MADE IN AMERICA

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MADE IN AMERICA
Self-Styled Success from Horatio Alger
to Oprah Winfrey

Jeffrey Louis Decker

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis
London
Copyright 1997 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

Portions of Chapter 3 originally appeared as “Reconstructing Enterprise:

Madam Walker, Black Womanhood, and the Transformation of the American
Culture of Success.” Reprinted from The Seductions of Biography edited by
David Suchoff and Mary Rhiel. Copyright 1996. Used by permission of the
publisher, Routledge: New York and London.

Portions of Chapter 5 originally appeared as “Gatsby’s Pristine Dream: The

Diminishment of the Self-Made Man in the Tribal Twenties,” in Novel: A
Forum on Fiction 28:1 (fall 1994). Copyright 1994. Reprinted by permission of
the Novel Corporation.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Decker, Jeffrey Louis.
Made in America : self-styled success from Horatio Alger to Oprah
Winfrey / Jeffrey Louis Decker.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8166-3020-8 (hardcover : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-8166-3021-6
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Success—United States—History. I. Title.
BJ1611.D36 1997
302′.14′0973—dc21 97-19568

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

To Jenny
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 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction xiii
The Rise of the Self-Made Man and the Triumph of
U.S. Nationalism
From Character to Personality to Image
Multicultural Narratives of Uplift in Twentieth-Century America

1 Class Mobility 1
Moral Luck and the Horatio Alger Formula: Andrew Carnegie
Hard Luck: John McLuckie
The Limits of Luck: James J. Davis

2 Gender Stability 15
Troubling the Horatio Alger Formula: Tattered Tom
True Womanhood in the Market: Harriet Hubbard Ayer
Domesticating Business: The “Emma McChesney” Trilogy

3 Racial Segregation 31
The Political Economy of a Lynch Mob: Tom Moss,
Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart
Free Enterprise: Booker T. Washington
Working Wonders: Madam C. J. Walker

4 Immigrant Aspirations 53
Out of America: Marcus Garvey
From Steerage to Self-Culture: Mary Antin
Oriental Yankees: Younghill Kang

vii
 Contents

5 Individual Enterprise in the Postfrontier Nation 78

Not-Quite-White Enterprise in the Tribal Twenties:
The Great Gatsby
Inventing the American Dream in the Great Depression:
The Epic of America

6 The Ends of Self-Making 102

Image, Inc.: Howard Hughes, Lee Iacocca, and
Ross Perot
Downsizing: Susan Powter and Oprah Winfrey

Epilogue: The Return of the Self-Made Man 127

Notes 135

Index 161

viii
 Acknowledgments

Although this book has many sources of inspiration, none is more

important to me than the life stories of my grandmother and my
mother. Both had circuitous, if not wholly atypical, routes to enter-
prising success for working women. I grew up hearing stories about
my grandmother, Mary Marinaro, an Italian immigrant who, at four-
teen years old, lied about her age to get a job as an operator with the
telephone company. By the time I was born she had climbed the cor-
porate ladder at AT&T into a midlevel executive position, which was
as far as familial obligations and the corporate glass ceiling allowed.
As I entered my teen years, a family crisis forced my mother, Cile
Decker, into the paid labor force for the first time in fifteen years.
She, like many women of her generation, turned to selling real estate.
Beginning as an independent broker, she moved into management
for a national real estate firm before starting her own company and
making a success of it.
I began working on this project as a graduate student in Ameri-
can Studies at Brown University, where I became interested in ex-
ploring the literature of the self-made man and the history of the
American dream. I owe a debt of gratitude to Brown’s Department of
American Civilization and to its Program in Modern Culture and
Media for allowing me the intellectual space to explore a well-worn
topic using nontraditional methods and materials. I thank my disser-
tation committee, Robert Scholes, Ellen Rooney, Neil Lazarus, and
David Hirsch, as well as Mary Jo Buhle and George Monteiro, all of

ix
 Acknowledgments

whom had the thankless task of supervising the initial stages of my

discovery. During this period and after, Tricia Rose was a vital source
of emotional support and intellectual camaraderie. George Lipsitz,
who read various drafts of the project, never allowed his enthusiasm
for my work to wane.
This book took its present shape during the 1992–93 academic
year, when I was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellowship
in the Humanities at Harvard University. My thanks to the Mellon
Program director, Richard Hunt, and the other Mellon Fellows for
their advice and good humor. William McFeely, who presided over
the group’s activities, took every opportunity to encourage the book’s
development. Henry Louis Gates Jr. offered timely support in nu-
merous ways, which included making available to me the resources
of Harvard’s Department of Afro-American Studies.
Over the past decade, my work on the book has benefited from
the assistance of teachers, colleagues, and students at Brown, Wes-
leyan, and Harvard universities, Boston College, and UCLA. Indi-
viduals who read parts of the manuscript and/or discussed with me
the general issues addressed therein include Nancy Armstrong, Hous-
ton Baker, Martha Banta, Randall Burkett, A’Lelia Bundles, King-
Kok Cheung, Emory Elliott, Kevin Gaines, James Goodwin, Elaine
Kim, Richard Ohmann, T. V. Reed, Janet Sarbanes, Richard Slotkin,
Werner Sollors, Eric Sundquist, Leonard Tennenhouse, and Khachig
Tölölyan. My editor at the University of Minnesota Press, Lisa Free-
man, along with her assistant, Robin Moir, helped me through the
trials of first-time authorship.
My family has been waiting patiently for this book to appear. I
thank them for their support and unconditional love. My greatest debt
is to Jenny Sharpe, soul mate and mother of our newborn, Maleka.
Jenny, a champion talker, knows this book inside out. The sound of
her voice, critical and caring, resonates through its every page.

x
As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an
invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
—Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1966)
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 Introduction

I locate this book within the long history of commentary that has
transformed the self-made man into an archetypal myth and the ethos
of entrepreneurial success into the quintessential American dream.
At one time, the self-made man was vital to the national identity of
the United States. Today, even as politicians campaign on the prom-
ise to rekindle the enterprising spirit that made the country great,
pundits bemoan the loss of moral character—the very thing that self-
making was supposed to cultivate in the individual. This book asks
the question: What happened to the myth of the self-made man in
America? If it is dead, what caused its demise? If it lives on, what
form has it taken?
My study is indebted to two seminal books on rags-to-riches
mythology: Irvin Wyllie’s Self-Made Man in America (1954) and John
Cawelti’s Apostles of the Self-Made Man (1965).1 Few studies since
have attempted to revise the insights provided by Wyllie and Cawelti.
The more discerning critics have remarked on what Garry Wills iden-
tifies as “the crisis of the self-made man” in our own time. In Nixon
Agonistes (1970), Wills explains how, at the peak of social unrest dur-
ing the sixties, the victorious presidential candidate embodied the old-
fashioned morality of success in the eyes of an electoral bloc newly
conceived as the Forgotten Americans. Ten years later, at height of
the Me Decade, Christopher Lasch produced a jeremiad about the
degeneracy of self-making in America. The author of The Culture
of Narcissism (1978) lamented the fall of the Horatio Alger hero and

xiii
 Introduction

his concomitant work ethic in a society seduced by consumerism’s

promise of instant gratification.
Made in America is, of course, no less influenced than previous
studies by the era in which it was written. The wide range of enter-
prising individuals included in my study, as well as my interpretation
of their narratives of self-making, are informed by the postmodern
fragmentation of the singular subject of history. Thus, although this
study is firmly situated within previous commentary that has trans-
formed the self-made man into an archetypal figure of American lit-
erature, my objective is not to locate a single or univocal rags-to-riches
story over the past century. Nor is it to simply celebrate new subjects
of self-making, such as Booker T. Washington, Madam Walker, Mary
Antin, or Younghill Kang. Instead, I am interested in the ways in
which individuals engage narratives of success in complex and con-
tradictory ways.
I use the word “narrative” rather than “myth” throughout my
book in an effort to emphasize the self-made man as a rhetorical fig-
ure within U.S. national culture—an ideological sign that is neither
timeless nor transcendent but historical and contested.2 By placing
mainstream narratives of individual uplift alongside less canonical
ones, I examine how dominant culture shapes and is shaped by the
cultures of subordinate groups. I read autobiographical and fictional
expressions of class mobility as a contentious arena in which non-
traditional entrepreneurs—working women, African Americans, and
a wide range of immigrants—appropriate roles traditionally reserved
for white, Anglo-Saxon men. I argue that the separation of gendered
spheres, racial segregation, and nativism are constitutive of conven-
tional stories of enterprise. While some marginal stories function pri-
marily to legitimate middle-class formulas for uplift, others under-
mine the normative power of self-making.
This study also maps, over the past century, three shifts in the
language of self-made success: from a nineteenth-century, producer-
oriented emphasis on virtuous “character” to an early twentieth-
century consumer-driven interest in psychological “personality” to a
late-twentieth-century media-manufactured focus on the celebrity
“image.” During the early period of American industrialization, indi-

xiv
 Introduction

vidual acquisitiveness was seen not simply as an end in itself but,

ideally, as an expression of inner virtue. With the emergence of con-
sumer culture at the end of the nineteenth century, a portentous
transformation in narratives of self-making began to take shape. The
alteration was marked by a shift from character to personality within
the language of uplift. A consumer-oriented turn toward personality
helped expand the terrain on which nonconventional entrepreneurs
(women, blacks, immigrants) might imagine their lives according to
the rags-to-riches formula. A greater inclusiveness coupled with the
advent of personality diminished the moral authority of the tradi-
tional, white, Anglo-Saxon, male-centered narrative just prior to the
Great Depression. With the emergence of the image-based celebrity
alongside the post–World War II rise of corporate media culture,
however, self-making made a return before century’s end.
Part of my project is to interpret autobiographical statements on
free enterprise symptomatically, for what the logic of personal uplift
does not allow to be spoken. This means looking for the ghost in the
machine, what Toni Morrison deftly identifies as the “active but un-
summoned presences that can distort the workings of the machine
and can also make it work.”3 Take, for example, President George
Bush’s controversial nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme
Court. When, at a 1991 Fourth of July holiday news conference, Bush
introduced Thomas as “a model for all Americans,”4 everyone knew
what he meant. Later the same day, Senate minority leader Bob Dole
put the appropriate media spin on the nomination by commending
the nominee as “a man whose very life exemplifies the American
dream.”5 He was right, of course, even if it might seem a bit startling
that a black man who fulfilled the dream of success could serve as a
representative American.
Yet there is a historical precedent to Thomas. Booker T. Wash-
ington, born into slavery, pulled himself up by his bootstraps and
became the most powerful black leader during the Progressive Era
(circa 1895–1915). Like his precursor, Thomas, the grandson of a share-
cropper, rose from an impoverished background in segregated Pin
Point, Georgia, to a position of political influence among conserva-
tives in Washington, D.C. Long before Anita Hill’s accusations of

xv
 Introduction

sexual harassment were made public, Thomas’s handlers used what

was referred to as the “Pin Point Strategy.” Rather than highlight
Thomas’s credentials as a judge or his political views on abortion, the
Bush administration maneuvered to sell their nominee to the Ameri-
can people as a black Horatio Alger hero.
The self-made black man was an image Clarence Thomas had
himself fostered for years. Speaking as chairman of the Equal Em-
ployment Opportunity Commission for the Reagan administration,
he wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal defending “black self-help,
as opposed to racial quotas and other race-conscious legal devices.”6
At a conference of black conservatives in the early 1980s, Thomas de-
clared that only his grandfather’s commonsense philosophy of hard
work and self-reliance saved him from a life similar to that of his
sister Emma Mae Martin, who was supporting four children on wel-
fare. “She gets mad when the mailman is late with her welfare check.
That’s how dependent she is. What’s worse is that now her kids feel
entitled to the check, too. They have no motivation for doing better
or getting out of that situation.”7 This statement, which Thomas
later denied making, is as interesting for what it does not say as for
what it does. Most notably, it fails to mention the circumstances—all
too familiar to women living in poverty—under which Martin sought
public assistance. While her brother was attending Yale Law School,
Martin was abandoned by her husband and, as a result, worked two
minimum-wage jobs to support her children. A family crisis ensued
when an elderly aunt, who provided child care for the kids, suffered a
stroke. Unable to afford day care for either her children or her aunt,
Martin lived off welfare for four and a half years.8
The trajectory of Martin’s life could not have diverged more
widely from that of her brother. Nevertheless, on the eve of Thomas’s
nomination for the Supreme Court, she did not refute her brother’s
alleged show of disgust for her stint on welfare. Instead, in an inter-
view with a journalist from the Los Angeles Times, she used the logic of
self-making to describe her own plight: “You make your life for your-
self. I had the opportunity to go to college if I wanted to, but I made
the choice. I took care of the older people.”9 This autobiographical
statement of failure equally depends on the language of individual

xvi
 Introduction

uplift as do Thomas’s reflections on his success. The power of self-

help as a framework would explain why, during the initial Supreme
Court confirmation hearings, Martin sat behind her brother, head
bowed, in silent support. After Anita Hill’s allegations were made pub-
lic, when the stakes in the Thomas nomination shifted from black
self-help to sexual harassment in the white-collar workplace, Martin
receded into the background. She would remain completely absent
from the media event that was the Thomas-Hill hearings.
The story of Clarence Thomas’s sister Emma Mae Martin, even
more than his own, draws attention to the normative power of the
self-made man. I am less interested in the fact that she confessed her
failure than the fact that she is obliged, by the agencies of power, to
confess at all. The authority of confession, as Michel Foucault re-
minds us, is in the ear of the listener rather than in the voice of the
speaker.10 As such, normative power governs the forms for articulat-
ing knowledge. It also has the capacity to silence certain stories while
finding a forum for others. In this case, the corporate media regulates
“truth” by encouraging Martin to speak the language of self-made
success.

The Rise of the Self-Made Man and

the Triumph of U.S. Nationalism
Because the self-made man is a paradigmatic American figure, his
study is useful for tracking historical changes to definitions of the
U.S. nation, particularly in regard to race and immigration. Thomas’s
rise to the highest court in the land suggests the persistent lure of
self-making as an expression of national identity. Historically, there
has been a close fit between personal success and nation building.
During the late eighteenth century, the nation was born from the
American Revolution, while the self-made man was made possible by
the fledgling concept of the modern individual. Up until the end of
the eighteenth century, the word “individual” had a long-standing
definition: it meant indivisible, “not cuttable, not divisible.” Accord-
ing to Raymond Williams, the premodern individual was defined as

xvii
 Introduction

“a single example of a group.” Alternatively, the individual in moder-

nity came to be considered as “a fundamental order of being.”11 Fou-
cault’s work elaborates on this development by showing that “man” is
a recent invention that has its origins in the late eighteenth century.
In an earlier period, it was assumed that God made men and that
human beings should endeavor to understand the order of his world.
The modern age inaugurates an epistemic shift whereby “man ap-
pears in his ambiguous position as an object of knowledge and as a
subject that knows.”12
Benjamin Franklin’s late-eighteenth-century memoirs stage the
ambiguous position of the enterprising man, who is not only an
agent of history but also an object for meticulous study. The self-made
statesman, while instructing his reader in “the bold and arduous Pro-
ject of arriving at moral Perfection,” appends to his list of virtues a
daily chart for self-examination: “I made a little Book in which I al-
lotted a Page for each of the Virtues. I rul’d each Page with red Ink so
as to have seven Columns, one for each Day of the Week, marking
each Column with a Letter for the Day. I cross’d these Columns with
thirteen red Lines.” In the spirit of the work ethic, he also reproduces
a detailed outline representing an hour-by-hour breakdown of his
daily scheme of order.13 From Booker T. Washington to Lee Iacocca,
aspiring self-made men have followed Franklin’s example and de-
ployed daily outlines, weekly routines, and monthly schedules as il-
lustrations of the frugality and industry of their enterprising meth-
ods. As Foucault remarks in regard to the widespread deployment of
timetables in modernity, “Precision and application are, with regular-
ity, the fundamental virtues of disciplinary time.”14 Together, democ-
racy and industrial capitalism demanded the transformation of the
individual along the paradoxical lines of autonomy and freedom on
the one hand, efficiency and atomization on the other.
The new meaning of the word “individual” gave root to the asso-
ciated concept of “individualism,” a word coined for popular use by
Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America. In the 1830s,
while observing citizens of the new nation, he proclaimed: “Individu-
alism is a novel expression, to which a novel idea has given birth.”
Tocqueville distinguishes the “democratic” idea of individualism,

xviii
 Introduction

which suggests autonomy and independence, from selfishness, which

“is a passionate and exaggerated love of self.”15 He also extends the
new concept of individualism to the condition of the U.S. nation in
the 1830s. Contrary to what one might expect, fifty years after the
American Revolution, he found a surge in the demand for “indepen-
dence” on the part of states rather than an increase in the federal gov-
ernment’s power. Although “the Union offered, in several respects,
the appearance of a single and undivided people,” he insisted that,
in the Jacksonian age, the “Constitution had not destroyed the indi-
viduality of the states.”16 Here, Tocqueville deployed the word “indi-
viduality” in its modern usage, meaning a unique entity.
The conflict between state sovereignty and federal authority on
which the battle over slavery was waged resulted in the Civil War. It
is a testament to Abraham Lincoln’s vision that he was able to ex-
press, specifically in the Gettysburg Address, the importance of plac-
ing the nation’s survival before states’ rights. Marking the new sense
of national unity, the noun “United States” would no longer be
plural but singular.17 This was the defining moment in the young na-
tion’s history, and historians have long described the outcome of the
Civil War as the “triumph” of U.S. nationalism.18 Although the birth
of the U.S. nation dates back to the late eighteenth century,19 Ameri-
can nationalism—the collective sense of Americanness and the insti-
tutionalized practices that promote such a feeling—is fully activated
only in the second half of the nineteenth century.20
It was not until the late nineteenth century that nation-conscious
traditions—such as ritualized observance of the Fourth of July and
Thanksgiving, as well as flying Old Glory over all public school-
houses—were widely institutionalized and disseminated throughout
the country. The practice of patriotism was, as Wallace Evan Davies
documents, “a sort of secular religion to unite the American re-
public.”21 Narratives of self-made success, too, were becoming in-
creasingly accented by the language of nation rather than that of
Christianity. Prior to the Civil War, writers such as Jacob Abbott
composed popular children’s fiction that both focused on solidly
upper-middle-class heroes and taught boys and girls lessons in Chris-
tian piety. As John Cawelti points out, even when an antebellum

xix
 Introduction

author like Louisa M. Tuthill employed the newer concept of class

mobility in her children’s primer, the stories unequivocally preach the
virtues of evangelical Protestantism.22 At the dawn of the Progressive
Era, however, even a good Christian such as Booker T. Washington
could be heard lecturing his audience on nationalism: “The indi-
vidual is the instrument, national virtue the end.”23
In the twilight of the Progressive Era, Mary Antin, a first-
generation Jewish immigrant and reformer, employed what she
called “the American vocabulary” of the “self-made man” in an effort
to crystallize, in the mind of her audience, “our national ideal of
manhood.”24 Her statement explicitly weds the idea of the modern
individual and the imagined community of the U.S. nation. Success
literature was increasingly circulated to civic-minded activists through-
out the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a means of
helping them instill middle-class values in the so-called dangerous
classes.25 The “new middle-class intelligentsia of nationalism had to
invite the masses into history,” explains historian Tom Nairn, “and
the invitation-card had to be written in a language they under-
stood.”26 Post–Civil War narratives of class mobility frequently
stressed the enterprising hero’s ability to demonstrate his connection
to the national body.
For instance, at the opening of Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick
(1868), the first and most-read “luck and pluck” fiction up through
the Progressive Era, the bootblack hero asserts that his threadbare
coat “once belonged” to the nation’s founding father, General Wash-
ington. The orphan Ragged Dick is, by comic implication, cut from
the same fabric as the father of the U.S. nation. The fact that the pro-
tagonist not only wraps himself in the flag but attempts to sell the
clothes off his back to the same customer (at a “reasonable” price)
suggests a link between a free country and the free market. When
Dick’s patron asks for change, the bootblack responds that he has not
a cent: “All my money’s invested in the Erie Railroad.”27 The trans-
continental railroad, aside from being a powerful symbol of national
unity, was the backbone of American industrialization and at the
forefront of the transformation of the U.S. economy from competi-
tive to corporate-monopoly capitalism.28 Although Dick thinks of

xx
 Introduction

himself as a descendant of George Washington and a shareholder

alongside Jay Gould, the same could not be said for those who built
the railroads, mainly Irish and Chinese immigrants. Nativist atti-
tudes are embedded in Alger’s Ragged Dick, where the hero’s antago-
nist, a juvenile delinquent named Mickey Maguire, is detected don-
ning Dick’s stolen Washington coat at the novel’s end.29
With the official closing of the American frontier in 1891, en-
terprising men and the corporations they headed set their sights on
expanding markets abroad. The imperialist impulse was found not
just in industrialists and financiers, such as Edward H. Harriman
and J. P. Morgan. In an era of monopoly capitalism and global colo-
nialism, entrepreneurs of all stripes—including black nationalist
leader Marcus Garvey and Edna Ferber’s fictional saleswoman, Emma
McChesney—scouted foreign markets for raw materials, cheap labor,
and new consumers. In the popular Emma McChesney & Co. (1915),
Ferber’s protagonist targets trade with South American nations.
Emma advocates expanding markets outside the United States be-
cause it “means a future and a fortune” for her New York–based com-
pany.30 The expansionist inflection in Ferber’s fiction was no doubt
influenced by the country’s awakened interest in new consumer out-
lets in South America prior to World War I. One observer, writing in
1911, noted that although the United States had recently “entered
upon an era of commercial conquest” in the region, the North Ameri-
can nation had yet to live up to its manifest potential in regard to
the Southern Hemisphere. He admonished his reader: “It is humili-
ating to an American to travel throughout . . . South America and see
the trade which legitimately belongs to us slipping away to Europe.”
It inevitably led one to ask the questions: “What is the matter with
the American business man? What is the matter with the American
manufacturer?”31
Ferber answered critics of postfrontier American enterprise by
targeting expanding consumer markets abroad. In an effort to beat
the competition in her South American destinations, her military-
minded heroine takes “just forty-eight hours to mobilize” from her
base of operations in Manhattan. First, with her usual flair, Emma
sells the idea of overseas expansion to her skeptical boss by implicitly

xxi
 Introduction

appealing to national pride in the corporate race to claim the upper

hand in global commerce: “If once I can introduce [our] petticoat
and knickerbocker into sunny South America, they’ll use those Eng-
lish and German petticoats for linoleum floor-coverings.” On the eve
of the invasion, the reader is informed that Emma “surveyed her ter-
ritory, behind and before, as a general studies troops and countryside
before going into battle.” Next, she packs her weapons: sample trunks
lined with skirts and knickers “calculated to dazzle Brazil and en-
trance Argentina.” Finally, face to face with a corrupt Brazilian offi-
cial, Emma coolly follows her New York training and offers him a
bribe: “Her blue eyes gazed confidingly up into the Brazilian’s snap-
ping black ones, and as she withdrew her hand from the depths of
her purse, there passed from her white fingers to his brown ones that
which is the Esperanto of the nations, the universal language under-
stood from Broadway to Brazil.” As it turns out, the skirts are “self-
sellers” in South America. After a four-month tour of duty, she re-
turns home “gloriously triumphant,” having conquered not only the
alien customs of overseas businessmen but, more important, both
foreign and domestic corporate competition south of the border.32
Having suggested that the historical possibility of the self-made
man in America is underwritten by the late-eighteenth-century emer-
gence of the modern individual and the spread of U.S. nationalism
prior to the end of the nineteenth century, I want to examine two turn-
of-the-twentieth-century developments that generate a crisis in the
traditional narrative of success. The first is the shift from a producer-
to a consumer-oriented society, which devalued the idea of moral
character in the language of business achievement, and the second is
the culture of personality, which allowed working women, African
Americans, and nonnorthern European immigrants to appropriate
stories of uplift and ultimately fracture the hegemonic discourse of
class mobility.

From Character to Personality to Image

The Progressive Era marks a transformation in the United States
from a producer- to a consumer-oriented economy. Although mak-

xxii
 Introduction

ing money has always been an integral component of success in

America, it began to undermine the art of virtue within the matur-
ing consumer markets of the early twentieth century. At the turn
of the century, the concept of personality was introduced into what
had previously been an essentially character-based discourse of enter-
prise. As Warren Susman suggests, the word “personality” is tied to an
emerging culture of consumption. He distinguishes between the new
psychoanalytic idea of competitive personality and the older, quasi-
religious concept of moral character, which evoked the spiritual call-
ing that energized the self-starter in a producer-oriented economy.33
My study develops Susman’s speculative treatment of this transfor-
mation in a number of ways. I examine how the turn-of-the-century
move from character to personality marked the democratization of
narrative uplift. More specifically, I argue that the concept of moral
character, which is coded as white, male, and middle-class, begins to
recede within stories of self-making as women, blacks, and immi-
grants emerge as entrepreneurs. Toward the end of my book I also
map a second historical transformation: from personality to image.
This shift is, in large part, enabled by the proliferation of new elec-
tronic media after World War II that results in the simultaneous rise
of the celebrity entrepreneur and effacement of character-based suc-
cess stories.
The word “character” arises repeatedly in Franklin’s eighteenth-
century writing, the urtext of the modern self-made man. Franklin’s
utilitarian method of self-making was prefigured, in part, by the
Puritan mission of bringing “works” into the covenant of “grace”
through the Calvinist teaching that worldly success was a sign of
God’s predestined favor.34 In his own attempts to practice “the Art
of Virtue,” Franklin aimed to cultivate “a perfect Character.”35 The
concept of character that Franklin ascribes to the individual was of
rather recent origin. Prior to the mid-seventeenth century, character
was defined as a sharp instrument for making distinctive marks, en-
gravings, brands, or stamps, and thus had no association with the
human soul. Nonetheless, the idea of the individual deployed in
Franklin’s writing retained its older association with community (i.e.,
the individual as a single example of a group). For the purveyor of

xxiii
 Introduction

the traditional idea of character-based success, self-making and self-

ishness were not synonymous.
The central importance that Franklin assigned to fostering the
inner character of the yeoman farmer or fledgling entrepreneur was
not lost on nineteenth-century purveyors of success. In his mid-
century treatise Elements of Success (1848), Robert C. Cushman pro-
claimed that “the attributes of his character,” rather than “the things
which surround a man,” were essential to personal achievement.36
The concept of character foregrounded the spiritual salvation inher-
ent in the Protestant work ethic in an effort to temper the avarice of
enterprising men. As Irvin Wyllie discovered, “The doctrine of the
secular calling provided the foundation for the religious defense of
worldly success.”37 Many of the earliest advocates of self-help were
clergymen who sermonized that man could serve God and Mammon
simultaneously. Henry Ward Beecher, for example, lectured in 1844:
“A good character, good habits, and iron industry, are impregnable to
the assaults of all the ill luck that fools ever dreamed of.”38 Market-
place advancement, preached nineteenth-century apostles of the self-
made man, was a sign of the cultivation of character. Onetime Uni-
tarian minister Ralph Waldo Emerson’s often repeated definition of the
word—“Moral order through the medium of individual nature”39—
is an attempt to resolve the conflict between God’s sacred master plot
and post-Enlightenment man’s desire for autonomy.
Although after the turn of the twentieth century the word “char-
acter” no longer monopolized the discourse of enterprising success, it
never abdicated its influence altogether. In 1900, soon-to-be presi-
dent Theodore Roosevelt published an article on the American char-
acter and the idea of success. Roosevelt asserted that the “virile char-
acter” of “a thoroughly manly race” could be achieved not simply
through amassing wealth but by means of “mental balance” and a
“steadfast resolution”—“that assemblage of virtues . . . which we
group together under the name of character.”40 Roosevelt, like many
of his contemporaries, used the words “race” and “nation” inter-
changeably in an effort to draft the self-made man into the service of
nation building.41 Andrew Carnegie, a poor immigrant turned steel

xxiv
 Introduction

magnate and outspoken proponent of the American Way, reminded

readers in The Empire of Business (1902) of his favorite theme: “honest
poverty” as the “soil” on which “alone the virtues and all that is pre-
cious in human character grow.”42 His good friend Booker T. Wash-
ington extended the concept of character to his program for Negro
education and enterprise. Despite criticism from black intellectuals
that his ideas for uplift were outdated, the author of Up From Slavery
(1901) championed “strength of character” to battle the temptations
of consumer culture.43 By maintaining the concept of character in
consumer America, Roosevelt, Carnegie, and Washington activated
what Raymond Williams calls the “residual” in dominant culture: an
element of the past “still active in the cultural process, not only and
often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element
of the present.”44
The twentieth century brought with it a transformation from
character to personality, which was increasingly based on image mak-
ing rather than inner calling.45 The introduction of personality into
the language of self-making no doubt energized the post–World
War I spread of “New Thought” philosophy of success, which em-
phasized “states of mind rather than traits of character” by attempt-
ing to “codify in scientific form the ‘laws’ of personal magnetism.”46
Advertising executive and minister’s son Bruce Barton told the story
of Jesus Christ, the “founder of modern business,” in his best-selling
book The Man Nobody Knows (1925). What, asked Barton, was the
quality that allowed the son of God to rise from poverty in a country
village to become the greatest leader of all time? First and foremost,
he possessed “the personal magnetism which begets loyalty and com-
mands respect.”47 Before it became a best-selling book, The Man No-
body Knows was serialized in the Woman’s Home Companion. Its origi-
nal place of publication suggests that individuals other than white
Protestant men were now targeted as consumers of success stories.
The modern fascination with personality helped expand the con-
sumer market for narratives of the self-made man even while it un-
dermined the narrative’s traditional authority. Just as Progressive Era
muckrakers were busy debunking the venerable character of the most

xxv
 Introduction

powerful businessmen, individuals whose life experiences were mar-

ginal to mainstream stories of success began, at an unprecedented
rate, fostering the winning personality. Ferber’s representation of fe-
male enterprise offers a literary example. “Personality’s one of the
biggest factors in business to-day,” announces an advertising execu-
tive in her 1914 novel Personality Plus. Although he explains that a
young woman who gives off too much “charm” is incapable of con-
trolling her personality in the world of sales,48 the reader observes the
heroine’s personal magnetism as the source of her success in selling
petticoats. “Her line is no better than ours,” complains her competi-
tor upon returning to the home office after being routed in South
America. “It’s her personality, not her petticoats.”49
Traveling salesmanship was not the only profession in which
marketing one’s appearance was inseparable from selling one’s prod-
uct. The emerging business of cosmetics, pioneered by women such
as Harriet Hubbard Ayer and Madam C. J. Walker, produced and
was a product of the personality craze in America. “Cultivate the per-
sonality of the successful salesman,” says Miss Fulton to Chungpa
Han, the narrator of Younghill Kang’s autobiographical novel, East
Goes West. “Make yourself an attractive human being,” she instructs,
“for most of your customers will be women.”50 As Elizabeth Wilson
reminds us, fashion is “essential to the world of modernity, the world
of spectacle and mass-communication.”51 From Alger’s poor boys,
whose class mobility is usually marked by the acquisition of a new
suit of clothes, to Madam Walker, who made millions styling hair,
fashion frequently plays a conspicuous role in modern formulas for
success. Or, as Emma McChesney puts it in regard to her prosperity
in peddling petticoats: “I not only sell it, I wear it.”52
In practical terms, enterprising women, immigrants, and minori-
ties had greater access to the manufacture as well as the consumption
of personality-enhancing products than, say, to steel or automobiles.
The advent of personality within narratives of self-making was thus
a two-way street. If consumer society allowed large numbers of non-
conventional entrepreneurs to appropriate rags-to-riches stories for
themselves, these individuals found an outlet for their ambition within
expanding consumer markets.

xxvi
 Introduction

Multicultural Narratives of Uplift

in Twentieth-Century America
Despite the fact that, after the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was eulo-
gized as the quintessential self-made man, the most publicized actors
during the late nineteenth century were not politicians but a dy-
namic breed of entrepreneurs, such as Astor, Gould, Vanderbilt,
Carnegie, and Rockefeller. By the turn of the century, however, op-
portunities for class mobility were in statistical decline due to the
introduction of the corporate structure to business enterprise.53 Para-
doxically, the Progressive Era is also the moment when stories of self-
made success were popularized, as never before, throughout Ameri-
can society. The paradox can be explained, in part, by understanding
the extent to which the flourishing narratives of uplift helped bring
marginalized individuals into the imagined community of the U.S.
nation. Ironically, the popularization of the rags-to-riches formula
caused an ethical crisis in traditional narratives of the self-made man
prior to the Great Depression.
Beginning with Benjamin Franklin’s memoirs, autobiography
has been the authoritative mode within which to imagine the self-
made man. However, recent studies of the genre demonstrate its com-
plicity with the Enlightenment project of establishing the subject of
history as white, male, and middle-class.54 As such, autobiographies
of enterprise composed by women and minorities are more likely
to reveal the normative conventions of self-making. But what if, as
in the case of most enterprising women and minorities, no formal
autobiography exists? In an effort to locate nonconventional auto-
biographical expressions of class mobility, I have found it necessary
to delimit the genre to include sources ranging from annual business
convention transcripts to newspaper advertisements and television
infomercials. In the absence of autobiographical statements, I locate
stories of nonconventional enterprising individuals within either
autobiographical writings of their contemporaries or popular fiction
of the day.55 My chapters read autobiographical and fictional ex-
pressions of class mobility as a contested arena in which nontradi-
tional entrepreneurs (women, minorities, and immigrants) appropri-

xxvii
 Introduction

ate roles traditionally reserved for white, Anglo-Saxon men. Upon

appropriating these popular models for middle-class uplift, they alter
them. It is my contention that the expansion of the category of the
self-made man to include working women, African Americans, and
nonnorthern European immigrants contributed to the traditional
figure’s demise.
Chapter 1 examines autobiographical and fictional formulas for
class mobility that, although inspired by enterprising opportunities
in the Gilded Age, were widely disseminated after the turn of the
century. I show how stories of entrepreneurial success confer “moral
luck”—a secular version of divine grace—on their upwardly mobile
protagonists while denying it to white ethnics and working-class he-
roes. Chapter 2 addresses the predicament of women who, during the
Progressive Era, inhabited male-identified narratives of self-making.
Not surprisingly, women’s entrepreneurial agency was restrained by
the imposition of the domestic ideal on their public activities. If popu-
lar literature generated imaginative models for female enterprise where
none existed in reality, it nonetheless was marked by an ambivalence
toward women’s capacity to reconcile the tender qualities of femi-
ninity with the cutthroat world of marketplace competition.
Chapter 3 explores narratives of black enterprise by focusing on
the political economy of racial segregation in America. What oppor-
tunities did Jim Crow have for realizing the dream of success? While
the most prominent black leader of the day declared individual,
merit-based uplift the standard by which to measure African Ameri-
can success, this focus distracted attention from the threat (imagined
or genuine) that black-owned businesses posed to the market share of
white entrepreneurs operating within the segregated economy. The
threat of black enterprise became the primary, if rarely acknowl-
edged, motive behind lynching. As a result, individualism—a term
(as demonstrated earlier) central to traditional narratives of the self-
made man—did not always take root in black America. Black enter-
prise was more likely to be an expression of racial uplift than personal
achievement. Chapter 4 begins by examining the appeal of Marcus
Garvey, a West Indian immigrant who implicitly addressed the prob-
lem of black individualism by envisioning a form of Negro enterprise

xxviii
 Introduction

that wedded personal uplift to a collective political campaign for

African nationhood. This chapter also documents the changing cli-
mate of opinion toward “foreigners” during the Progressive Era and
the Tribal Twenties. I evaluate the extent to which eastern European
and east Asian immigrants both challenged consensus definitions of
self-making and incorporated them into strategies for New World
survival.
Chapter 5 examines the demise of the traditional self-made man
in the 1920s. I read Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby not as the quintessential
representation of the American dream but as its reverse: a canonical
text that shows the self-made man in crisis. In order to recuperate his
hero, Fitzgerald’s narrator takes refuge in the nostalgic recovery of the
American past underwritten by the logic of nativism. It was not until
the 1930s that the term “American dream” was used. And, the con-
cept was deployed not to celebrate but to critique, from the stand-
point of the Great Depression, the moral bankruptcy of self-made in-
dustrialists since the Gilded Age.
Chapter 6 evaluates the ends of self-making within the context of
postmodernity. The faceless structure of corporate America, consoli-
dated after World War II, helped render the traditional enterprising
individual invisible to the public eye. The expanding corporate
media, however, found a new market for the self-made man: celebrity-
dom. In one sense, selling the celebrity through magnetism takes
the modern idea of personality to its logical conclusion. In another
sense, media culture has not extended the idea of personality to the
celebrity so much as effaced the old opposition between character
and personality altogether. If, in the modern period, narratives of the
self-made man shifted from a quasi-religious exploration of the inner
soul (character) to a psychoanalytic examination of outward behavior
(personality), image-based self-making collapses the distinction be-
tween inner self and outer appearance. As we move from an indus-
trial to an information age, the figure of the self-made man is no
longer principally the site of a utilitarian calling, behavior modifica-
tion, or even economic production but, increasingly, of body image
and consumer desire.

