collective denial, if not
hypocrisy: while many of us consider the self-made paradigm dated and
unrealistic, we continue to embrace many aspects of it. That might not be so
bad – indeed, it is, as it often has been, an energizing notion that has
spurred innovation and a salutary sense of confidence that generates
self-fulfilling prophecies. But I suspect there are times when self-making becomes conflated with self-gratification. This concern is centuries
old, and one reason why so much of the literature of the self-made man is
rooted in religious discourse. The moral dimension of the equation has largely
evaporated in the last century, in large measure because it has been rightfully
viewed as unrealistic. Yet one must wonder, given the past and present of
societies in which individual citizens are expected to orient their lives
around something other than the self, how long the United States can maintain a
sense of cohesion and purpose around the self-made man, especially in its
narrowly economic formulation. It’s an idea that merits another searching look.
