The Thinkers
This monthly series will highlight people from Western Pennsylvania who are on the forefront of new ideas in their fields.

Robin Rombach, Post-Gazette Click photo for larger image. Scott Sandage Age: 41 Position: Associate professor of history, Carnegie Mellon University Education: Bachelor's, German language and literature and communication studies, University of Iowa, 1985; master's, history, Rutgers University, 1992; Ph.D., U.S. history, Rutgers University, 1995. Previous work: Mellon postdoctoral fellow in history, Columbia University, 1995-96; editor and staff member, American Association of Homes for the Aging, Washington D.C., 1987-89; international trade representative, Iowa Department of Economic Development, Frankfurt, Germany, 1986. Professional honors: Thomas J. Wilson Prize, best first book accepted by Harvard University Press; Outstanding faculty member, 2000-01, CMU Greek Council; best dissertation, Northeast Association of Graduate Schools, 1995-96. Publications: "Born Losers: A History of Failure in America," Harvard University Press, 2005; "The L on Your Forehead," essay on art and failure, Whitney Museum of American Art catalog of the 2004 biennial exhibition; "A Marble House Divided: The Lincoln Memorial, the Civil Rights Movement and the Politics of Memory, 1939-63," Journal of American History. Related story: From "Born Losers:" How a lawsuit on credit rating went to Supreme Court The Series Click here to view other installments in this continuing series.

Scott Sandage was always fascinated by the row upon row of self-help books at Barnes & Noble and Borders -- so many evangelistic prescriptions for how to become richer, happier, smarter and better-looking.

But as a historian and a student of human nature, he wondered: Why aren't there any books on failure?

The smug answer might be that nobody would pay money to learn how to fail.

Still, there are the hard realities of daily life. Half of all small businesses go under within the first five years. Four out of 10 initial marriages collapse. The top baseball players, sports analysts are fond of saying, only get a hit about three times out of 10.

And even Abraham Lincoln, before he became president, once wrote that "Men are greedy to publish the successes of [their] efforts, but meanly shy as to publishing the failures of men. Men are ruined by this one-sided practice of concealment of blunders and failures."

Pondering the meaning of all this led Sandage, an associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, on a 10-year journey that resulted in his writing "Born Losers: A History of Failure in America," which was awarded the Thomas J. Wilson Prize as best first book published this year by Harvard University Press.

Along the way, Sandage discovered that starting sometime in the 1800s, failure in America changed from an event to a state of being.

If a person "failed" in the late 1700s, it meant his business had crumbled.

When a person failed in the late 1800s, it meant that he himself had come up short. Not only that, but the standard for failure grew increasingly tougher as the 19th century progressed. At first, a man was a "loser" if he went out of business. By the end of the century, though, he was a "loser" even if he was steadily employed, but simply failed to advance.

So, by 1900, Sandage said, "the definition that we live with today was in place -- that a loser is an aimless plodder through life who's not ambitious enough to get ahead."

What is remarkable, Sandage said, is that "the myth of success in America developed at the exact same time in history when the mechanisms for achieving success were becoming less workable."

The idealized formula for an American to succeed, he said, was to start a business and keep expanding it until it prospered, but between 1870 and 1970, the percentage of workers who were entrepreneurs actually declined.

Most people in America work for someone else, which means they have only limited control over their economic fortunes, as millions of laid-off and downsized employees can attest.

But despite the evidence that large forces outside most people's control can mean the difference between thriving or barely scraping by, the average American believes there is only one person to blame if he fails -- himself.

"Most Americans know that Donald Trump didn't rise to success solely by pulling himself up by his bootstraps," Sandage said, "and yet I think we mostly still believe -- hook, line and sinker -- the notion that when someone fails, it's his own fault."

The idea that someone could be a "born loser" arose during the period when America embraced individualism: the belief that society is shaped by the actions of individuals, and that each person is responsible for his fate.

But Sandage also found that a powerful new institution in American society helped solidify this conviction -- the credit rating agency.

As the American economy began to expand, citizens increasingly conducted business with people who lived far away from them and whom they didn't know. How trustworthy was this person? Would he pay his debts? Was he moving up in the world or moving down?

To answer those questions, a new firm known as the Mercantile Agency formed in New York in the 1840s.