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 1
Class Mobility

Moral Luck and the Horatio Alger Formula:

Andrew Carnegie
The fact that Horatio Alger’s “luck and pluck” stories reach their
peak in popular readership around 1910 has baffled literary histori-
ans. His cheap stories of boyhood achievement, although originally
published in the second half of the nineteenth century, were reissued
posthumously in paperback editions that sold more than one million
copies annually by 1910. More copies sold each year between his
death in 1899 until 1920 than they did in his entire lifetime.1 Editor-
ial abridgments of Alger’s fiction turned what was, in his original
work, a moral message with a monetary prize into tales of class
mobility. Alger’s portrait of poor boys, unlike the representation of
working-class heroes in dime novels, does not remotely reflect the
harsh economic realities of either the Gilded Age or the Progressive
Era. Although his tales of virtue and good fortune recall an ante-
bellum economic system of small manufacturers and agrarian farm-
ers, it is inaccurate to conclude (as a recent commentator on success
literature suggests) that “Alger is not a representative of his time, but
a nostalgic spokesman of a dying order.”2 True, his protagonists are
rarely industrial laborers; most have never even seen the inside of a
factory. However, their ability to secure respectable white-collar work
is characteristic of Progressive Era standards for middle-class success.
The turn-of-the-century production and circulation of rags-to-

1
 Class Mobility

riches narratives needs to be understood as a symptom of the decline

in opportunities for prospective entrepreneurs. Real-life prospects for
upward mobility were, statistically speaking, curtailed once the cor-
porate structure began to dominate the organization of American
business. How, then, can we account for the fact that the literature of
economic uplift—from Horatio Alger Jr.’s posthumous “luck and
pluck” boy’s fiction to self-improvement magazines such as World’s
Work and Success—reached the height of its popularity just prior to
World War I? Despite the growing influence of the corporate way of
life, many Americans would continue to valorize marketplace com-
petition as a terrain of rugged individualism at least until the Great
Depression.
Through principles I will term moral luck and market pluck, I
argue that Alger’s uplifting stories offered turn-of-the-century writers
and their audience an outlet for reinforcing their belief in the resid-
ual concept of character-based success. Moral luck, I argue, is a secu-
lar form of grace that is coded as white, as masculine, and as middle-
class. This chapter demonstrates how standard stories of class mobility
confer moral luck on their heroes while denying it to industrial wage
earners. For example, in Ragged Dick, Alger’s most popular fiction,
the honest hero labors without ever taking a step up the ladder of
success. However, when he saves a wealthy man’s drowning child at
the book’s end, Dick is handsomely rewarded with a new suit of
clothes and white-collar employment. “Dick’s great ambition to ‘grow
up ’spectable,’ ” Alger reassures his audience near the book’s conclu-
sion, “seemed likely to be accomplished.”3 Moral luck thus creates
the context in which the display of market pluck is rewarded with a
respectable occupation and income. As we will see, the language of
moral luck is conspicuously absent from literature written by or di-
rected to working-class Americans.
The primary innovation in the turn-of-the-century “luck and
pluck” formula can be located in what is missing: didactic expressions
of Christian morality common to self-help literature prior to the Civil
War. Alger did not wholly abandon a Christian-based antebellum
value system. As John Cawelti suggests, his stories are less tales of rags
to riches than fables of rags to respectability: “Alger’s formula is more

2
 Class Mobility

accurately stated as middle-class respectability equals spiritual grace.”4

Market pluck, I would add, pays off only with luck guided by God’s
invisible hand. The author’s promotion of the idea of respectable
inner character allowed his audience to read a secular notion of class
mobility into the imaginary landscape of virtuous success. For read-
ers who lived through what historians call the nationwide “search for
order,”5 Alger’s stories implicitly spoke to their fears about encroach-
ing urbanization and addressed their anxieties about the fledgling re-
organization of the workplace through corporate hierarchies.
The Gilded Age promise—that the opportunity to amass per-
sonal wealth was an American birthright—was threatened by turn-of-
the-century economic upheavals and social dislocations. No self-made
man of this era lectured more widely and wrote more prolifically on
the twin topics of personal success and national progress than steel
magnate Andrew Carnegie. Born in Dunfermline, Scotland, Carnegie
emigrated to the United States in 1848 at the age of thirteen. His
family lived in western Pennsylvania, where, a year later, he obtained
a job as a messenger boy in a Pittsburgh telegraph office. Working for
Pennsylvania Railroad in the 1850s, he rose from telegraph boy to
steel master before the century was over. In between, he invested
wisely in railroads and related industries, concentrated his resources in
a revolutionary steelmaking process, acquired coal and iron-ore prop-
erties, and, finally, sold out to financiers who were putting together
the U.S. Steel Corporation in the first decade of the new century.
Carnegie’s favorite theme concerned building the moral charac-
ter (honesty and integrity) of the enterprising man through market
pluck (hard work and determination). He detailed the importance of
pluck in his repeated discussions of the “advantages” of being “reared
in the stimulating school of poverty.”6 Not surprisingly, when we
turn to Carnegie’s accounts of his personal uplift, the efficacy of
strenuous market activity is sanctioned by the idea of moral luck. Up
to this point, I have been borrowing loosely from philosopher Ber-
nard Williams’s theory of moral luck. In considering the importance
of luck to moral life, he argues for a reassessment of the conventional
(Kantian) notion that personal success is immune to luck and that
the capacity for moral agency is available to any rational individual.

3
 Class Mobility

Instead, Williams demonstrates how the moral justification for one’s

acts is retrospectively constructed along the lines of constitutive luck.7
Williams’s notion of moral luck is useful for considering both auto-
biography, a literary genre defined by retrospection, and traditional
narratives of the self-made man, where the excesses of rugged indi-
vidualism are mastered by the art of virtue. Moral luck also manifests
the turn-of-the-century crisis in character-based self-making, where
the sacred notion of a moral life was threatened not just by the cut-
throat requirements of marketplace competition but by new con-
sumer temptations as well.
The language of moral luck is deployed in Carnegie’s descrip-
tions of his successful escape from his first job performing menial
labor in a cotton factory. Employment of this type included long
days, poor working conditions, and little pay. Despite the hardship,
young Andrew imagines a better life: “But I was young and had my
dreams, and something within always told me that this would not,
could not, should not last—I should someday get into a better posi-
tion.”8 Yet, rather than provide opportunities for entrepreneurial ad-
vancement, operating a boiler offers Carnegie a living nightmare. “I
often awoke and found myself sitting up in bed through the night
trying the steam-gauges.”9 The experience on the factory floor was so
dark that he endured his work-related anxieties in complete isolation
from his family.
Moral luck is bequeathed to Carnegie at the age of fourteen,
when he found his salvation in the middle-class work environment of
a respectable white-collar office. Here he is fortunate enough to re-
ceive what he calls his “deliverance” from the factory when he is of-
fered employment as a messenger boy for a telegraph company in
Pittsburgh. At this moment, Carnegie recollects in his Autobiography,
“I got my first real start in life”:
From the dark cellar running a steam engine at two dollars a week,
begrimed with coal dirt, without a trace of the elevating influences
of life, I was lifted into paradise, yes, heaven, as it seemed to me,
with newspapers, pens, pencils, and sunshine about me. . . . I felt
that my foot was upon the ladder and that I was bound to climb.
(38–39)

4
 Class Mobility

In an earlier autobiographical statement, Carnegie put it this way:

“My ‘Good Fairy’ found me in a cellar firing a boiler and a little
steam engine, and carried me into the bright and sunny office.”10
Carnegie’s recollection of his transformation from dirty industrial
laborer to immaculate office boy demonstrates the almost magical in-
fluence of secular luck on the narrative of the self-made man. Now
settled into his white-collar occupation, he claims in yet another
essay: “I entered a new world.”11 Carnegie models his early success
on a character-driven narrative popularized in Alger’s fiction. His
boyhood desires echo no one so much as Ragged Dick, who wistfully
states to his friend: “I’d like to be a office boy, and learn business, and
grow up ’spectable.”12
Moral luck is not distributed equally among the poor boys of
Alger’s fiction. In Ragged Dick, the reader is presented with a stereo-
typical Irish bully named Mickey Maguire, whose fall into delin-
quency is mirrored by Dick’s ascent toward grace. Good fortune is
never bestowed upon Mickey because, whereas Dick’s ambition is al-
ways virtuous, his Irish rival’s is not. Mickey, we learn, has been in
prison “two or three times for stealing.”13 Even when, as in a later
Alger story titled Mark, the Matchboy (1869), Mickey returns and is
reformed, his rise to the top is cut short. “In capacity and education,”
judges Alger’s narrator, “he is far inferior to his old associate, Richard
Hunter [formerly Ragged Dick], who is destined to rise much higher
than at present.”14 As Cawelti reminds us, “the old maxim ‘No Irish
Need Apply’ still held for Alger.”15
The tendency to leave “whiteness,” as a racial category, unmarked
in our reading of standard narratives of upward mobility has contri-
buted to its transparency and normative power. Yet, in Alger’s juve-
nile stories, new immigrants are far less likely to receive the divinity
of moral luck. In his Autobiography, young Andrew Carnegie must
shed his ethnic identity before he enters the order of the self-made
man. Like Alger’s antagonist, Carnegie was a recent arrival to the
United States. For the thirteen-year-old Scotsman, assimilation was a
prerequisite for acquiring the moral luck that would elevate him into
the “new world” of American middle-class respectability. The reader
of Carnegie’s Autobiography learns that, just prior to being blessed

5
 Class Mobility

with good fortune, he was transformed from working-class foreigner

to middle-class citizen. In order to gain employment as a messenger
boy in a telegraph office, he is compelled to reject his Scottish identity
by literally and symbolically disassociating himself from his father.
Arriving at the office for his interview, young Andrew, not wanting
to look foolish in front of his father, asks him to wait outside. Carne-
gie recalls: “I insisted upon going alone.”
I was led to this, perhaps, because I had by that time begun to con-
sider myself something of an American. At first boys used to call
me “Scotchie! Scotchie!” and I answered, “Yes, I’m Scotch and I
am proud of the name.” But in speech and in address the broad
Scotch had been worn off to a slight extent, and I imagined that I
could make a smarter showing if alone with Mr. Brooks than if my
good old Scotch father were present, perhaps to smile at my airs.
(37–38)
Carnegie sheds his immigrant identity by imagining himself as an
isolated individual, distanced from the Old World community he as-
sociates with his father. A symbolic orphan, he swallows his foreign
accent and dons attire “usually kept sacred for Sabbath day” (38). He
is now prepared to receive the divinity of moral luck.

Hard Luck: John McLuckie

When working-class characters make an appearance within a con-
ventional rags-to-riches story, they draw attention not only to the
limits of class mobility for industrial laborers but also to the dis-
course of nativism that sometimes licensed their bad luck. It was the
Mickey Maguires of the world, rather than the Richard Hunters,
who were more likely to labor in the factories. One such working-
class individual was “Honest” John McLuckie, who emerges in the
middle of Carnegie’s Autobiography, and whose name seems to mock
the moral luck required for class mobility. McLuckie was a key actor
on the stage of the famous 1892 Homestead strike, which, as labor
historians argue, undermined the ideals of labor republicanism and
helped make corporate capitalism triumphant.16 Homestead was the
largest and most modernized open-hearth steel mill of its day. Prior

6
 Class Mobility

to Carnegie’s purchase of the plant in 1883, its workforce was orga-

nized into a half-dozen unionized labor lodges of the Amalgamated
Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Ironically, it was the power of
the union and a history of labor unrest at the plant that enabled
Carnegie to purchase the mill below market price from its previous
owners. The details of the Homestead strike are well documented.
On management’s side, Carnegie’s trusted associate, Henry Clay
Frick, handled the contract negotiations and the strike itself. Frick,
who was fiercely antiunion, produced an inflexible contract proposal
that was intended to force a strike and ultimately break the union.
Despite efforts by the Amalgamated Association to keep contract ne-
gotiations open, on the last day of June 1892 all 3,800 union and
nonunion Homestead employees walked out.
The strike was immediately supported by the town of Home-
stead, led by its mayor, John McLuckie, who was a skilled worker at
the mill. Three hundred Pinkerton guards were brought in by Frick
on July 6 in order to protect the company’s property and its replace-
ment workers. Violence erupted and lasted for twelve hours; by the
end of the day, four Pinkerton guards were dead and many more
were injured. The Homestead plant, however, was untouched and it
remained under the control of the strikers for four days. On July 10,
the governor of Pennsylvania ordered in eight thousand troops to re-
store Homestead to its owners. Within a week the plant was operat-
ing with replacement labor.
Andrew Carnegie was conspicuously absent from strike negotia-
tions and, at the time, uncharacteristically silent about the events
surrounding it.17 His Autobiography, composed approximately fifteen
years after the strike, is interesting for what it both expresses and re-
fuses to say about Homestead.18 Carnegie inserts a pair of documents
from uncorroborated sources into a twelve-page chapter titled “The
Homestead Strike,” where the author explains his opposition to hir-
ing replacement workers while absolving himself of responsibility for
doing just that at Homestead. The two documents were supposedly
authored by laboring men: one is a letter from the strikers at Home-
stead appealing to Carnegie for paternal guidance; the other contains
McLuckie’s words of kindness for his former boss fifteen years after

7
 Class Mobility

the strike. These documents function to confirm the virtuous charac-

ter of Andrew Carnegie, venerated self-made man. However, they
also point to the limits of moral luck, within a story of class mobility,
for an “honest” laborer such as John McLuckie.
The first document is a telegram that Carnegie claims to have re-
ceived belatedly “from the officers of the union of our workmen” once
the strike was already under way and out of the steel magnate’s hands.
It reads: “Kind master, tell us what you wish us to do and we shall
do it for you” (232). According to Carnegie’s biographer, Joseph Fra-
zier Wall, the author knew at the time he was composing his auto-
biography that the document did not exist: “nowhere in his personal
papers could [Carnegie] find such a telegram.”19 In 1912, Carnegie em-
ployed a top executive to track down the cable or, if unlocatable, to ob-
tain confessions from former Homestead employees to having signed
the telegram. The executive’s efforts proved unsuccessful on both
counts. Nevertheless, Carnegie published the cable in the Homestead
chapter of his book in an apparent effort to boost his reputation as a
champion for the rights of the workingman.
The second document concerns the whereabouts of John
McLuckie after the Homestead strike and the personal testimony re-
garding his former boss, Andrew Carnegie. It is important to remem-
ber that the leaders of the strike, McLuckie included, were black-
listed from working in steel mills in the United States ever again.
Moreover, within a decade after Carnegie Steel defeated the Amal-
gamated Association at Homestead, unions in the steel plants were
essentially defunct and were not able to organize effectively in such
industries until the Great Depression. The author’s portrait of
McLuckie is a secondhand account provided by John C. Van Dyke,
who posthumously edited Carnegie’s Autobiography. Van Dyke re-
ports that he accidentally discovered McLuckie working as an un-
skilled laborer in a Mexican mine in 1900. McLuckie was “careful not
to blame Mr. Carnegie, saying to me several times that if ‘Andy’ had
been there [at Homestead] the trouble would never have arisen.”
Upon being informed of Van Dyke’s discovery, Carnegie claims to
have sent Van Dyke the following telegram: “Give McLuckie all the
money he wants, but don’t mention my name.” Following these in-

8
 Class Mobility

structions, Van Dyke informs McLuckie of his incredible good for-

tune without disclosing its source. To Van Dyke’s surprise, McLuckie
declines the generous gift: “He said he would fight it out and make
his own way, which was the right-enough American spirit. I could
not help but admire it in him” (235–37).
Within Carnegie’s narrative of self-made success, even an exiled
working-class hero can display a work ethic attributable to the Ameri-
can Way. However, he cannot accept the benefits of middle-class
morality. Later, Carnegie provides a postscript to McLuckie’s hard-
luck story. He claims that, within the year, Van Dyke happens upon
McLuckie once again, now gainfully employed by a railway company
in Mexico. So that McLuckie “might not think unjustly of those who
had been compelled to fight him,” Van Dyke discloses the source of
his prior offer of financial assistance. “McLuckie was fairly stunned,
and all he could say was: ‘Well, that was damned white of Andy, wasn’t
it?’” (237). For Carnegie, the reluctant robber baron, his act of char-
ity and McLuckie’s response vindicated his personal responsibility at
Homestead and his treatment of labor in general: “it indicated I had
been kind to one of our workmen” (238). Carnegie, it was said, never
tired of hearing the story of his ex-employee’s final disclosure.
I would suggest that Carnegie’s identity as a self-made man
obliged him to interpret McLuckie’s use of the word “white” as
meaning fair, generous, and decent. Is this how McLuckie meant it?
We will never know for sure, but we would be well advised to situate
the statement within the context in which it was spoken. The former
mayor of Homestead was, as one biographer points out, “the most
unbridled spokesman of the rebellious strikers.”20 Even Carnegie ac-
knowledges that, after Homestead, McLuckie lost everything: em-
ployment, money, family, and country (236). It thus seems more
likely that the exiled burgomaster used the word “white” sarcastically,
as in the sentence: “That was very white of you!” With this in mind,
McLuckie’s declaration constitutes a thinly veiled denunciation of his
former boss. By conjuring the ghosts of Homestead past, McLuckie’s
momentary presence in Carnegie’s Autobiography has the capacity to
rupture a narrative of moral luck.

9
 Class Mobility

The Limits of Luck: James J. Davis

In Horatio Alger’s self-improvement literature, upward mobility is
bestowed on those poor boys who embrace a white-collar corporate
identity. As Daniel Rodgers flatly states, whatever else success writing
might be, “it was not a literature aimed at the industrial wage
earner.”21 Alternatively, the working-class dime novel was a site for
imagining and interpreting life in and around the factory. Michael
Denning demonstrates how these stories measured success by stan-
dards sometimes foreign to the middle-class morality of Alger’s “luck
and pluck” formula. For instance, while dime novelist Frederick Whit-
taker penned cheap stories that attempted to “reconcile” the antinomy
of self-advancement and class solidarity, he also wrote about the la-
boring hero who “resist[s] the lure of the ladder” altogether. When en-
terprising capitalists do appear on the stage of the workingman’s tale,
as in an Albert Aiken serialized story about the “Molly Maguires,”
the author “defend[s] the republican community” of striking workers
“against the greed of ‘self-made men.’”22 James J. Davis’s The Iron
Puddler (1922), the autobiography of an enterprising wage laborer,
reads according to the conventions of the working-class dime novel.
For example, the forty-eight-year-old Davis deliberately opens his
autobiography with an account of a fistfight between the town bully
and himself at age eighteen. “A fight in the first chapter made a book
interesting to me when I was a boy,” the author recollects.23 Denning
draws a parallel between Davis’s opening and the “fistic duel” that
typically begins working-class dime novels, such as Whittaker’s 1883
tale of Larry Locke, “boy of iron.” This type of “structuring event” was
deployed in these stories to confer manliness upon their working-
class heroes.24
I propose to read Davis’s enterprising autobiography for what it
is not: namely, a middle-class narrative of upward mobility that uti-
lizes the moral luck and market pluck formula. The bulk of The Iron
Puddler is devoted to the efficacy of hard work and fraternity among
wage earners in the mills during the last decades of the nineteenth
century. After emigrating from Wales in 1881 at the age of seven, Davis

10
 Class Mobility

spent the next fifteen years of his life searching for steady work. Like
young Andrew Carnegie and Ragged Dick, Davis began working
part-time as a telegraph messenger and a bootblack. He secured his
first “regular job” sorting nails in a nail factory. Unlike Carnegie,
Davis found fraternity rather than fear and loneliness on the factory
floor. At age twelve, he was baptized into the exhilarating fires of the
iron mill as a master puddler’s helper. By age eighteen, he became a
master puddler, a trade he eventually used to secure employment in
a tin factory.
No Alger boy-hero, the poorly clad, eleven-year-old Jim Davis is
given a new blue serge suit by a local charity only to return it at
the request of his mother (21). From just such an experience the
author generates an antiluck motto promoted throughout his auto-
biography: “expect no gift from life” (30). In fact, the fight with the
town bully that opens The Iron Puddler is motivated by the signifi-
cance of the blue suit to Davis’s working-class identity. After return-
ing the clothes to the charity from which they came, young Jimmy
buys a cheap piece of fabric with his hard-earned pennies and gives it
to his mother to sew into an ill-fitting suit. When the town bully
spies his unevenly stitched garments, he teases Davis: “This was the
first time that my spirit had been hurt. His words were a torment
that left a scar upon my very soul” (23). When the working boy is fi-
nally given an opportunity to fight the bully, he not only gives him a
beating but informs him:
Where you made your mistake was when you made fun of my
breeches, seven years ago. And do you remember that blue suit you
had on at the time? I know where you got that blue suit of clothes,
and I know who had it before you got it. If you still think that a
bully in charity clothes can make fun of a boy in clothes that he
earned with his own labor, just say so, and I’ll give you another
clout that will finish you. (25)
Davis’s battle with the town bully reverses Ragged Dick’s scuffle with
his antagonist, Mickey Maguire, who also dons a set of clothes pre-
viously worn by his rival. Whereas divine intervention in the form
of good fortune allows Dick to ascend from begrimed street urchin

11
 Class Mobility

to fashionable white-collar office boy, Jimmy refuses to trade his

working-class identity for middle-class respectability even if it means
maintaining his patchwork garb and eschewing finery.
The Alger formula, which couples moral luck with market pluck,
is absent from Davis’s working-class story. In The Iron Puddler the
concept of luck is tied not to personal fortune but, rather, national
pride: “Work is a blessing, not a curse. This country had the good
luck to be settled by the hardest workers in the world” (269). Here,
luck is not the moral agent of individual advancement but, instead,
the product of virtuous work performed by the laboring classes. In
1922, Davis, as the newly appointed secretary of labor under Presi-
dent Warren Harding, was authorized in his autobiography to draw
the close connection between the U.S. nation and the workingman.
The cabinet post also afforded him a forum from which to voice his
nativist attitude toward immigrants from outside northern Europe.
Nativism, usually wrapped in the banner of Nordicism, was reaching
the height of its popularity in America during the early twenties. In
this climate, Davis could promote an immigration restriction policy
based on fixed racial hierarchies. In a statement directed to U.S. em-
ployers and published in 1923 in the journal Industrial Management,
he advocated reducing immigration into America in order to “pro-
tect” the nation from contamination from nonnorthern European
nations. “America has always prided itself upon having for its basic
stock the so-called ‘Nordic races,’” remarks the labor secretary. He
adds that it is “shortsighted” to seek cheap labor by welcoming “low
grade” immigrants to our shores. “It has been my experience since
the days when I worked in the mills,” he concludes, “that cheap labor
is expensive labor, both for the industry which employs it, and for
the community which houses it.”25
In The Iron Puddler, Davis begins from the assumption that
“racial characteristics do not change” and argues that, while some
races have “good traits” which will help “buil[d] up” America, others
have “swinish traits” fit only to “destroy[ing]” the nation (28). He ex-
ploits the metaphor of iron puddling in his autobiography to develop
his racist argument for denying immigration to lesser breeds:

12
 Class Mobility

Some races are pig-iron; Hottentots and Bushmen are pig-iron.

They break at a blow. They have been smelted out of wild animal-
ism, but they went no further; they are of no use in this modern
world because they are brittle. Only the wrought-iron races can do
the work. All this I felt but could not say in the days when I piled
the pig-iron in the puddling furnace and turned with boyish eager-
ness to have my father show me how. (97–98)
The proliferation of nativist attitudes during the twenties (to which I
will return in greater detail in chapters 4 and 5) licensed Davis’s belief
that immigration policy should test for racial purity. The author’s at-
tack on non-Nordic immigrants finds an allied cause in his advocacy
of the deportation of anarchists and communists, most of whom
were believed to be recent arrivals from southern and eastern Europe.
If Davis criticizes communists for promulgating the idea that im-
moral luck is a factor in business enterprise (“They believe the suc-
cessful men lack intellect; are all luck” [127]), he also steadfastly
refuses to use the Algeresque concept of ethical good fortune in ex-
plaining self-advancement. Instead, Davis promotes the character-
based virtues of thrift and hard work when, for example, he reflects
on the rags-to-riches achievements of entrepreneurs from his boy-
hood hometown of Sheron, Pennsylvania:
I learned that the banker, the hotel keeper and the station agent
had all been poor boys like myself. They started with nothing but
their hands to labor with. They had worked hard and saved a part
of their wages, and this had given them “a start.” . . . From this I
learned that laborers became capitalists when they saved their
money. (76–77)
Neither does Davis deploy the language of luck to explain his per-
sonal triumphs when hard work and thrift will do. He insists that, as
a poor boy on the factory floor, he “lusted” for labor: “I worked and
I liked it” (87). Late in The Iron Puddler, the reader learns that the
author went “from tin worker to small capitalist” not by becoming a
captain of industry but by possessing the good business sense to save
money and invest it wisely (240).
Davis’s greatest achievement comes when, after securing employ-
ment in a tin factory at age twenty-two, he rallies his coworkers to

13
 Class Mobility

vote against an imprudent strike. As a result, he is elected president

of his local union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and
Tin Workers of North America. Davis acknowledges that his reputa-
tion for resolving disputes between labor and capital through negoti-
ated compromise coupled with a “thorough knowledge of the pro-
duction end of the business” opened doors for him “to get out of the
labor field and into the field of management.” However, he declined
these opportunities, explaining that not only was he unfamiliar with
“salesmanship” as an occupation but that he felt a “natural feeling of
fraternity” among workingmen (207).

14
 2
Gender Stability

Troubling the Horatio Alger Formula: Tattered Tom

Women, like working-class men, rarely occupy center stage in the co-
pious “luck and pluck” stories. The only exception is Alger’s Tattered
Tom; or, The Story of a Street Arab, where the boy-hero is, in fact,
a heroine. Tom, a street sweep in New York City, cross-dresses in
order to create and sustain a masculine identity. Her cross-dressing
splits the self-identical subject of manly enterprise and exposes it as a
social construction. However, the cult of true womanhood ultimately
thwarts Tom’s efforts to sustain a masculine identity. The power of
domestic ideology frustrates her participation in what Michael Moon
labels the male homosocial market economy of late Victorian soci-
ety.1 In the end, Alger’s fiction recuperates the domestic ideal by leav-
ing in tatters Tom’s dream of autonomous public sphere participation
and advancement.
If, as discussed earlier, clothing is a preeminent sign of success in
rags-to-riches stories, fashion takes on heightened significance in Tat-
tered Tom. Here, the twelve-year-old hero(ine) is initially identified as
a “bundle of rags” by a gentleman considered to be “a leader of fash-
ion.” It is left to the story’s narrator to sort through the begrimed
bundle in search of its proper identity: “It was not quite easy to de-
termine whether it was a boy or a girl. The head was surmounted by
a boy’s cap, the hair was cut short, it wore a boy’s jacket, but under-
neath was a girl’s dress.”2 The reader is told in the opening pages that
the protagonist is not a true Tom but a tomboy. However, the narra-

15
 Gender Stability

tor’s use of the gender neutral pronoun “it” in the initial description
of the protagonist is reinforced by onlookers who repeatedly view
Tom as a “strange creature—half boy in appearance” (42–43). Early
on, the reader learns that, on the menacing streets of New York,
“Tom claimed no immunity or privilege on the score of sex.” She rec-
ognizes that her independence is based on her ability to maintain a
masculine identity in the public marketplace, and thus she desires to
be a boy. In fact, she “regarded herself, to all intents and purposes, as
a boy, and strongly wished that she were one” (55–56).
Tom is not immune to the moral luck that propels the Alger hero
up the ladder of success. However, because this sort of middle-class
respectability compels her to desire the domestic ideal, it is unclear
whether moral luck for an enterprising woman is a gift or a life sen-
tence. Just at the moment when the reader learns that “Tom, like
others of her sex, found herself shut out from an employment for
which she considered herself fitted” (71), good fortune is bestowed in
the form of a warmhearted Christian named Albert Barnes, who takes
it upon himself to “civilize” the “untamed” girl (72). “There’s enough
in her to make a very smart woman,” he thinks, “if she is placed
under the right influences and properly trained” (90). As Alger’s col-
league, Christian reformer Charles Loring Brace of the Children’s
Aid Society, insisted, nothing enriches the respectable character of
young women like industrious housework.3 In this spirit, Barnes
turns Tom over to his sister, Martha Merton, who runs a boarding-
house. In a chapter titled “Tom Drops Her Tatters,” Martha begins
her instruction in domesticity by giving Tom feminine attire and in-
sisting that she use her “real name,” Jenny. Finally, Tom “ceased to be
a street Arab, and obtained a respectable home” (139).
Her new life is momentarily interrupted when she is wrongly ac-
cused of the most heinous sin in the Alger lexicon, dishonesty. The
content of her character is directly challenged. Without a moral rud-
der to guide her, Tom returns to the streets. However, her newly ac-
quired feminine identity, like her new attire, is not shed so easily in
her old environment. Offered the opportunity to sweep sidewalks, she
refuses because she perceives that the task is “too dirty” (201). Street
sweeping is, for a finely clad young lady with higher aspirations, a

16
 Gender Stability

shameful occupation. Moral luck returns to Tom when, by divine

grace, her wealthy and forgotten mother finally finds her long-lost
daughter. The story concludes with the establishment of the protago-
nist’s proper surname, Jane Lindsay, along with the narrator’s assur-
ance that “the influence of an excellent mother will, I am convinced,
in time eradicate” all traces of Tattered Tom (275). In Andrew Carne-
gie’s autobiography, symbolic orphan status offered a way to wealth.
In Alger’s only female “luck and pluck” story, the domestic influence
of a mother simultaneously secures Tom’s place within the home and
forecloses opportunities for her public sphere ambitions.

True Womanhood in the Market: Harriet Hubbard Ayer

Middle-class women’s assignment to domestic space diminished their
access to the world of business enterprise. In fact, their relation to the
marketplace was usually of a disinterested sort. Because women took
on the roles of virtuous mothers and supporting wives, entrepreneur-
ial success was mediated through the achievements of men. Through-
out the nineteenth century and beyond, it was the task of the good
wife or mother to nurture a husband’s or a son’s sense of virtue. As
Wyllie points out, the aspiring businessman chose his wife not on the
basis of her financial worth but because the “good wife enriched her
husband by bringing profitable qualities of character, not money,
into the home.”4 However, when independent women entered the
masculine arena of free enterprise, they not only abandoned their
role as domestic guardian of character. They also pioneered many of
the consumer-oriented personality industries, such as cosmetics,
which mass-marketed the beautification of women that helped to
undermine some of the protocols of true womanhood.
It is important to remember, as Caroline Bird’s historical survey
of female entrepreneurs demonstrates, that women who have been at
the forefront of business ventures rarely have led rags-to-riches lives.
If the enterprising woman was not born into wealth, then she usually
married into it.5 More commonly than not, women became entre-
preneurs only after a matrimonial crisis, such as the death or divorce
of a husband. Their marketplace ambitions typically led to the di-

17
 Gender Stability

minishment of their domestic authority as wives or mothers. The life

of Harriet Hubbard Ayer, a pioneering cosmetic entrepreneur in the
last decades of the nineteenth century, is a case in point. Her story il-
lustrates how the domestic ideal not only worked to obstruct women’s
activity within the marketplace but also delegitimated the female en-
trepreneur’s domestic authority as wife or mother.
Ayer’s experiences offer a prominent example of a riches-to-rags-
to-riches pattern not uncommon among enterprising women of the
late nineteenth century. Her story is unusual in that she left auto-
biographical statements, albeit in the form of advertisements for the
company that bore her name. Like most women, Ayer got her busi-
ness start only by first gaining autonomy from the male authority fig-
ure in her life. Perhaps unlike many of these women, Ayer initiated
her own path to independence by divorcing her husband of seven-
teen years during the mid-1880s. This began a series of sensational
legal battles, played out in the popular press as well as in the courts,
that lasted for fifteen years. Civil suits filed against Ayer focused on
three issues: her suitability for child custody, her competency in man-
aging a corporation, and her sanity. The legal challenges to Ayer’s au-
thority in the private and the public spheres constituted attempts to
maintain residual notions of true womanhood in the face of expand-
ing business opportunities for female entrepreneurs.
In contrast to the legend of the self-made man, Harriet Ayer’s life
began at the top of the social ladder.6 Her father made a fortune in
real estate; her husband, Herbert Copeland Ayer, whom she wed in
1865 at age sixteen, inherited a prosperous Ohio iron dealership,
Brown, Bunnell & Co., from his father and became a leading Chi-
cago business executive. Harriet, now married, lived a life of leisure
while managing her husband’s home and cultivating an interest in
European decorative arts. She also developed, from a comfortable dis-
tance, an interest in the rights of labor and women’s suffrage. In 1882,
estranged from her husband, she left Chicago for New York with her
two daughters. A year later, her husband’s financial empire collapsed,
and the once wealthy society matron was now a divorcée and unable
to sustain the privileged lifestyle to which she was accustomed.
Determined not to allow the end of her marriage and decline in

18
 Gender Stability

financial security to ruin her life or that of her children, Ayer found
employment as a saleswoman in an exclusive New York furniture es-
tablishment, Sypher & Co., which catered to wealthy women. Ac-
cording to newspaper reports, Harriet Ayer was hired because Sypher
& Co. felt that she—a woman of character who had fallen on hard
times—would attract customers. Before beginning work, Ayer felt
compelled to explain her unorthodox behavior to her husband via a
letter to one of his close associates: “As your opinion has great weight
with Mr. Ayer, will you as a great favor to me take my part when he
explodes as he will, about my going to work. . . . When Mr. A. is able
to set aside a sum of money upon the income on which we can live, I
shall be willing to fold my hands.”7 Although she was successful as a
saleswoman, Harriet Ayer did not earn a fortune off her commis-
sions. In the midst of a front-page story in the New York Times a
decade later (on the topic of her ex-husband’s attempt to have her
permanently committed to an insane asylum), the reporter sketched
her early success at Sypher & Co. in this manner: “She soon suc-
ceeded in building up a large clientele. . . . She was apparently born
with a genius for business, and for several years it was estimated that
she was making from $10,000 to $15,000 per annum.”8 During these
years, Ayer found herself traveling throughout Europe to hunt down
antiques for customers.
It was on just such a trip in 1886 that Ayer later claimed to have
purchased the Récamier formula from M. Mirault, a transaction that
opened the door to free enterprise. Mirault’s grandfather, a Parisian
chemist, reportedly made the cream that kept the skin of the famous
Madame Récamier (according to legend, a woman Napoléon feared
because of her beauty) youthful well beyond her prime. In order to
buy the skin-care formula from Mirault, Ayer was forced to go to a
family friend and Wall Street broker, James Seymour, for fifty thou-
sand dollars. As we will see, three years later this sum of money
sparked a civil suit in which Seymour claimed the amount was an in-
vestment, which gave him control over the company, whereas Ayer
maintained that it was a loan previously repaid. Ayer patented and
began to market her skin-care medicine in April 1887, just when

19
 Gender Stability

American women were starting to use specialized cosmetics to aid

their complexion.
Going into business for oneself was a bold move for a woman of
the late nineteenth century. Ayer’s most daring and innovative stroke
lay in the manner in which she marketed her product: she offered her
own name and the Hubbard coat of arms for the Récamier trade-
mark. This promotional ploy symbolically situated Ayer, as a woman
previously assigned to the sphere of domesticity and leisure, within
the manly marketplace. In late-Victorian America, however, using a
woman’s name to sell a product was considered outside the bounds of
good taste. Nevertheless, this marketing strategy coupled with Ayer’s
literary flair for creating appealing advertisement copy generated
strong sales in England as well as the United States. Her advertising
acumen extended to a daring appropriation of the figure of the self-
made man for herself. In a booklet advertising her line of cosmetics,
she wove her own riches-to-rags-to-riches story into a sales pitch.
Ayer tells of traveling in France as a wealthy man’s wife when, suffer-
ing from sunburn, she obtains a salve from a once-prominent count-
ess who consents to sell her the Récamier formula.
In those days I was a rich woman. I little dreamed that the scrap of
paper which contained the directions for an old French skin pre-
servative would be the keystone to a gigantic business. So it proved,
for when I found myself absolutely penniless, and in order to sup-
port myself and educate my children, I obtained a position in a
large bric-a-brac house in New York, often working very late at
night. . . . [I was] a woman without a dollar beyond the wages
earned by [my] head and hands.9
The advertisement introduces a family physician who diagnoses
Ayer’s faltering health as work-related stress. Nevertheless he is moved
to make the following compliment: “Mrs. Ayer, how in the world do
you keep your skin so smooth and fair in spite of loss of sleep, lack of
proper exercise and irregular meals? What do you use for your com-
plexion?” Ayer reveals the skin cream’s ingredients to the doctor. The
physician not only gives his scientific blessing to the skin-care for-
mula but also advises his patient to sell the product so that other
women may also benefit from its wonders. “From this conversation,”

20
 Gender Stability

Ayer concludes, “I date the inception of the business which is now

known all over the world.”
Advertisements are not conventional autobiographical source ma-
terial. However, in the case of nontraditional entrepreneurs, where
no authoritative self-composition exists, I have found it necessary to
utilize unorthodox evidence. Ayer’s advertisement, in particular, il-
lustrates how privileged white women in the late nineteenth century
might have appropriated and rewritten an enterprising narrative for
themselves. The absence of Ayer’s divorce from the ad copy is symp-
tomatic of the range of representation appropriate to a female uplift
story. First, she performs a reversal of the rags-to-riches story. Her
self-promoting portrait moves abruptly from her days as “a rich
woman” to the moment when she finds herself “absolutely penni-
less.” Second, her ambition is represented in terms of disinterested
domestic values, which allows Ayer to maintain her status as a good
wife and mother. Finally, although her father and husband are both
absent from the ad, her personal ambition is authorized through the
paternal advice of the family physician. In another advertisement for
Récamier, which appeared in the New York World, Ayer describes
the satisfaction the product gave her high-class customers. The pro-
motional campaign includes a list of prominent family names of
“well-known society women,” including “the Vanderbilt, Astor, Ker-
nochan, Goelet, Lorillard, Beckwith—in fact, every one of the most
aristocratic families of old New York.”10 These advertisements func-
tioned to confer the seal of high-society respectability on Ayer and,
by implication, on her mass-marketed cosmetics.
Ayer’s success, however, was short-lived. As the 1880s came to a
close, her fortunes took a turn for the worse when Jim Seymour (pre-
viously a friend, business associate, and now father-in-law to her
eldest daughter) brought a lawsuit against her. He charged, as a stock-
holder in Récamier Preparations, that not only was Ayer mismanaging
the company’s operations but she was mentally ill. The sensation
aroused by his accusations and by Ayer’s countersuit made news-
paper headlines in the spring of 1889. According to Ayer’s sworn testi-
mony, the conspirator attempted to deprive her of her mental health
by having a doctor prescribe a debilitating drug. She claimed that

21
 Gender Stability

Seymour’s intent was to incapacitate her and, in doing so, to gain

control of the company.
In the popular press, an attention to matters of sexual impropri-
ety overwhelmed what might, in a different context, have been re-
ported as a business dispute between two enterprising individuals. A
New York Herald story, for instance, reported the case in sensational
detail. Under the headline “Crazed by Drugs—Left at Death’s Door,”
the story opens:
Never outside of the realms of romance was a more dramatic story
told than was set forth in the affidavits read before Judge Daly, in
the court of Common Pleas, yesterday. A woman whose success in
business has made her name familiar in every town and city from
the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, charged a stockbroker, a man
whose wealth is estimated at many millions, with a crime that ap-
pears almost incredible in this century. . . . In order to rob her of
her money these people [Seymour and his coconspirators], accord-
ing to her sworn assertions, wished to have her declared insane and
placed in an asylum.11
The newspaper account leaves no doubt as to Ayer’s self-made suc-
cess. However, in the same article the Herald published seven letters,
provided by Jim Seymour, which Ayer immediately dismissed as for-
geries. They were signed by both Margaret, Ayer’s youngest daughter,
and her governess, Blanche Howard, and they were addressed to
Ayer’s other daughter, Hattie.
The published correspondence is important less because of its re-
liability as truthful documentation (the fact that Seymour’s attorneys
decided against entering the letters as evidence in court suggests that
they were forged) than for what it reveals about the social climate
under which an independent businesswoman such as Ayer labored.
Seymour’s case against her depended on his ability to exploit conven-
tional assumptions about a woman’s proper role. Ayer’s transgres-
sions against femininity could best be documented not through the
testimony of businessmen but by those who challenged her authority
in the home: her daughters and their governess. It was one thing to
charge Ayer with alcoholism and insanity but it was quite another to
link such weaknesses to the performance of her domestic duties. In a

22
 Gender Stability

letter to Hattie, dated 25 January 1889, and published in the Herald,

Margaret accuses her mother not only of lying but of being an “aw-
fully bad woman” who is addicted to habits that make everyone hate
her. “How I wish our mother was good. It’s awful, and the only thing
we can do is to try and make ourselves as much unlike her as we can.”
Margaret concludes her letter with two additional barbs meant to
delegitimate her mother’s claim to the mantle of femininity: “I don’t
think she is pretty either, for if you ever got all the paint, rouge,
whitewash and dye off (but you never will) you’d see she was much
different than you thought she was. I think it was very mean of her to
leave Papa as soon as he lost his money.”12 As a matter of fact, Harriet
left her husband prior to his financial ruin. Nevertheless, a published
statement made by a twelve-year-old accusing her mother of dishon-
esty, a bad temperament, cheap vanity, and matrimonial unfaithful-
ness transformed a business dispute into a public hearing on the
fledgling culture of consumption. The published letters were an im-
plicit indictment not only of the female entrepreneurs responsible for
producing mass-marketed cosmetics but of the women who con-
sumed them. The Herald thus offered a forum for those who believed
that consumerism and the manufacture of products for the new con-
sumer markets demeaned women and jeopardized the moral lives of
those who came under their care.
One week later, newspapers reported that Ayer’s lawyers had little
difficulty revealing the blatant contradictions and lies in Seymour’s
accusations.13 Her reputation and that of the product that carried her
name, however, were irreparably damaged by the notoriety aroused
in the popular press. If this was not difficult enough for Ayer, a month
after the trial ended, her ex-husband, Herbert, asked a Chicago court
for an injunction to restrain Harriet from maintaining custody of
Margaret (Hattie was now married). Some evidence previously dis-
missed in the trial over business dealings with Seymour was allowed
in the court battle over child custody with her ex-husband. As the
New York Times later reported: “He charged that his wife [sic] was an
unfit person to look after the girl; that she had become addicted to
the use of morphine and alcohol, . . . and that she was not a moral
woman.”14 Although the custody hearing was conducted “behind

23
 Gender Stability

closed doors,” testimony that linked Ayer’s name to prominent poli-

ticians and businessmen was leaked to the press. The Times suggests
that these unspoken charges were enough to give custody of Mar-
garet to her father.15 This was a court battle that Harriet Ayer could
not win. Although enterprising men might be accepted in the public
eye after being found guilty of poor judgment or even recklessness in
personal affairs, the sexual double standard ensured that the same le-
niency would not be afforded to businesswomen who might also be
wives or mothers.16 For Ayer, the price of short-lived marketplace
success was the loss of moral authority in her domestic life.
There is a postscript to this phase of Harriet Ayer’s public life that
is worth mentioning. In 1893, those apparently conspiring against
Ayer were finally successful in placing her—against her will—in an
insane asylum. With assistance from her lawyers, she was able to se-
cure her release fourteen months later. Afterward, she agitated against
the institutional treatment of the insane and those thought to be
mentally ill. As her own cosmetics business sputtered during this pe-
riod, Ayer found another way of maintaining influence within the
fledgling personality-enhancing industries. In 1896, she took a posi-
tion as a New York World columnist, where she offered health and
beauty advice for the newly inaugurated woman’s page of the Sunday
edition.

