To a great degree, the erasure of the
self-made man from common parlance reflects a shared understanding – or, more
accurately, a shared misunderstanding
– on the part of defenders and critics alike. This involved a narrowing of the
concept to a single archetype: the businessman. Even those who invoked the
self-made man in politics almost always credentialed themselves as self-made in
the realm of commerce (which has been standard operating procedure in for
Republicans in particular). Those who did not, like Bill Clinton and Barack
Obama, were not taken seriously as such by their opponents or particularly
cherished as such even by many of their supporters. I’d venture to say Obama’s wonky credentials and slightly
noblesse oblige background as a community organizer excites his core liberal supporters
more than the fact his mother spent time on food stamps.
Yet even a cursory immersion in
seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth century U.S. history suggests that the
conception of the self-made man was a good deal broader than business or politics. Yes, of course, John D.
Rockefeller was considered an
exemplar of the self-made man. But so Ralph Waldo Emerson. Benjamin Franklin is
widely considered the patron saint of American capitalism. But he was also a
self-made scientist, diplomat, and writer. The concept expands far beyond
commerce to include the clergy (Charles Grandison Finney to Norman Vincent
Peale), the military (Andrew Jackson to George Patton), and other domains.
The other problem with the prevailing economic
conception of the self-made man is that it obscures changes in the nature of
U.S. capitalism over 250 years. Initially, such capitalism was agricultural, represented by the
self-sufficient farmer. Though he is not typically remembered on such a basis,
this was an important part of George Washington’s identity and the basis of a
fortune that came from far-sighted independence from mono-crop cultivation and
British finance. The spokesman for the self-made man as farmer was Thomas
Jefferson, who famously described the autonomous yeoman (who may or may not
have owned slaves) as those “whose breasts [God] has made his peculiar deposit
for substantial and genuine virtue.” Such figures were sometimes imagined as
operating outside a global trade market, but it has been a long time since
anyone has taken that idea very seriously. Nor do I.
By the late eighteenth century, a
competing notion of the self-made man emerged, of which Franklin was widely –
and properly – viewed as emblematic. This was a form of capitalism that was mercantile: a pre-industrial, but
non-agrarian, basis of wealth creation. This was the self-made man as
craftsman, merchant, and eventually manufacturer, albeit manufacturer of the
small-scale sort. Such a vision was powerful and durable, so much so that it
persisted long after it had been effectively become obsolete. As many scholars
of novelist Horatio Alger have noted, his books for boys peddled an early 19th
century mercantile vision in an era that had long since been overtaken by late
19th century industrial capitalism.
Indeed, it is this phase – the phase of
the industry titan, stretching from Andrew Carnegie through Henry Ford – that
more than any other has survived most vividly in the American imagination. This
was the self-made man as master of mass production: steel, oil, cars. Though
sometimes a subject of scorn, even hatred in their day, Americans on the whole
were fascinated by such figures and sought to emulate them – again, long after
capitalism had moved on to a new phase.
The next phase, stretching between the
1920s and the 1970s, posed more of a problem for the myth of the self-made man.
This was the age of managerial
capitalism, in which values like planning, collaboration and coordination were
central. In such an environment, the valorization of the self-made man centered
on the corporate executive. Perhaps the most vivid examples of the archetype
were the so-called movie moguls, with names like Fox and Warner and Disney, who
created – but, more decisively in terms of their legacies, managed –
enterprises in which they were able to generate a mystique of creativity. F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished 1940 novel The
Last Tycoon, inspired by the career of cinema legend Irving Thalberg,
vividly evokes this particular variation on the self-made man.
The closing decades of the twentieth
century witnessed a new valorization of the individual entrepreneur, from Sam
Walton to Mark Zuckerberg, tirelessly upheld by boosters as role models worthy
of emulation. To a great extent this post-industrial phase of U.S. capitalism
focused more on services and consumption rather than production. Because of the
increasing sophistication of the marketplace, the self-made archetype abandoned
the autodidactic model of earlier times and avowedly embraced formal education
as a means of upward mobility (even if mass access to such an education
increasingly became a fantasy along the lines of an Alger character becoming a pastoral
merchant in an industrial age).
I’ve made some effort to delineate
phases in the economic model of the self-made man as part of a larger point
that even this perceived dominant variation of the myth was itself subject to
shifting currents and emphases and often marked by cultural lag. But again, my larger point is that just
as multiple versions of the self-made man jostled within the realm of commerce, multiple versions jostled outside it as well. At any given moment,
an economic version, a political version, and a cultural version, among many others,
were available and competing for allegiance in a U.S. population whose
diversity whose attention united by little else. At the very moment Mark
Zuckerberg was embodying the self-made myth of entrepreneurial pluck, Bruce
Springsteen was tapping its cultural power and the evangelical minister Joel
Osteen was preaching an ethos of self-help that burgeoned into a religious
media empire.
The fact that in an earlier age these men would have been
explicitly lionized as self-made does not necessarily mean they (or their
predecessors) began with nothing. As noted, Zuckerberg came from a background that
was thoroughly bourgeois; Springsteen’s evocatively named hometown of Freehold
was more suburban than ghetto; Osteen inherited the pastorate whose size he
trebled. They were nevertheless seen, not altogether wrongly, as people who
realized objectives that initially seemed unlikely and attributed to their unique
talents. Luck was sometimes mentioned, though almost always as a secondary
consideration. Almost never in American life has success been considered
arbitrary; the implications of such an idea were too troubling to fully
embrace.
Which is not to say that the honor
rendered a self-made man was always rooted on a moral basis. For every Carnegie
or Rockefeller who invoked a moral claim and accepted a moral obligation, there
were scoundrels like the railroad magnate Jim Fisk, who was accepted, even
honored celebrated, as such. Jessie James, Bonnie & Clyde, Vito Corleone,
Tupac Shakur, Tony Soprano: the pantheon of self-made men has a full gallery of
rogues, real and imagined (even if there was always some form of code of honor
among such thieves, very often one of race or ethnicity that served as a foil
for the white, Anglo-Saxon foundation of U.S. self-made mythology).