Its founder was Lewis Tappan, a well-known abolitionist, a great-grandnephew of Benjamin Franklin, and the man who hired former President John Quincy Adams to successfully defend the Africans who had mutinied aboard the slave ship Amistad.

Tappan firmly embraced the idea of the "Christian self-made man," Sandage wrote, and his Mercantile Agency, which later became Dun & Bradstreet, developed a system of evaluating not only the business skills of merchants, but their moral character.

Within 10 years, the agency had 2,000 anonymous informants scattered around the country who would make regular reports on the fortunes and setbacks of Americans in all walks of life, all of which would be recorded in red leather-bound books by a small army of clerks.

As Sandage pored over those records, it was clear that the agency's evaluations relied as much on the informants' assessment of someone's character as on whether he had done well in business.

An 1848 entry about a Massachusetts tailor, for instance, not only noted that he had left town without paying his debts, but added: "be sure & never trust him, will always be worthless."

Even those who did fairly well might get a negative review from the agency. A grocer named Alexander W. Bateman was said to be "steady to business, but don't think he will succeed, he is unpopular. He is rather of an unhappy disposition."

A poor evaluation by the agency could ruin a man's business because suppliers would no longer sell to him and bankers would not lend him money.

And while in most cases, the Mercantile Agency was probably close to the mark in its appraisals, it sometimes was spectacularly wrong, and prominent merchants were ruined based on inaccurate or unfair evaluations turned in by the agency's anonymous informants, who in a few cases were rivals of the people they were evaluating.

In the end, the reams of reports on people all over America institutionalized the idea that those who did well in business possessed sound morals and vigorous energy, and those who did not had some personal weakness or inherent laziness.

One major consequence of this belief, Sandage found, was that it took decades for the United States to adopt an effective, fair bankruptcy law.

Each time reformers would try to introduce bankruptcy legislation in the 1800s, someone would argue that people became debtors through their own flaws, and no law should relieve the debtor of his responsibility to pay what he owed.

A final treasure trove that helped Sandage prove how deeply Americans believed in individual merits and flaws was the "begging letters" that began to proliferate after millionaire business magnates like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller emerged in the late 1800s.

One of the most poignant letters was sent to Rockefeller in 1890 by J.W. Bomgardner, a Midwestern grain merchant who, at age 60, "surveyed a life of unremitting failure," Sandage wrote.

Bomgardner reminded Rockefeller that 30 years before, he had passed up a chance to become a partner with Rockefeller in the grain business in Ohio, investing instead in an Indiana mill that went under in the panic of 1873.

". . . I have watched your career with considerable interest, sometimes thinking how near I came to being a Millionaire," Bomgardner wrote, and then asked Rockefeller for a job.

The oil baron wrote back with good wishes, but turned Bomgardner down.

In writing a reply, Bomgardner wanted to defend his character, even though he had no hope of assistance.

". . . probably I should not have Ventured writing you at all . . . . Yet in asking if you could do any thing for me, it was not in the light of charity . . . I thought if the proper place could be found for me to drop into, I could fill it . . . What I am seeking is not a good salary for a soft and easy place. But I would like a little rest from this care and anxiety."

In some ways, Sandage's own struggle to complete the book forced him to come to terms with what success or failure means to him.

It was a difficult book to finish, he said, not only because no other cultural historian had written about the subject, but also because "the people themselves and the issues themselves were hard to live with every day, because pretty much every one of the people I wrote about went down in flames."

As the book was about to be published, Sandage decided that what was important to him was "being true to myself and completing it so it was the book I wanted it to be, regardless of what the book did for me."

As he looks at how the winners-and-losers images reverberate in society today, Sandage worries the concept has been stretched too far.

He recounted hearing a CNN anchorman recently mutter "loser" under his breath after he had described a story in which a man raped and killed his child.

"A man who rapes and kills his own child may be a monster, but he's not a loser," Sandage said.

And yet more and more, the term is being applied to violent people with antisocial pathologies, including the Unabomber and the young shooters at Columbine High School.

"So today, a loser is still a worthless person, but also possibly a dangerous person, and that frightens me."

THE THINKERS

THIS IS ONE IN A MONTHLY SERIES HIGHLIGHTING PEOPLE FROM WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA WHO ARE ON THE FOREFRONT OF NEW IDEAS IN THEIR FIELDS.