Domesticating Business: The “Emma McChesney” Trilogy

Despite the gender barrier faced by women within the male market-
place, the literary imagination was one arena in which a middle-class
woman of uncompromised moral standing might achieve more than
momentary success. At the height of the Progressive Era, popular
novelist Edna Ferber (remembered today as the author of Giant) pre-
sented just such an enterprising heroine in the form of the beloved
Emma McChesney, a divorcée and single parent. Emma’s unortho-
dox ambitions are prompted by necessity. The reader learns that she
is the victim of an alcoholic husband who failed to provide for his
family. Emma divorces him and, at the time she lands a job with
T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat and Lingerie Company, is “penni-

24
 Gender Stability

less, refusing support from the man she had married eight years be-
fore.” Her employer “watche[s] her rise” from typist to traveling sales
representative for the coveted Midwest territory.17 Even more im-
pressive is the fact that, in twelve short years, Emma “had risen from
the humble position of stenographer . . . to the secretaryship of the
firm.”18
The “Emma McChesney” trilogy—consisting of Roast Beef, Me-
dium (1913), Personality Plus (1914), and Emma McChesney & Co.
(1915)—inaugurated a hybrid literary form: the domestic business
novel. Ferber’s popular stories incorporated the middle-class moralism
of nineteenth-century domestic fiction (which, as Nancy Armstrong
argues, was authorized by a social contract that enforced separate
spheres)19 into the burgeoning business novel format. The trilogy, ini-
tially serialized in American Magazine, offered working- and middle-
class women readers a fantasy escape from what were more often
than not boring, dead-end jobs in and outside the home. Through
her heroine, Emma McChesney, the author attempted to resolve the
contradiction for enterprising women who wished to remain faithful
to the ideals of true womanhood.
Ferber imagines a female subjectivity capable of mastering men’s
business without forfeiting the domestic virtues assigned to feminin-
ity. Her “lady drummer” brings domesticity to bear upon the un-
scrupulous world of cutthroat sales competition. In the end, Emma’s
actions do less to undermine the separation of gendered spheres than
to give cultural authority to the domestic ideal within a narrative of
enterprise. Although Ferber’s saleswoman insists from the very begin-
ning that “Any place in the world is the place for a lady” and “Any
work is woman’s work that a woman can do well” (RB, 67, 258), she
is portrayed as an exception rather than the rule among women.20
Emma repeatedly runs into men who are aghast at the idea of an inde-
pendent woman on the road selling goods. “A man just naturally re-
fuses to talk business to a pretty woman,” an advertising executive pro-
nounces. In the same breath, however, he concedes that Emma is “one
woman in a million” (PP, 52). In the employ of the Featherloom com-
pany, she is “known from coast to coast as the most successful travel-
ing saleswoman in the business.”21 She has all the market pluck of the

25
 Gender Stability

traditional self-made man—sagacity and self-control, confidence and

commitment, practicality and perseverance—and more. She declares:
T. A. Buck’s Featherloom Petticoats have been my existence for al-
most ten years. I’ve sold Featherlooms six days in the week, and
seven when I had a Sunday customer. They’ve not only been my
business and my means of earning a livelihood, they’ve been my
religion, my diversion, my life, my pet pastime. I’ve lived petti-
coats, I’ve talked petticoats, I’ve sold petticoats, I’ve dreamed petti-
coats—why, I’ve even worn the darned things! And that’s more
than any man will ever do. (RB, 156)
Emma is not merely a drummer peddling her company’s wares. As
a woman, she has a firsthand knowledge of the product and its
consumer.
Between 1880 and 1920, as an abundance of commodities gen-
erated the need for expanded markets, enterprising women found
their earliest and most profitable opportunities for autonomous self-
making within the sector of the economy that catered to their newly
created consumer desires. This is reflected in the opening chapter of
The Girl and the Job (1919), where authors Helen Hoerle and Flo-
rence Saltzberg advise young women that there exist “many things
that girls may sell profitably,” most notably “those that we are most
familiar with . . . cooked food, clothes, and flowers.”22 Hoerle and
Saltzberg insist that although traveling salesmanship may be a fickle
occupation, it need not be gender-bound.23 Curiously enough, when
it comes time to locate a convincing example of a successful sales-
woman capable of overturning the stereotype of the male drummer,
the authors turn to Ferber’s fictional heroine:
The work of the commercial traveler is well illustrated in the stories
of the well-known author, Edna Ferber. She has turned out the most
readable fiction on what work as a drummer may mean to a woman
in the way of joy and sorrow, trouble and pleasure. How one woman
managed to maintain a womanly and dignified bearing, and at the
same time a bright and engaging cordiality of manner; how she
managed to keep in good health under conditions so trying that
many men fail to do so; how she managed not only to earn a good
living for herself, but also for her son whom she sent to college—
any girl who is thinking of becoming a drummer should read.24

26
 Gender Stability

This example illustrates how popular fiction has the power to

generate models for enterprise where, in actuality, none exists. The
“Emma McChesney” trilogy produced the conditions by which a
working girl might imagine herself on the most revered and manly
terrain in America: the open road. The New York Times, in a review
of Emma McChesney & Co., had recognized the achievement of Fer-
ber’s heroine when they crowned her “a defier of precedent” and “the
pioneer among traveling saleswomen.”25 Hoerle and Saltzberg explic-
itly instruct the working girl who wants to become a drummer to ask
herself, “Could I be another Emma McChesney?”26 The example on
which they draw suggests the manner in which the popular formulas
reproduced in success literature from Alger to Ferber helped shape
the actual lives of individuals.
Emma’s capacity to uphold her domestic duties despite her entre-
preneurial adventures was confirmed by one reviewer for the New
York Times who dubbed her a “plucky mother.”27 Personal advance-
ment is, in the first instance, the objective of the self-made man. In
the case of Ferber’s heroine, however, the welfare of her seventeen-
year-old son, Jock, is always at the forefront of her career ambitions:
“Those ten years on the road! . . . And all for Jock” (PP, 151). Emma’s
success seems to be the by-product of her “maternal instinct” (RB, 13)
and of “self-denial for her son Jock” (EM, 62). “Next to my boy at
school,” she tells her boss, the firm is “the biggest thing in my life”
(RB, 258). Ferber does not include moral luck in the recipe for
Emma’s rise. Rather, as the authors of The Girl and the Job recognize,
the virtues of true womanhood that Emma brings to her occupa-
tion—dignity, cordiality, good health, and maternal sacrifice—create
the conditions for her success.
But Emma brings another quality to the maturing consumer
marketplace, namely, personality. Philosophers of success warned
against an excess of personality, for which they thought women to be
particularly prone. An ad man in Ferber’s fiction, immediately after
explaining the role of personality in modern business methods, offers
a warning about the damage that an unharnessed personality can do
to sales. His illustration takes the form of an overwrought female
employee: “Look at Miss Galt. When we have a job that needs a

27
 Gender Stability

woman’s eye do we send her? No. Why? Because she’s too blame
charming. Too much personality” (PP , 51–52). Alternatively, Mrs.
McChesney is tops in sales because she knows how to exploit her per-
sonality for optimum efficiency and effectiveness. Even her rival Fat
Ed Meyers concedes that her success is based not on her petticoats
but on her “personality” (EM, 42).
Even by the standards of their contemporaries, there was one
quality that neither Ferber nor her heroine expressly possessed: femi-
nism.28 Still, some of Ferber’s avid readers were skeptical about a
woman’s capacity to maintain traditional female virtues after being
exposed to the rough-and-tumble world of business enterprise. The
most famous fan of Ferber’s Bull Moose heroine was Theodore Roo-
sevelt, who publicly declared his admiration for Emma’s spunk and
ambition but had trouble squaring her successful career with her
choice to forgo the institution of marriage. Although Roosevelt was
quoted in the press as commending the author for “the way in which
Mrs. McChesney solves her sociological problems,”29 he was decid-
edly less enthusiastic about Emma’s resistance to matrimony. In the
December 1912 issue of American Magazine, an advertisement for one
of Ferber’s “Emma McChesney” stories trumpeted: “In the heat of
his [presidential] campaign, Colonel Roosevelt wrote a characteristic
letter to Miss Ferber, part protest, part appeal and part command
that Emma McChesney get married at once! ”30
Ferber was as strong-willed as her fictional heroine. In advertis-
ing the upcoming “Emma McChesney” stories, the editor of American
Magazine reluctantly informed his readers: “Emma McChesney . . .
positively refuses to marry T. A. Buck. The pleading of Miss Ferber,
even the insistence of Colonel Roosevelt . . . was without effect.”31
Prior to publishing the final volume of the trilogy in 1915, the author
resisted the injunctions of Roosevelt and her editor. Ferber recog-
nized that marriage meant the end to her enterprising heroine as her
readers knew her. She had grander plans for the self-proclaimed “lady
captain of finance” (RB, 269). At the outset of Emma McChesney &
Co., Emma all but conquers the corporate hierarchy. Although sec-
ond in command to T. A. Buck Jr. (the attractive but ineffectual son
of the original and now deceased T. A. Buck, founder of Feather-

28
 Gender Stability

loom), Emma runs the day-to-day operations of the firm with the ef-
ficiency of the most conscientious homemaker. “But now comes her
greatest exploit,” raved the New York Times.32 Our heroine risks her
reputation for irreproachable business instincts, not to mention the
financial stability of the firm, on a scheme designed to open up the
company’s sales territory abroad. Emma’s enterprising expedition in
South American markets pushes to the limit the contradiction of the
true woman in the business world. Ferber strives to resolve this in-
consistency by demonstrating the efficient fit between domesticity
and free enterprise. After four months abroad, Emma returns home
“gloriously triumphant.” Over the inept protest of the company presi-
dent and romantic love-interest, T. A. Buck, she “had invaded the
southern continent and left it abloom with Featherlooms from the
Plata to the Canal” (EM, 43). Ferber’s message seems to be that, even
as Emma’s commercial crusade leaves Latin America littered with cor-
sets, her heroine’s feminine touch beautifies the continent. Emma’s
success confirms the profitability of female enterprise in the post-
frontier nation.
Emma’s commercial victory abroad does less to legitimate her
agency within the business world than to sanction her influence in
the public sphere. As she navigates her way through South American
markets, her industrious example inspires (or perhaps shames) T. A.
Buck into making himself a man by asserting his entrepreneurial au-
thority at home. Traveling as a salesman throughout Emma’s old ter-
ritory, the American Midwest, not only reinvigorates T. A.; it also
lays the groundwork for Emma’s reentry into domesticity by means
of marriage to the company boss. This signals what Ferber calls, with
a wink and a nod, “a closer corporation.” However, it is a business
merger that differently affects husband and wife. The enterprising
achievements of Emma Buck are incorporated into the domestic
economy. The closing novel in the trilogy tries to persuade the reader
that Emma’s greatest success is not her rise in retail but the feminine
influence she exercises over the men in her life. Her fiancé expresses
his gratitude with reference to her womanly capacity to nurture oth-
ers: “And what I am to-day you have made me, directly and indi-
rectly, by association and by actual orders, by suggestion, and by di-

29
 Gender Stability

rect contact. What you did for Jock, purposefully and by force, you
did for me, too. . . . you’ve made —actually made, molded shaped,
and turned out two men” (EM, 92). As this passage suggests, the ex-
pansion of domestic influence into the world of business denies
women agency within the market economy.
In the end, the popular trilogy maintained the efficacy of sepa-
rate spheres for men and women. Emma never recovers the autonomy
and authority that made her the most renowned saleswoman in Fer-
ber’s America. She is also complicit in her own retirement from en-
trepreneurial activity as she sacrifices her famous personality at the
altar: “She learned to efface her own personality that others might
shine who had a better right” (EM, 228). She dutifully, if reluctantly,
throws off the mantle of self-making in order to fulfill her proper role
as Mrs. Buck, who brings moral integrity to her husband’s ambition.
The final installment in the trilogy illustrates the extent to which the
residual concept of moral character is not confined to the masculinist
success literature of Horatio Alger. It extends as well to the fiction of
Edna Ferber, where the accomplished self-made woman retreats into
the home and, in doing so, maintains traditional gender assignments
that were undergoing imminent change.

30
 3
Racial Segregation

The Political Economy of a Lynch Mob:

Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart
Marketplace segregation was the most severe restraint placed on black
entrepreneurship at the turn of the twentieth century. It left many
African Americans wondering whether or not Jim Crow truly had
the opportunity to become a self-made man. The issue was at the
heart of an 1899 publication titled The Negro in Business, the first sys-
tematic investigation of black enterprise in the United States. The
book’s editor, W. E. B. Du Bois, opened the Atlanta University study
by insisting that it was impossible “to place too great stress on the
deep significance of business ventures among American Negroes.
Physical emancipation came in 1863, but economic emancipation is
still far off.”1 Statistics amassed in The Negro in Business point to
approximately five thousand black Americans engaged in private
businesses during the last decade of the nineteenth century.2 Few of
these black enterprises manufactured industrial goods. Most, like
Madam C. J. Walker’s cosmetics company, were concentrated in the
consumer-oriented service and retail sectors of the segregated econ-
omy. “These enterprises,” Du Bois concluded, “are peculiar instances
of the ‘advantage of the disadvantage’—of the way in which a hostile
environment has forced the Negro to do for himself.”3
Black entrepreneurs, attentive to generating the conditions under
which their investments might flourish, actively incorporated the im-

31
 Racial Segregation

position of segregation into the very fabric of their business schemes.

This exploitation of the preassigned color-coded markets was a strat-
egy of economic survival that was supported by the majority of black
intellectuals and race leaders. The Atlanta University study, for exam-
ple, adopted the following resolution: “The mass of the Negroes
must learn to patronize business enterprises conducted by their own
race, even at some slight disadvantage.”4 The resolution’s reference
to “some slight disadvantage” suggests the limits of individual enter-
prise as well as the importance of racial solidarity within segregated
America.
The yoke of segregation extended well beyond the problem of
patronage. The disadvantage might also lead to death when white en-
trepreneurs operating in black communities felt their businesses
threatened by black-owned shops. Journalist Ida B. Wells, an enter-
prising individual in her own right, discovered in the last decade of
the nineteenth century that white commerce and civic leaders ex-
ploited every means available—including lynching—to discourage
the development of Negro businesses. In her autobiography, Wells
reports that her thirty-year “crusade for justice” was originally based
on a fundamental discovery: lynching was primarily motivated by
the threat black access to free enterprise posed to white entrepre-
neurs. It was an “excuse,” she insisted, “to get rid of Negroes who
were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized
and ‘keep the nigger down.’”5
In her posthumously published autobiography, originally com-
posed between 1928 and 1931,Wells presents herself as an independent-
minded black woman. Her familiarity with stories of the self-made
man in America was initiated by her extensive childhood reading list,
which included Oliver Optic’s Algeresque stories for boyhood uplift
alongside both Western classics and domestic fiction for little women.6
As an adult, her career as a militant black reporter flourished despite
numerous obstacles, including the threat of lynching from angry
whites. Nevertheless, her memoirs consistently undersell what she calls
her “little success” in the arena of activist journalism.7
In March 1892, just prior to her thirtieth birthday, Wells ob-
served a lynching in Memphis, which she contends “changed the

32
 Racial Segregation

whole course of my life.”8 While living in Memphis and editing the

city’s black newspaper, Free Speech, a close friend named Thomas
Moss, along with Calvin McDowell and Henry Stewart, was lynched
by a white mob. These men were respected entrepreneurs within the
segregated Tennessee community in which they resided. “All of them
were engaged in the mercantile business,” states Wells in A Red Record,
a pamphlet cataloging the truth about lynching. All, according to the
author’s account, “were known to be among the most honorable, re-
liable, worthy and peaceable colored citizens of the community.”9 In
regard to her friend Tom Moss, who was the principal investor in the
black-owned and -operated People’s Grocery Company, Wells com-
ments: “He owned his little home, and having saved his money he
went into the grocery business with the same ambition that a young
white man would have had.”10 People’s Grocery was in direct compe-
tition with an establishment across the street owned by a white man
named Barrett, who had previously had a monopoly on commercial
trade in the heavily populated black suburb.11
A series of provocations by Barrett and his associates resulted in a
Saturday night assault on People’s Grocery. Black men gathered in
the store and armed themselves for the anticipated confrontation.
During the skirmish, gunfire wounded three white men before their
compatriots fled the scene. The Sunday morning headlines whipped
the white community into a frenzy by announcing that the wounded
were officers of the law who were simply carrying out their duty to
arrest criminals supposedly being harbored in the black-owned gro-
cery. Such sensationalism sanctioned law officials to imprison more
than one hundred black men. Three days later, during the early
morning hours, a group of white men arrived at the local jail. After
gaining admittance, they dragged the three officials of People’s Gro-
cery out of their cells. Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry
Stewart were taken a mile out of town and lynched. Soon thereafter a
white mob looted their store, forcing its creditors to close the estab-
lishment and auction off the remaining stock.
In her newspaper, Free Speech, Wells reported Tom Moss’s last
words to his executioners: “tell my people to go West—there is no
justice for them here.” The black citizens of Memphis responded. In

33
 Racial Segregation

an effort to pressure white authorities to bring the lynchers to justice,

they not only left Memphis in droves but those who remained boy-
cotted white-owned businesses. Wells, who was instrumental in sup-
porting the black exodus and organizing the local boycott, analyzes
the circumstances at the opening of a chapter titled “Self Help” in
Southern Horrors (1892):
To Northern capital and Afro-American labor the South owes its
rehabilitation. If labor is withdrawn capital will not remain. The
Afro-American is thus the backbone of the South. A thorough
knowledge and judicious exercise of this power in lynching locali-
ties could many times effect a bloodless revolution. The white
man’s dollar is his god, and to stop this will be to stop outrages in
many localities.12
Wells’s keen comprehension of the logic of segregated enterprise al-
lowed her to forge a twofold strategy that effectively addressed both
the fears of the white lynchers and the desires of the black commu-
nity. First, by understanding that God and Mammon walked hand in
hand in the mind of Northern investors, Wells appealed to their sense
of a higher law by shrewdly aiming at their purse strings. Second, she
couched the militant Memphis boycott in the conventional language
of self-reliance, concluding the “Self Help” chapter with the proverb:
“The gods help those who help themselves.”13 Her community-based
self-help activism was enough of a threat to white enterprise that,
while she was away in New York a few months later, the office of Free
Speech was destroyed by prominent white citizens. Friends in Mem-
phis cautioned Wells that she would be in imminent danger from an
angry lynch mob if she ever returned to her place of business. The
threat only strengthened her steadfast resolve to campaign for justice
on behalf of enterprising black Americans.
Wells admits that, prior to the lynching of the three businessmen
in Memphis, she had never seriously questioned the officially sanc-
tioned motive behind the white South’s frequent lynching of blacks
since the Civil War. “Like many another person who had read of
lynching in the South,” she says, “I had accepted the idea meant to
be conveyed—that although lynching was irregular and contrary to
law and order, unreasoning anger over the terrible crime of rape led

34
 Racial Segregation

to the lynching.” Yet, this alibi did not square with the facts of the
Memphis lynching, despite the white newspapers’ attempts to use it
as a justification in this incident as well. Moss, McDowell, and Stew-
art had committed no crime against white women. The true story
of lynching was not white men protecting the honor of Southern
womanhood against the threat of the black rapist. Rather, the tale
that needed to be told concerned the license that such an alibi gave
whites in their attempt to thwart the efforts of enterprising black men
and, in doing so, terrorize the entire African American community.

Free Enterprise: Booker T. Washington

In 1892, the year that Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stew-
art were murdered, lynching reached an all-time high.14 It is the same
period in which Booker T. Washington emerged on the national
scene. To many, Washington appeared as the traditional self-made
man in black. He embraced an individualist ethos founded on the
virtues of character-based success. To do so, he turned a blind eye to
even the most pernicious forms of American racism, as is evident
in a statement that appeared near the beginning of his 1901 auto-
biography, Up From Slavery. He claims that the Ku Klux Klan not
only no longer existed but “the fact that such [an organization] ever
existed is almost forgotten by both races.”15 It was well known that
Washington, who advanced his personal career while attempting to
uplift the race, downplayed the occurrence and the significance of
Southern lynching throughout his influential career. This helps ex-
plain how he could be such an unapologetic advocate for mainstream
notions of individual enterprise in a segregated society. Moreover, his
accommodationist approach to politics compelled him to urge pro-
spective black businessmen to follow the Protestant work ethic. He
went so far as to say that “it is well to bear in mind that whatever other
sins the South may be called to bear, when it comes to business, pure
and simple, it is in the South that the Negro is given a man’s chance
in the commercial world” (146–50). Washington masked the deadly
white competition encountered by men such as Tom Moss only by
adhering strictly to the racially coded narrative of self-making.

35
 Racial Segregation

It may not be an overstatement to say that Up From Slavery was

the most widely read book written by a black American in the first
half of the twentieth century. Most contemporary reviewers, in the
black and white press alike, hailed it as a first-rate achievement and a
descendant of a legacy inaugurated by Benjamin Franklin.16 At the
most basic level, Washington’s autobiography authorized black uplift
through the appropriation of a residual model of American success.
Washington, an avid reader of Horatio Alger, was indelibly influenced
by the middle-class conception of virtuous enterprise. This elucidates
his infamous description of slavery as a “school” (37).17 By classifying
slavery as a precursor to black industrial education, he simply ig-
nored its dogged legacy in the wake of the failure of Reconstruction.
The title of Up From Slavery is ambiguous enough to suggest ei-
ther a rags-to-riches story or a narrative of an ex-bondsman. How-
ever, once the reader moves beyond the first chapter, the book fo-
cuses not on the significance of slavery and its legacy in industrial
society, but instead on the idea of black uplift founded on individual
merit. This emphasis allowed Washington to break with the tradition
of nineteenth-century black writing, the slave narrative. Rather than
rely on Frederick Douglass for his inspiration, Washington looked to
the popular figure of Abraham Lincoln—uneducated backwoods boy
who became president, savior of the nation, emancipator of the race,
and arguably the most legendary self-made man in post-Civil War
America18—as his “patron saint” in literature (172). Elsewhere Wash-
ington judges that the abolitionist struggle “had not prepared Mr.
Douglass [and other Negro leaders] to take up the equally difficult
task of fitting the Negro for the opportunities and responsibilities of
freedom.”19 Whereas Douglass demanded immediate and full citi-
zenship for recently freed slaves, Washington lobbied for accommo-
dationist proposals under which Americans of African descent were
obliged to prove themselves worthy of full participation as citizens of
the nation. Washington felt that the segregated economy provided
the most pragmatic arena within which blacks could demonstrate the
content of their character in the new century.
At the heart of Up From Slavery is Washington’s famous 1895 At-

36
 Racial Segregation

lanta Exposition Address, which helped consolidate his hold on power

in the eyes of Americans, white as well as black.20 In the address he not
only offered sensible advice to African Americans, particularly those
living in the Black Belt, but lectured on the significance of self-help
by pointing to the manner in which honest manual labor dignified
the individual and the race. Furthermore, he maintained that blacks
should “learn to draw the line between the superficial and the sub-
stantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful” (147). Earlier
in the autobiography, Washington anticipates this anticonsumerist
appeal with a tale about his own boyhood experience in the mining
town of Malden, West Virginia. Upon entering school, young Booker
felt pressure from his peers to acquire a store-bought cap. His mother
decided otherwise, and displayed an impressive “strength of charac-
ter” when she insisted that her son wear a homespun cap so that the
family could continue to live within its means. Washington recalls
retrospectively:
I have noted the fact, but without satisfaction, I need not add, that
several of the boys who began their careers with “store hats” and
who were my schoolmates and used to join in the sport that was
made of me because I had only a “homespun” cap, have ended
their careers in the penitentiary, while others are not able now to
buy any kind of hat. (46–47)
The anecdote is intended to illustrate the efficacy of the virtuous self
and the hazards of wanton consumerism. Only character-based vigi-
lance could keep conspicuous consumption from derailing one’s ef-
forts to climb the ladder of success.
Washington’s Algeresque rags-to-respectability narrative is, like
his promotion of industrial education for the black masses, an appeal
to a residual Protestant ethos that valorized the development of inner
morality. Echoing Carnegie’s dictum, he insists that a black youth
“gets a strength, a confidence, that one misses whose pathway is com-
paratively smooth by reason of birth and race.” Echoing Du Bois,
Washington claims that there is a peculiar benefit to membership in
the “unpopular race,” concluding that “often the Negro boy’s birth . . .

37
 Racial Segregation

is an advantage so far as real life is concerned.” Yet, rather than devel-

oping the latter point into an argument for racially conscious enter-
prise, Washington immediately argues for merit-based black success.
It is not race but “intrinsic, individual merit” (a “universal and eter-
nal” law that applies equally to all Americans) that constitutes the
basis for black enterprise (50).
Racial difference enters Washington’s essentially color-blind nar-
rative of self-making in circuitous ways. The moral luck of Alger’s
formula is, for instance, conspicuously absent from Up From Slavery.
Moreover, the way this absence is staged suggests the extent to which
luck is racially coded in conventional narratives of the self-made
man. After completing his first year of study at Hampton Institute,
Washington finds himself sixteen dollars in debt. Struggling to earn
enough money with which to pay off his debt, he works in a restau-
rant during the summer recess. Still in debt a week before school re-
opens, he finds “a crisp, new ten-dollar bill” under the table at his
place of employment:
I could hardly contain myself, I was so happy. As it was not my
place of business I felt it to be the proper thing to show the money
to the proprietor. This I did. He seemed as glad as I was, but he
coolly explained to me that, as it was his place of business, he had a
right to keep the money, and he proceeded to do so. This, I con-
fess, was another pretty hard blow to me. (63)
Washington insists that he did not allow this piece of good-luck-
turned-bad to become a source of discouragement. Thus, while offer-
ing his life story as an example of the efficacy of middle-class moral-
ity, the wizard of Tuskegee insists that his fame and fortune have
nothing to do with luck, moral or otherwise. Later, he makes clear
that “it was not luck” but “hard work” that ultimately brought him
success (130). In his 1907 tract on the state of black enterprise in
America, The Negro in Business, Washington extends this lesson to all
members of the race: “I believe that the success won by hard work,
rather than by lucky chance, is the only success that is of any impor-
tance to the race as a whole.”21
Even if moral luck is absent from Up From Slavery, the author
does not climb the ladder of success by pluck alone:

38
 Racial Segregation

In those days, and later as a young man, I used to try to picture in

my imagination the feelings and ambitions of a white boy with ab-
solutely no limit placed upon his aspirations and activities. I used
to envy the white boy who had no obstacles placed in the way of
his becoming a Congressman, Governor, Bishop, or President by
reason of the accident of his birth or race. I used to picture the way
that I would begin at the bottom and keep rising until I reached
the highest round of success. (50)
Washington is not being capricious, nor is he simply appropriating
the most readily available model of uplift, which is racially coded.
The boyhood obstacle described here is not encountered by Carne-
gie, whose assimilation into middle America takes the form of shed-
ding a Scottish accent. Young Booker is obliged to imagine himself as
white, a requirement shared by proponents of enterprise as diverse as
Marcus Garvey and Younghill Kang.
Moral hygiene, rather than moral luck, is a cornerstone of black
uplift in Washington’s autobiography. For example, Mrs. Viola Ruff-
ner, a white lady, demonstrates the efficacy of Christian virtue by
providing him during his youth with an education in the art of clean-
liness. In turn, he imparts this knowledge to his students. At Hamp-
ton Institute, Washington participates as a teacher in the “experiment”
of educating Native Americans. He insists, contrary to the Indian’s
resistance to white customs, that not only the success but the survival
of a race in industrial America depends on its ability to accommodate
European culture: “but no white American ever thinks that any other
race is wholly civilized until he wears the white man’s clothes, eats the
white man’s food, speaks the white man’s language, and professes the
white man’s religion” (81). Later, Washington extends these lessons in
Western civilization to his students at Tuskegee Institute. Here, he
puts into practice the middle-class ideals of “civilization, self-help,
and self-reliance” (108) by making his students perform the domes-
tic, agricultural, and industrial work related to the maintenance and
growth of Tuskegee itself.
Tuskegee functions efficiently even in the absence of its president
because its students’ adherence to industrial time keeps the institu-
tional gears well greased. Washington boasts that members of the col-

39
 Racial Segregation

lege community are a “force . . . so organized and subdivided that the

machinery of the school goes on day by day like clockwork” (170).
The school is a civilizing machine that molds black students into in-
dustrial laborers under Jim Crow. Near the close of Up From Slavery,
Washington provides evidence to support this claim: a complete “out-
line” of the student daily work schedule, from “5 a.m., rising bell” to
“9.30 p.m., retiring bell” (201–2). The document, which resembles
Franklin’s famous “Scheme of Order,” enforces the mechanisms of
industrial time. Time at Tuskegee is oriented toward work and the re-
finement of behavior—hence, the Pavlovian “bells” that rouse the
black student body. Washington introduces his outline for Tuskegee
time in order to assure his audience that the student body is always
“kept busy” and “out of mischief.”
As Foucault explains, disciplinary time—deployed not only in
schools, but also in prisons, hospitals, and factories—is “different
than slavery because [it is] not based on a relation of appropriation of
bodies.” By controlling the operations of the body through the new
microphysics of power, modern institutions “dispense with this
costly and violent relation by obtaining effects of utility at least as
great.”22 The adult Washington, as represented in Up From Slavery,
bears these inscriptions of modern time. In the final passage in the
book, just after he explains the logic behind the outline for daily
work at Tuskegee, he quotes a flattering newspaper account of his
own recent itinerary. The document details Washington’s every move,
including the times and places of each of his public appearances, and
concludes that “the foremost educator among the colored people of
the world” is “a very busy man” (203). It confirms that the head of
Tuskegee practices what he preaches: the gospel of disciplined uplift.
Washington, however, did not care to recognize the extent to
which black success was inhibited by its heightened subjection to the
scrutiny of disciplinary institutions. Up From Slavery nonetheless
stages the contradictions of modern time under Jim Crow. The most
notable example is offered in the chapter “Boyhood Days,” when
young Booker confronts the first significant obstacle to self-made
success in the form of reconciling his need to work in the West Vir-

40
 Racial Segregation

ginia salt mines with his desire for an education. He confesses that, in
order to work until nine o’clock in the morning and make it to
school at the same time, he yielded to what was retrospectively an
embarrassing temptation:
There was a large clock in a little office in the furnace. This clock,
of course, all the hundred or more workmen depended upon to
regulate their hours of beginning and ending the day’s work. I got
the idea that the way for me to reach school on time was to move
the clock hands from half-past eight up to the nine o’clock mark.
This I found myself doing morning after morning, till the furnace
“boss” discovered that something was wrong, and locked the clock
in a case. I did not mean to inconvenience any body. I simply
meant to reach that schoolhouse in time. (45–46)
Washington is not merely describing an indiscretion on the part of
a poor but well-intentioned black youth. The institutional demands
of the workplace and the schoolroom make it impossible for him to
maintain a conventional relation to modern time. Carnegie, accord-
ing to his Autobiography, was lifted off the factory floor and into a
white-collar office only after jettisoning his unassimilated immigrant
identity. I interpreted this recollection as an instance of racially coded
moral luck, an element absent from Up From Slavery. Washington
recollects that he had little choice but to distort industrial time so
that he could be in two places at once. His boss soon discovered the
boy’s temporal transgression, reset the time, and placed a lock on the
clock’s case. The normative power of industrial order and moral dis-
cipline were thus restored.

Working Wonders: Madam C. J. Walker

Up From Slavery was published just a year after Booker T. Washing-
ton founded the influential National Negro Business League. The
NNBL, bankrolled by his vocal supporter Andrew Carnegie, became
the premier black entrepreneurial organization in the first half of this
century.23 Presiding over the thirteenth annual NNBL convention
held in late August 1912 at the Institutional Church on Chicago’s

41
 Racial Segregation

South Side, Washington refused to interrupt the second day’s sched-

ule in order to yield the floor to a little-known, forty-four-year-old
black woman named Madam C. J. Walker. On the third and final
day, with outside temperatures hovering at 90 degrees, inside the
convention hall even the sage of Tuskegee would not deny Madam
Walker the chance to speak. Once again unable to gain recognition
from Washington, she shouted from her seat in the audience: “Surely
you are not going to shut the door in my face. I feel that I am in a
business that is a credit to the womanhood of our race.”24
In order to legitimate a female voice within the institutional ap-
paratus of segregated enterprise, Madam Walker developed a unique
if contradictory expression of African American women’s agency.
She appropriated and transformed the language of Horatio Alger
uplift—according to the gospel of Booker T. Washington—in a
manner that pointed to the moral efficacy of entrepreneurial endeav-
ors for black womanhood. Walker thus opened her intervention at
the 1912 NNBL convention by asserting that she was indeed “a
credit to the womanhood of our race,” and proceeded to testify to
her remarkable, if not wholly unfamiliar, rags-to-riches story. She
began: “I am a woman who started in business seven years ago with
only $1.50.”25
Walker, like pioneering cosmetics manufacturer Harriet Ayer be-
fore her, left only autobiographical fragments, forcing historians to
reconstruct her life piecemeal from public statements made within
specific institutional sites. She composed her life not in a room of her
own but on the convention floor of Washington’s National Negro
Business League. Washington’s imprint is visible on her August 1912
intervention into the male-dominated NNBL. Consider the way she
concludes her speech from the convention floor:
Now my object in life is not simply to make money for myself. . . .
Perhaps many of you have heard of the real ambition of my life,
the all-absorbing idea which I hope to accomplish, and when you
have heard what it is, I hope you will catch the inspiration, grasp
the opportunity to do something of far-reaching importance, and
lend me your support. My ambition is to build an industrial
school in Africa,—by the help of God and the cooperation of my

42
 Racial Segregation

people in this country, I am going to build a Tuskegee Institute in

Africa! (prolonged applause)26
By linking business success in segregated America to the uplift of
Africa, Walker raises a story of individual self-making to the level of
black nationalism. It is important to remember that her efforts on
behalf of Africa were largely circumscribed by the Tuskegee machine.
Today Washington is rarely remembered as a proponent of black na-
tionalism. However, just after organizing the NNBL, he went into
partnership with European investors in order to experiment with
Tuskegee-style industrial education in Germany’s African colonies.27
This was black nationalism within what Wilson Moses terms its “civ-
ilizationist” tradition.28
Madam Walker’s intervention before the 1912 NNBL convention
stages the manner in which Du Bois’s notion of “the advantage of the
disadvantage” extended to a marketplace segregated not merely by
the color line, but along gender lines as well. Before demonstrating
further the monetary success of her “Wonderful Hair Grower” prod-
ucts by citing impressive increases in annual gross revenue over the
previous six years, Walker interrupted her impromptu success story
by stating: “I went into a business that is despised, that is criticized
and talked about by everybody—the business of growing hair.” Al-
though male barbers might be revered within their community for
the myriad tasks they performed, Walker’s occupation was dispar-
aged by a black middle class that was not only prone to gender and
class bias but uneasy about the moral efficacy of indiscriminate con-
sumerism. Specifically, the black bourgeoisie perceived hair dressing
and straightening as menial work performed by lower-class black
women; and hair growing was simply the province of con men.
Pausing before an NNBL audience now held captive by her au-
dacious behavior, Walker coupled her frustration at gaining recogni-
tion on the convention floor with her prior attempts “to abandon the
wash-tub for more pleasant and profitable occupation”:
I have been trying to get before you business people and tell you
what I am doing. I am a woman that came from the cotton fields
of the South; I was promoted from there to the wash-tub (laugh-

43
 Racial Segregation

ter); then I was promoted to the cook kitchen, and from there I
promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods
and preparations.29
Walker’s testimony is remarkable for its assertion of agency through
black enterprise (from “I was promoted to . . .” to “I promoted my-
self . . .”). She suggests that her public identity was largely defined for
her until she became self-employed and, hence, self-promotable.
Nevertheless, by reading her story of self-promotion next to more
conventional Progressive Era narratives of success, we begin to see the
degree to which black patriarchy defined the meaning of female en-
terprise within segregated America.
Walker’s gender-coded uplift story forced her audience to con-
front the plight of poor black women who had little choice but to ac-
cept menial domestic employment as laundresses, maids, and cooks.30
Walker, attempting to seize the narrative authority of entrepreneurial
self-making before an NNBL membership that was both awestruck
and amused, pleaded: “Please don’t applaud—just let me talk!”
Walker’s exclamation drew more laughter, but she pushed forward: “I
am not ashamed of my past; I am not ashamed of my humble begin-
ning. Don’t think because you have to go down in the wash-tub that
you are any less a lady!” (prolonged applause).31 At stake for Walker
was not just establishing her lowly start in life. She conveys to her
audience that, despite the prevailing stereotype that labeled black
women who labor in the fields or as domestics as unnaturally mascu-
line, black womanhood is not sacrificed at the washtub. There is no
shame, Walker insists, in work of any kind.
Madam Walker rose from being a sharecropper’s daughter to be-
coming black America’s most notable millionaire at a time when
black businessmen were struggling to maintain a precarious foothold
in the segregated marketplace. She had gone public with her rags-to-
riches tale prior to her unannounced appearance before the NNBL
convention in 1912. An extensive biographical sketch of her life was
published in the 11 November 1911 edition of the Indianapolis Free-
man, a nationally circulated black newspaper that just happened to
have its base of operation in Madam Walker’s recently adopted home-

