The American Dream gives each of us the chance to be a born loser," concludes Scott Sandage in his densely packed history of capitalism's dark side.

	"BORN LOSERS: A HISTORY OF FAILURE IN AMERICA" By Scott Sandage Harvard University Press ($35)

What is that dream -- a chicken in every pot, a full lunch pail, a new house, two SUVs in the garage, Patriots' season tickets on the 50-yard line?

Sandage, a history professor at Carnegie Mellon University, says it's more than just achieving financial success.

In America, "achievement and identity" are one and the same, he writes, drawing on a popular definition of that dream in the 1931 "The Epic of America" by James Truslow Adams:

"It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to obtain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable and be recognized by others for what they are."

Today, with such bland cheerleaders of the Dream as David Brooks hailing the opening of another shopping mall as proof of the country's greatness, the connection seems permanent.

Sandage hunts the underside of that fantasy, the debtor, the business failure, the Willy Loman who kills himself so his sons can get his life insurance money.

"Success at Last" was the headline on a 1897 obituary of a Brooklyn man whose first two suicide attempts failed. Is death at your own hand the only way out of the embarrassment of financial losses?

Apparently, in some circles, it was, says Sandage, pointing out that the Wall Street Crash jumpers of 1929 were hardly the first to take that route when ruin set in.

"The land stinks with suicide," announced Ralph Waldo Emerson as the Panic of 1837 gripped the nation.

The author of "Self-Reliance" believed that "there is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune, and so in making money."

That's the corollary to the Dream in a nutshell: It's your own damn fault that you failed. Sandage offers us examples from diaries, newspapers, letters, documents and court cases; a steady stream that might have been choked off at some point.

Examples overlap. Chapters seem to blend into one story after another of collapse, self-pity and disaster.

Adding to the growing debris field is Sandage's overheated prose:

"Many traders had fresh scars from the bust of 1857 when the boom of 1861 -- at Fort Sumter -- hit them again."

"His brother took a new partner to brew beer and sold dry goods alone. John grew rich on lager and lace ..."

Sandage salvages himself at mid-book with the tale of the Mercantile Agency, a forerunner of credit reporting services, that filled the world of business with spies and informants, including one "A. Lincoln" of Illinois.

Lincoln's own credit history in the Mercantile files was sanitized after his assassination.

The Information Age had now begun, as early as the 1840s, and no American who bought on credit would go unrecorded since.

The nation has grown far more tolerant of its "losers" in this century. "Sideways," a film about a habitual failure, is an Oscar nominee, for starters, and Arthur Miller's Loman has come to represent a quintessential American.

Despite its faults, Sandage's history of another America that paved the way for this one is instructive and fascinating.