44
 Racial Segregation

town.32 This is the most complete contemporary account of her life

on record. The newspaper biography reports Walker’s birth, as Sarah
Breedlove, to ex-slaves during the first days of Reconstruction. Her
early years were spent on a Louisiana sharecropping farm. At seven, she
was orphaned. Seven years later she wed a man named McWilliams;
the Freeman puts it plainly: “She married at the age of fourteen in
order to get a home.”33 A hard life in Vicksburg, Mississippi, was
made more difficult when, at twenty, she was widowed and left to
care for her only child. Walker and her daughter, like many African
Americans living in the Black Belt during the post-Reconstruction
era, left the South by following the Mississippi River north to Saint
Louis. She found employment as a domestic in Saint Louis and, dur-
ing this period, developed her miracle hair-treatment formula. She
migrated west to Denver, Colorado, in order to make a business of
her cosmetic discovery. In Denver she met and married her second
husband, C. J. Walker, a black journalist who initially helped market
her product. Despite the considerable potential for developing a
profitable enterprise, the Freeman reports that C. J. Walker “discour-
aged” his wife from expanding her business because “he could see
nothing ahead but failure.”34 Apparently ignoring the advice of her
husband, she pursued her entrepreneurial ambition alone.
This early biographical sketch is notable for how it situates
Walker’s first husband as outside of and her second husband as an
obstacle to her quest for success. When Madam Walker finally of-
fered her story to a live audience—as she did every year at the NNBL
(with one exception) between 1912 and 1916—she made only a pass-
ing mention of her widowhood and no reference at all to her second
husband, whose initials and surname she made famous. The strained
marriage ended in divorce. The absence of domestic life from
Walker’s uplift story (whether told by the Freeman or by herself ) sug-
gests the degree to which narratives of enterprise excluded married
women, regardless of race, from autonomous public sphere success.
Like Ayer, Walker was best equipped to make her mark in the busi-
ness world when she was not wedded to the restricted expectations of
a woman’s role within the home. And, like Ayer, Walker’s entrance

45
 Racial Segregation

into the marketplace was energized by, if restricted to, the emerging
field of consumer-oriented manufacturing.
The Annual Report of the 1912 NNBL indicates that Washington
was, at least publicly, unmoved by Walker’s unscheduled address be-
fore his organization. Despite both the sensation her speech created
on the floor and her nod to the important work of the wizard of
Tuskegee, Washington apparently ignored Madam Walker by avoid-
ing comment on her testimony and moving immediately to the next
item of business on the agenda. This was no doubt due, in large part,
to the fact that the NNBL (like all American entrepreneurial organi-
zations of the time) was a men’s club. Black women almost always at-
tended these conventions as wives, if they attended at all.35 Although
Walker’s ambition allowed her to elude many of the obstacles placed
in front of her by the male-dominated NNBL, she never issued a sys-
tematic critique of the organization’s expectations of black women.
The League’s annual reports suggest that explicit criticism was
not heard on the convention floor until 1917, when Mrs. D. Lamp-
ton Bacchus spoke unexpectedly (i.e., “at her request”) on the topic
“Woman—A Factor in Business.” Elaborating on the type of obsta-
cles confronting black female entrepreneurs, Lampton Bacchus states:
Today she occupies a unique place in the world, being confronted
by a woman question, a business and a race question, and yet, she
is almost an unknown and an unacknowledged factor in each. We
often find ourselves hampered with a very, very conservative atti-
tude from those whose opinions we seek and respect most. This is
not true of all our men, for had we not the support of them, no
woman could succeed in business or be employed in the different
occupations of men.36
Lampton Bacchus’s own business experience—and her invitation to
address the NNBL convention on this topic—was largely a result of
family connections. Bishop E. W. Lampton of Greenville, Missis-
sippi, had appointed his daughter to administer his considerable es-
tate after his death. The means by which Lampton Bacchus entered
the public sphere of business—that is, a family inheritance—was by
far the most common avenue to entrepreneurship for women of any
race. Moreover, her appeal on behalf of black womanhood should be

46
 Racial Segregation

placed within the legacy of African American women reformers that

emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. This tradition in-
cluded intellectuals and activists such as Frances Harper, Ida B. Wells,
and Anna Julia Cooper. As Hazel Carby demonstrates, black women
reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries chal-
lenged the racist assumptions in conventional notions of feminin-
ity.37 In doing so they articulated the unique predicament of black
women, who were consistently denied access to the social authority
and influence assigned to white women better able to fulfill the ex-
pectations prescribed by the cult of true womanhood.
Madam Walker, however, does not fit neatly into the tradition of
black women intellectuals and activists. Although self-taught, she
was not an intellectual; although a philanthropist, she cannot rightly
be called a middle-class reformer. Nor can Walker, by the fact of her
financial stake in the burgeoning personality industry, simply be as-
signed the role of disciple of Booker T. Washington. For these rea-
sons, discussions of black uplift after the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury are incomplete without accounting for Walker’s conspicuous
presence. Even by 1912, the year of her memorable if unexpected ap-
pearance before the National Negro Business League, the black press
reported that she trained as sales agents nationwide “not less than
1,600 people, women mainly.”38 At the following year’s NNBL con-
vention, Walker made the slightly more modest claim of having
given “employment to more than 1000 women.” Nevertheless, she
could boast that her agents “are now making all the way from $5,
$10, and even as high as $15 a day.”39 These numbers are put into per-
spective when it is understood that, at this time, unskilled white
workers earned under $2 per day and few black women made more
than $1.50 per week.40
At the 1912 convention, Madam Walker forced open the door of
the NNBL for black working-class women who labored in occupa-
tions considered less than respectable by the black bourgeoisie. The
following year, Washington formally invited Walker to speak before
the NNBL in Philadelphia on the practical subject of “Manufactur-
ing Hair Preparations.” She opened her first officially sanctioned ad-
dress by announcing: “it would be more interesting and profitable

47
 Racial Segregation

for me to tell how I have succeeded in the business world, in order

that other women of my race may take hold of similar work and make
good.” As a capitalist, Walker was primarily concerned with profits.
As a self-promoter, she was interested in the art of the sale. She
understood that the best way to sell her goods was to advertise her-
self through the language of virtuous uplift that was so familiar to her
customers.
Yet Walker also viewed her own success as inextricably bound to
uplifting her race. More specifically, she argued before the 1913
NNBL that her efforts to dignify the cosmetics industry would profit
other black women too. Thus, prior to repeating the narrative of her
triumphant plight from sharecropper to entrepreneur before the con-
vention audience, she spoke of the unique obstacles facing black
women in business. “The girls and women of our race must not be
afraid to take hold of business endeavor and, by patient industry[,]
close economy, determined effort, and close application to business,
wring success out of a number of business opportunities that lie at
their very doors.”41 Walker touted her own achievement in giving
many women of her race the opportunity for employment as sales
agents for her products. “I have made it possible,” she concluded, “for
many colored women to abandon the wash-tub for more pleasant
and profitable occupation.”42 It was fast becoming a widely known
fact that hundreds of black women were gainfully employed as Walker
agents and, as such, instructed in the civic virtues of business success
as well as cosmetics application.43
With Walker’s 1913 NNBL address finished, Washington rose in
order to direct the convention toward its next item of business. Yet,
before doing so, he gave her a compliment, one that might be con-
sidered patronizing and even backhanded in view of the context in
which it was uttered and the considerable laughter it drew from the
floor: “You [fellow entrepreneurs] talk about what the men are doing
in a business way, why if we don’t watch out the women will excel
us.”44 Indeed, Walker was excelling in every way. Her business was
booming. Furthermore, as she toured the country giving lectures on
the topic “The Negro Woman in Business,” she was hailed in the
black press as both black America’s first millionaire and “America’s

48
 Racial Segregation

Foremost Colored Woman,” who displayed a “philanthropic promi-

nence classing with Helen Gould, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew
Carnegie.”45
The following year, Washington invited Walker—now considered
the most famous entrepreneur in black America—to the NNBL’s
Fifteenth Annual Convention in Muskogee, Oklahoma. We might
speculate that he learned a lesson from his prior encounter with her,
for on this occasion he simply announced: “We are going to give
[Madam Walker] five minutes’ time in which she can talk about any-
thing she chooses.” Not surprisingly, Walker reiterated themes famil-
iar to her audience—including references to her personal rags-to-
riches story, to what she called “the struggle I am making to build up
Negro womanhood,” and to her philanthropic efforts at home and in
Africa. In another audacious and thoroughly self-promoting gesture,
she took the opportunity to request that the NNBL officially “en-
dorse” her as the leading businesswoman in black America. Never
one to play it safe, she concluded her 1914 address by seemingly re-
turning the favor of Washington’s compliment from the year before:
“Everything that [Booker T. Washington] and his League are trying
to do deserves and gets my warmest sympathy and support, and,” she
added, “if the truth be known there are many women who are re-
sponsible for the success of you men.” When the laughter and ap-
plause ceased, the convention immediately gave Walker its endorse-
ment as “the foremost business woman of our race.”46
Walker’s command over Washington’s business league was now
complete. Washington died prior to the following year’s convention,
which was devoted to eulogizing their fallen president and the Pro-
gressive Era’s most prominent race leader. This makes Walker’s appar-
ent absence from the 1915 NNBL conference (her name never ap-
pears in the annual report) seem almost conspicuous. At the next
year’s 1916 annual meeting, she made a triumphant return to the
League by declaring in her scheduled address: “I have now built up
the biggest business owned and operated by Negroes anywhere in
America.”47 No black entrepreneur, male or female, could challenge
this boast. Soon thereafter Walker symbolically backed her colossal
assertion by building on the Hudson River her Xanadu, a spectacular

49
 Racial Segregation

mansion dubbed Villa Lewaro by Enrico Caruso. Not just a spectacu-

lar mansion, Villa Lewaro was also a monument to conspicuous con-
sumption and consumer desire in black America.
The evidence strongly suggests that, even prior to her outspoken
debut at the 1912 NNBL gathering, Walker had mastered the conven-
tional paradigm of the self-made man. Two and one-half years earlier
she used her success story to advertise her makeover products in the
local and national black media. On 16 April 1910, she publicly an-
nounced the new location of Walker Manufacturing Company by
running her first advertisement in her hometown Indianapolis Free-
man, one of the most widely read and respected black newspapers in
the country. The ad for her Wonderful Hair Grower covered a full
two-thirds of the newspaper’s second page. About half of the space
was covered with letters (eleven in all) from satisfied customers. One
letter, for example, testified to the product’s unequaled merits in “the
art of growing hair.” Walker also used her own likeness to promote
her business. Atop the page for this ad was a “Before and After”
photo of Madam Walker, a portrait that became a trademark when
she put her face on the labels of her products. The text of the ad con-
veyed her eighteen years of frustration at losing her hair “until she
made this wonderful discovery, which is now known to people
throughout the country.” Mainstream spokesmen for the gospel of
American success had long promoted the partnership of God and
Mammon. A shrewd saleswoman and self-described “Hair Cultur-
ist,” Madam Walker was no stranger to this doctrine, which she ex-
ploited to gain the confidence of potential customers:
During my many years of research, endeavoring to find something
to improve my own hair, in preparations manufactured by others I
was always unsuccessful, until through the Divine Providence of
God I was permitted in a dream to discover the preparation that I
am now placing at the disposal of the thousands who are today in
the same condition that I was in, just three years ago.48
Not once, but at four separate moments in the Wonderful Hair
Growing ad of April 1910, Walker explicitly credits God for bequeath-
ing to her the magical hair care formula and for inspiring her to share

50
 Racial Segregation

it with others. Walker balanced the pitch for her product’s ability to
improve one’s external appearance with the story of a divinely or-
dained discovery of the miracle hair grower. In this way, she created a
hybrid form of self-made success, one that mixed moral luck and the
new consumer desire for a magnetic personality.
The literature of success, as we have seen, typically codes luck as
white. In appropriating the convention of divinely ordained uplift,
Walker altered moral luck to meet the expectations of the black
American consumer. For example, in an interview with the Kansas
City Star (circa 1915), she repeated her story of entrepreneurial inspi-
ration, but placed an African medium between herself and God—
and suggested that the entire scenario appeared to her within a dream.
“He answered my prayer, for one night I had a dream, and in that
dream a big black man appeared to me and told me what to mix up
for my hair. Some of the remedy was grown in Africa, but I sent for
it, mixed it, [and] put it on my scalp.”49 The African continent, aside
from transmitting inspiration to her entrepreneurial children across
the sea, played a more tangible role in Walker’s affairs. By 1914 she
could claim before the NNBL annual convention that, among her
other philanthropic endeavors, she was currently financing the edu-
cation of five African children (three boys and two girls) at Tuskegee
“for the purpose of founding and establishing a Negro Industrial
School on the West Coast of Africa.”50
Within a year before her own death in May 1919, Madam Walker’s
political and economic agenda for racial uplift at home and abroad
took on a nationalist look that would soon be associated with Gar-
veyism. She gladly offered her Hudson mansion as the site of at least
one 1919 meeting of the International League of Darker Peoples
(ILDP), a small group of activists whose members included A. Philip
Randolph and Marcus Garvey. The ILDP, in rejecting President Wil-
son’s proposal at Versailles that Europe continue to oversee Germany’s
African colonies, demanded that German Africa be replaced by a
governing body composed of “enlightened sections” of the African
diaspora.51 Thus, while the demand for African self-rule marked a
turn away from Booker Washington’s limited partnership with Euro-

51
 Racial Segregation

pean colonization, it nevertheless remained true to the “civilization-

ist” legacy of American black nationalism.
On the home front, Walker, like many race leaders of her day,
opposed social equality, a phrase associated with racial integration,
while being a vocal supporter of the NAACP’s antilynching cam-
paign. “We don’t want social equality with white folks,” she was heard
telling the delegates at the July 1918 Association of Colored Women
convention in Denver. “We do want equality of opportunity” within
black America.52 It would be a mistake to read Walker’s repudiation
of social equality simply as a nod to black nationalism. Instead, it
marks her intervention into the debate over black enterprise. Given
that enterprising blacks faced the threat of lynching as well as busi-
ness competition from white America, opposing racial integration
while calling for equal opportunity made good business as well as po-
litical sense. Decades after Madam Walker’s death, when she was
memorialized as a millionaire folk hero,53 rumors circulated concern-
ing the belief that her first husband, Moses McWilliams, was the vic-
tim of a lynching. There is no factual evidence (of which I am aware)
to support this claim. Yet, as A’Lelia Bundles suggests, the lynching
of McWilliams is a “plausible fiction given the era.”54 Regardless,
Walker’s speech before the Association of Colored Women captured
the considerable scope of her ambition. In the Age of Booker T.
Washington, it displayed her business acumen; anticipating the com-
ing of Jamaican-born immigrant Marcus Garvey, it manifested the
politics of racial solidarity. Given the gathering of enterprising black
women, it marked Madam Walker as a race woman of the first order.

52
 4
Immigrant Aspirations

Out of America: Marcus Garvey

When twenty-nine-year-old West Indian Marcus Garvey reached the
port of New York in March 1916, he stepped ashore and headed for
Harlem where he roomed with a Jamaican family. He was not alone
in his journey north. Harlem was the final destination for thousands
of Caribbean immigrants who joined black Americans from the South
in the Great Migration to the urban metropolis. Most newly arrived
blacks had worked in rural settings and were now experiencing the
unsettling process of proletarianization under an expanding indus-
trial economy attempting to meet the demands of World War I.
The Back-to-Africa movement known as Garveyism captured the
imagination of these recently displaced black agricultural workers. Its
dynamic if potentially contradictory message wedded individual en-
terprise to racial solidarity in the service of building a black Palestine
through mass migration to the African motherland. For an emerging
black proletariat that dreamed of class mobility but whose opportuni-
ties were bound by segregation, Marcus Garvey offered a revision of
Washington’s famous but increasingly less relevant call to “cast down
your buckets where you are.” Speaking before his organization, the
Universal Negro Improvement Association, in 1921, Garvey pointed
out that the UNIA program
seeks not to let the negro cast down his bucket where he is, but to
have the bucket suspended and at the same time have a desire to
build up himself as an independent force, as an independent factor in

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 Immigrant Aspirations

the country that God Almighty gave him. . . . You cannot get away
from the fact that the black man’s—the colored man’s—native
habitat is Africa.1
Less than a year later, at the annual August UNIA convention, Gar-
vey reconfirmed his organization’s commitment to “the idea of fos-
tering the industrial program set by Booker T. Washington, and in
addition . . . the idea of nationhood—a government of our own
so that our industries could be protected.”2 Garvey appropriated
Washington’s legacy of individual uplift and transformed it to meet
the needs of the changing African American geopolitical terrain of
around 1920.
Yet, unlike Washington, who attempted to transform Jim Crow
into the self-made man by appealing to Christian morality, Marcus
Garvey made positive racial difference grounded in national con-
sciousness the basis of his appeal for black uplift. While Washington
lectured that “the individual is the instrument, national virtue the
end,”3 Garvey revised this color-blind, character-based motto of
American self-making by explicitly foregrounding race alongside na-
tion: “As of the individual, so should it be of the race and nation.”4
Garvey, who resided in the United States between 1916 and 1927,
believed that the African nation would open frontiers for the new
Negro capable of uplifting the entire race. This argument tapped into
the frustration of blacks who, on the whole, were less likely than
other Americans to buy into the prevailing conception of individual-
ism. Garvey seemed to understand the legacy of Tom Moss and other
black businessmen in the United States who were lynched at the
hands of angry if enterprising whites. “If you cannot get the same
chance and opportunity alongside the white man,” he stated at the
height of his popularity in the United States in 1921, “then find a
country of your own and rise to the highest position within that
country.”5 Garvey offered black Americans entrepreneurial Pan-
Africanism. Garveyism promoted a concept of African self-reliance
that he first encountered while visiting Britain between 1912 and
1914, but that would become a product unique to the United States
during the post–World War I era.

54
 Immigrant Aspirations

In his only sustained autobiographical composition, a 1923 essay

titled “The Negro’s Greatest Enemy,” Garvey offers his life story as
an example of the efficacy of wedding individual uplift to a positive
racial identity. As a personal statement, the brief sketch provides few
details that might assist the biographer.6 I believe, however, that it is
important to situate the self-composition within the context of what
historian Robert Hill refers to as Garvey’s “political retreat.” 7 Garvey
had been convicted on mail fraud charges, was incarcerated in New
York City’s Tombs Prison, and wrote “The Negro’s Greatest Enemy”
while awaiting the outcome of his appeal for bail. The boyhood por-
trait includes a tribute to his own father:
I was born in the Island of Jamaica, British West Indies, on Aug. 17,
1887. My parents were black negroes. My father was a man of bril-
liant intellect and dashing courage. He was unafraid of conse-
quences. He took human chances in the course of life, as most
bold men do, and he failed at the close of his career. He once had a
fortune; he died poor.8
The author not only comments on his father’s capacity as a self-
starter but uses the language of personality, fully in vogue after World
War I, to describe the senior Garvey’s captivating disposition.
Marcus Garvey situates his own awakening to racial conscious-
ness within the context of Jamaica’s two-tiered color-coded class/
racial-caste hierarchy. Not until his “maturity” at age eighteen, he as-
serts, was racial prejudice a factor in his everyday life. He claims to
have “got mixed up in public life” for the first time when, while a
manager at a Kingston printing establishment, he “saw the injustice
done to my race because it was black.” The crisis in race relations
compelled Garvey to leave Jamaica and travel throughout the West
Indies, Central and South America, and finally Europe. He writes,
repeatedly, “I found the same stumbling-block—‘You are black.’”9
Faced with racial obstacles to personal advancement prior to emigrat-
ing to the United States, Garvey groped for a means to understand-
ing and improving his condition. According to the account given in
“The Negro’s Greatest Enemy,” he stumbled onto a rosetta stone:
“I read ‘Up From Slavery,’ by Booker T. Washington, and then my

55
 Immigrant Aspirations

doom—if I may so call it—of being a race leader dawned upon me in

London after I had traveled through almost half of Europe.” He im-
mediately asked himself: “ ‘Where is the black man’s Government?’
‘Where is his King and his kingdom?’ ‘Where is his President, his
country, and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big af-
fairs?’ I could not find them, and then I declared, ‘I will help to make
them.’”10 Placing Booker T. Washington at the center of his personal
statement not only made Garvey’s life more readable to U.S. audi-
ences. It also gave him a way of making black nationalism relevant to
the lives of a recently uprooted black working class.
Early in 1915, the twenty-seven-year-old Garvey wrote Booker T.
Washington telling him of his plans for a Tuskegee-style industrial
school in Jamaica and asking for his support. When he wrote again,
stating his intention to visit the United States, the foremost black
American leader responded politely, offering to make the young Ja-
maican’s stay “as pleasant and as profitable as we can.”11 As Washing-
ton’s biographer suggests, it is likely that he misinterpreted Garvey’s
intentions, believing UNIA to be a flattering imitation of his own
National Negro Business League.12 Washington died only months
after his correspondence with Garvey, but his influence on the latter
did not diminish with his passing.
Tuskegee provided an inspirational, if not actual,13 blueprint for
the UNIA and its most ambitious entrepreneurial project, a steam-
ship company named the Black Star Line (BSL). From the moment
of his 1916 arrival on the mainland to his federal deportation in 1927,
Garvey linked individual enterprise to black nationalism. In doing
so, he laid claim to Washington’s legacy as the foremost race leader in
the United States. In the mid-twenties, when the efficacy of the
UNIA and its uplift projects was in doubt due to public scrutiny,
government infiltration, and internal mismanagement, black news-
papers continued to measure Garvey’s achievements alongside the
accomplishments of Washington. In 1924, after the irrepressible Ja-
maican purchased the fourth vessel (the General G. W. Goethals) of
the BSL fleet and announced his plan to rechristen it the Booker T.
Washington, he drew a mixed reaction. In the September issue of the
Chicago Defender, a journalist frequently critical of Garvey did not

56
 Immigrant Aspirations

miss the opportunity to comment: “No one objects to Mr. Garvey

owning ships or going back to Africa. American colored people do
object to his taking the name of their greatest man as a title to his
comedy. The name of his vessel ought to be the ‘Marcus A. Garvey.’
Booker T. Washington was a success.”14 At the same moment, the
Harlem News editorialized that, despite Garvey’s blunders, the leader
of the UNIA had “awakened the race consciousness and race pride of
the masses of Africans everywhere as no man ever did . . . save Booker
T. Washington.”15 The historical misreading in this statement reveals
the influence that Garvey had on black America of the period. Only
in the wake of Garvey, who persistently attempted to ally himself with
the sage of Tuskegee, could Washington’s efforts be remembered as
an attempt to stimulate “the race consciousness and race pride” in the
African diaspora. Nevertheless, the organic appeal of Garvey’s mes-
sage was based on an ideal promoted by Booker Washington and the
National Negro Business League: namely, blacks should invest their
money in black-owned businesses. The Negro Moses put it this way:
“The Black Star Line corporation presents to every Black Man,
Woman and Child the opportunity to climb the great ladder of in-
dustrial and commercial progress. . . . The [BSL] will turn over large
profits and dividends to stockholders, and operate to their interest
even whilst they will be asleep.”16
For Garvey, black enterprise was the motor of individual oppor-
tunity and the progress of the race. As Edmund David Cronon
points out, financial speculation in the UNIA’s Black Star Line or in
its Negro Factory Corporation allowed blacks to claim for themselves
a success previously associated only with white financiers, such as the
Wall Street wizard J. Pierpont Morgan.17
Garvey readily acknowledged the significance of Washington’s
Up From Slavery on his own emergence as the most popular race
leader in America during the 1920s.18 As we saw earlier, the broad-
based appeal of Up From Slavery was due, in large part, to its author’s
ability to appropriate for black men the rhetorical conventions of
Anglo-Saxon entrepreneurial success without explicitly challenging
racist institutions and practices. While in the United States, Garvey
also spoke within the individualistic language of the American Way.

57
 Immigrant Aspirations

In a 1919 Philadelphia speech, he preached “self-reliance wherein the

Negro must do for himself,”19 and, in 1921, he told a journalist that
“no man will do as much for you as you will do for yourself.”20 Gar-
vey’s writing on uplift also displayed the masculinist inflection com-
mon to nationalist narratives of self-making, black or white. In a 1922
editorial published in the UNIA’s organ, Negro World, he states: “The
first thing th[at] we will have to do is to remake ourselves, lift our-
selves from the conditions of slavery, of being lackeys, parasites or
wards, to the position of real men, men of initiative, men of brawn
and power, men of great accomplishments.”21 Although Garvey might
praise the entrepreneurial achievements of Madam Walker,22 his
speeches and writings suggest that he believed that “real men” remade
themselves in steel and shipping trades rather than by manufacturing
hair-care products or perfume. In turn, he advised the women of
his race to conform to racially coded middle-class standards of true
womanhood: “be true to your men,” he told black women, “be as
true to your men in this crisis as the white women have been to their
men through all their difficulties.”23
Although Garvey was a black leader in the nineteenth-century
“civilizationist” tradition, he also spoke directly to a newly awakened
black diaspora by celebrating the common history and inherent
racial uniqueness of Africans at home and throughout the world.
Nonetheless, from at least the time of his first trip to Britain in 1912,
Garvey believed that, without an Anglicized culture, members of the
African diaspora lacked the means for racial uplift and were destined
for extinction. Upon his return to Jamaica two years later, he imme-
diately gained a brash reputation among the black and colored Ja-
maican elite. He scolded them for their “callous indifference and in-
sincerity” toward the vast majority of the population, who were
black, poor, and “still ignorant and backward.” More directly, they
had “failed to do their duty by the race in promoting a civilized im-
perialism that would meet with the approval of established ideals.”24
Soon afterward, he settled on the idea that the black man required “a
nation and a country of his own, where he can best show evidence of
his own ability in the art of human progress.”25
In a well-publicized address delivered in Kingston six months be-

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 Immigrant Aspirations

fore his arrival in the United States, Garvey continued to indict the
“cultured class” that would rather avoid than confront the “uncouth
and vulgar” environs of the Jamaican masses.26 Alternatively, the
Universal Negro Improvement Association, which Garvey headed,
“has set itself the task to go among the people and help them up to
a better state of appreciation among the cultured classes, and
raise them to the standard of civil[iz]ed approval.” Booker T. Wash-
ington cast a long shadow over Garvey’s speech: he is mentioned at
the beginning, middle, and end of the address. The 1914 speech made
explicit the degree to which Washington’s authorizing signature was
written upon Garvey’s maturing public persona. The address, which
was reprinted in the Jamaican Daily Chronicle, incited a heated de-
bate. One vocal opponent of Garvey at the time, a colored Jamaican
professional named Leo S. Pink, attempted to use the Washington
mystique to deflate the posturing of the young UNIA president:
“Booker T. Washington worked earnestly for his race and is entitled
to the position he now occupies, and Mr. Garvey must not think for
one moment he can be a Booker Washington, as great men are born,
not made.”27 Pink apparently had not read Up From Slavery. The
president of the UNIA, on the other hand, was already well versed in
tales of American success prior to his arrival in the United States.
At this time, as Judith Stein observes, there was a general agree-
ment among leaders, black and white, that the model of “Euro-
pean . . . planning and efficiency” could provide the means for bring-
ing Africa into the modern world.28 Garvey’s popularity can be
attributed to his ability to wed the imperialist example of white in-
dustrialists and financiers to a message of Pan-African pride. The
UNIA’s Black Star Line was the perfect vehicle for imagining, if not
fulfilling, his Back-to-Africa program. In the wake of World War I,
commercial shipping became increasingly important to the U.S.
strategy of dominance in global affairs. Not only was the American
navy the focus of its war efforts but, as Stein elaborates, after the
armistice the new American fleet became the means by which the
United States could sustain and expand its overseas markets.29 Gar-
vey’s grand schemes were financed, in part, by the relative affluence
of black Americans, who indirectly benefited from the economic

59
 Immigrant Aspirations

prosperity of the United States on the world market during the post-
war period. In an effort to raise sufficient capital to purchase steam-
ships for the BSL fleet, the UNIA sold stock shares to its black con-
stituency, who resided primarily in the United States and, to a lesser
extent, in the Caribbean.30 “If we are to rise as a great [people] to be-
come a great national force, we must start business enterprises of our
own,” stated Garvey in 1919. More specifically, “we must build ships
and start trading with ourselves between America, the West Indies
and Africa.”31 The Black Star Line reversed the direction of the At-
lantic slave trade, transforming the infamous Middle Passage into a
Pan-Africanist shipping as well as emigration route for “the purpose
of bettering the industrial and economic condition of the race.”32
Garvey found himself in the contradictory position of promot-
ing the activities of corporate captains of industry while criticizing
their imperialist interests abroad. He made one of his earliest public
references to Anglo-Saxon self-made men on the final day of the 1922
UNIA convention. In the process of asking Americans of African de-
scent to redirect their savings and investments from white-controlled
Wall Street institutions to the black-owned UNIA organizations,
Garvey offered ideas on the white way to wealth:
God never made rich men. How did men come to be rich? By
being able to fool the other folks. If you read the lives of million-
aires like Carnegie and Rockefeller you will find that they never
started with anything. They were not born rich, they got rich by
working out plans by which they would get people to work for
them. . . . All that he uses is brains to harness your labor and the
whole country of white people is working for these few men of
brains who sit down in Wall Street.33
Garvey, apparently an avid reader of entrepreneurial autobiographies,
believed that millionaires were not born but made by the power of
their minds. His appeal to mind power as a means to business em-
pire—which, Robert Hill points out, had its most significant impact
on the leader of the UNIA only after he was deported from the
United States34—was indebted to the spread of the New Thought
philosophy of success in the first few decades of this century.
Regardless, the imperialist-based schemes of the Rockefellers, the

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 Immigrant Aspirations

Firestones, and the Carnegies—which amassed fortunes for Ameri-

can captains of industry in the name of civilized human progress for
underdeveloped nations—posed a problem for Garvey. What was the
difference between the overseas entrepreneurial adventures of these
white men and his own blueprint for establishing black-owned cor-
porations in the motherland? As early as April 1923, Garvey began
pointing out that when white capitalists look toward the dark conti-
nent, it is not with the interests of Africans in mind: “The white man
is now” developing Africa “not with the intention of building for
other races, but with the intention of building for himself—for the
white race.”35
If the oil of Africa is good for Rockefeller’s interest; if iron ore is
good for the Carnegie Trust; then surely these minerals are good
for us. Why should we allow Wall Street and the capitalist group of
America and other countries to exploit our country when they
refuse to give us a fair chance in the countries of our adoption?
Why should not Africa give to the world its black Rockefeller,
Rothschild and Henry Ford?36
According to the logic of Garvey’s words, imperialism in Africa is a
problem when white captains of industry exploit the raw materials of
the continent; it is a virtue when it grants the opportunity to bring
forth entrepreneurs from the black diaspora. As he saw it, the task
at hand was for blacks worldwide “to make a desperate effort to re-
conquer our Motherland,” and protect her from the “selfish exploita-
tion and domination” of white men. With a fervor reminiscent of
nineteenth-century Christian missionaries, he writes: “If native Afri-
cans are unable to appreciate the value of their own country from the
standard of Western civilization, then it is for us, their brothers, to
take to them the knowledge and information that they need to help
to develop the country.”37
Black Americans, unlike Jamaicans and other West Indians, were
not living under a colonial doctrine according to which England or
France was the mother country. Garvey recognized this difference,
and cultivated among blacks in the United States a collective racial
consciousness that confirmed Africa as their national origin. The
United States, in turn, might be seen as a port of departure for black

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 Immigrant Aspirations

Americans who desired to emigrate to Africa. Yet, aside from his per-
sonal entanglements with the law, two problems overwhelmed Gar-
vey’s dream of what he once called the “United States of Africa.”38
First, moving millions of people across the Atlantic involved an array
of nearly insurmountable practical hurdles. Second, by the 1920s
native-born blacks increasingly thought of themselves as U.S. citizens
first and African descendants second. This must have been difficult
for a West Indian emigrant to comprehend. For Garvey, who in-
sisted, “I was born in an alien country [ Jamaica],”39 America was a
long way from the promised land. The United States functioned, in-
stead, as his inspirational and practical port of departure.

From Steerage to Self-Culture: Mary Antin

For most immigrants who came to the United States during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, America became a final
resting place if not a paradise of riches. The Progressive Era not only
witnessed the largest wave of immigration to the nation’s shores, but
also saw the composition of the foreign-born population shift from
northwestern to southeastern Europeans.40 The great wave, lasting
roughly from 1890 to 1920, coincided with a period in U.S. history
when the idea of the self-made man was at its most popular. How did
the idea of American success influence the lives of new arrivals, par-
ticularly those who, although not black, emigrated from countries
outside northwestern Europe? What impact, if any, did the visibility
of these strangers in America have on the figure of the self-made man
in the new century? Traditionally, the heroes of uplift stories were not
only white and male but northern European too. After the Civil War,
as long as newcomers continued to migrate mainly from Germany
and Britain, native-born Americans had little reason to feel that their
cultural traditions were threatened by outsiders. As John Higham
points out, even nativists of the 1880s were confident that the Anglo-
Saxon had “a marvelous capacity for assimilating kindred races, ab-
sorbing their valuable qualities, yet remaining basically unchanged.”41
The venerated Gilded Age self-made man, Scottish immigrant
Andrew Carnegie, concurred with this assessment. He agreed that

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America was a melting pot, but of a very narrow kind. New arrivals
would ideally be assimilated as Anglo-Americans. In the opening sen-
tence of a chapter titled “The American People” from his Triumphant
Democracy (1886), the steel magnate professed his faith that newcomers
could be absorbed into the national culture of the United States.
“Fortunately for the American people,” he stated, “they are essen-
tially British.”42 In the year that Carnegie published Triumphant
Democracy, only 16 percent of all immigrants to the United States
originated in the eastern and southern regions of the Old World. Ten
years later, in 1896, new immigrants from southeastern Europe stock
outnumbered “old immigrants” for the first time. By the middle of
the next decade, 75 percent of all new arrivals came from eastern and
southern Europe, and the largest portion of these were Russian Jews
and southern Italians. New immigrants were distinguishable from
the old in a number of ways: they practiced a religion other than
Protestantism, they resided in the crowded urban ghettoes, and they
became industrial wage earners rather than agricultural workers.
Many native-born citizens perceived them to be a class apart inas-
much as they seemed less assimilable and more impoverished than
earlier arrivals.
After the turn of the century, according to Higham, the increase
in new immigrants coincided with the rise of a new type of nativism
based on racial, rather than primarily religious, prejudice. In the first
decade of the twentieth century, nativists began to exploit the lan-
guage of white Anglo-Saxon superiority.43 The earliest and most sig-
nificant manifestation of the new nativism came in 1906 when Con-
gress attempted to enact a literacy test in order to curtail emigration
from southeastern Europe. Although the literacy test was defeated,
Congress established the U.S. Immigration Commission (ak a the
Dillingham Commission) to study the problem. The federal agency
was charged with investigating “the changed character of the immi-
gration movement to the United States over the past twenty-five
years.” As such, the commission started with the following presuppo-
sition: “The old and the new immigration differ in many essentials.”
Whereas the old immigrant arrived from the “most progressive sec-
tions of Europe for the purpose of making for themselves homes in

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 Immigrant Aspirations

the New World,” the new immigrant was characterized as “unskilled

laboring men who have come, in large part temporarily, from the less
progressive and advanced countries of Europe.” Assimilation for new
immigrants, it was believed, “has been slow as compared to that of
the earlier non-English-speaking races.”44
Behind the Dillingham study was the increasingly commonplace
assumption that the new immigrants were an inferior breed, and thus
less qualified than their European forerunners to be Americans. It
was against a mounting tide of nativism that Mary Antin published
her tract They Who Knock at Our Gates (1914). A first-generation Rus-
sian Jew, she defended new immigrants by imagining a continuum
between old-stock Americans and recent arrivals. “The ghost of the
Mayflower pilots every immigrant ship,” chanted Antin, “and Ellis
Island is another name for Plymouth Rock.”45 In the opening pages,
she acknowledges: “Granted that Sicilians are not Scotchmen, how
does that affect the right of a Sicilian to travel in pursuit of happi-
ness?” For Antin, America was symbolized by what her friend, play-
wright Israel Zangwill, had recently dubbed “the melting pot”—a
place where distinctions along lines of descent were softened, where
an Italian Catholic had the same opportunity to climb the ladder of
success as Andrew Carnegie.46 In They Who Knock at Our Gates,
Antin looks into the face of the new immigrant and envisions “a self-
made man”:
There is a phrase in the American vocabulary of approval that
sums up our national ideal of manhood. That phrase is “a self-
made man.” To such we pay the tribute of our highest admiration,
justly regarding our self-made men as the noblest product of our
democratic institutions. Now let any one compile a biographical
dictionary of our self-made men, from the romantic age of our his-
tory down to the prosaic year of 1914, and see how the smell of the
steerage pervades the volume! 47
Antin’s polemical prose enacts a counternarrative as she transforms
the rags-to-riches Christian into the pungent self-made immigrant.
Prior to the appearance of They Who Knock at Our Gates, Antin
had adroitly appropriated the language of American self-making in
order to introduce herself to a largely Protestant readership. The Prom-

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ised Land, Antin’s widely read immigrant autobiography of 1912, opens

with the pronouncement: “I was born, I have lived, and I have been
made over. . . . I am absolutely other than the person whose story I
have to tell.”48 The enthusiastic reviews of The Promised Land, cou-
pled with its impressive sales, suggest the effectiveness of her rhetori-
cal strategy.49 The book’s success can be partly attributed to the fact
that it falls within a uniquely American heritage of self-composition
dating back to Franklin. Unlike the most prominent Jewish immi-
grant writer of her era, Abraham Cahan, Antin does not dwell on the
abiding sense of religious and cultural alienation suffered by over-
achieving immigrants. And, unlike Korean writer Younghill Kang,
who was subjected to the explicitly racist forms of nativism during
the Tribal Twenties, Antin’s Progressive Era autobiography demon-
strates the efficacy of the melting-pot model of success.
It is symptomatic of Antin’s adherence to the melting-pot para-
digm in The Promised Land that she is unable to see how African
Americans might be at a disadvantage even in their encounter with
new arrivals. In a brief but telling childhood recollection, Antin de-
scribes how a neighborhood black boy, whom she accuses of bullying
her, is taken to court by her father and punished with imprisonment.
“[T]he moral of this incident,” the author remarks, “was what I saw
of the way in which justice was actually administered in the United
States. Here we were gathered in the little courtroom, bearded Ar-
lington Street against wool-headed Arlington Street. . . . We were all
free, and all treated equally, just as it said in the Constitution!” (260).
Antin’s blindness to the racial coding of morality if not justice should
not be understood as a personal oversight that lies outside Progres-
sivism. Racism lies within the logic of a movement that routinely saw
nothing disingenuous in the “separate but equal” axiom of Jim Crow.
However, in what is otherwise an optimistic immigrant narrative of
New World promises fulfilled, Antin’s frustration with her entrepre-
neurial ambitions is overdetermined by her unequal footing in the
male-dominated marketplace as a woman.
The key to immigrant uplift and assimilation in America is, for
Antin, the nation’s fledgling public school system. “The public school
has done its best for us foreigners,” she asserts in The Promised Land,

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 Immigrant Aspirations

adding “and for the country, when it has made us into good Ameri-
cans” (222). The author goes to great lengths to demonstrate how
American schools manifest the ideals of self-made success by promot-
ing freedom of opportunity. Antin claims that, while attending
Boston public schools immediately after her arrival in 1894, her edu-
cation in U.S. history forced her to “revise” her self-estimation. Here
she is exposed to the patriotic theme “Fellow Citizens”—and, more
specifically, to America’s First Fellow Citizen, George Washington.
Not only is the eager student in awe of such an inimitable historical
figure, but, she reflects, “the twin of my new-born humility, paradoxi-
cal as it may seem, was a sense of dignity I had never known before.
For if I found that I was a person of small consequence, I discovered
at the same time that I was more nobly related than I had ever sup-
posed” (224). Star-spangled statements such as this have caused com-
mentators, at least since the 1930s, to cast a skeptical eye across the
pages of The Promised Land. The book has been criticized for its
naive celebration of the American Way, especially when compared to
the realist portraits of ambitious immigrants created in the fiction of
Cahan.50
The standard reproach to Antin’s optimistic autobiography can
be maintained only when the critic overlooks how femininity func-
tions in the book to work against the grain of a celebratory story of
immigrant uplift. Only when the gendered contradictions of Antin’s
immigrant self-making are taken into account do the economic hard-
ships she and her family suffered come into sharp focus. Throughout
The Promised Land, the women in Antin’s family constitute the an-
tithesis of the ideals embodied by the self-made man. Her mother, at
times the primary breadwinner in the Old World, is repeatedly char-
acterized as “self-effacing” in the New (246). Her older sister, Frieda,
fairs little better as her “path of duty” leads only to a domestic dead
end (252) and, after the family’s arrival in Boston, to the factory floor
of a garment shop (277). Alternatively, Mary is able to take advantage
of opportunities for personal uplift not only because she has pluck
but also because she is endowed with good fortune: “I differed from
[Frieda] a little in age, considerably in health, and enormously in luck”
(99). This, however, does not explain Mary’s younger sister, Dora. Al-

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though she has all the advantages afforded Mary, Dora gravitates, like
Frieda, toward traditional women’s roles.51 As for herself, the author
simply states: “I did not like housework” (255).
Young Mary, like Alger’s fictional Tattered Tom, is able to imag-
ine herself as an enterprising individual so long as she is misrecog-
nized as a boy. Throughout the autobiography, Antin expresses her
youthful desire “to play the tomboy” (259, 266, 335), an identity that
affords her entry into the public arena of the self-made man. Her
adolescent reading list duplicates the masculine success literature
found on the childhood shelves of ambitious women such as Ida B.
Wells. Second only to stories written by Louisa Alcott, claims Antin,
“were boys’ books of adventure, many of them by Horatio Alger; and
I read all, I suppose, of the Rollo books, by Jacob Abbott” (257):
In the boys’ books I was fond of reading I came across all sorts of
heroes, and I sympathized with them all. The boy who ran away to
sea; the boy who delighted in the society of ranchmen and cow-
boys; the stage-struck boy, whose ambition was to drive a paste-
board chariot in a circus; the boy who gave up his holidays in order
to earn money for books; the bad boy who played tricks on people;
the clever boy who invented amusing toys for his blind little sis-
ter—all these boys I admired. I could put myself in the place of
any one of these heroes, and delight in their delights. (322)
Poor Frieda, the author laments, “had little enough time for reading,
unless she stole it from the sewing or the baking or the mending.”
The four walls of that kitchen “bounded her life” (337–38). Alter-
natively, sister Mary describes herself as the “imaginative growing
child” (190).
In a provocative chapter titled “The Landlady,” Antin stages the
gender restrictions placed on an immigrant girl. The reader learns
that her family’s inability to keep up with the weekly rent for their
Dover Street apartment was a persistent source of anxiety for their
seventeen-year-old daughter. Being “particularly ambitious to earn
the rent,” Mary finds a job soliciting subscriptions for a local paper
(301). Possessing all of the optimistic energy of an Alger street urchin,
Antin encounters only men in the downtown Boston business dis-
trict and sells only one subscription. A potential patron advises her

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that “he did not think it was a nice business for a girl, going through
the offices like that. This took me aback. I had not thought anything
about the nature of the business. I only wanted the money to pay the
rent. I wandered through miles of stone corridors, unable to see why
it was not a nice business, and yet reluctant to go on with it, with the
doubt in my mind” (306). Before Antin figures out why soliciting
subscriptions is inappropriate for young women, another potential
customer adds insult to injury by misidentifying her as a common
beggar rather than the enterprising youth she intends herself to be.
Although the author simply describes her loss of faith in the product
she peddles (308), the careful reader can not help but recognize the
limits placed on entrepreneurial success for a woman.
Tired, hungry, and feeling uncharacteristic self-pity as a result of
her business failure, Antin drifts into fantasy. She imagines herself
lost and destitute on the rough streets of Boston. Without hope, she
faints on a stranger’s doorstep and is found dead the next morning.
An optimistic fantasy, however, quickly replaces the nightmare: “I
might faint at the door of a rich old man’s house, who would take me
in, and order his housekeeper to nurse me, just like in the story books”
(308). The poor but virtuous girl falls into favor with a wealthy
gentleman, who takes her home to Dover Street (“in a carriage!”)
where she is happily reunited with her family. He offers her father
gainful employment, which allows the family to move out of their
ghetto apartment and into a pastoral home (“with a garden around
it”). Antin returns from escapist dreams to a bleak and humiliating
reality. In a state of desperation over the rent, she makes the mistake
of attempting to reason with her landlady, Mrs. Hutch. Antin ex-
plains to Mrs. Hutch that she intends “to go to college, to fit myself
to write poetry, and get rich, and pay the arrears.” The landlady
abruptly cuts her off by scoffing at the idea of “lazy” immigrant “beg-
gars” going to college: “You ought to go to work, if you know enough
to do one sensible thing.” The enterprising girl was at an impasse. “I
tried to sell papers, for the sake of the rent,” she recollects as she flees
her landlady’s home in shame, “and I was told it was not a nice busi-
ness” (315–17).
Despite the buoyant mood of The Promised Land, Antin is ulti-

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mately unable to cast her own success in terms of the narrative of the
self-made man. If she is unwilling to be explicitly critical of America
for thwarting her aspirations, Antin’s autobiography nevertheless per-
forms this operation by what is left unsaid in its conclusion. Here,
she addresses an anticipated question from her readership regarding
the financial rewards presumed to accompany her achievements. “Did
I get rich? you may want to know, remembering my ambition to pro-
vide for the family.” She replies: “I have earned enough to pay Mrs.
Hutch the arrears, and satisfy all my wants. And where have I lived
since I left the slums? My favorite abode is a tent in the wilderness”
(360). If the promised land does not pay off for Antin, she finds
refuge in nature. This explains why she concludes her autobiography
by recounting an anecdote about her emergence as a “practicing
naturalist” (363).
Antin maintains that she discovered “the genuine, practical equal-
ity” missing from other areas of her life in the Hale House Natural
History Club. It was her club membership—and not her entre-
preneurial endeavors—“which played an important part in my final
emancipation from the slums” (362). The author describes an excur-
sion to study marine life, where she is exposed to nature’s mysteries.
It is an experience full of wonderment for Antin, which ultimately al-
lows her to forge a deeply felt connection between herself and the
promised land. “The tide had rushed in at its proper time, stealing
away our seaweed cushions, drowning our transparent pools, spout-
ing in the crevices, booming and hissing, and tossing high the snowy
foam. . . . The members of the club . . . discussed the day’s successes,
compared specimens, exchanged field notes, or watched the western
horizon in sympathetic silence” (363). Antin, a student of nineteenth-
century Transcendentalist philosophy, locates her own narrative of
uplift in the Emersonian idea of higher laws and, more specifically, in
Thoreau’s experience at Walden Pond. Emerson’s conception of the
Oversoul, which expresses the unity of self and nature, provides her
with an alternative to commercialism.52 Only in this way does Antin
vindicate her faith in the United States as the land of what Emerson
called the “self-helping man”—the exemplar of self-culture who strives
to nourish his hungry soul rather than stockpile his bank account.53

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Oriental Yankees: Younghill Kang

Chungpa Han—the autobiographical narrator of Younghill Kang’s
East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee 54—echoes the spirit
of Mary Antin’s immigrant narrative when, upon arriving in America
in 1922, he states: “I entered a new life like one born again.”55 Born
in a northern province of Korea in 1903, Kang lived through the hu-
miliating first decade of Japanese occupation. Kang resided in Seoul
during the tumultuous year of 1919, where he found himself translat-
ing Pilgrim’s Progress for a Western missionary while protesting Japan-
ese colonial rule by participating in the March First (Sam Il) inde-
pendence movement. Disillusioned by Korea’s inability to respond
effectively to colonial occupation, he developed the unshakable de-
sire “to escape death and torture if possible and to come to Amer-
ica.”56 He arrived in New York City at the age of eighteen, just three
years prior to a statute mandating the end of Korean immigration
and completing a long-standing policy of Asian exclusion. While
Kang struggled economically and emotionally as a “foreign student,”
he kept his distance from the Korean independence movement in
America. He put his energies into finding employment that would,
aside from allowing him to complete degrees in prestigious U.S. uni-
versities, open doors toward fulfilling his desire to remake himself
through entrepreneurial success.
Historian Oscar Handlin judges that the harsh reality of immi-
grant existence was “not congenial to the ideal of the self-made busi-
nessman.”57 Kang’s autobiographical novel suggests the extent to
which, for a Korean in the 1920s, the lack of congeniality in the arena
of enterprise was rooted in nativism and racial prejudice. Chungpa
Han’s “first American step . . . in economic life” (57), for example, is
as a cook’s helper in an upper-class white home. Here he is imme-
diately exposed to racial hierarchies within the United States. His
employer informs him that he and a Korean friend are replacing a
hardworking Negro cook because she believes they will be more “pre-
sentable” than a black servant (63). Within a week, however, Han is
fired for ineptitude. This is the first in a series of instances in which
the Korean immigrant’s lack of familiarity with Western business prac-

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tices coupled with the nativist attitudes of his employers results in his
failure to get a foot onto the ladder of marketplace achievement.
Contemporary reviewers of East Goes West interpreted the book
as an optimistic celebration of the immigrant in America, perhaps
akin to Antin’s Promised Land. More recently, Elaine Kim has re-
sponded to these misreadings by flatly stating that Kang’s book “is
not a minority success story.”58 Indeed, the fictional autobiography
not only represents Han as a failed entrepreneur but illustrates the
difficult, often racist, conditions under which Koreans labored in
America. It is important to add, however, that Kang’s work demon-
strates the productivity of failed immigrant uplift in the 1920s. More
specifically, the author appropriates the language of self-made success
not simply to illustrate his victimization in the New World but also
as a means of representing the process by which a Korean’s ethnic
identity is fashioned and refashioned even under the most restrictive
forms of nativism.
In Kang’s first autobiographical novel, The Grass Roof, the author
examines the differences between East and West primarily through
the concept of individual enterprise. The narrator, Han, describes his
Buddhist upbringing within a Korean society where a precapitalist
mode of accumulation endured and where the idea of the “indi-
vidual” or “success” remained foreign. Until recently, he informs us,
Korea and other Asian cultures devalued business enterprise relative
to other worldly pursuits: “According to Korean, Chinese, and Japan-
ese social system of the old days, business almost was the lowest oc-
cupation, the order being scholars, agriculturists, artisans and mer-
chants, coolies and dog-slayers.”59 Alternatively, the figure of the
self-made man provides the immigrant Han with a newly conceived
identity. As he prepares for his Occidental voyage at the conclusion
of The Grass Roof, Han rationalizes the prohibitive cost by casting
himself in the same mold as an American original: “After paying my
passage I was almost penniless, like young Benjamin Franklin arriv-
ing in Philadelphia.”60 Nearly two hundred years to the day after
Franklin disembarked from the Market Street Wharf in Philadelphia,
Kang’s autobiographical narrator steps off a steamship in the New
York harbor with four dollars in his pocket. At the opening of East

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Goes West, Han wanders the city streets aimlessly and, by the after-
noon of his second day, is left with a dime. Despite such hardships,
he remains optimistic: “My first American step,” he tells his Ameri-
canized Korean friend named George, “I will make money” (57). Yet,
as an Asian immigrant, Han makes more of an awkward appearance
than Franklin ever imagined for himself. He attempts to improve his
look with a visit to the barbershop, although his first job interview
proves a failure when he learns that the prospective employer is not
hiring Negroes or Orientals.
In the most immediate sense, Han’s business ventures are a means
to fulfilling the promise of a Western education offered by “the land
of golden opportunity” (134). Yet, in repeated efforts to fulfill his
New World expectations, Han finds less than ideal employment in
the area of retail sales—both on the road (peddling encyclopedias)
and on the floor of a major department store (where his identity as
an Oriental is exploited in the service of selling chinaware). The
lessons Han learns in business become the foundation for his educa-
tion not just in American consumerism but in the forms that racism
and nativism take in the United States. His most extensive exposure
to the art of the sale comes in the form of an encounter with Mr. D. J.
Lively, the bullish owner of the Universal Education Publishing Com-
pany. Lively, whose tautological motto is “The successful salesman is
a success” (154), suggests putting Han to work selling the Universal
Education encyclopedia. When his prospective employee explains how
“very hard” it is “for an Oriental to learn American salesmanship,” he
gives Han the hard sell on the “spirit of American optimism.”
Kang’s representation of Lively appears as a gloss on the teach-
ings of Bruce Barton, who during the 1920s popularized the life of
Jesus Christ by envisioning him as an enterprising prophet with a
magnetic personality.61 More specifically, Lively promotes retail sales
to Han with an inspiring account of how the nation’s founding fa-
ther, George Washington, got his start as a drummer:
“How I do like to see manly independence! The spirit that inspired
Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. The spirit back of
these United States of America. Nothing is too small by which to
make honest money. George Washington, the father of his coun-

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try, was only a poor bookseller once. Did you know that, my boy?
Yes, a poor bookseller.” He made an impressive pause. “And the
man you see before you, too. D. J. Lively. That’s how he got his
start. The selling business.” (142–43)
Successful sales skills are, Lively suggests, essential to nation building.
He recognizes that his prospective employee must make an advan-
tage out of the obvious disadvantage of being an Asian outsider
within the U.S. marketplace. He thus decides on an appropriate sales
image for Han: “A fine clean Christian young Oriental earning his
way through college” (143).
In the Protestant tradition of the self-made man, Lively teaches
that making money is a means of fulfilling a Christian calling: “in
salesmanship, just as in Life, you must have Faith. Faith in all the
finer, nobler things—in yourself, in the goods you are selling” (145).
Using his Sunday School voice and a chalkboard, he opens the train-
ing session for his new employees with a lesson in climbing the lad-
der of success. Lively instructs his students to follow the “four S’s,”
which he places in ascending order on the blackboard. The first “S”
stands for Service: “Doing good is the secret of how [our company]
makes money.” The middle two “S’s” stand for Stuff and Sticking,
the necessary ingredients to completing the fourth “S”: “Sales, of
course!” exclaims Lively. “And it’s sales that makes the successful man
or woman in business.” But, Lively insists, “it takes all four S’s to
make the big S in Success!” at which time he draws a line through all
the S’s and asks: “what do we get, folks? Why, yes! The American dol-
lar!” Han’s ecstatic response to Lively’s instruction comes in the form
of a rhetorical question: “Was I not being admitted into the Holy of
Holies of the American civilization? This was just the very baptism I
needed” (153–54).
Han’s immersion in the fires of free enterprise is also the moment
when he offers some of his most caustic, if unwitting, comments on
the contradictions of the concept of success. The clerical tone of
Lively’s lecture inspires in his pupil a colonial frame of reference for
understanding a sales vocation: “Almost like a missionary” (145), Han
thinks, as he associates American capitalism with Christian charity in
Korea. The narrator’s knowledge of Chinese brings him to the un-

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anticipated revelation: “I thought Mr. Lively would surely approve of

the Chinese character for Buddha, which is man with a dollar sign
after it (so: )” (154). Here Han’s familiarity with a non-Western lan-
guage generates a poignant commentary on the enterprising man in
America, for whom the Almighty Dollar is a manifestation of God’s
presence in this world.
Lively’s assistant, Miss Fulton, reinforces her boss’s lesson: “We
are spreading the light of knowledge and a true foundation of good
Christian character” (158). If nineteenth-century prophets of success
preached that Mammon could serve God, their twentieth-century
counterparts were known to contend that the salesman’s winning
personality might nourish the inner character of the customer. “We
all know,” Miss Fulton instructs, “that we are not only helping our-
selves and the company . . . but we are making the customer do what
we know is good for her” (158). Only the salesman willing to “revolu-
tionize [his] personality” has the capacity to create desire and break
down resistance: “The good salesman makes the customer want the
unwanted article. . . . No customer willingly buys. He struggles
against buying though it may be for his own good.” Sporting a gold-
toothed “successful smile,” Miss Fulton urges her pupils: “Be vital,
dynamic” and, above all, “make yourself an attractive human being”
(154–56).
Although his door-to-door sales experience proves disastrous,
Han, armed with personal magnetism, takes a job as a retail clerk in
the chinaware section of a large department store chain in Philadel-
phia. He soon finds himself appalled by the management techniques
employed by the company, which prompts his critique of Tayloriza-
tion, the process by which human activity in the workplace is orga-
nized according to models of rational efficiency.62 Han describes the
enforced “regimentation” of department store work, where every em-
ployee has a number rather than a name and is governed by a clock,
and sullenly concludes that “life in a department store was a horrible
life for all people” (312–13). Work-related experiences of this sort
force him to recognize that, despite his initial optimism, the work
ethic in modern America “costs too much in soul-destroying energy”
(318). Once he dreamed of becoming a department store buyer and

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climbing the corporate ladder of success (307). His enterprising vi-

sion is thwarted, however, when he is refused promotion from the
level of a lowly sales clerk.63 With the adverse experience behind him,
Kang wrote in a 1941 autobiographical sketch: “I severed my com-
mercial ties” forever.64
Han is haunted by the reality of racial prejudice directed at a
nonwhite enterprising immigrant such as himself. “Once in Amer-
ica,” he states near the conclusion of East Goes West, “I had a dream.”
It opens with the narrator climbing a lofty tree. Upon reaching its
peak he sees a hairlike suspension bridge attached to a limb and
stretching across a wide body of water to Korea, a nostalgic “paradise
of wild and flowery magic . . . a never-never land.” At the far end of
the bridge, two of Han’s boyhood friends beckon him to cross over.
“But all in a moment, things began tumbling out of my pockets,
money and keys, contracts and business letters. Especially the key to
my car, my American car. I clutched, but I saw it falling” (400). The
dream stages the impossibility of simply bridging or harmonizing the
beliefs and value systems of Eastern and Western cultures. It also re-
veals the persistent lure of materialism for the immigrant Han: “ever
present in my mind [during the dream] was the urgency of finding
the car key, of recovering all of the money” (401).
Han, wandering through his dream searching for his money and
keys, finds himself running down steps into a cryptlike cellar beneath
an unnamed American city. He is not alone. The other men in the
cellar are frightened-looking Negroes. Peering through the iron grat-
ing above, Han sees red-faced men outside carrying clubs, knives,
and torches, and realizes that the cellar is being attacked by an angry
lynch mob. “And through the grating I saw the flaring torches being
brought. And applied. Being shoved, crackling, through the gratings.
I awoke like the phoenix out of a burst of flames” (401). In his dream,
Han fares little better than black men such as Tom Moss, who were
lynched by white racists for their enterprising ambitions. An earlier
comment from Han’s close friend, To Wan Kim, echoes throughout
the former’s horrible dream. “But money and power in New York are
not for men of my race,” Kim instructs Han, and continues: “Even if

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we succeeded, we would not be admired for that, but only hated and
feared” (232).
It might be best to interpret Han’s dream sequence within the
context of a nonwhite immigrant’s existence in racially segregated
America. The dream is thus symbolic not merely of the clash between
Western society and an Eastern value system. It also stages the life-
threatening circumstances—specifically, lynchings—under which he
and his compatriots labored. In this light, it is difficult to read the nar-
rator’s Eastern interpretation of his dream as anything but a distress-
ing recuperation of what is otherwise an immigrant’s dream turned
nightmare. “I have remembered this dream, because according to
Oriental interpretation, it is a dream of good omen. To be killed in a
dream means success, and in particular death by fire augurs good for-
tune. This is supposed to be so, because death symbolizes in Buddhis-
tic philosophy growth and rebirth and a happier reincarnation” (401).
Perhaps an appropriate gloss on Han’s dream interpretation can be
found in an observation provided by author Sui Sin Far. In a short
story published during the Progressive Era, her narrator comments
on the limits of Asian success in the United States: “with true Chi-
nese philosophy he had begun to reject realities and accept dreams as
the stuff upon which to live. Life itself was hard, bitter, and disap-
pointing. Only dreams are joyous and smiling.”65
But what if we take Han at his word, and translate his unmaking
at the hands of an angry mob as a paragon of his phoenixlike res-
urrection? 66 His Oriental dream interpretation is drawn from the
Buddhist belief in rebirth, a process that can take place after death or
during life.67 In The Grass Roof, the reader learns that Kang’s auto-
biographical narrator was instructed in this philosophy during his
boyhood days in Korea.68 In the passage cited earlier, Han glosses the
dream images with the Buddha’s “fire sermon,” which teaches that all
emotional and physical possessions burn with the fires of attach-
ment, hatred, and delusion. A goal of Buddha’s instruction is the de-
struction of these three fires or defilements through Nirvana (literally
meaning extinction or quenching). If Han has reached Nirvana, it is
not so much a state of nothingness as a state of enlightened compre-
hension beyond understanding.

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This opens an alternative reading of Han’s dream interpretation,

one perhaps less convincing but that nonetheless addresses the pro-
ductivity of a nonwhite immigrant’s frustrated efforts at free enter-
prise. By shifting his narrator’s frame of reference to Buddhism, Kang
generates an ethnic critique of the presuppositions behind the self-
made man in America. The Western concept of the modern individ-
ual—particularly in the guise of the self-made man—is antithetical
to teachings, which promote the concept of the “not-self.” In a prac-
tical sense, the notion of the not-self is used to discourage attach-
ment. On a spiritual level, it invites the idea that all things are imper-
manent and that, by implication, the true or empirical self does not
exist. The goal of the Buddhist path is the relinquishing of emotional
and material self-interest, and the attainment of a state of Nirvana
that, while it is beyond impermanence, remains not-self.
Han’s final recourse to a Buddhist frame of reference allows him
to manage, if only imaginatively, some of the most pernicious obsta-
cles blocking the immigrant’s path not just to self-made success but
to survival in the New World. More broadly, his interpretation of
his nightmare bears witness to what, earlier in the novel, he identified
as the “signs” of “this strangely great age of disintegration and new
combination” between East and West (341). Ethnic identities are best
understood, I believe, by the dialectical process through which the
transplanted self is transformed by contact with the New World while
challenging conventional standards for what it means to be Ameri-
can. In East Goes West, it is precisely at the crossroads—where East
meets West—that Han hazards to affirm the efficacy of a modern eth-
nic identity.

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 5
Individual Enterprise in
the Postfrontier Nation

Not-Quite-White Enterprise in the Tribal Twenties:

The Great Gatsby
Prior to the consolidation of post–World War II corporate culture,
and even before the onset of the Great Depression, the traditional fig-
ure of the self-made man in America was nearing its end. The Great
Gatsby represents the diminishing moral authority of uplift stories in
an age of declining faith in the nation’s ability to assimilate new im-
migrants. Through the eyes of Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway,
Gatsby appears in the guise of the archetypal, if somewhat mis-
guided, self-made man. Gatsby’s upward struggle is inspired by tradi-
tional purveyors of middle-class success, such as Ben Franklin and
Horatio Alger. However, another less virtuous narrative of Gatsby’s
self-making unfolds, which connects his business schemes to the
tainted hand of immigrant gangsters. A story of entrepreneurial cor-
ruption, accented by the language of nativism, competes with and ul-
timately foils the traditional narrative of virtuous ambitions. Gatsby
thus stages a national anxiety about immigration and racial inte-
gration in the 1920s, an unease manifested in the crisis of the self-
made man.
The Tribal Twenties produced the conditions under which Fitz-
gerald’s narrator imagines Gatsby as a figure for America. Nick in-
forms the reader in the opening pages that, despite his hero’s criminal
connections, “Gatsby turned out all right at the end.”1 In order

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to fulfill this expectation, the novel’s famous conclusion must elide

the narrative struggle—perpetrated by Gatsby’s nativist rival, Tom
Buchanan—over the ethnic as well as the ethical nature of our hero’s
enterprise. On the book’s final page, Tom’s interrogation into Gatsby’s
clouded past is displaced by Nick’s inspirational vision of Gatsby’s in-
violate dream of the New World. The narrator conceives a myth of
American origins by imagining initial contact with a virgin continent
through “Dutch sailors’ eyes” (189). Through this incarnation Gatsby
becomes great: a forward-looking visionary who not only transcends
the crisis of his contemporary moment but who is also associated
with the nation’s legendary pastoral promise.
Lionel Trilling’s statement that Gatsby “comes inevitably to stand
for America itself ” best exemplifies the consensus among Fitzgerald
critics who have, over the past fifty years, turned The Great Gatsby
into the novel of the American dream.2 This sentiment, I believe, car-
ries with it residual (albeit unwitting) traces of 1920s nativism that
are embedded in the book’s ending. One of the earliest critics to
identify the theme of the American dream in The Great Gatsby was
Edwin Fussell. In “Fitzgerald’s Brave New World,” he suggests that
Gatsby is corrupted “by values and attitudes that he holds in com-
mon with the society that destroys him.” Within a “mechanized”
world, Fussell points out that “a dream like Gatsby’s cannot remain
pristine, given the materials upon which the original impulse toward
wonder must expend itself.”3
Nevertheless, we are left with a persistent question. Despite
mounting evidence supporting Tom’s accusations regarding his rival’s
entrepreneurial corruption through shady associations with immi-
grant gangsters, how does Gatsby maintain “his incorruptible dream”
(162) in the eyes of the narrator and readers alike? The standard pro-
cedure among critics is to interpret Gatsby’s dream according to
Nick’s narrative demands: like Nick, critics usually separate modern
corruption from a pristine dream located in the nation’s distant past.
This type of commentary reads Gatsby according to an opposition
between present and past, between Gatsby’s unethical business con-
nections and the wonder he inspires.4 Marius Bewley, in his “Scott
Fitzgerald’s Criticism of America,” was one of the first commentators

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 The Postfrontier Nation

to use this now widespread formulation. “The theme of Gatsby,”

Bewley states, “is the withering of the American dream” in industrial
society. “We recognize that the great achievement of this novel,” he
concludes, “is that it manages, while poetically evoking a sense of the
goodness of that early dream, to offer the most damaging criticism
of . . . deficiencies inherent in contemporary manifestations of the
American vision itself.”5 It is important to recognize that Fussell’s
and Bewley’s interpretative models share the assumption that Gatsby’s
dream is principally a product of the past. These critics assume that
the emergence of the American dream is coterminous with either the
European discoveries of the New World, the seventeenth-century set-
tlements along the eastern seaboard of North America, or the birth of
the United States as a nation in the late eighteenth century.
Alternatively, I want to argue that the “American dream” is not a
transhistorical concept but a term invented after the 1920s. As I dis-
cuss in the next section of this chapter, from the viewpoint of the
Great Depression, the idea of the American dream addressed the
moral vacuity of entrepreneurial self-making in the nation’s past. In
addition, the social climate of the early twenties, specifically as it is
expressed in increasingly racialized forms of nativism, generated cir-
cumstances under which Nick remembers Gatsby as the representative
American. Gatsby’s dream does not have its origins in an earlier era
of American history but is a product of the Tribal Twenties. This latter
point builds on the provocative work of Walter Benn Michaels, who
situates American national literature of the period, including Gatsby,
within a discourse of nativism. However, Michaels’s singular focus
on nativism in the work of Fitzgerald and other canonical writers—
exemplified in the statement, “What is to be feared most [in classic
fiction of the 1920s] is the foreigner’s desire to become American”—
elides the persistence of racial segregation in this literature.6 I argue
that when the specter of black/white integration emerges in Gatsby,
the rising tide of hostility toward new immigrants recedes.
Fitzgerald’s novel reveals the degree to which, even for an un-
compromising nativist such as Tom Buchanan, the transgression of
black/white difference remains the most profound threat to the pres-
ervation of the country’s Nordic identity. This threat is embedded,

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for instance, in the nativist myth of national origins. Nordicists, in

assigning the role of New World discoverer to northern Europeans
from Leif Eriksson to Henry Hudson, systematically excluded the in-
troduction of black slaves from the beginning. The founding contri-
butions of Africans in North America are not missing from a nativist
history as a mere oversight. Their exclusion is symptomatic of how
black/white difference was enforced through racial segregation dur-
ing the twenties.
At first glance, nothing seems more remote from The Great Gatsby
than the issue of racial segregation or black empowerment. Despite
the novel’s being set in metropolitan New York, African Americans
almost never appear in Gatsby’s world. Yet, from Garveyism to the
fledgling Harlem Renaissance, New York was becoming the mecca
of black American politics and culture. The near-complete absence
of blacks from the novel can be comprehended only if we factor in
the ubiquitous power of racial segregation. It is precisely the absence
of African Americans alongside the novel’s conspicuous appropria-
tion of black culture that makes it a definitive text of the so-called
Jazz Age.
In Nick’s eyes Gatsby lives on the edge of two worlds, neither of
which is black: the established white society of the Buchanans and
the not-quite-white immigrant underworld of Meyer Wolfshiem. Yet
Nick is at home in neither environment, a feeling reflected in his pre-
carious sense of moral order in society. It is precisely the homeless
perspective coupled with the ambivalent narrative expression of racial
politics that places Gatsby squarely within the high modernist literary
tradition. Like the work of Joseph Conrad, to which Fitzgerald ac-
knowledged a primary debt, Gatsby undermines contemporary forms
of racism only to the degree that it maintains them.7 Although Nick
consistently dismisses Tom Buchanan’s racial nativism as “impas-
sioned gibberish” (137), his own narration reinforces both the stereo-
typical degeneracy of the new immigrant (especially the Semite) and
the minstrelsy of the Negro.
If blacks are conspicuous in their absence from Fitzgerald’s Jazz
Age fiction, there are notable exceptions that provide us ways of read-
ing the persistent tension between black and white in the 1920s. Afri-

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can Americans appear at two crucial moments in the novel, both in-
volving Gatsby’s famed automobile: during Nick’s memorable ride
across the Queensboro Bridge and at the moment of the hit-and-run
killing of Myrtle Wilson. Each scene, in its own way, anticipates
Nick’s concluding invocation of Gatsby’s capacity for “wonder” in the
Dutch sailors’ eyes. In both instances new immigrants play a promi-
nent role. In the latter (and, for our purposes, less significant) scene,
a “pale, well-dressed Negro” is described as the one person able to
identify accurately the “death car” as Gatsby’s. Interestingly enough,
the only other witness to the hit-and-run accident is the “young
Greek, Michaelis” (144–47).
In the Queensboro Bridge scene, immigrants and blacks are not
passive witnesses to Gatsby and his gilded machine. Instead they
share the American road with him. As Nick rides beside Gatsby and
experiences the “wonder” associated with “the city seen for the first
time, in its first wild promise” (73), an immigrant funeral procession
passes. Our narrator observes that the deceased’s “friends looked out
at us with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of south-eastern Eu-
rope.” Here, Nick marks these immigrants as emotionally and physi-
cally distinct from old stock Americans. However, by cheerfully add-
ing that his hero’s “splendid car was included in their somber holiday”
(73), Nick implies that the distance between Gatsby’s world and that
of the immigrant is not so great after all. The Queensboro Bridge ex-
cursion immediately precedes Nick’s introduction to Gatsby’s business
associate, Meyer Wolfshiem, the Jewish gangster characterized by
stereotypical Semitic features.
Before Nick and Gatsby reach their noon engagement with
Wolfshiem, another car overtakes them on the Queensboro Bridge.
It is a limousine, “driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three
modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl.” In contrast to the funeral
procession, the narrator finds this scene intensely amusing: “I laughed
aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty ri-
valry” (73). Beyond the obvious racial stereotyping of the happy dark-
ies aping white ways, note the pleasure Nick takes in observing the
high-spirited Negroes, an amusement indebted to the legacy of black-
face minstrelsy in the United States.8 The reflection of the sportive

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Negroes in Gatsby’s “mirrored” (68) car—rather than their inclusion

in his world—illustrates how the color line fixes the separation be-
tween blacks and whites even as it generates an ambivalent identity
between the two.
Racial segregation, by excluding African Americans from full par-
ticipation in U.S. society, managed the challenge that blacks posed to
white supremacy in the economic marketplace and elsewhere. When,
during the 1920s, black empowerment threatened white privilege,
nationalists readily abandoned their nativist attack on non-Nordic
Europeans and reasserted the need for black/white separation through
appeals to (among other things) intrawhite brotherhood. A case in
point was President Warren Harding’s widely publicized speech be-
fore a racially mixed audience in Birmingham, Alabama, in Novem-
ber 1921. Harding was an influential post–Progressive Era nativist.
Upon entering office, he immediately overturned former President
Woodrow Wilson’s veto of an immigration restriction bill. The tem-
porary law, according to one historian, “proved in the long run the
most important turning-point in American immigration policy.”9 In
his fall speech before the Southern city of Birmingham, Harding
conveniently repressed his nativist platform. Lecturing on behalf of
“the self respect of the colored race,” the president argued for main-
taining the “natural segregations” between black and white. Without
hesitation, he turned to the white audience and pleaded for national
unity: “The one thing we must sedulously avoid is the development
of group and class organizations in this country” based on “the labor
vote, the business vote, the Irish vote, the Scandinavian vote, the Ital-
ian vote, and so on.”10 Clearly, here was a prominent American who,
while supporting nativist demands for restricting immigration from
southeastern Europe, appealed to intrawhite brotherhood when the
specter of desegregation was raised.
Black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, who once described “the
problem of the Twentieth century” as “the color-line,” was outraged
by what he called “the logical contradictions” of the president’s ad-
dress. In order to illustrate his point, he used his December editorial
in the NAACP’s Crisis magazine to place the contradictory state-
ments side by side. Harding promoted black/white segregation while,

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in the same breath, criticizing “demagogues” who pitted old stock

white Americans against recent European immigrants. Du Bois thus
asked rhetorically: “Is the President calling himself a demagogue?” He
countered the president’s statements by offering a twofold warning to
“Harding or any white man” about teaching “Negroes pride of race.”
First, “our pride is our business and not theirs.” Second, black pride
is something whites “would better fear rather than evoke.” Du Bois
concluded apocalyptically: “For the day that Black men love Black
men simply because they are Black, is the day they will hate White
men simply because they are White. And then, God help us all!”11
Du Bois was making a thinly veiled reference to his political rival,
Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-born nationalist leader who based his
United Negro Improvement Association headquarters in Harlem. In
late 1921, Garvey was reaching the peak of his popularity among the
black masses. A few months earlier he had publicly chastised “the Dr.
Du Bois group” for fighting racial segregation. In opposition, Garvey
reiterated the UNIA’s belief that “amalgamation . . . is a crime against
nature.” Writing in a November 1921 issue of the UNIA newspaper
Negro World, he heaped praise upon President Harding for the “Great
Vision” conveyed in his Birmingham address and urged blacks to
stand together “against the idea of social equality.”12
Garvey built the first and largest mass movement ever among
blacks in the United States by, in part, conceding that “America [is] a
White Man’s Country” and exploiting the racist assertion as a means
of promoting his enterprising Back-to-Africa campaign. After 1922,
a period marked by Garvey’s declining political fortunes, the UNIA
leader openly flirted with white racist and nativist groups, ranging
from the Ku Klux Klan to the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America. How-
ever, public overtures to white supremacists did little to stop the
federal government from arresting the UNIA leader on mail fraud
charges and jailing him in 1923 and between 1925 and 1927. Even the
vague threat posed by Garvey’s unprecedented ability to mobilize
large numbers of blacks forced the U.S. government to deport him
immediately upon his release from prison. Garvey was both black
and an immigrant in an era of intense hostility toward both groups.
However, his nationalist dream of a distant but glorious African past

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was not far from being the black mirror image of Gatsby’s timeless
dream of northern European national origins in Dutch explorers’
eyes. Both visions were a part of the politics of immigration restric-
tion and racial segregation in New York City during the twenties.
Higham reports that around 1920 Nordicists began attacking new
immigrants—particularly Catholics and Jews, but Japanese on the
Pacific Coast as well—under a nativist banner that now tied racial to
more traditional religious xenophobia. Before the end of the year, the
gathering tide of anti-immigration sentiment became fueled by both
an economic downturn and a sharp increase in the importation of
cheap labor from abroad. These twin factors—the state of the econ-
omy and the scale of immigration—regularly play a role in estab-
lishing the level of nativism in the United States. However, Higham
puts forward a third determinant in nativist politics that exploded on
the scene in 1920 and assumed greater importance than ever before:
namely, the connection between foreigners and crime.13 The confla-
tion of new arrivals with unethical business practices offers the li-
cense for reading The Great Gatsby according to the rise of nativism
and the fall of the self-made man.
Fitzgerald’s familiarity with the grammar of nativism was likely
informed by his professional affiliation during the 1920s with the
Saturday Evening Post. During this period, he placed many of his
short stories with the Post and, as such, it became his most lucrative
source of income while composing Gatsby. As the nation’s most popu-
lar magazine, the Post began publishing nativist opinions in its pages
as early as the spring of 1920. At this time Post editorials advocated
the racialist doctrines of Madison Grant. During the same year, its
editor, George Horace Lorimer, sent Kenneth Roberts abroad to re-
port on European immigration to the United States. According to
Higham, Roberts’s articles (which appeared in the Post and which
were published in a 1922 collection under the title Why Europe Leaves
Home) became the most widely read effusions on Nordic theory of its
day.14 Roberts began from the twin premises of Nordicism: “The
American nation was founded and developed by the Nordic race”
and “Races can not be cross-bred without mongrelization.” Writing
overseas, he speculated that “if a few more million members of the

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Alpine, Mediterranean and Semitic races are poured among us, the
result must inevitably be a hybrid race of people as worthless and fu-
tile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and South-
eastern Europe.”15
Early in Gatsby, Tom Buchanan, working himself into a frenzy
about the threat of mongrelization to the nation’s white identity,
whispers to the dinner guests at his Long Island estate: “The idea is
that we’re Nordics . . . and we’ve produced all the things that go to
make civilization” (18). Tom’s words remind us that Nordicism was a
form of nativism activated in post–World War I America. In its every-
day expressions, Nordicism conflated Saxons (English), Dutch (Ger-
mans), as well as Nordics (Scandinavians), despite the fact that these
immigrant groups did not always have an amicable coexistence on
the North American continent. The popular appeal of Nordicism
during the twenties provides a context for understanding the pro-
duction of classic American literature at mid-decade. For example,
William Carlos Williams’s relocation of the discovery of America in
the voyages of “Red Eric” (father of Leif Eriksson) in the opening
pages of In the American Grain (1925) might signal something more
than the anti-Puritan impulse common to writers of this era. Fitzger-
ald’s Dutchmen, like Williams’s Norsemen, bear the inadvertent mark
of nativism specific to the twenties. Nick’s invocation of the Dutch
sailors’ vision of the New World adheres to the nativist logic of Presi-
dent Coolidge’s April 1924 message to Congress on passage of the im-
migration bill: “America must be kept American.”16
The discourse of Nordicism circulated in academic and popular
forums alike. For instance, during the same month and year as the
president’s congressional address, an argument for Nordic superiority
appeared in a letter to the editor of the New York Times, signed by
Henry Fairfield Osborn. Its author, a prominent biologist and presi-
dent of both the American Museum of Natural History and the Sec-
ond (1921) International Congress of Eugenics, proposed that “the
selection, preservation and multiplication of the best heredity is a pa-
triotic duty of first importance.” A dozen years earlier, at the height of
the Progressive Era, Columbus Day was officially introduced as a holi-
day in New York. Attempting to make sense of the current “confusion

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between nationality and race,” Osborn points out that “Columbus,

from his portraits and from his busts, authentic or not, was clearly of
Nordic ancestry.” For Osborn, tracing bloodlines of racial descent was
the key to ending the confusion over the identity of the “discoverer”
of New World America.
The Nordic debate over Columbus’s place in American history
emerged in the New York Times as early as the summer of 1922, when
Fitzgerald began composing short stories that would lead to Gatsby
and at the moment when he stages the initial encounter between
Nick and Gatsby on Long Island. Now a backlash in public opinion
raged on the editorial pages of the Times. A letter dated 23 June 1922
opened by congratulating the newspaper for its “fine editorials . . .
against perverted historical facts tending to encourage Anglo-phobia.”
The author proposed “the elimination of the Columbus legend” in
light of recent discoveries that “reveal the real America, discovered
by . . . Leif Erikson, from whose strong Nordic stock our early pio-
neers derived their rugged virtues.”17 The nativist proposal drew a re-
sponse in a Times letter, dated June 30, from the editor of a journal
published by the Knights of Columbus. Although the author ac-
knowledged “Ericson’s arrival” in the New World, he complains: “At
present there is a persistent and extremely verbose propaganda seek-
ing to diminish the achievement of Columbus.”18 Not surprisingly,
counterresponses ensued, including one dated July 4 under the title
“Leif Did Discover America!” and signed “Nordic.” The letter, which
followed the logic of Nordicism by conflating immigrants of English
and Scandinavian descent, insisted that “Americans of Anglo-Saxon
lineage are glad to know that . . . one of their own Nordic strain, was
the real discoverer of this continent.” Clinton Stoddard Burr sum-
med up the nativist tone of the Times with his 1922 proclamation:
“Americanism is actually the racial thought of the Nordic race.”19
Gatsby’s association with immigrant crime, particularly in the
form of bootlegging, jeopardizes both the purity of his white identity
and the ethics of his entrepreneurial success. The association of im-
migrants with lawlessness was crystallized during Prohibition, which
was no less than a moral crusade to preserve the American Way
through social control and conformity. The Eighteenth Amendment

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propelled organized gangsterism to new heights and, in doing so,

opened opportunities for new arrivals by creating a lucrative trade in
illicit alcohol. It also activated the stereotype of the nonnorthern Eu-
ropean immigrant as gangster, realized in sensational trials such as
that of “Bootleg King” millionaire Harry Brolaski who, in his own
words, “always took a gambling chance.” In four months from June
to September 1920, Brolaski made a fortune that was lost before the
end of the year when he was tried and convicted of masterminding a
Pacific Coast bootlegging ring.20
Despite the fact that Gatsby’s original surname (“Gatz”) carries
a possible Jewish inflection, there is little if any evidence to support
the claim that the protagonist is the offspring of recent immigrants.
Nevertheless, he is undoubtedly a bootlegger who associates with un-
savory new arrivals and vile members of the underworld. The asso-
ciation forces him to make up improbable stories about his past be-
cause, as he explains to Nick, “I didn’t want you to think I was just
some nobody” (71). Although Nick desperately wants to believe in
Gatsby’s grand self-descriptions, contemporary reviewers were not al-
ways so sympathetic. One insists that the “Great Gatsby wasn’t great
at all—just a sordid, cheap, little crook.”21 Information marshaled
by Tom Buchanan’s investigation into Gatsby’s past supports such a
reading:
“Who are you anyhow?” broke out Tom. “You’re one of that bunch
that hangs around with Meyer Wolfshiem—that much I happen
to know. I’ve made a little investigation into your affairs . . . I
found out what your ‘drug stores’ were.” He turned to us and spoke
rapidly. “He and this Wolfshiem bought up a lot of side-street
drug stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the
counter. That’s one of his little stunts. I picked him for a boot-
legger the first time I saw him and I wasn’t far wrong.” (141)
Gatsby brazenly refuses to deny Tom’s accusation of his bootlegging
activities, responding politely: “What about it? . . . I guess your
friend Walter Chase wasn’t too proud to come in on it.” Tom’s find-
ings not only implicate his rival in various unnamed criminal schemes
by providing almost irrefutable evidence of his involvement in the ille-

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gal sale of alcohol. Hoping to play to the nativist fears of his audience,
he also binds Gatsby’s identity to the Jewish gangster Wolfshiem.
Nick’s stereotypical description of Wolfshiem is colored by racial
nativism to the extent that it carries with it traces of the degeneracy
associated with Semites. Upon being introduced by Gatsby to his
friend, the narrator provides the following description of Wolfshiem:
“A small flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with
two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a
moment I discovered his tiny eyes in the half darkness.” Nick repeat-
edly characterizes the man he finds “looking for a business gonneg-
tion” according to his gross physical appearance, typified by refer-
ences to “his tragic nose” (73–77). The descriptions implicate Nick in
a form of what Sander Gilman calls “pathological stereotyping.”22
Immutable stereotyping of this sort licenses the construction of a
rigid difference between the vigorous Anglo-Saxon, Tom Buchanan,
and degenerate Jew Meyer Wolfshiem. Gatsby is caught in a no-
man’s-land between the two ethnic extremes.
Wolfshiem’s business activities are not merely illegal; they threaten
the integrity of the national sporting event, baseball’s World Series.
Eventually we learn that he runs his illicit business out of “The Swas-
tika Holding Company,” a name that continues to befuddle readers.
It is unlikely that Fitzgerald would have known that Hitler was using
the swastika as the symbol of his fledgling Nazi party. Instead, the
swastika was widely recognized at the time as an ancient Aryan sym-
bol of good luck.23 Wolfshiem’s possession of the swastika as the
name of his holding company manifests the widely perceived threat
to an Aryan nation posed by enterprising immigrants, particularly
Jews. Burr, in his book America’s Race Heritage (1922), insists that the
“most objectionable classes of the ‘new’ immigration are rapidly
breaking down American institutions and honorable business meth-
ods.” In the context of discussing recent Jewish arrivals, he describes
“business trickery” as a “trait . . . so ingrained that one may doubt
whether it could be eradicated for generations.”24
Gatsby’s illicit business association (indeed, his friendship) with
immigrant gangster Meyer Wolfshiem compromises the ethics of
self-made success while undermining the stability of white ethnic dif-

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ference. His enterprising efforts among shady foreigners stages the

nation’s growing suspicion of immigrants after World War I. This
sentiment is confirmed, for instance, in a contemporary commenta-
tor’s use of an anti-Catholic slur to describe Gatsby upon his first en-
counter with Daisy. Thomas Chubb, in his review of the novel in the
August 1925 issue of Forum magazine, commented that Gatsby “is
still poor as an Irishman on Sunday morning.”25 Even Nick, after
meeting his mysterious neighbor for the first time at one of his gala
parties, immediately thinks of his host as a stranger in his own home:
“I would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby
sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of
New York” (54).
Nick’s suspicions about the source of Gatsby’s wealth are height-
ened just after he is introduced to Wolfshiem. Gatsby is caught off
guard and becomes noticeably upset when, having boasted that it
took him only three years to earn his fortune, Nick points out that he
was under the impression that he had “inherited” his money through
a legacy of family wealth (95). In the chapter that follows this uneasy
exchange, Nick casts young Jimmy Gatz in the role of an Alger boy-
hero who had a fortunate encounter with wealthy yachtsman Dan
Cody.26 Yet Nick’s telling of Gatsby’s “luck and pluck” tale suggests
the loss of faith in stories of the self-made man at this time. For ex-
ample, Gatsby’s benefactor, Cody, is not the genteel aristocrat of
Alger’s stories but “the pioneer debauchee.” He is a product of “the
savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon,” and thus a con-
siderable distance from even the celebrated frontier individualist
imagined by Progressive Era historian Frederick Jackson Turner.
When he sets sail for the West Indies and the Barbary Coast (places
associated with pirating, the African slave trade, and colonialism),
Cody employs the impressionable teenager in some “vague personal
capacity” and gives him a “singularly appropriate education” before
dying suddenly (106–7). Fitzgerald’s peculiar appropriation of the
Alger formula suggests a crisis in the traditional narrative of character-
based uplift. Recall that, only a decade prior to the publication of
Gatsby, melting-pot advocate Mary Antin proclaimed that the mod-
ern self-made man started at the bottom of the overseas ship’s steer-

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age. During the 1920s, the idea of virtuous immigrant enterprise was
undercut by a declining commitment to assimilating new arrivals.
After Gatsby’s own sudden death, Nick approaches Wolfshiem—
the deceased’s “closest friend”—for an account of Gatsby’s source
of wealth. Wolfshiem’s recollection functions to reconfirm the new
threat the immigrants posed to ethical entrepreneurship. To Nick’s
inquiry, “Did you start him in business?” Wolfshiem replies, “Start
him! I made him,” and continues: “I raised him up out of nothing,
right out of the gutter. I saw right away he was a fine appearing gen-
tlemanly young man and when he told me he was an Oggsford I
knew I could use him good. . . . We were so thick like that in every-
thing—” He held up two bulbous fingers “—always together” (179).
Wolfshiem’s depiction of Gatsby’s uplift helps confirm the findings
of Tom’s investigation. Not only is Gatsby “raised . . . up out of
nothing,” he is “made” not by the sweat of his honest brow but by
the black hand of the immigrant gangster. Wolfshiem’s grotesque
“bulbous fingers” offer a degenerate image of togetherness. If he and
Gatsby are as separate as fingers, they are also as one as the hand.
Wolfshiem’s story of Gatsby’s inauspicious beginnings leaves Nick
wondering whether their “partnership” also included the World’s Se-
ries scandal.
The encounter with Wolfshiem immediately leads to another il-
lustration of Gatsby’s original ambition, one apparently modeled on
the prescriptions of middle-class morality. This example takes a page
out of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. However, because it mocks
the conventions of character building associated with the tradition of
self-made success, this illustration ultimately functions to undermine
evidence for Gatsby’s wholesome uplift. More specifically, the reader
is presented with Jimmy Gatz’s transcription, on the flyleaf of a dime
novel, of a Franklin-style timetable and resolves.27 Unlike Franklin,
who builds the “perfect Character” by pondering questions of inner
goodness before setting out for a day of hard work, sixteen-year-old
Gatsby’s morning itinerary and daily resolves are essentially devoid of
the art of virtue. Instead of nourishing his soul, young Gatsby re-
shapes his body through “Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling” and
betters his mind by “read[ing] one improving book or magazine per

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week” (181–82). If the former suggests a heightened regard for super-

ficial self-improvement in this century, the latter invokes the currents
of New Thought. “The development of ‘mind-power,’” Richard Weiss
properly explains, “occupied the same position in the new literature
of self-help that the development of character had in the old.”28 In
the end, Fitzgerald offers a twentieth-century parody of Franklin’s ar-
chetypal self-made man. More specifically, Gatsby’s self-advancement
demonstrates the extent to which, with the consolidation of con-
sumer society, the cult of personality eclipsed an earlier producer-
oriented notion of character. The defection from character did not
single-handedly undermine the traditional narrative of success. How-
ever, when coupled with rising suspicions regarding both the rec-
titude of new immigrants and popular get-rich-quick schemes, the
apparent excesses of the personality craze contributed to the di-
minishing authority of the figure of the self-made man during the
1920s. Fitzgerald represented this national identity crisis through
Gatsby.
The social climate that guaranteed Gatsby’s failure as the tradi-
tional self-made man also provided the social conditions under which
his pristine dream could be imagined. During the twenties, racial na-
tivism was sanctioned by the pseudoscientific discourse of Nor-
dicism, which narrowed definitions of whiteness. After decades of
seemingly unrestricted immigration from eastern and southern Eu-
rope, nativists responded to the fear of the loss of white supremacy
by attempting to fix and maintain the boundaries between Ameri-
cans of northwestern European descent and all others. Higham ex-
plains that the deployment of genetic typologies became widespread
in Nordicist descriptions of the racial degeneracy in new immigrants.
Respectable social scientist Madison Grant, probably the most im-
portant nativist in modern American history,29 worked from the “sci-
ence” of eugenics and taught two basic lessons. First, old stock Ameri-
cans should properly identify themselves as Nordic. Second, Nordics
must avoid cross-breeding with white Europeans of a lower racial de-
scent, namely, Alpines and Mediterraneans, or face the degenerative
process of “mongrelization.”30
Gatsby’s romantic ambition is, of course, to amass a fortune fan-

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tastic enough to win the heart of Daisy Fay, who reveals that she is as
much Southern belle as flapper when she refers to her own youth as
her “white girlhood” (24). A consumerist version of the all-American
girl, Daisy is a symbol for a Nordic national identity in the twen-
ties.31 She functions within the novel as a gendered sign for the
mythological American continent: a nurturing mother and a beck-
oning lover who offers “the incomparable milk of wonder” (112). The
fact that Daisy’s voice is also described as “full of money—that was
the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it” (120) is less a contra-
diction than the other side of the same coin. In an era of neocolonial
corporate expansion, the frontier is seductive not in spite of but be-
cause of its exploitability. At the novel’s conclusion, Daisy’s green
light in Gatsby’s eyes invokes, for Nick, the Dutch explorers’ initial
sighting of a pristine America.
Paradoxically, Gatsby must transgress the Nordic/non-Nordic di-
vide and associate with immigrant gangster Meyer Wolfshiem in
order to generate a fortune grand enough to impress the belle of
Louisville. In a desperate attempt to foil Gatsby’s dazzling design, Tom
spews the slogans and parrots the precepts of Nordic supremacy. It is
no secret that Nordicism receives its most unrestrained expression on
the pages of Gatsby in the voice of Tom Buchanan. As one contempo-
rary reviewer of the novel reluctantly observed, Tom “is an American
university product of almost unbearable reality.”32 Tom assaults Nick
with his nativist racism early in the novel, before either one of them
is introduced to Gatsby. Over dinner at the Buchanan Long Island
estate, Nick confesses that his cosmopolitan cousin, Daisy, makes him
feel “uncivilized.” Before Daisy responds, Tom interrupts the conver-
sation with a gloomy prediction: “Civilization’s going to pieces. . . .
I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read
‘The Rise of the Coloured Empires’ by this man Goddard?” Nick an-
swers in the negative, and Tom, in a petulant mood, approvingly ex-
plains the book’s thesis: “The idea is if we don’t look out the white
race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s
been proved” (17). The exchange has led literary critics to speculate
that Tom’s authority is Lothrop Stoddard, whose conservative ideas

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were widely disseminated among nativists after the publication of his

Rising Tide of Color.33
Nativists voiced the fear that America’s once pure racial stock was
now under siege by a generation of unsavory immigrants who were,
in too many instances, amassing wealth without adhering to the
Protestant work ethic and the gospel of virtuous success.34 “It’s up to
us who are the dominant race to watch out,” asserts Tom, “or these
other races will have control of things” (17). His sense of control is de-
fined by his faith in the moral superiority of northern European civi-
lization. Nick thinks to himself that Tom’s white supremacist mono-
logue is “pathetic.” Daisy responds to her husband with little more
than sarcasm (“We’ve got to beat them down”). Her friend, Jordon
Baker, offers the most provocative, albeit cryptic, aside: “You ought
to live in California—.” Jordon’s passing reference to the West Coast
is made intelligible when we consider the politics of nativism in Cali-
fornia at the time. After Japan demonstrated its military prowess
in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, Anglo-Americans on the Pacific
Coast experienced a twofold threat: fears about Japan’s expansionist
foreign policy were placed alongside the danger Japanese immigra-
tion posed to Anglo hegemony on the West Coast.35 Even Stoddard,
who discusses the international “Yellow Peril” at length in The Rising
Tide of Color, makes reference to the California crisis by quoting
from the Los Angeles Times: “If California is to be preserved for the
next generation as a ‘white man’s country’ there must be some move-
ment started that will restrict the Japanese birth-rate in California.”36
By the time of Harding’s presidential election in 1920, anti-Japanese
hysteria on the West Coast had reached unprecedented levels.37 As a
result, the Johnson-Reed Act was drafted in a way that prohibited
Japanese immigration altogether, completing a long-standing policy
of Oriental exclusion.
Tom, oblivious to criticism of almost any kind, interrupts Jor-
don’s mention of California with the proposition that “we’re Nor-
dics” (18). Later, during the novel’s climactic Plaza Hotel scene, Tom
and Gatsby square off against one another. Tom, by linking Gatsby’s
enterprising ambitions to Wolfshiem’s underworld operations, turns
his personal claim on a Nordic identity into a weapon against his

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rival. In doing so, he diminishes Gatsby’s standing in society to that

of the “nobody” our hero so desperately wants to escape. “I suppose
the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere
make love to your wife. . . . Nowadays people begin by sneering at
family life and family institutions and next they’ll throw everything
overboard and have intermarriage between black and white” (137).
This passage expresses the complex relation between nativism and
the color line at the time. It is tempting to conclude, along with Wal-
ter Benn Michaels, that Tom is identifying Gatsby “as in some sense
black.”38 But this would be to misjudge the degree to which, even
during the twenties, nativists were willing or able to collapse the dis-
tinction between blacks and immigrants from southeastern Europe.
According to the nativist logic of Tom’s argument, Gatsby seems less
than white because of his intimate connection with immigrant crime.
The association licenses Tom’s accusation that Gatsby jeopardizes the
health of the family, the institution indispensable to maintaining
white racial purity. Next, he suggests that black/white miscegenation
poses the most profound threat to the Nordic race. Although Tom
does not suggest that Gatsby is in any way black, his statement re-
veals the degree to which nativists narrowed the notion of whiteness
while simultaneously maintaining what President Harding called the
“natural segregations” between black and white.
Jordon Baker, in response to Tom’s diatribe against Gatsby,
makes another spontaneous intervention: “We’re all white here.” Jor-
don’s comment points to a crisis in the nation’s Nordic identity,
where, for nativists at least, whiteness is no guarantee of racial purity.
The fragility of the modern family—racial and national, extended
and nuclear—was at the heart of nativist arguments against un-
restricted immigration. Nordic nationalist Charles W. Gold, in a book
titled America: A Family Matter (1922), attributed the downfall of
Rome, and by extension “the continuing downfall of humanity” up
through the present, to mongrelization. Although he appears to be
unaware of the fact that the “melting pot” was a concept only re-
cently popularized during the Progressive Era, Gold nonetheless ar-
gues that throughout the ages efforts at this type of ethnic assimi-
lation have been misguided. “Tear from the phrase the softening

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metaphor and we recognize ‘melting pot’ in its true, its unpleasant

form—‘miscegenation.’” He concludes that national histories teach
America a simple but indispensable lesson: “Repeal our naturaliza-
tion laws.” Legislative reform would bar entrance to aliens, helping
to “secure our children and our children’s children in their legitimate
birthright.”39 Or, as Lothrop Stoddard pleaded, “the immigrant tide
must at all costs be stopped and America given a chance to stabilize
her ethnic being.”40 The passage of the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924 ful-
filled the demands of racial nativists, who insisted on the preserva-
tion of what they regarded as a “distinct American type”: the white
northern European Protestant. The law implemented a “national ori-
gins” principle. By setting quotas according to the contribution of
each national stock to the American population, the law ensured that
six or seven times more immigrants would originate annually from
northwestern Europe than from southeastern Europe. Higham con-
cludes that, by counting everyone’s ancestors, the Johnson-Reed Act
“gave expression to the tribal mood, and comfort to the democratic
conscience.”41
The frequently cited conclusion of The Great Gatsby illustrates
nationalism in its general form as well as its manifestation peculiar to
the 1920s. Broadly speaking, Fitzgerald represents the double-sided
logic of nationalism by offering, on the one hand, a promising future
in the prophecy “tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms
farther” and, on the other, an immemorial myth of American na-
tional origins envisioned in “boats . . . borne back ceaselessly into
the past” (189). I offer the final passage from Freud’s Interpretation of
Dreams as a gloss on Gatsby’s pristine dream in the famous last lines
of Fitzgerald’s novel: “By picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are
after all leading us into the future. But this future, which the dreamer
pictures as the present, has been moulded by his indestructible wish
into a perfect likeness of the past.”42 Following Freud, we might say
that Nick’s belief in Gatsby’s gift of hope for a more perfect future is
inverted in the expression of his hero’s vision of an inviolate past.
Gatsby’s Janus-faced wonder at “the orgiastic future that year by year
recedes before us” is mirrored in the eyes of Nick’s sixteenth-century
Dutch explorers.43

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In death Gatsby is freed from his venal partnership with immi-

grant gangsters and remembered within a lineage of northern Euro-
pean explorers. Fitzgerald might have returned his reader to the
“Columbus story” (9), used near the beginning of the novel to map
the geographical configuration of Gatsby’s “ancestral home” (162).
Instead, Nick resurrects his hero’s fallen reputation by transforming
Gatsby’s glimpse at Daisy’s green light into the desire in the “Dutch
sailors’ eyes” for the continent that “flowered” before them as “a fresh,
green breast of the new world.” Against the current wave of immigra-
tion, Gatsby is “borne back ceaselessly” into a northern European
past as recollected within the nativist climate of the 1920s, when con-
ceptions of whiteness both narrow and become a sign not of skin
color but of national identity.

Inventing the American Dream in the Great Depression:

The Epic of America
Despite half a century of literary criticism on the expression of the
American dream in Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, the phrase is a mis-
nomer when used to characterize the book’s nationalist vision. The
term was not put into print until 1931, when middle-brow historian
James Truslow Adams coined and used it throughout the pages of a
book titled The Epic of America.44 Adams’s history of the United
States was widely read; it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection
that ultimately topped the best-seller list in 1932.45 The American
dream is to be understood as an ethical doctrine that is symptomatic
of a crisis in national identity during the thirties.46 The newly in-
vented dream calls out for a supplement to the outmoded narrative
of individuated uplift, which had lost its moral capacity to guide the
nation during the Depression. Adams makes no mention of Fitzger-
ald or The Great Gatsby in his book, nor should he. By explicitly ap-
pealing to a shared, rather than tribal, sense of national identity, he
steers clear of group conflict and directs his reader toward a secular
belief in the American dream. For Adams, the spirit of the dream in-
vokes an ecstatic faith in the nation’s heroic past and a willingness to
sacrifice for its future.47

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Adams’s history marks the revival of communitarian concern

in the thirties. He articulates his nationalist vision (“the American
dream”) through an ambiguous form of moral economics meant to
address and subdue the imminent threat of class antagonism that was
amplified by the Great Depression.48 “The point is that if we are to
have a rich and full life in which all are to share and play their parts,
if the American dream is to be a reality, our communal spiritual and
intellectual life must be distinctly higher than elsewhere, where
classes and groups have their separate interests, habits, markets, arts,
and lives.”49 The author’s anticommunism is matched only by his
anticonsumerism. Adams thus continues by placing the threat posed
by socialism alongside that posed by the culture of consumption. “If
the dream is not to prove possible of fulfillment, we might as well
become stark realists, become once more class-conscious, and strug-
gle as individuals or classes against one another. We cannot become a
great democracy by giving ourselves up as individuals to selfishness,
physical comfort, and cheap amusements” (411). Although Adams
never explicitly critiques the popular concept of personality, such a
criticism is implied in his objection to the increasing propensity for
conspicuous consumption. The American dream, he concludes, “can
never be wrought into a reality by cheap people or by ‘keeping up
with the Joneses’” (411).
Writing at the onset of the Depression, Adams’s historical and
moral vision was inspired by the Progressive Era.50 For him, the pe-
riod marked the most recent historical moment in which the promise
of the American dream could be fulfilled. The thought of Frederick
Jackson Turner, leading proponent of frontier mythology since the
1890s, is written across the pages of Adams’s narrative.51 The inven-
tion of the American dream was also indebted to the reformist im-
pulses of muckraking. Adams was favorably impressed by the ethical
component behind the journalistic exposés on the misdoing of cor-
porate trusts: “America for the first time was beginning to take stock
of the morality of its everyday business life” (353). Not surprisingly,
he had nothing to say about the rise of enterprising women and mi-
norities during the Age of Reform. Adams probably had never heard
of Harriet Ayer or Madam Walker. Given that their success was lo-

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cated within the new consumer markets—the very thing that sup-
posedly contributed to the collapse of the American dream—it is
likely that he would have cast a skeptical eye across their contribu-
tions. Yet, Adams’s blindness toward nontraditional entrepreneurs
helps explain his positive appropriation of Mary Antin’s words from
The Promised Land at his book’s end. Rather than cite from her dis-
cussion of her failed entrepreneurial ambitions, he quotes extensively
from her Emersonian vision of America past and future. Americans
in the Roaring Twenties, according to Adams, simply abandoned the
ideals of the Progressive Era: “The battle cries of Roosevelt and Wil-
son in the struggle to realize the American dream had been changed
into the . . . shouts for ‘Coolidge prosperity’” (398). He asserts that
the get-rich-quick schemes of the 1920s coupled with consumerism
precipitated the near-complete bankruptcy of the American dream.
For Adams, the 1920s were not the origin of the dream’s corrup-
tion, but rather its most recent manifestation. Adams locates the
source of the dream’s demise in the rise of monopoly capitalism dur-
ing the Gilded Age. In a chapter titled “The Age of the Dinosaurs,”
he deploys a discourse of natural history to describe the nation’s de-
evolution from the Frontier Age to the “Jurassic period.” Just as evo-
lutionary forces allowed huge and frightening reptiles to dominate
the earth in prehistoric times, “in our own age, a combination of ele-
ments suddenly brought into existence . . . huge business combina-
tions in the form of corporations of a hitherto undreamed-of size . . .
to rule the land.” And, like the dinosaurs, whose extinction is attrib-
uted to a “lack of brain power,” the author points to evidence for the
“difficulty of supplying our modern economic monsters with suffi-
cient power of intellectual direction” (342–43). The incorporation of
America transformed the frontier town into a Jurassic industrial park
and reincarnated the exalted yeoman farmer as a self-interested rob-
ber baron. Adams lays the lion’s share of the blame for the demise of
the dream at the feet of the nation’s captains of industry, who not
only work in cahoots with corrupt government officials but lack the
requisite morality to ensure the country’s spiritual as well as eco-
nomic health. Instead of enshrining self-made men such as Carnegie,
Rockefeller, and Ford as the most recent purveyors of the American

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dream, he sharply accuses them of betraying its very ideal. “To such
men,” asserts Adams, “the American dream was drivel” (347).
The Epic of America berates famous industrialists for allowing
themselves to be “perniciously held up by newspapers and clergymen
as models for ambitious American youth.” Adams dismisses Alger-
esque formulas exploited by businessmen in their autobiographies as
little more than banal self-promotion, and concludes: “They did in-
deed have to have daring and courage, as does a pirate or a bootleg
king, as well as ruthlessness” (315). Worse, U.S. citizens were cur-
rently placing the nation’s destiny in the hands of men such as Henry
Ford, who privileged practicality over morality: “Our most conspicu-
ously successful manufacturer, Mr. Ford, announced in his new book
in 1930 that ‘we now know that anything which is economically right
is also morally right.’” Adams criticizes Ford’s statement by mocking
his claim to an entrepreneurial form of statesmanship: “As the suc-
cessful businessman would consider himself the best interpreter of
good economics, he thus set himself up as the best judge of national
morals” (400). The national ideal of manhood—the virtuous self-
made man—proved to be a twentieth-century sham.
Adams insisted that the damage inflicted by the business elite on
the nation was so great that it turned the American dream into a
nightmare, a calamity currently being played out in the form of the
Great Depression. His worst fears were probably confirmed when,
only months after The Epic of America first appeared, a bloody battle
between labor and capital erupted at the famous Ford River Rouge
factory in Dearborn, Michigan. On 7 March 1932, a few thousand
people, under the direction of the Communist Party USA, assembled
at the Ford plant to make their demands known to management.
Police were brought in to disperse the gathering and, by the end of
the day, four demonstrators were killed and another fifty injured. For
the general public prior to the Great Depression, River Rouge sym-
bolized Ford—the beloved self-made hero and the successful com-
pany. By the early 1930s, however, the Ford name came to represent
the utter incorrigibility of an entrepreneurial spirit past, while River
Rouge conjured the ghosts of Homestead.
Adams’s uncompromising criticism of once-glorified captains of

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industry found its full-blown expression in fellow historian Matthew

Josephson’s Robber Barons, a study that revealed the gross inequities
of class in U.S. society. Unlike Josephson’s study, however, which fre-
quently reproduces the rags-to-riches formula in its biographies of
industrialists and financiers, Adams’s history had the distinction of
not being held captive by the outmoded language of Horatio Alger
uplift.52 Regardless, the most thorough intervention into the idea of
the virtuous self-made man probably was presented in the form of an
American novel. In 1934, the same year The Robber Barons was pub-
lished, Nathanael West’s A Cool Million appeared. Its precursors can
be found in the literary realism of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie
and Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky. Although these
Progressive Era novels are critical of the success ideal, the plight of
their title characters nonetheless maintains many of the narrative
conventions associated with rags-to-riches fiction. A Cool Million is
different. For the first time, readers were offered an unyielding satire
on moral luck and market pluck in the form of the literal dismem-
berment and reassemblage of the novel’s protagonist, Lem Pitkin, in
the name of shameless individual enterprise and corporate profit.53
Back in 1931, Adams was still left pondering the question, what is
to be done? “It has been a great epic and a great dream,” waxes the
author at the end of his book. “What, now, of the future?” (405).
Paradoxically, it was this present-tense query, directed at the nation’s
future, that underlies his narrative of U.S. history. Adams answers his
own question with neither an ambitious economic road map nor a
detailed legislative blueprint for recovery. Instead, The Epic of Amer-
ica maintains a secular faith in the communal concept of the Ameri-
can dream. Adams, I think, should be given credit for inventing an
enduring national tradition, one that attempted to manage the social
pressures of his contemporary moment (what he observed as the twin
threats of communism and consumerism). In his popular history of
the United States, he pointed to the source of these threats by ad-
dressing the moral hollowness of past self-made men.

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 6
The Ends of Self-Making

Image, Inc.: Howard Hughes,

Lee Iacocca, and Ross Perot
If the appropriation of the language of individual enterprise by
women, blacks, and immigrants delegitimated the traditional self-
made man prior to 1930, the cold reality of the marketplace during
the Great Depression made narratives of upward class mobility al-
most unimaginable. Yet Americans did not abandon self-culture. In-
stead, they looked away from narratives of enterprise and toward less
monetary models for personal betterment. John Cawelti discovered
that the thirties saw the proliferation of self-improvement manuals,
such as Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People
(1936) and Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich (1937). These tracts
rejected what had come to be known as the crass materialism behind
the Alger formula in favor of prescriptions for positive thinking.1
However, when the economy pulled out of the Depression after
World War II, the figure of the self-made man did not make a tri-
umphant return. The recently consolidated corporate way of life ap-
peared hostile to self-starters, and the loss of opportunities for in-
dividual enterprise was the price the nation had to pay for greater
economic growth and stability. For David Riesman, author of The
Lonely Crowd (1950), the work of Dale Carnegie marked the unfortu-
nate displacement of the producer-oriented character by a consumer-
oriented personality.2 Three books appeared in 1956—William Whyte’s

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The Organization Man, C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite, and Robert
L. Heilbroner’s The Quest for Wealth—which essentially supported
Riesman’s evaluation. Each pondered what Heilbroner called “the de-
humanization of the personality”3 in corporate society, and each
deployed (implicitly if not explicitly) ego-psychology to critique the
acquisitive personality in postwar America.
Whyte, noting that “personality tests are the voice of The Orga-
nization,”4 lamented the passing of individualistic ethos with the
spread of conformity-minded big business. The changing face of en-
terprise gave Mills the confidence to conclude that “there is, in psy-
chological fact, no such thing as a self-made man.”5 The author of
The Power Elite exposed what he identified as the structural immoral-
ity behind corporate capitalism’s anonymous facade: “In the corpo-
rate era, economic relations become impersonal—and the executive
feels less personal responsibility.” Not long ago, Mills observed, the
entrepreneur—whether adored as a captain of industry or scorned as
a robber baron—was at least in the public eye. After the Great De-
pression and World War II, business magnates were no longer “so visi-
ble as they once seemed.” They had not been displaced, but instead
were supplemented by a complex arrangement of corporate- and
state-sponsored hierarchies that, worst of all, lacked genuine public
accountability. Affluent industrialists “are still very much among us,”
Mills assured his reader, “even though many are hidden, as it were, in
the impersonal organizations in which their power, their wealth, and
their privileges are anchored.”6
Howard Hughes, with his conspicuous disappearance from pub-
lic view in 1957, became the most famous representative of the face-
less corporate head and the new class of entrepreneurs. His story
marks the end of traditional narratives of the self-made man. Because
his business successes were founded on his sizable family inheritance,
his life did not remotely fit the old-fashioned rags-to-riches scenario.
As Fortune magazine was never tired of pointing out, Hughes was
no Henry Ford.7 Moreover, he was everything his father was not.
Howard Senior was a moderately successful Texas oil man who in-
vented a uniquely effective bit for drilling through rock for oil. Once
the oil-drilling bit was patented in 1909, the Hughes family fortune

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was guaranteed. As his son admitted in a rare autobiographical rec-

ollection, he failed to master the magnetic personality of his hard-
working father:
My father was plenty tough. He never suggested that I do some-
thing; he just told me. He shoved things down my throat, and I
had to like it. But he had a hail-fellow-well-met quality that I
never had. . . . He was a terrifically loved man. I am not. I don’t
have the ability to win people the way he did. . . . I suppose I’m
not like other men. Most of them like to study people. I’m not
nearly as interested in people as I should be, I guess. What I am
tremendously interested in is science, nature in its various manifes-
tations, the earth and the minerals that come out of it.8
Here, in a 1948 interview, Hughes models his father’s achievements
on a familiar formula for entrepreneurial success. The son even be-
trays a sense of guilt at not at least appearing to be interested in pub-
lic relations and thus failing to measure up to the only available (al-
beit outmoded) models of self-made success.
Orphaned after his father’s unexpected death in 1924, eighteen-
year-old Howard had the foresight to gain singular control of Hughes
Tool Company, and the good sense not to interfere with its day-to-
day operations.9 Hughes’s obsession with control—over his public
image as well as his corporate empire—became legendary. Although,
at one time, Hughes had made entrepreneurial forays into the emi-
nent world of Hollywood filmmaking, the shy executive exploited
the anonymity of the corporate structure and became known as “the
spook of American capitalism.”10 Slowly withdrawing from public
view throughout the fifties, Hughes, after 1957, vanished altogether.
He granted his last on-the-record interview in 1954 and, within two
years, instructed everyone, from the press to his top executives, not
to call him directly but to contact him through his Hollywood com-
mand post at 7000 Romaine Street. “What he really wants,” his pub-
licist pleaded to an indifferent press corps in the early 1960s, “is to
have nothing written about himself.”11
However, the proliferation of print and electronic media coupled
with the rise of the celebrity after World War II ensured that Hughes’s
bid for complete anonymity would fail. A paradox, peculiar to the

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logic of electronic image culture, thus emerged: the more Hughes de-
manded privacy, the more conspicuous became his presence in the
media and the public imagination. From the late 1950s until his
death in 1976, “Hughesiana” was a regular feature in magazines as di-
verse as Fortune and Look. It was not uncommon for editors to assign
a star reporter to secure the exclusive Hughes interview; all, of course,
were denied access.12 Yet Hughes’s secrecy simply fed the media’s ap-
petite for more information and the public’s fascination with his
reclusion. As a celebrity entrepreneur in absentia, he had a “visibility”
that contemporary commentators on corporate life, such as C. Wright
Mills, never anticipated.
At no time did Hughes compose an extended autobiographical
statement regarding his personal life or professional achievements. To
ensure his anonymity, he did his utmost to halt all biographies. By
1965, Hughes devised a legal means to protect his privacy: Rosemont
Enterprises, Inc. Rosemont was set up by Hughes Tool Company
executives and an independent contractor who worked outside his
empire.13 It was founded with one simple but unprecedented aim in
mind: to patent a man’s life in an effort to censor press speculation
on Hughes himself. By claiming the exclusive rights to Hughes’s per-
sonal history, Rosemont Enterprises attempted to foreclose the possi-
bility that his story be made public through the mass media. It did
so, for example, by buying the copyright on previously published
magazine articles on him. Or, when a prospective biographer was
preparing to go public with a book, Rosemont might make him an
offer he could not refuse. In 1966, Newsweek reported that “at least
two prospective biographers have disappeared into the ranks of
[Hughes’s] amorphous organization, never to be heard from again.”14
Although only three biographies managed to slip by the Rose-
mont censors between 1966 and 1971, attempts at obstruction inten-
sified tabloid speculation on the life and legend of Howard Hughes.
However, in December 1971, the largest threat yet to his anonymity
was posed. McGraw-Hill announced, with great fanfare, that it had
secured the exclusive rights to his autobiography, which was sched-
uled for three-part serialization in Life magazine prior to the book’s
spring publication. According to the publisher’s press release, Hughes

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had recently told his life story to a little-known American novelist

named Clifford Irving. Hughes’s executives immediately denounced
the manuscript as an outright fraud. The denial proved ineffective,
only fueling the book’s prerelease publicity. Hughes, unable to halt
the media tidal wave around the alleged “authentic autobiography,”
made a desperate gesture: he went public for the first time in four-
teen years to make a personal disclaimer.15 Rather than appear in the
flesh before a ravenous press, he arranged a telephone conference call
from his retreat in the Bahamas on 9 January 1972. The bizarre media
event included seven journalists sitting in front of network television
cameras inside a Los Angeles hotel room with the task of interview-
ing a disembodied voice transmitted from three thousand miles away.
To the astonishment of many listeners, Hughes not only rambled
about obscure aeronautic technicalities but also failed to answer four
of six initial “test” questions. The four unanswered questions had a
common element: they asked him to identify particular individuals
with whom he had had memorable contact in his early adulthood
(for example, a superstitious woman who gave him a good-luck charm
prior to his record-setting around-the-world flight, and a friend who
had helped him construct an airplane engine). Hughes made almost
no attempt to guess the correct answers to these nontechnical ques-
tions but, rather, simply stated: “I don’t recall” and “I don’t remember
that.”16 As the authors of Hoax, the “inside” account of the Howard
Hughes-Clifford Irving affair, observe: the interviewee’s “weak point,
it emerged, was people; his strong point hardware.”17 This alone
leaves little doubt that the voice was indeed Hughes’s.18 After all, as
his 1948 interview suggests, poor people skills and an obsession with
technological detail had long been his trademark.
To Hughes’s dismay, the telecommunicated press conference did
little to put an end to the swirl of controversy surrounding the auto-
biography. Instead, it created a media circus that intensified public
interest. The following Sunday, Mike Wallace interviewed Clifford
Irving on 60 Minutes. Before long, the Los Angeles Times had more re-
porters (nine) investigating the hoax than it had covering the Viet-
nam War. In order to capitalize on publicity and prevent “leaks,” Life
moved up the publication date of its exclusive excerpts from the auto-

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biography.19 Hughes’s final bid for control over his anonymity failed
because he and his advisers miscalculated the workings of an infor-
mation society, which stages such spectacles not to squelch public in-
terest but to generate it. As media theorists since Marshall McLuhan
have known, the press does not merely report the news to us; it con-
structs our world as a media event. The momentary resurrection of
Howard Hughes in front of a national audience made clear that, in a
world increasingly transfixed by information and images, the press
has the power to break as well as to make the subject of success.
The proliferation of the electronic media after World War II
found a way to resurrect and repackage the idea of self-making by
manufacturing and marketing the enterprising image through the
charismatic figure of the celebrity. The media makes famous those
enterprising individuals upon whom it confers an image of success.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, the media-made personality is
an image in search of an audience and a market share. Iacocca (1984),
the blockbuster autobiography of the famous auto executive, illus-
trates the extent to which the preservation of the self-made man is
an effect of corporate-media power. Consider the book’s Prologue,
where Lee Iacocca locates the origin of his celebrated success: “For-
tunately, Chrysler recovered from its brush with death. Today I’m
a hero. But strangely enough, it’s all because of that moment of
truth at the warehouse. With determination, with luck, and with
help from lots of good people, I was able to rise up from the ashes.”20
At first glance, it appears that Iacocca simply offers his reader an old-
fashioned “luck” and pluck (“determination”) formula, adding a
shade of modesty to balance his considerable ego. This indicates that,
in the post–Civil Rights Era, where race relations shift and white eth-
nicity emerges as a trope of empowerment, an Italian American can
inhabit an Anglo-Saxon narrative of moral luck.
The passage not only highlights the entrepreneur’s good fortune
and hard work. Iacocca also attributes his status as a hero to “that
moment of truth at the warehouse.” The life-defining event that
transpired at the warehouse was his public burning before the news
media on 16 October 1978, the day after his fifty-fourth birthday. Ac-
cording to Iacocca, this is the single most memorable experience of

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his life. Three months prior to the moment of truth, he had been
fired as president of Ford Motor Company by its “despot” ruler,
Henry Ford II. Now he was forced to flee Ford’s palatial corporate
headquarters in Dearborn for the confines of “an obscure warehouse”
a few miles away. The press, however, preceded Iacocca to his place of
exile, where it gathered to greet “the newly deposed president of
Ford.” Before he could find a place to park his car, an eager TV jour-
nalist shoved a microphone in his face and asked: “How do you feel,
coming to this warehouse after eight years at the top?” Iacocca of-
fered no comment, but the typical media inquiry demanded no re-
sponse. In fact, it begged for reticence.21 The television audience not
only expected the moment of restless silence but sensed its signifi-
cance. The refusal to comment confirms the media’s presentation of
the auto executive’s descent down the corporate ladder.
What Iacocca identifies as his defining “moment of truth at the
warehouse” was a media event staged not to endorse his heroic entre-
preneurial stature but to ensure his dramatic unmaking before the
public. He thus reflects: “The private pain I could have endured. But
the deliberate public humiliation was too much for me” (xv). Yet,
within an information society, the separation between the private
and the public life (fundamental to the idea of the individual under
modernity) becomes irrelevant. The circus at the warehouse demon-
strates the degree to which a narrative of success is now a function of
a media spectacle whose outcome seems decided in advance.
Iacocca is not an “advertisement for myself ” but an “advertise-
ment for my corporation.” Corporate America works in tandem with
Madison Avenue and Hollywood to manufacture a variety of images
for the successful individual. Iacocca’s eventual resurrection, like his
fall, is a product of this combination. The connection between busi-
ness enterprise and image culture is made manifest in the structure of
the book, which is organized around the author’s corporate image.
The twenty-eight chapters are broken down into four sections. The
two middle sections—“The Ford Story” and “The Chrysler Story”—
carry the names of the two automobile manufacturers for whom
Iacocca worked. The first and last sections—“Made in America” and
“Straight Talk”—are advertising slogans made popular on radio and

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television in the early 1980s by Chrysler pitchman Lee Iacocca. The

“Made in America” motto emerged in the early eighties as a part of
Chrysler’s campaign to sell nostalgia for the old-fashioned work ethic
through the theme of “Yankee Ingenuity.” Iacocca, in a television
commercial aired during the summer of 1982, stated: “There was a
time when ‘Made in America’ meant something. It meant you made
the best. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans don’t believe that any-
more, and maybe with good reason. . . . We in the car industry must
make ‘Made in America’ mean something again.”22 In response to
the national crisis brought on by the globalization of the economy
during the eighties (for U.S. automakers, this event was marked by
American consumers’ increased demand for European and especially
Japanese cars), this ad illustrates an effort to renew faith in the
Protestant ethos. If “Made in America” had once been a sign of qual-
ity products, it was now an ad slogan aimed at consumers.
The blockbuster sales of Iacocca illustrate a resurgence of national
interest in the man who not only fulfilled the dream of success but
had the capacity to “make ‘Made in America’ mean something again.”
The book simultaneously borrowed from the Chrysler advertising
campaign and cashed in on the post–Civil Rights white ethnic craze.
Unlike industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who enters a narrative of moral
luck only after distancing himself from his immigrant father and
swallowing his Scottish accent, Iacocca sells white ethnic nostalgia
by highlighting his familial roots and his life as an “Italian Yankee”
(37). His autobiography updates the traditional story of class mobil-
ity by generating a tale of American enterprise that emphasizes ethnic
heritage over economic hardship. Iacocca concludes the book’s Pro-
logue with the sentence, “Now let me tell you my story” (xv), but
opens the first chapter (titled “Family”) with a tribute to his immi-
grant father. It begins: “Nicola Iacocca, my father, arrived in this
country in 1902 at the age of twelve—poor, alone, and scared” (3).
Iacocca thus starts not with Lido’s birth but with the ordeals endured
by his Italian father, Nicola, upon arrival in the New World. Nicola
Iacocca is a Horatio Alger hero with an Italian accent. In Allentown,
Pennsylvania, he “pursued the American dream with all his might . . .
he was full of ambition and hope” (4–5). Self-employed, he saved his

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money and became the proprietor of local restaurants and movie

houses.
For the son of Nicola, financial distress is overwritten by the expe-
rience of persistent ethnic prejudice in school and at work. Although
Lido Iacocca did not rise from the immigrant ghetto,23 neither is he
Henry Ford II, the spoiled grandson of Henry Ford who sticks his
silver foot in his mouth every time he makes a racist, anti-Semitic, or
nativist remark. If Nicola is the immigrant-as-enterprising-man, his
son is the second-generation ad man in the Anglocentric melting pot
of corporate America. The latter’s high school and college days teach
him the importance of “luck” (21) and pluck. In the tradition of Ben
Franklin, he maintains his self-discipline by keeping a daily “sched-
ule” and weekly “outline” (20). In 1946, Lee Iacocca accepted his first
job with Ford Motor Company. Imagining himself as the “Italian
Yankee,” he describes the personality-enhancing process by which he
“made” himself into a skillful salesman (32). This explains why, as a
seasoned businessman, he is a “great believer” in the Dale Carnegie
Institute for self-improvement (54) and openly critical of the “faceless
personality” management style at General Motors (58).
Prior to the 1970s, his experience in corporate culture taught him
that there were definite limits to the uses of personality. Iacocca’s first
thirty years in marketing convinced him that “there were certain
broad standards you just didn’t violate”: namely, a corporate chair-
man should never appear in his company’s ads (268). Thus he ac-
knowledges his skepticism when asked by Chrysler’s ad agency, im-
mediately after being hired as the company head in 1978, to appear in
television commercials. If the idea of an inner character now seemed
antiquated, the notion of the media-made personality was imminent.
Like it or not, Iacocca became a recognizable face after the press at-
tention he received during the 1979 congressional hearings, where
Chrysler was awarded $1.5 billion in loan guarantees to avoid bank-
ruptcy. Chrysler’s ad agency, Kenyon and Eckhardt, exploited his
celebrity status in a successful effort to reinvigorate the car company’s
image and thereby increase its products’ market share. They did so
by staging television and radio commercials in which Iacocca’s ex-
pressive face and familiar voice made personal appeals and guarantees

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to the consumer on behalf of an otherwise impersonal and increas-

ingly transnational corporation. The entrepreneur was now a media-
manufactured commodity.
Iacocca was instantaneously transformed from salesman to celeb-
rity. The press now courted him as a prospective presidential candi-
date. In the summer of 1982, he was featured in the middle of the
front page of the Wall Street Journal, where “his cocksure personality”
was offered as evidence that here was “the lone colorful auto man in a
faceless sea.” Responding to the media query, “If a Hollywood star
can [become President], why not a Detroit car salesman?”24 Iacocca
reflects: “I guess the rumors started because of all the TV commer-
cials I did for Chrysler. Many people now think I’m an actor. But
that’s ridiculous. Everybody knows that being an actor doesn’t qualify
you to be President!” (267). It is unclear whether Iacocca simply
thinks that an actor is unqualified to be the nation’s highest elected
public official or whether he believes as well that it is “ridiculous” to
assume that he is an actor. Obviously, neither was the case. In 1984,
the president of the United States was a Hollywood actor and the
country’s most beloved entrepreneur was a celebrity. Media culture,
in its capacity to collapse the distinctions between the private and
public spheres and the inner and outer selves, also flattens the dis-
tinction between actors, entrepreneurs, and presidents.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Ross Perot’s 1992 media-
driven third-party candidate run for president of the United States,
where the self-made billionaire posed before the American people as
a charismatic populist folk hero. Such a farce compels us to update
Iacocca’s ironic proclamation by substituting “entrepreneur” for
“actor.” When, on 1 October 1992, Perot reentered the presidential
race, he echoed Iacocca’s sentiments from a decade past.25 He told re-
porters and supporters that his decision to run was simple. “We must
make the words ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ once again the world’s standard
for excellence,” to which he added: “we’ve got to pass on the Ameri-
can dream to . . . our children and grandchildren.” His personal stake
in the American dream was succinctly summed up in a one-sentence
Algeresque invocation of moral luck: “I have been extremely fortu-
nate during my business career.”

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Rather than use the campaign platform to detail his own road to
riches, Perot shifted focus from himself to the first-generation Jewish
immigrant grandfather of Mort Myerson, president of Electronic
Data Systems, a corporation owned by Perot from the early 1960s to
the mid-1980s. With every bit as much courage and sacrifice as Nicola
Iacocca, grandpa Myerson fled Russia “because he happened to be a
Jew. He lived in an attic in Brooklyn for eighteen months working as
a tailor . . . so he could get together the money to buy a train ticket to
Fort Worth, Texas.” On the day Myerson was promoted to president
of EDS, his ninety-five-year-old grandfather, “with tears in his eyes,”
told his grandson: “through you I have fulfilled all of the dreams I
had as a young man when I came to America.” The elder Myerson,
who escaped religious persecution in the Old World, realized his im-
migrant dream by means of hard work, decency and, belatedly, his
grandson’s achievements. Perot’s elaborate and emotional story of
grandpa Myerson stands in stark contrast to the brevity and restraint
of his description of how, by being “extremely fortunate,” he inherited
the American dream. More than humility may be operating here,
however. Perot’s televised speech deflects detailed inquiries concern-
ing how he built his financial empire, as well as allegations against
him regarding anti-Semitism, through the strategic placement of an
uplifting story about a turn-of-the-century immigrant.26 His brief
comment on his own self-made success is coded by white moral luck,
a convention he used repeatedly in his two-part “Conversation with
Ross Perot,” the half-hour autobiographical infomercials aired on
cable and network television just before the November elections.

Downsizing: Susan Powter and Oprah Winfrey

In an era of infomercials and the celebrity, narratives of self-made suc-
cess foreground the body rather than the soul and, in doing so, collapse
the distinctions between image and reality, private and public selves.
Women’s uplift stories often complicate this narrative transformation
by representing the female body as an object to be scorned or desired
and as an instrument for self-imprisonment or self-empowerment.
Think only of enterprising entertainers like Madonna or Cher, who

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have maintained a certain amount of financial independence from

men (husbands and lovers) throughout their careers. Each has shrewdly
transformed her celebrity image not merely by changing the clothes
she wears but by resculpting her figure through diet, exercise, and
surgery. Even more than the contemporary self-made man, today’s
self-made woman is as likely to be as much a product of cosmetic
surgery as a producer of cosmetics.
As previous chapters of this study indicate, over the past century
enterprising women have been most successful in exploiting con-
sumer society’s desire to adorn the female form. Business pioneers
such as Harriet Ayer and Madam Walker marketed fashion trends as
a means of personal autonomy outside their marriages. However,
today’s enterprising woman sells her media-manufactured image—
including her story of self-making—as the product of entrepreneur-
ial triumph. If Emma McChesney made the pitch to the petticoat
customer, “I not only sell it, I wear it,” today’s female celebrity might
say to her customers, “I not only sell it, I am it.” While she peddles
an objectified self-image to her lusting (largely male) viewership,
the successful woman offers her adoring (largely female) fans an
enabling ideal for remaking themselves. The media-manufactured
woman is neither wholly objectified nor simply empowered; as narra-
tives of the female celebrity suggest, she is both simultaneously. Even
as these women provide their fans with models for self-improvement
and uplift, they belong to the multimillion-dollar-a-year diet, fitness,
and medical establishment, which targets female consumers by pro-
moting nearly impossible (if not unnatural or unhealthy) standards
of beauty.
Perhaps no self-made woman in America fits this contradictory
profile better than Australian-born fitness guru Susan Powter, host of
the late-night infomercial “Stop the Insanity!” and author of the
best-selling autobiographical book by the same name. The fact that
Powter’s infomercial and book share the same name demonstrates the
extent to which, particularly within an image society, the individual
sells the product. Whereas the traditional self-made man sold his
story as an afterthought to the accumulation of riches, the celebrity’s
primary source of income is her story. Celebrity is the self that sells.

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With the eclipse of the traditional, character-based entrepreneur by

the media personality, the “self ” has become more superficial but no
less germane to American success.
Powter is the self-proclaimed “housewife who figured it out.”27
In infomercial and autobiography alike, she moves deftly from fitness
guru to girlfriend. As she reminds her audience, she is an “expert by
experience” (212). Born and raised in Sydney, Australia, she was edu-
cated at a Dominican convent school prior to accompanying her
family to the United States at age ten. She dropped out of high
school in the ninth grade, and worked as a nurse’s aide and a secre-
tary. Later, living in Texas, she met and married Prince Charming
(which is how she refers to her first husband throughout Stop the In-
sanity! ), the man of her dreams: “If not the American dream, the
Cinderella one” (40). After six weeks of marriage, her doctor told her
she was four weeks pregnant; her second child was conceived two
months after the birth of her first. Although taught to believe that
motherhood would be her “fulfillment” and drawing consolation
from being anointed a saint by her husband’s Catholic family, back-
to-back births made Powter feel the loss of her sexuality, freedom, en-
ergy and, eventually, her marriage (43). In the meantime, the Prince
demanded fulfillment of what Mary Antin once referred to as “our
national ideal of manhood.” Powter puts it this way: “One of the
Prince’s biggest worries, or insecurities, was his need to work for him-
self. To not be under anyone’s thumb. To feel like a man” (47).
Powter not only performed the traditional tasks of the self-made
man’s wife, she updated the role for the 1980s. Caring for two infants
and supporting her husband’s entrepreneurial ambitions was not
enough. She felt a need to look sexy while doing it. While the Prince
assumed the role of the “young, good-looking entrepreneur,” she des-
perately tried to get “skinny” in order to fulfill her duty as “his pink
paisley wife.” Soon the young wife not only realized that her “self-
worth was second to his,” but that her husband’s business venture
gave him “a sense of accomplishment that I was severely lacking.”
Moreover, while she stayed at home changing diapers and battling
her weight, he found another way to validate his manhood: he en-
gaged in extramarital affairs while running the family business. The

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unequal relationship between businessman and wife proved to be the

unmaking of the Prince’s and Powter’s “entrepreneurial life together”
(47–49).
For the author of Stop the Insanity!, the end of her American Cin-
derella dream is manifested through a complete loss of control over
her body. As the “Prince’s life grew: his business, his list of girl-
friends,” so did his ex-wife’s body, which bloated to 260 pounds.
Awakening one day from her “fat coma” (51), Powter says she “did
what all of us have done. I went to the diet industry—the first big-
gest mistake of my life” (60). When dieting failed, she turned to the
fitness industry and found an aerobic atmosphere rigged not only to
ignore the needs of but also to humiliate overweight women. With
two strikes against her, Powter chose her own way out: she simply
“went for a walk.”
There wasn’t a fitness goal or physical image in my mind. When I
went for a walk I felt better, so I just took a walk. . . . I wanted to
walk forever. Walk away from my life and into someone else’s,
preferably that of a beautiful model, a successful businesswoman,
or one of those women who have children and still fit into their
“old high school jeans.” (78–79)
Inasmuch as walking involves continuous movement and breath-
ing, this simple act (along with eating high-volume, low-fat foods)
became the cornerstone of Powter’s “wellness” program. Even as the
author rejects the diet industry’s unhealthy prescriptions for weight
loss and the fitness industry’s unreasonable workout regimes, she
nonetheless advocates many of the standards of beauty promoted by
them. This is made evident in Powter’s autobiography by the slippage
between actual fitness and the image of fitness. The self-image she
promotes as “strong, lean, and healthy” includes not only exercise
(for good health) but cosmetic surgery (for good looks). By simulta-
neously repudiating the means by which corporate America pro-
motes femininity and embracing its ends, Powter speaks to the con-
tradictory desires of large numbers of women. Even as they search for
commonsense alternatives, they still want to become the diet indus-
try’s ideal type. Powter is a charismatic ideal for her female audience:

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the self-made woman who not only owns her own line of designer
clothes but has overcome the struggle to fit into them. Her viewers
shed the limitations of their own lives and identify with the success-
ful and entertaining self-image projected by their infomercial host.
Powter has built her career by both terrorizing and profiting from
the diet and fitness industries. Prodding her largely female reader-
ship to “hear your own story mixed in with mine” (15), her popular
authority derives from her capacity to speak directly to the desires
and real-life experiences of ordinary women. Powter’s narrative weds
her life story to good business sense in order to demonstrate the
health dangers of a profit-driven diet industry. Early in the book, for
example, she cites well-known studies that reveal the high percentage
of teenage girls on weight-loss diets. So as to humanize the cold sta-
tistics, Powter offers a personal anecdote—dubbed the “cider vinegar
story”—to illustrate her own teenage insanity. At age thirteen, the
author says she tried just about anything to lose weight, even a com-
bination diet of kelp, lecithin capsules, and cider vinegar. Around the
same time, her family noticed that her two-year-old brother, when-
ever in the presence of his older sister, had the habit of squinching his
nose and mumbling something akin to “P U—dirty socks!” In hind-
sight, Powter realizes that “the cider vinegar was oozing from every
pore in my body, and I smelled like . . . dirty socks” (29). Although
this weight-loss story is amusing, it makes the point that methods for
achieving the ideal self-image can be hazardous to your health. It can
also be expensive, as she explains on the next page. She instructs her
reader on the “insanity” of blindly following the prescriptions of the
diet industry:
Think about this. Business 101. You give “them” your hard-earned
money. Then they tell you what kind of starvation you’ll be living
on. . . . Business 101 tells me that if I pay you for a temporary,
painful—and dieting is painful—solution to my problem, if the
solution I am paying for will absolutely set me up for failure, and if
I will need you again in a couple of months, then this is not . . . a
good investment. (30)
In a book “for women, about women getting well” (13) and looking
good, Powter deploys the language of entrepreneurship to assess the

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diet industry’s bottom line. As she states with characteristic bluntness,

“manufacturers [of diet products] lie for profit” (110).
Whether pitching her “wellness” program in Stop the Insanity! or
discussing teen pregnancies on her nationally syndicated talk show,
Powter sells her licensed products to her largely female viewership by
shifting from fitness expert to next-door neighbor. In this sense, she
is a product of the Oprahfication of the television talk-show format,28
where the audience identifies not merely with the program’s guests
(as on Oprah’s forerunner, the Phil Donahue Show) but with the host.
In turn, the distinction between guest and host disappears as the au-
dience absorbs frequent personal confessions from the talk-show host.
The once plump Oprah made her national reputation—in her 1985
screen debut in The Color Purple and on her talk show, which began
airing nationwide a year later—by being opinionated but nurturing.
Media critics began describing her in terms of the black mammy
stereotype: “nearly 200 pounds of Mississippi-bred black woman-
hood, brassy, earthy, street smart and soulful,” retorted the first na-
tional news story to profile Winfrey’s talk-showmanship.29 The hard-
bodied Powter, by contrast, who sports spiky bleached-blonde hair
above Vulcan-like ears, is a friendly but firm alien-outsider from
Down Under. Although both Oprah and Powter are exotic enough
to pique the curiosity of their middle-American TV viewership,30
they are domesticated enough to be invited back into their living
rooms on a regular basis. Television brings the world into the home
and offers viewers what Jean Baudrillard characterizes as an “ecstasy of
communication.”31 By collapsing inside (home) and outside (world),
foreground (self ) and background (scene), TV allows viewers to in-
habit the space of audience and celebrity simultaneously.
It is not unimportant that Powter’s major moneymakers—her
fitness video Lean, Strong, and Healthy as well as Stop the Insanity!—
appeared around the same time as Oprah’s 1993 “Weight Loss Show,”
which detailed the host’s life-defining battle with weight loss. As
early as the national debut of the Oprah Winfrey Show in September
1986, the host confided to her viewers: “I don’t have a lot of problems
in my life. . . . But two things have bugged me for years. The first, my
thighs. The second, my love life.”32 Winfrey’s bootstrap story would

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do Madam Walker proud. She was born into poverty on a small farm
in Mississippi and later reared in the inner city of Milwaukee before
becoming a TV personality and media mogul. However, her repeated
attempts to adhere to conventional standards of femininity through
dieting and dating dampened her personal evaluation of her own suc-
cess. Oprah appeared to have cleared the first of these last two hur-
dles by the end of 1988. On November 15 of that year, she taped her
now-famous “Diet Show.” Before a live audience, the host stripped
off her jacket to reveal a svelte figure squeezed into a pair of size ten
Calvin Klein jeans. To demonstrate her newfound control over her
never-ending struggle with weight, the 145-pound Oprah paraded
around the stage in her Calvin’s with a little red wagon. The kiddy
toy hauled sixty-seven pounds of beef fat, or precisely the amount the
host had shed through a severe eighteen-week, four-hundred-calories-
a-day liquid diet program. When the show aired three days later, it
won a 16.4 rating—equivalent to a remarkable 45 percent share of the
U.S. television market—making Oprah the highest-rated talk show
in syndication.33
Within a year, Oprah gained back the weight she had lost. Given
that 98 percent of all diets end in failure, this comes as no surprise.
What shocked her adoring fans was a disclosure regarding the cover
of the 20 August–1 September 1989 issue of TV Guide, which pictured
Oprah Winfrey. An apparent photo of the sexy, sequin-clad million-
aire perched atop a pile of money next to the headline “Oprah! The
Richest Woman on TV” was revealed to be a morphed image of
Oprah’s head onto Ann-Margret’s colorized body. Over the past
decade, in scattered responses to questions about how it feels to have
accumulated such a fortune, Oprah claims that her entrepreneurial
acumen has a “deep spiritual” meaning: “It’s symbolic of what I am
supposed to do in my life.”34 Her beliefs are expressed in terms com-
monly associated with New Age religion, specifically its concept of
“prosperity consciousness.” This philosophy explains her rise from
poverty to prosperity as a sign of a higher calling. It emphasizes not
only the individual’s responsibility for amassing wealth. The altera-
tion of self-image is a prerequisite to ascending the ladder of success.
In this light, New Age prosperity consciousness can be seen as a spir-

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itual addendum to New Thought, whose maxim was “think and

grow rich.”35 Yet, as the Oprah Winfrey–Ann-Margret composite on
the cover of TV Guide illustrates, the news and entertainment indus-
try tends to look elsewhere when marketing the celebrity’s self-made
fortune. Simply put, the mass media privileges body-image over self-
awareness when presenting the story of Oprah’s uplift to the public
at large.
It may seem absurd to measure people’s professional accomplish-
ments according to their capacity to lose weight or look sexy. Yet
even Oprah publicly acknowledged (by airing parts of her private
diary on her November 1993 “Weight Loss Show,” and more recently,
by publishing these revelations as a part of her autobiographical
sketch titled “Oprah’s Story”)36 that her physical self-image became
the standard she employed to assess her success. In a journal entry
dated 13 December 1989, she wrote: “The new studio is looking
great. . . . The farmhouse is coming together too. So why do I feel
compelled to eat?” An entry for 20 February 1991 reads: “gained eight
pounds, bringing me to an all-time whopping 226 pounds. . . . I
don’t know this self. . . . I caught a glimpse of myself reflected in a
store window. I didn’t recognize the fat lady staring back at me.” The
misrecognition suggests the manner in which the feminine self—
here mirrored in a mall window—is preceded by images of beauty
thrown up by consumer culture. The advertised image, such as Ann-
Margret’s body, becomes the measure of real-life womanhood. An-
other year passed before Oprah began the painful process of realign-
ing her corpulent self with the feminine ideal through weight-loss
instruction that combined more sensible eating with rigorous exercise.
The occasion for making public the diary entries, Oprah’s “Weight
Loss Show,” opened with the host’s confession: “I’ve kept journals
almost all my life. And although I’ve experienced some incredible
changes throughout my career, my weight was all-consuming.”
Today’s self-made woman is not only required to make money
but—in order to be perceived as in control and therefore success-
ful—must look good while making it. This explains why Oprah was
consumed by her failure to control her self-image, which seemed to
overshadow her achievements as a media mogul. This also elucidates

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the logic behind Susan Powter’s revision of Sophie Tucker’s apho-

rism, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and rich is better,” with “I’ve
been fit and I’ve been fat, and fit is better” (18). For Powter, recon-
structing the body precedes not only emotional sanity but financial
prowess as well. Powter’s anti-New Thought success motto identifies
the problem in the simplest terms: “It’s not in your mind, it’s in your
body.”
If Stop the Insanity! has one goal it is this: “change your body for-
ever” (102). However, while good fitness might generate the condi-
tions under which the enterprising individual can scale the mountain
to success, more important in today’s image-generated culture is sim-
ply looking good—too often regardless of health hazards. Cosmetic
surgery is to the celebrity what steroids have become to the body-
builder. Despite her emphasis on good health, Susan Powter uses the
word “superficial” to introduce one of her more salient personality
traits (15). In the course of her book, she advocates cosmetic surgery
for all those who want to look as well as feel fit, and then confesses to
having had a tummy tuck and an ear job (276–77). The superficial
nature of celebritydom suggests the distance between it and, say, the
inner soul in an age of character, or even willpower in the high era of
personality. In a recent interview, Powter clarified her intent: “The
message is: you make your own money, and here’s how to do it. First,
have the energy to get out of bed.”37 Powter’s prescription does not
revisit the modern debate about entrepreneurial uplift: character ver-
sus personality. Instead, it displaces the opposition altogether. As she
instructs her students: “The problem is not your lack of mind power,
discipline, self-control, or ‘eating disorder.’ . . . It’s not in your mind,
it’s in your body” (87). Or, as she plainly put it in an interview with
the New York Times Magazine, “The most empowering thing is to be
physically well.”38
Powter’s turning point occurred while shopping—what she calls
her “moment in the mall” (85). Inverting Oprah’s painful moment of
misrecognition in the store window, Powter first recognized the real-
ity of her new, downsized self-image when, while strolling in a local
mall, she realized that her thighs no longer rubbed together. The eu-
phoria helped propel her on her way toward entrepreneurial uplift.

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 The Ends of Self-Making

However, Powter, like nonconventional self-made individuals before

her, insists that “luck” had “nothing to do” with her mercurial rise.
For women raised on romantic fairy tales, she maintains: “There was
no magical moment. . . . the fairy godmother is a lie” (78). Powter
insists that hard work coupled with common sense has allowed her
to become the superwoman of her post-Cinderella dreams. In fact,
she is a mom who models her line of designer clothing as a part of
her larger success. Nonetheless, her book demonstrates the extent to
which the new media age has not brought with it an end to the en-
terprising woman’s need to negotiate her gender identity. In order to
combat certain protocols of femininity and look good while doing it,
Powter advocates a high-heeled form of feminist critique. Stop the In-
sanity! reveals not only the author’s love of pumps but, as will become
apparent, the literal and symbolic role high heels play in her profes-
sional downfall as well as her entrepreneurial climb.
Powter takes a high-heeled feminist approach to her fat-to-fit-to-
famous story in a chapter titled “Life Changes.” It opens with a photo
of the author in a confident if sexy pose, donning her trademark buzz
cut, and wearing nothing more than a thong bikini and high heels
(280). It is, we learn later, one of her favorite likenesses, “much closer
to the truth” (322) of who she really is than other professional por-
traits in circulation. The image sets the tone for the entire chapter,
which describes Powter’s literal and figurative fall prior to her entre-
preneurial ascent. When her ex-husband failed to make regular ali-
mony and child-support payments, Powter supplemented her income
by holding jobs in a variety of traditional female occupations, includ-
ing two stay-at-home jobs (babysitter and cooking instructor) and a
stint as a secretary. None of these satisfied her emotional or economic
need for independence. “It was time to decide how I was going to
make a living and not compromise what was important to me. I got
fit, then changed my body and started feeling and looking better, and
establishing some sanity in my life” (298). Rather than establish psycho-
logical stability prior to making changes in other facets of her life,
Powter made a change in her physical well-being: she “got fit.” After
transforming her self-image “from a 260-pound housewife to a lean
machine” (308), she made a career decision that “many of you may

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regard as insane.” She put her new body to work in a strip club. “I had
just lived through the inequality in women’s lives. The Prince’s rules
were different from mine. I looked at the system and figured if that’s
the way it is, I’ll not only join them—I’ll beat them at their own
game.” Powter attempts to slip the corset of women’s “inequality”—
from feminine ideals to women’s work—by seizing these constraints
and turning them into a means of economic independence. Employ-
ing a pseudonym and otherwise disguised by little else than a wig, a
G-string, and high heels, Powter finally moves out from underneath
the authority of her ex-husband by dancing for dollars. “I knew if I
was ever going to pull myself up by those damn bootstraps that every-
one was telling me about, I’d need money. . . . I wanted a job that re-
quired no commitment and very little time, that gave me hours that
worked for me and the children and lots of cash” (298).
If, as Powter claims, topless dancing became the first step toward
“rebuilding my financial future” (300), it also proved to be something
of a misstep. Powter avoids romanticizing this period of her life be-
cause, upon reflection, she recognizes the extent to which exotic danc-
ing is not so far from other female jobs she previously performed,
such as being a housewife or a secretary: “I see topless dancing as
a very honest example of what life is really like for most women. We
parade our wares in front of all the men, they ogle and admire and
pay cash, they pick the one they want, and we walk away thinking we
have security” (301). Powter takes this credo to its logical conclusion
when she turns from dancing to sex for money; or, in her words, “a
socially acceptable form of prostitution.” After being introduced to a
wealthy customer at her strip club, she begins an intimate affair with
him: “We dated and slept together, and he gave me cash. That’s what
it was, and never—not for a second—did I think it was anything
else” (304).
Given that self-making within an electronic media culture is real-
ized along the surface of the body rather through the cultivation of
character, stripping and prostitution have perhaps become more per-
missible forms of enterprise. Powter’s turn to prostitution might thus
be read as a literal gloss on Christopher Lasch’s figure of the “happy
hooker,” who, the author of The Culture of Narcissism sardonically

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claimed, today “stands in place of Horatio Alger as the prototype of

personal success.”39 Powter is, no doubt, more Moll Flanders than
Robinson Crusoe. But in the tradition of her literary foremother,
prostitution afforded Powter a certain degree of economic stability
and personal autonomy. Specifically, an illicit relationship with a
wealthy, married man enabled her to pursue a career in fitness. Free
from the grind of exotic dancing, she could afford to be poorly paid
as an entry-level aerobic instructor. Teaching up to five fitness classes
a day was not simply a lesson in the Protestant work ethic but offered
Powter her first taste of professional fulfillment. However, prostitu-
tion—the very thing that provided her a means toward taking her
first step up the ladder of success—brought with it a dogged sense of
self-exploitation that dampened her newfound self-worth. Feeling
“strangled,” she abandoned the sex-for-cash arrangement. With no-
where else to go, she returned to exotic dancing, hoping that she
could continue teaching aerobics in the daytime. Her retreat to the
strip club stage lasted only one night. During the final set of her first
night back, Powter, elevated by stiletto pumps, slipped on a cus-
tomer’s spilled beer and “flipped” off the stage: “When I say flipped, I
mean I did a complete flip and landed in five-inch heels on both feet”
(306). The fall resulted in severely broken feet but also turned out to
be the last obstacle in Powter’s road to riches. Confined to a wheel-
chair for months, she realized her professional calling: sharing with
others the idea that fitness is for everyone.
Here, a gap appears in Stop the Insanity!, one that corresponds to
the three years prior to the release of the book. Although Powter im-
mediately informs us that she found her vocation—“change the face
of fitness”—she leaves unsaid just how, during the first years of the
1990s, she financed her fitness scheme. Of course, the nuts and bolts
of business decisions have never been a staple of narratives of the self-
made man, which operate through familiar if formulaic tropes (e.g.,
luck and pluck; timetables) rather than the details of day-to-day
business operations. Nevertheless, the reader never learns how she
financed her fitness empire. The silence is, in part, a symptom of
Powter’s gendered narrative, which, as Emma McChesney finally con-
ceded, compels the author of Stop the Insanity! to give more weight to

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 The Ends of Self-Making

personal affairs than corporate ones. Specifically, Powter sidetracks

her entrepreneurial adventures with inside information about her ro-
mance with her soon-to-be second husband. Advice about business
aptitude is reduced to her trademark message: a fit body is the foun-
dation of healthy finances. “That’s what changing my body has meant
to me,” Powter concludes toward the end of the “Life Changes” chap-
ter. “Yeah, it’s cool that I do national TV, write books, do seminars,
and own and operate a very successful business, but it’s even cooler
that I’m in control and have choices now” (318).
As it turns out, Powter had less dominion over her fitness empire
than she let on. About a year after the publication of Stop the Insan-
ity!, she publicly complained about the lack of control she exercised
over the Susan Powter Corporation, which was estimated to have
sales of more than $50 million. She began suing for control of the
company. She alleged to have been coerced into signing a contract
that gave two Dallas investors, brothers Gerald and Richard Frankel,
50 percent of her business and left her cash poor and owing creditors
$3.2 million. Three months later, in January 1995, she filed for bank-
ruptcy, claiming that legal fees had wiped her out.40 “Here I am,”
Powter fumed to a reporter, “the only revenue generator, writing,
producing, talking, selling, doing seminars, telling my story, for God’s
sake, and they decided it was theirs to market as they please.”41 Rather
than blemish the profitable image of self-made success surrounding
his corporation’s namesake, Gerald Frankel used the rags-to-riches
story to counter her testimony: “The year before we formed our part-
nership, she made $14,000 a year as an aerobics instructor. . . . We
put close to $1 million into an absolutely unknown, and over the
next two years [she] made over $3 million.”42
As Powter says, “my story” is what is at stake here. In an age of
celebrity, the entrepreneur’s uplift saga is not intended simply to be
put in the service of maintaining a form of America’s national iden-
tity. The story itself has become the individual’s way to wealth. After
all, what else is celebrity but the commodification of the self? If, after
the death of the self-made man, the figure of success has been recy-
cled, it seems only logical that she would become the product of an
electronic society. In a world increasingly dominated by mass media,

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the distinction between actual self and self-image (in narratives of

self-making as elsewhere) has collapsed.
Susan Powter’s post–Stop the Insanity! saga points to the limited
authority successful individuals have over the circulation of their sto-
ries in era in which a shrinking number of media conglomerates con-
trol public access to information. Take the example of Powter’s at-
tempt to compete directly with Oprah by moving from the 2 a.m.
infomercial format to daytime talk-show television. At the outset, the
host of the Susan Powter Show (which first aired in the fall of 1994)
had some very clear ideas about what the show would and would not
be. “There will be no tabloid issues at all,” she told a Los Angeles
Times reporter. “There’s no exploiting people at all. . . . and if that
doesn’t fly on TV, it ain’t gonna fly.”43 The show ran in two hundred
markets for more than a year before being pulled off the air because
of low ratings. Powter blames television executives, who were unable
to see beyond a tabloid format, for failing to fulfill her vision: “It
started to be about real conversation, but the producers turned it
into a tabloid—‘Teens from Hell’ and ‘Why Doesn’t He Love Me
Anymore?’”44
Despite her efforts to maintain a certain degree of respectability
on her TV show, Powter is a product of tabloid culture, which can
make and unmake her success story. The mass media is increasingly
saturated by a tabloid sensibility that fixates on the sensational and
the scandalous while eroding the distinction between fact and fic-
tion, truth and lie. When, in the Afterword to Stop the Insanity! (ti-
tled “Tabloid 101”), Powter defends herself against allegations made
on tabloid TV’s Inside Edition that she never weighed 260 pounds,
she does less to discredit the hoax than reinforce the reader’s percep-
tion of her as a media personality. Despite Powter’s predictable com-
plaints about tabloid journalism, Stop the Insanity! is littered with fa-
vorable references to the same. Throughout the book, she conveys
the authenticity of her personal experiences (love and marriage [41],
her ex-husband’s extramarital affairs [46], prostitution [304]) through
explicit references to tabloid magazines and television (Cosmo, Dona-
hue, and Geraldo, respectively). At the end of the book’s Introduction,
Powter describes a flight to Los Angeles, during which she had her

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first face-to-face encounter with Dolly Parton, who also had recently
gone through a much-publicized period of downsizing. The anec-
dote is paradigmatic for how the self-referential signs of uplift oper-
ate in today’s consumer society:
Dolly Parton is my idol. My nails need just a bit more acrylic, and
the high heels, I’ve got them down (see my “after” picture). I’ll
never be able to match the big hair, but let me strive. Strive to
be Dolly.
During our flight a couple of people asked Dolly for her auto-
graph. She was so polite, accommodating and sweet, but what was
going on two seats behind her was blowing my mind. At least six-
teen people came up to me asking questions, wanting an auto-
graph, or just telling me that they were eating, breathing, and
moving, and their lives were changing. (19)
In her story about meeting Dolly, Powter transgresses the border be-
tween “before” (a star-crossed fan) and “after” (a star who, appar-
ently, is bigger than her idol).
In media culture, where the distance between the actual reality
and advertised image has eroded, the consumer’s desire “to be” an
idol of success is potentially fulfilled by mirroring the charismatic
face on the cover of a tabloid magazine or by becoming the sexy fig-
ure on the TV screen. This explains Powter’s parenthetical aside (“see
my ‘after’ picture”), which refers to the trademark hard-bodied, high-
heeled swimsuit photograph mentioned earlier. At the start of her
first fitness video, Lean, Strong, and Healthy, Powter, clad in a work-
out leotard, stands between life-size “before” (fat and slovenly) and
“after” (fit and sexy) images of herself. Yet, the leotard-clad host looks
as little like her “after” portrait as her “before” photo.45 The staging
of the opening video shot illustrates the workings of self-making
within image society: the firm but friendly host inspires her audience
to follow her instruction by leaving behind the (“before”) self we are
and by becoming the (“after”) self we desire to be.

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 Epilogue: The Return of
the Self-Made Man

Although physical fitness has been an occasional ingredient in self-

improvement recipes over the past century, it was not until the advent
of media culture that it took hold as an integral part of narratives of
self-making. Postmodern society—with its focus on depthless image
instead of internal reality, celebrity rather than character—found a
vehicle for marketing the idea of success in enterprising stories that
foregrounded bodily transformations. Is it any wonder, then, that
Arnold Schwarzenegger was at the forefront of the self-made man’s
rehabilitation? At the opening of Arnold: The Education of a Body-
builder, the immigrant from Graz insists: “I knew I was going to be
a bodybuilder. . . . I would be the best bodybuilder in the world, the
greatest, the best-built man.”1 Unable to speak more than a few words
of English when he first stepped onto U.S. shores in 1968, Schwarze-
negger was already an American dreamer: “From the age of ten, I
wanted to be the best. I thought I had been born in the wrong coun-
try. All I wanted to do was leave Austria and come to America. And
when I got here I would not be one of the masses.”2 Prior to coming
to America, young Arnold was a voracious reader of U.S. magazines
such as Muscle Builder and Mr. America, which, he recalls, were “full
of success stories” about bodybuilders turned movie stars. This, too,
was Schwarzenegger’s youthful ambition. From the start he under-
stood that “bodybuilding was show business . . . [thus] I had to be-
come a showman” (58). The image-making factories in Hollywood

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seemed a natural extension of the muscle pit, the big screen another
form of exhibiting the exaggerated self before an audience.
The entertainment industry helped make Schwarzenegger not
just a media celebrity but one of the richest men in the nation. For
years Hollywood scripted his successive remakings for popular con-
sumption. Moviegoers, most of whom were introduced to Schwarz-
enegger in the documentary Pumping Iron (1977), watched his trans-
formation between the Reagan and Bush presidencies. With the help
of films such as Twins (1988) and Kindergarten Cop (1990), his on-
screen personality went from menacing muscle-bound/cyborgian
alien in The Terminator (1984) to benevolent muscle-bound/cyborgian
hero in its Spielbergian sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1992).
Critics of the latter movie identified the kinder and gentler Schwarz-
enegger, who kneecaps rather than kills his enemies, as a metaphor
for the United States’ surgical bombing of Baghdad during the 1991
Gulf War. In the spirit of compassion, he delivers the following line
in Terminator 2 with his trademark foreign accent: “The more con-
tact I have with humans, the more I can learn.” The touching mo-
ment, as J. Hoberman suggests, perhaps marks the Americanization
of the Arnold.3 A few years back, Schwarzenegger’s marriage to news
personality and JFK niece Maria Shriver helped legitimate his claim
to U.S. citizenship, which was officially obtained in 1983. With his
appointment as chairman of President Bush’s Council on Physical
Fitness and Sports, the enterprising bodybuilder had climbed out of
the local muscle pit and into the White House gym.
As promoter Ben Weider, dubbed the Napoléon of his sport, has
been known to say, “Bodybuilding is important for nation building.”
Schwarzenegger carries the additional weight of being identified as
the Übermensch, a label no doubt fueled by reports of his father’s
membership in the Nazi party. However, after the fall of the Third
Reich, it is no longer acceptable (as it was in America of the 1920s) to
promote oneself as a Nordic self-made man. By maintaining his Ger-
manic name and accent, however, the individual once known as the
Austrian Oak proudly claims a white ethnic identity suitable to the
post–Civil Rights Era in America. In a sense, he is the opposite side
of the same coin that bears the visage of Clarence Thomas. Whereas

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whiteness, for Schwarzenegger, is that which need not speak its name
but which is imaged in conspicuous ways, blackness, for Thomas, is
that which must be disclaimed in the name of merit-based achieve-
ment. These proverbial twins, taken together, illustrate the mainte-
nance of racial difference in representations of self-made success,
where blackness is negated and whiteness is unmarked as the norm.
In the well-worn tradition of the self-made man in America,
Schwarzenegger uses his capacity for order and self-discipline in his
rise to the top. “The meaning of life,” he meditates in Arnold, “is not
simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to
conquer” (112). The “secret” to his success is a “three-part formula”—
“self-confidence, a positive mental attitude, and honest hard work”
(30)—which is developed through his daily workout but implicitly
inspired by the legacy of New Thought. If moral luck is absent from
this formula, then so is divine intervention. Although raised Catho-
lic, one of the first lessons Schwarzenegger learns in the gym is that
the individual alone is responsible for his self-making or unmaking:
“if I achieved something in life, I shouldn’t thank God for it, I should
thank myself. It was the same thing if something bad happened. . . .
if I wanted a great body, I had to build it. Nobody else could. Least of
all God” (32). Rather than wait for good fortune to smile on him, he
masters the art of self-improvement by studying his physique in
minute detail:
I discovered that taking measurements gave me both satisfaction
and incentive. I measured my calves, arms and thighs regularly,
and I’d be turned on if I saw I’d increased an eighth-inch or a half-
inch. On a calendar I kept even fractional changes in measure-
ments and weight. I had a photographer take pictures at least once
a month. I studied each shot with a magnifying glass. (64)
Self-surveillance is not only the key to remaking the self in the sport
of bodybuilding; it also provides voyeuristic pleasure (“I’d be turned
on if I saw . . .”). Detailed knowledge of the self is provided by calen-
dars and clocks, rulers and tape measures, photographic images and
mirrors. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, Schwarzenegger
consults “lists and charts” (71). “My body has become like . . . a spe-

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 Epilogue: The Return of the Self-Made Man

cial clock,” he observes, “that is tuned so well it only goes wrong one
second in five years” (110). He also generates self-knowledge through
a five-point list, which includes: checking his body chemistry, mak-
ing the most of his strict parental upbringing, avoiding distractions,
cultivating a positive attitude, and being open to self-criticism. “I
went down this list periodically,” he explains with a Franklinesque
flourish, “and checked it off item by item” (66). For the reader who
intends to imitate Arnold’s success, the second part of “the education
of a bodybuilder” is devoted to a detailed catalog of schedules and
lists that inventory weight training, cardiovascular exercise, diet, and
positive thinking.
From the moment Schwarzenegger entered the United States, he
worked to fulfill what he calls his “master plan.”4 A five-time Mr.
Universe and seven-time Mr. Olympia, Schwarzenegger instructs his
readers that bodybuilding is not an end in itself but a means toward
greater achievement: “If I had been able to change my body that
much, I could also, through the same discipline and determination,
change anything else I wanted” (28). Schwarzenegger makes body-
building a metaphor for pursuing entrepreneurial ambition in Amer-
ica. In the postmodern world, the ability to remake one’s body offers
an immediate, if somewhat superficial and nostalgic, gratification of
the desire for self-creation. In our body-obsessed society, there may
be a peculiar Horatio Alger appeal to the twenty-two-inch ballooned
bicep. “People aren’t born with arms like that, they make them,” re-
marks George Butler, producer and director of Pumping Iron, which
launched Schwarzenegger’s movie career.5 Yet, since the Arnold en-
tered the world of bodybuilding in the late 1960s, the sport has be-
come as much a product of synthetic drugs and cybertechnologies as
it is a resistance to the condition of postmodernity. Today, body
sculptors can do without anabolic steroids and plastic surgery no less
than discipline and determination.
If bodybuilding has somehow come to signify entrepreneurial
uplift, it can also act as a cautionary tale. Over an extended period of
time, the toll taken by steroids on the body-in-training can be as
menacing yet undetectable as the damage to the environment caused
by a toxic spill. Bodybuilder Steve Michalik, winner of the 1975 Mr.

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Universe and the consensus pick among his peers to end Schwarz-
enegger’s reign as Mr. Olympia, pumped himself full of steroids to
the point of ruining his immune system. When Michalik was on the
verge of being named the best-built man on earth, he was also in the
initial stages of a drawn-out period of personal destruction. A self-
made carcass, he could barely climb onto the stage at the 1975 Mr.
Universe show: “I had a cholesterol level of over 400, my blood pres-
sure was 240 over 110—but, Jesus Christ, I was a great-looking
corpse,” Michalik told journalist Paul Solotaroff. “No one had ever
seen anything like me. . . . I had absolutely perfect symmetry: 19-inch
arms, 19-inch calves, and a 54-inch chest that was exactly twice the
size of my thighs. The crowd went bazongo, the judges all loved me.”
For Michalik, however, all sense of achievement was wiped out by
the side effects of being juiced up on steroids: “The only feeling I was
capable of anymore was deep, deep hatred.”6
In 1983, after a decade of accumulating toxins, Michalik’s body
nearly ceased to function. Although he had experienced internal and
external hemorrhaging for years, only now—when his muscles turned
to jelly—did his darkest nightmare become reality. As Solotaroff de-
scribes it: “No matter how he worked them or what he shot into
them, they lost their gleaming, osmotic hardness, and began to
pooch out like $20 whitewalls.”7 Michalik somehow lasted a few
more years on the tour, but by the fall of 1986, his internal organs
were in a critical phase of meltdown. “I knew it was all over for me,”
Michalik confesses. “Every system in my body was shot, my testicles
had shrunk to the size of cocktail peanuts.” After years of abusing his
body in the name of superficial self-improvement, “it was like, sud-
denly, all the bills were coming in.”8 Miraculously, he survived a stint
in intensive care, but his once buffed body rapidly lost its luster and
decomposed. Minus his daily diet of five pounds of chicken and a
fistful of steroids, he dropped more than a hundred pounds in three
weeks. Months later he entered a rigorous detox program. The one-
time Mr. Universe “could scarcely jog around the block that first
day,” reports Solotaroff, “but in the sauna, it all started coming out of
him: a viscous, green paste that oozed out of his eyes and nostrils.”9

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Finally, Michalik’s body began purging the toxins that, ingested in

order to build the perfect body, had all but ended his life.
Schwarzenegger and his public relations people, in the venerable
tradition of the self-made man, are careful to avoid all mention of
the darker sides to his own uplifting past, including his use of
steroids during the 1970s. Instead, he upholds bodybuilding as a
model for entrepreneurship by keeping his focus and ours on the
bottom line: “It feels good being the best-built man in the world,” he
states matter-of-factly in Arnold, “but the question always comes up:
Okay, how can you use that to make money?” (107). As a sport that
literalizes self-making along the body’s surface, bodybuilding is mar-
keted to consumers for its promise to return a sense of power and
control to the individual. Placing a nonconventional story of uplift,
such as Steve Michalik’s, alongside a highly publicized one like Ar-
nold Schwarzenegger’s compels us to ask: Which body is postmodern
America?
We should not confuse our era with the Gilded Age, when cap-
tains of industry were revered as self-made men. In an image society,
it is entertainers in the film, television, and music industries, such as
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Oprah Winfrey, and Madonna, who capture
the public’s imagination. Today’s self-made man is a recycled image, a
commodity in search of an audience. The manufacture of self-styled
success in the form of the celebrity forecloses the central concern be-
hind old-fashioned narratives of uplift: the cultivation of inner moral-
ity made manifest in the character of the entrepreneur. How do we
account, then, for the fact that in the past few years there has been a
proliferation of interest in and discussion about restoring character-
based morality to politics, education, and the family, as well as to
corporate enterprise? It is, I think, misleading to interpret this devel-
opment as a harbinger of the return of traditional virtue. Rather, calls
for the restoration of character and morality are symptomatic of a na-
tional crisis over their disappearance.
Many people will no doubt continue to yearn for a time when
the morality of success was integral to the nation’s creed. Such nostal-
gia does little to address the cultural logic of our time, which does
not prescribe immorality so much as refuse the distinction between

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morality and immorality altogether. This study addresses the politi-

cal stakes associated with the collapse of that distinction inasmuch as
it answers the question: Why did the traditional figure of the self-
made man meet its end? The post–World War II corporate consoli-
dation of the electronic media and the rise of the celebrity are only
part of a longer story. At the beginning of this century, despite the
best intentions of Progressive Era reformers, the Horatio Alger for-
mula for success failed to survive its appropriation by women, blacks,
and immigrants. This was not because these new faces of enterprise
inherently lacked the qualities of character. Instead, their stories
speak what the logic of personal uplift does not allow to be spoken:
the separation of gendered spheres, racial segregation, and nativism
on which the rags-to-respectability-and-riches model was based. In
doing so, they expose morality as a discourse traditionally placed in
the service of normative power.

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 Notes

Introduction
1. Irvin G. Wyllie, The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1954); John G. Cawelti, Apostles of
the Self-Made Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). Aside from the
books by Wyllie and Cawelti, there was a flurry of published studies on the Ameri-
can success creed during the third quarter of this century. They include Kenneth S.
Lynn, The Dream of Success: A Study of the Modern American Imagination (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1955); Richard Weiss, The American Myth of Success: From Horatio
Alger to Norman Vincent Peale (New York: Basic Books, 1969); Richard M. Huber,
The American Idea of Success (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971); Lawrence Cheno-
weth, The American Dream of Success: The Search for the Self in the Twentieth Cen-
tury (North Scituate, Mass.: Duxbury Press, 1974); Rex Burns, Success in America:
The Yeoman Dream and the Industrial Revolution (Amherst: University of Massachu-
setts Press, 1976).
2. By using the concept of narrative rather than myth in my study, I try to
avoid some of the methodological pitfalls of traditional American Studies scholar-
ship, commonly known as the “myth and symbol” school of criticism. The inaugural
work in this influential tradition is Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American
West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950). For a brief
overview of the “myth and symbol” school, see Myra Jehlen, “Introduction: Beyond
Transcendence,” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch
and Myra Jehlen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 2–4.
3. Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Pres-
ence in American Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (winter 1989): 13.
4. “Bush Announces the Nomination of Thomas to Supreme Court,” Con-
gressional Quarterly Weekly Report 49 (6 July 1991): 1851.
5. Robert J. Dole, quoted in John E. Yang and Sharon LaFraniere, “Bush
Picks Thomas for Supreme Court,” Washington Post, 2 July 1991, A1.
6. Clarence Thomas, letter to the editor, Wall Street Journal, 20 February
1987, 21.

135
 Notes to Introduction

7. Clarence Thomas’s statement before the conference of black conservatives

is quoted in Karen Tumulty, “Sister of High Court Nominee Traveled Different
Road,” Los Angeles Times, 5 July 1991, A4.
8. Emma Mae Martin’s story was initially uncovered by Tumulty in “Sister of
High Court Nominee Traveled Different Road.” For further details, see Lisa Jones,
“Invisible Ones,” Village Voice 36 (12 November 1991), 27–28.
9. Emma Mae Martin, quoted in Tumulty, “Sister of High Court Nominee
Traveled Different Road,” A4.
10. Michel Foucault makes this point most succinctly in the first volume of
The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), 61–62.
11. Raymond Williams, Keywords, rev. ed. (London: Flamingo, 1983), 161–65.
12. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sci-
ences (New York: Vintage, 1973), 312.
13. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall
(New York: Norton, 1986), 66, 70, 72.
14. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 151.
15. Tocqueville stated: “Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which dis-
poses each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows
and to draw apart with his family and his friends.” Although, as always, Tocqueville
seemed ambivalent about the moral efficacy of this peculiarly American trait, he
leaned toward disapproval. Democratic individualists “owe nothing to any man,
they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering
themselves standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in
their own hands” (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, trans. Henry
Reeve [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946], 98–99).
16. Ibid., vol. 1, 406.
17. This point is made by Garry Wills in his essay “The Words That Remade
America,” Atlantic Monthly 269 (June 1992): 79.
18. See, for example, Merle Curti et al., An American History, vol. 1 (New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1950), 538, 596.
19. In Keywords, 213, Raymond Williams points to the eighteenth-century
emergence of “nation,” where it begins to mean a people grouped under the aus-
pices of political organization rather than older notions of race.
20. In Nationalism: Problems concerning the Word, the Concept and Classification
(Jyväskylä: Kustantajat, 1964), 48, Aira Kemiläinen reports that nationalism “does
not seem to have been very frequently used before the end of the 19th Century.”
21. Wallace Evan Davies, Patriotism on Parade: The Story of Veterans’ and
Hereditary Organizations in America, 1783-1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1955), 216.
22. Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man, 103–6.
23. Black-Belt Diamonds: Gems from the Speeches, Addresses, and Talks to Stu-
dents of Booker T. Washington, ed. Victoria Earle Matthews (New York: Fortune and
Scott, 1898), 60.
24. Mary Antin, They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigra-
tion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 76.

136
 Notes to Introduction

25. In fact, as Irvin Wyllie discovered, 80 percent of all success manuals pub-
lished during the nineteenth century appeared after the Civil War (see Wyllie, The
Self-Made Man in America, 117). The point I want to make here is that national cul-
ture is dependent on the spread of print-capitalism, as Benedict Anderson argues in
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Lon-
don: Verso, 1983), 30, because it provides “the technical means for ‘re-presenting’
the kind of imagined community that is the nation.”
26. Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1981), 340.
27. Horatio Alger Jr., Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York (Boston: A. K.
Loring, 1868), 13–14.
28. Alan Trachtenberg writes: “Railroad companies were the earliest giant cor-
porations, the field of enterprise in which first appeared a new breed of men—the
Cookes, Stanfords, Huntingtons, and Hills—of unprecedented personal wealth and
untrammeled power” (Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture
and Society in the Gilded Age [New York: Hill and Wang, 1982], 57).
29. Alger, Ragged Dick, 294. Earlier in the story, the reader is informed that
Mickey Maguire has a prior criminal record, having been in prison “two or three
times for stealing” (197).
30. Edna Ferber, Emma McChesney & Co. (New York: Frederick A. Stokes,
1915), 39.
31. Nevin O. Winter, Argentina and Her People of To-day (Boston: Page, 1911),
viii, 362, 365–66. Winter’s concerns were trumpeted in self-improvement maga-
zines; see, for example, Charles Lyon Chandler, “The World Race for the Rich
South American Trade,” World’s Work 25 (January 1913): 314–22.
32. Ferber, Emma McChesney & Co., 8, 9, 13, 14, 31, 39, 43.
33. Warren I. Susman, “ ‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth-Century
Culture,” in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twen-
tieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 271–85.
34. See A. Whitney Griswold, “Three Puritans on Prosperity,” New England
Quarterly 7 (1934): 475–93.
35. Franklin, Autobiography, 73.
36. Robert C. Cushman, quoted in Wyllie, The Self-Made Man in America, 21.
37. Ibid., 60.
38. Henry Ward Beecher, quoted in ibid., 156.
39. Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Susman, “ ‘Personality’ and the Making
of Twentieth-Century Culture,” 274.
40. Theodore Roosevelt, “Character and Success,” Outlook 64 (31 March
1900): 725–27.
41. Take, for example, statements made by two of Roosevelt’s contemporaries.
Andrew Carnegie, commenting on the “new race” of Americans, claimed: “It may,
however, safely be averred that the small mixture of foreign races is a decided advan-
tage to the new [American] race, for even the British race is improved by a slight
cross” (Andrew Carnegie,Triumphant Democracy; or, Fifty Years’ March of the Republic
[New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1886], 26). Historian Frederick Jackson Turner
conflated race and nation in his influential “Frontier Thesis,” where he asserted that
the “immigrants [are] Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race,” with

137
 Notes to Introduction

the result being a “composite nationality for the American people” (Frederick Jackson
Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Early Writ-
ings of Frederick Jackson Turner [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1938], 211).
42. Andrew Carnegie, The Empire of Business (New York: Doubleday, Page,
1902), 129.
43. Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery, in Three Negro Classics (New
York: Avon, 1965), 46.
44. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1977), 122.
45. It should be noted, however, that outward appearance was an aspect of self-
making in its earliest manifestations. Benjamin Franklin, for example, in the midst
of invoking the concept of character for entrepreneurial success, advises his students
to pay attention to outer image: “In order to secure my Credit and Character as a
Tradesman, I took care not only to be in Reality Industrious and frugal, but to avoid
all Appearances of the Contrary. I dressed plainly” (Franklin, Autobiography, 54). Al-
though the self-promoting “I” of P. T. Barnum’s first autobiography, The Life of P. T.
Barnum, Written by Himself (1855), proves to be something of an exception to the
reign of “character” in nineteenth-century narratives of individual success, the more
tempered “self ” in Struggles and Triumphs, or Forty Years’ Recollections of P. T. Bar-
num, Written by Himself (1869) more readily conforms to this rule.
46. Weiss, The American Myth of Success, 133; Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made
Man, 183.
47. Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus (Indi-
anapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925), 19.
48. Edna Ferber, Personality Plus: Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and
Her Son, Jock (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1914), 51–52.
49. Ferber, Emma McChesney & Co., 42.
50. Younghill Kang, East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee (New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937), 154, 156.
51. Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1987), 12.
52. Ferber, Emma McChesney & Co., 38.
53. See Pitirim Sorokin, “American Millionaires and Multi-Millionaires: A
Comparative Statistical Study,” Journal of Social Forces 3 (May 1925): 627–40; William
Miller, “American Historians and the Business Elite,” Journal of Economic History 9
(November 1949): 184–208; Frances W. Gregory and Irene D. Neu, “The American
Industrial Elite in the 1870s,” Men in Business: Essays in the History of Entrepreneurship,
ed. William Miller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), 193–211.
54. See, for example, Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject:
Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1989).
55. My study makes no attempt to reconstruct the entire life of each individual
under consideration. Instead, the book focuses on each (real or imagined) individ-
ual’s use of the narrative of self-made success to depict the experience of class mobil-
ity. Some chapters also consider instances where the individual explicitly advocates
a scheme for entrepreneurial uplift directed at his or her aspiring audience.

138
 Notes to Chapter 1

1. Class Mobility
1. My discussion of Alger’s Progressive Era readership is drawn from Gary
Scharnhorst with Jack Bales’s informative Afterword to The Lost Life of Horatio
Alger, Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 149–56.
2. Richard Weiss, The American Myth of Success: From Horatio Alger to Nor-
man Vincent Peale (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 49.
3. Horatio Alger Jr., Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York (Boston: A. K.
Loring, 1868), 293.
4. John G. Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1965), 110.
5. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1967); see also Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and
Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).
6. Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth and Its Uses,” in The Empire of Business (New
York: Doubleday, Page, 1902), 125–26. See also Carnegie’s “The Advantages of
Poverty,” in The Gospel of Wealth and Other Timely Essays (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, Doran, 1933), 43–76.
7. Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers, 1973–1980 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 20–39.
8. Andrew Carnegie, “Introduction: How I Served My Apprenticeship,” in
The Gospel of Wealth, ix.
9. Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1920), 34–35. All further references to this work will be included in the text.
10. Andrew Carnegie to the U.S. Military and Old Time Telegraph Associa-
tion, 10 August 1896. Quoted in Joseph Frazier Wall, Andrew Carnegie (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1970), 90.
11. Carnegie, “Introduction: How I Served My Apprenticeship,” in The Gospel
of Wealth, xii.
12. Alger, Ragged Dick, 65.
13. Ibid., 197. It is difficult to overlook the fact that Mickey’s name is almost
synonymous with the infamous Molly Maguires, an alleged terrorist organization
connected to organized Irish miners in Pennsylvania, who reached public notoriety
less than a decade after the appearance of Ragged Dick but who were already ru-
mored to exist around the time of the book’s initial publication.
14. Quoted in Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man, 111.
15. Ibid., 110.
16. Workers and capitalists, particularly during the 1870s and 1880s, battled
over the meaning of democracy and industrialism, as well as the distribution of pri-
vate property and profits. Many workers responded to the demise of craft produc-
tion and the ascension of the factory system by adhering to a republican ideology
that emphasized community over new forms of individualism, fought for the equal
rights of all citizens (usually extending only as far as white men), and battled against
the corrupting influence of large inequalities in wealth. Corporate capitalists had an
alternative vision of American society. Men such as Carnegie, for example, wanted
to place profit and the accumulation of vast fortunes in the moral service of middle-

139
 Notes to Chapter 2

class notions of progress. For a discussion of labor republicanism within the context
of Carnegie’s business empire, see Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 1880–1892:
Politics, Culture, and Steel (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992).
17. One reason Homestead has such a prominent place in U.S. labor history is
that it took place within the Carnegie empire. Unlike other robber barons of his
era, Carnegie relentlessly portrayed himself as a friend of the workingman despite
his conflicting financial interests. On many occasions, he insisted on preserving the
dignity of the poor and laboring classes; he went so far as to publicly support the
right for workingmen to unionize. Yet, although he claimed to disagree with Frick’s
violent tactics, Carnegie insisted on the same end—the dissolution of the union at
Homestead.
18. Biographer Joseph Frazier Wall suggests that Carnegie, suffering from ei-
ther poor or selective memory, misrepresents in the Autobiography his movements
abroad during the Homestead strike as well as his knowledge of the strike during
this period (see Wall, Andrew Carnegie, 575). My discussion of Carnegie’s involve-
ment in the Homestead strike is partly drawn from Wall’s treatment of the same in
his chapter entitled “Homestead 1892.”
19. Ibid., 576.
20. This description of McLuckie is provided in Burton J. Hendrick, The Life
of Andrew Carnegie (London: William Heinemann, 1933), 340.
21. Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 39.
22. Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Cul-
ture in America (New York: Verso, 1987), 173, 136.
23. James J. Davis, The Iron Puddler: My Life in the Rolling Mills and What
Came of It (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1922), 17. All further references to this
work will be included in the text.
24. Denning, Mechanic Accents, 175.
25. Davis develops his nativist position in the essay “Our Labor Shortage and
Immigration,” Industrial Management 65 (June 1923): 321–23.

2. Gender Stability
1. Michael Moon, “ ‘The Gentle Boy from the Dangerous Classes’: Pederasty,
Domesticity, and Capitalism in Horatio Alger,” Representations 19 (summer 1987):
87–110.
2. Horatio Alger Jr., Tattered Tom; or, The Story of a Street Arab (Boston: A. K.
Loring, 1871), 9–10. All further references to this work will be included in the text.
3. For a discussion of Alger’s relationship to Charles Loring Brace’s Children’s
Aid Society, see Gary Scharnhorst with Jack Bales, The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr.
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 78, 80, 111. For an analysis of the ef-
fects of such reform institutions on girls, see Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex
and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).
4. Irvin G. Wyllie, The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1954), 30–31.
5. Some combination of these scenarios was the case for medicine manufac-

140
 Notes to Chapter 2

turer Lydia Pinkham, rancher Henrietta King, newspaper mogul Eliza Nicholson,
and secretarial school founder Katherine Gibbs. For sketches of the lives of these
women, see Caroline Bird, Enterprising Women (New York: Norton, 1976).
6. The most complete account of Harriet Hubbard Ayer’s life and career is
contained in Margaret Hubbard Ayer and Isabella Taves, The Three Lives of Harriet
Hubbard Ayer (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1957). Biographical overviews of Ayer
can be found in Bernard A.Weisberger’s entry in Notable American Women, 1607–1950,
ed. Edward T. James et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 72–74, as
well as in Bird, Enterprising Women, 127–30.
7. Quoted in Ayer and Taves, The Three Lives of Harriet Hubbard Ayer, 119–20.
8. New York Times, 28 February 1893, 1.
9. Quoted in Ayer and Taves, The Three Lives of Harriet Hubbard Ayer, 160.
10. Quoted in ibid., 162.
11. New York Herald, 21 May 1889, 3.
12. Ibid.
13. See New York Times, 28 May 1889, 8; New York Herald, 28 May 1889, 5.
14. New York Times, 28 February 1893, 1.
15. Ayer and Taves assert that the courts granted a child custody injunction
based, in part, on Herbert Ayer’s plea that “his wife entertained men at her home in
the evening for business conferences” (The Three Lives of Harriet Hubbard Ayer, 213).
16. In Caroline Bird’s brief sketch of turn-of-the-century money-market specu-
lator Hetty Green, she describes the impossibility of the cult of true womanhood
squaring with a woman’s entrepreneurial ambition: “Hetty has come down in his-
tory as a psychopath, but equally paranoid male speculators have been called merely
eccentric.” Bird rightly concludes: “Whatever the facts behind these images, they
reflect the nineteenth-century stereotype that accepted lapses from morality, and
even sanity, in men who made money” but not in women (Enterprising Women, 87).
17. Edna Ferber, Roast Beef, Medium: The Business Adventures of Emma McChes-
ney (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1913), 198–99. All further references to this
work, abbreviated RB, will be included in the text.
18. Edna Ferber, Personality Plus: Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and
Her Son, Jock (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1914), 58. All further references to this
work, abbreviated PP, will be included in the text.
19. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the
Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
20. Note that the U.S. census indicates that, during the 1910s, the number of
women employed as traveling sales agents actually declined relative to the prior
decade. See “Table 115: Women Employed in Each Specified Occupation . . . 1920,”
in Joseph A. Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations, 1870–1920 (Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Government Printing Office, 1929), 180–81. In fact, women were two and one-
half times less likely to be sales agents in 1920 than in 1910. Alternatively, the num-
ber of saleswomen inside stores (whose numbers, in 1920, were more than two hun-
dred times greater than those of traveling sales agents) showed a marked increase
over their numbers in 1910.
21. Edna Ferber, Emma McChesney & Co. (New York: Frederick A. Stokes,

141
 Notes to Chapter 3

1915), 178. All further references to this work, abbreviated EM, will be included in
the text.
22. Helen Christene Hoerle and Florence B. Saltzberg, The Girl and the Job
(New York: Henry Holt, 1919), 5.
23. In a chapter titled “The Girl in Industry,” Hoerle and Saltzberg suggest
that “more women are employed in the clothing industries than in all the others
combined” (a trend that would continue until 1940). The authors do state, how-
ever, that women remain largely excluded from the field of commercial travel.
“Until very recently,” they acknowledge, a woman’s “capability for selling merchan-
dise” on the road “was doubted.” Furthermore, conventional wisdom suggested
“that the incessant traveling necessary in this kind of work was too wearing for a
woman” (Hoerle and Saltzberg, The Girl and the Job, 103, 224).
24. Ibid., 105. In appropriating Ferber’s literary character Emma McChesney
as their model for the successful saleswoman, Hoerle and Saltzberg bypass the forty-
three female professional consultants (whose fields of employment range from
stenographer to statistician but none of whom is a commercial traveler) listed in the
book’s acknowledgments.
25. “Emma McChesney,” review of Emma McChesney & Co., New York Times
Book Review (17 October 1915): 390.
26. Hoerle and Saltzberg, The Girl and the Job, 105.
27. “Personality Plus,” review of Personality Plus, New York Times Book Review
(20 September 1914): 386.
28. Ferber’s uneasiness with contemporary feminism is evident in a New York
Times interview that appeared in the same year as Emma McChesney & Co. See
Julie Goldsmith Gilbert, Ferber: A Biography (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978),
409. In Emma McChesney & Co., the title character is heard scolding affluent and
apparently out-of-touch feminist reformers who lobby on behalf of uplifting the
working girl.
29. “Vaudeville Sketches of the Business Woman,” review of Roast Beef, Me-
dium, Current Opinion 54 (June 1913): 491.
30. American Magazine 75 (December 1912): 107. In fact, Roosevelt did not
write this letter to Ferber. However, in a letter to Ferber dated 4 December 1912,
Roosevelt happily confirmed that he said these things: “I did make those statements
and I am rather proud that it should be publicly known that I had such good taste!”
See The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 7, ed. Elting E. Morison (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1954), 661.
31. American Magazine 75 (April 1913): 5.
32. “Emma McChesney,” New York Times Book Review, 390.

3. Racial Segregation
1. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Results of the Investigation,” The Negro in Business: A
Social Study Made under the Direction of the Atlanta University by the Fourth Atlanta
Conference, ed. W. E. B. Du Bois (Atlanta: Press of Atlanta University, 1899), 5.
2. Ibid., 6.
3. Ibid., 15.

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 Notes to Chapter 3

4. “Resolutions Adopted by the Conference,” in The Negro in Business, 50.

5. Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Al-
freda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 64.
6. Ibid., 21. William T. Adams, author of Oliver Optic’s boy’s stories, was the
editor of Student and Schoolmate. He worked alongside his close friend Horatio
Alger Jr. in helping the latter conceive the “luck and pluck” formula, and then pro-
ceeded to use it himself. Under the nom de plume Oliver Optic, Adams published a
number of boy’s stories with Alger-inspired formulas, such as Desk and Debit; or,
The Catastrophes of a Clerk (1873). It is no coincidence that Alger’s Ragged Dick,
which propelled the author to fame and fortune, was initially serialized in January
1867 issues of Student and Schoolmate. For a discussion of the personal and profes-
sional relationship between Adams and Alger, see Edwin P. Hoyt, Horatio’s Boys: The
Life and Works of Horatio Alger, Jr. (Radnor, Pa.: Chilton Book Co., 1974), 73–74.
7. Wells, Crusade for Justice, 32.
8. Ibid., 47.
9. Ida B. Wells, A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynch-
ings in the United States, 1892–1893–1894 (1895), in Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-
Barnett (New York: Oxford, 1991), 219.
10. Wells, Crusade for Justice, 48.
11. In Southern Horrors—Ida B. Wells’s first attempt outside a newspaper for-
mat to make public the racist logic behind lynching—she quotes angry whites in
Memphis as saying: “The Negroes are getting too independent . . . we must teach
them a lesson” (Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases [1892], in Selected
Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, 36).
12. Ibid., 40.
13. Ibid., 45.
14. Wells reported that, prior to the turn of the century, lynchings peaked in
the year 1892 at 241. See Ida B. Wells, Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and
His Fight to the Death (1900), in ibid., 320.
15. Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery, in Three Negro Classics (New
York: Avon, 1965), 71. All further references to Up From Slavery will be included in
the text.
16. For an overview of the reception of Up From Slavery, see Louis R. Harlan,
Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1972), 249–53.
17. Recall that Washington’s close ally, Andrew Carnegie (whom Washington
trusted as “one of the dearest and best friends I ever had” [Booker T. Washington to
Andrew Carnegie, 7 December 1906; quoted in Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Wash-
ington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983),
138]), was very fond of preaching that “poverty” rather than affluence was nothing
less than a righteous “school” for preparing the disadvantaged for success. See, for
instance, Carnegie’s 1891 article titled “The Advantages of Poverty,” in The Gospel of
Wealth and Other Timely Essays (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1933).
18. See Roy P. Basler, The Lincoln Legend: A Study in Changing Conceptions
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935).

143
 Notes to Chapter 3

19. Booker T. Washington, My Larger Education: Being Chapters from My Ex-

perience (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1911), 106.
20. As historian August Meier cautions, Washington’s rise to national promi-
nence was the result not of the originality of his proposals, “but because his pro-
gram had already become the core of the thought of influential groups in the
North, in the South, and among Negroes” (Meier, Negro Thought in America,
1880–1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington [Ann Arbor: Univer-
sity of Michigan Press, 1969], 99).
21. Booker T. Washington, The Negro in Business (Boston: Hertel, Jenkins,
1907), 4. See also Washington’s collection of speeches titled Black-Belt Diamonds,
ed. Victoria Earle Matthews (New York: Fortune and Scott, 1898).
22. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 137.
23. Andrew Carnegie stated that no individual represented the rags-to-riches
American success story better than Booker T. Washington. In his Autobiography
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), 276–77, Carnegie writes: “We should all take
our hats off to the man who not only raised himself from slavery but helped raise
millions of his race to a higher stage of civilization.” He elaborates on the remark-
able career of Washington as follows: “No truer, more self-sacrificing hero ever
lived: a man compounded of all the virtues. . . . If it be asked which man of our age,
or even of the past ages, has risen from the lowest to the highest, the answer must be
Booker Washington. He rose from slavery to the leadership of his people—a mod-
ern Moses and Joshua combined, leading his people both onward and upward.”
Carnegie’s leadership role in funding the NNBL is referenced in August Meier’s
Negro Thought in America, 124.
24. Report of the Thirteenth Annual Convention of the National Negro Business
League (Nashville: Sunday School Union Print, 1912), 154.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 155.
27. Louis Harlan provides a discussion of Washington’s limited role in the
development of colonial Africa in Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee,
1901–1915, 266–94.
28. Despite their awareness of the crimes committed against Africans through-
out the world in the name of progress, black leaders—ranging from the Reverend
Alexander Crummell to Booker T. Washington—appropriated the European lan-
guage of the civilizing mission in their attempt to bring Africa into the modern
world. For an account of the “civilizationist” tradition within black nationalism, see
Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988).
29. Report of the Thirteenth Annual Convention of the National Negro Business
League, 154.
30. For an analysis of black women’s employment in the South at the turn of
the century, see Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women,
Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
31. Report of the Thirteenth Annual Convention of the National Negro Business
League, 154–55.

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 Notes to Chapter 3

32. The Indianapolis Freeman provided Walker extensive press coverage from
the time she moved her business operations to Indiana in 1910 until her death in
1919. On this day, the newspaper ran three separate stories on Walker: the afore-
mentioned front-page biography, which both opened by erroneously giving the day
of her birth as 25 December 1867 and included a flattering photo of Walker over the
caption: “The best known Hair Culturist in America”; a page-two photojournalist
piece depicting the operations of the Walker Manufacturing Company, Inc.; and, a
page-four lifestyles article titled “Mme. C. J. Walker. A Review of a Remarkable
Business Woman and Her Brilliant Career.”
33. Indianapolis Freeman, 11 November 1911, 1.
34. Ibid.
35. Conventional gender assignments at NNBL gatherings are indicated in a
1909 open letter signed by Washington and addressed to black newspapers that ad-
vertised the upcoming tenth annual convention. Although Washington “urge[d] the
attendance of men and women of our race engaged in business throughout the
country,” he made a special plea to businessmen: “We hope that the men will not
only be present in large numbers but, if possible, they will bring their wives and
other members of their families” (Indianapolis Freeman, 3 July 1909, 3).
36. Report of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Annual Sessions of the National
Negro Business League (Nashville: Baptist Publishing Board, n.d.), 77.
37. Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-
American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
38. Indianapolis Freeman, 28 December 1912, 16.
39. Report of the Fourteenth Annual Convention of the National Negro Business
League (Nashville: Sunday School Union Print, 1913), 210.
40. A’Lelia Perry Bundles, Madam C. J. Walker (New York: Chelsea House,
1991), 15.
41. Report of the Fourteenth Annual Convention of the National Negro Business
League, 210.
42. Ibid., 211.
43. During the same year, for example, one woman wrote her: “You have
opened up a trade for hundreds of colored women to make an honest and profitable
living where they make as much in one week as a month’s salary would bring from
any other position that a colored woman can secure” (quoted in A’Lelia Perry Bun-
dles, “Madam C. J. Walker—Cosmetics Tycoon,” Ms. 11 [July 1983], 93).
44. Report of the Fourteenth Annual Convention of the National Negro Business
League, 212.
45. Indianapolis Freeman, 26 December 1914, 1.
46. Report of the Fifteenth Annual Convention of the National Negro Business
League (Nashville: Sunday School Union Print, 1914), 153.
47. Report of the Seventeenth Annual Convention of the National Negro Business
League (Nashville: National Baptist Publishing Board, 1916), 134.
48. Indianapolis Freeman, 16 April 1910, 2.
49. Walker, quoted in Bundles, “Madam C. J. Walker—Cosmetics Tycoon,” 92.
50. Report of the Fifteenth Annual Convention of the National Negro Business
League, 152.

145
 Notes to Chapter 4

51. ILDP, quoted in Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class
in Modern Society (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 50.
52. Denver Post, 11 July 1918, 13.
53. Prior to desegregation, Madam Walker was repeatedly celebrated in black
newspapers and magazines for her accomplishments as a Negro and a woman, a
millionaire and a philanthropist. The readers of Ebony, for instance, in celebration
of Black History Week during February 1956, chose Madam Walker as their first in-
ductee into the monthly magazine’s Hall of Fame. See Ebony 11 (February 1956): 25.
54. A’Lelia Bundles, quoted from personal correspondence. In addition, Bun-
dles states that, given Walker’s vocal support for the NAACP’s antilynching cam-
paign in the mid-teens, “one would think that she would have capitalized on such a
life-defining event to help the cause.”

4. Immigrant Aspirations
1. “Will Stand by Slogan ‘Africa for the Africans at Home and Abroad,’”
Negro World, 17 September 1921, in The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Im-
provement Association Papers, ed. Robert A. Hill, 10 vols. projected (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1983–), vol. 4, 35.
2. “Convention Report,” Negro World, 2 September 1922, in ibid., 940.
3. Black-Belt Diamonds: Gems from the Speeches, Addresses, and Talks to Stu-
dents of Booker T. Washington, ed. Victoria Earle Matthews (New York: Fortune and
Scott, 1898), 60.
4. Marcus Garvey, Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, ed. Amy Jacques
Garvey, 2 vols. (1926; rpt. Totawa, N.J.: Frank Cass, 1967), vol. 2, 23. Garvey repro-
duced this quote in a full front-page statement carried in the 29 January 1927 Negro
World. It appeared this time under the equally blunt title “Momentum of Progress
Will Batter Down the Prejudice against Negroes—Nothing Succeeds like Success.”
5. Garvey, quoted in Rollin Lynde Hartt, “The Negro Moses and His Cam-
paign to Lead the Black Millions into Their Promised Land,” Independent 105 (26
February 1921): 206.
6. Garvey’s biographers are in general agreement about the lack of reliable in-
formation, autobiographical or otherwise, in regard to his boyhood. Under the
heading “Autobiography,” Robert A. Hill has collected Garvey’s postdeportation
recollections of his years in the United States as head of the UNIA, which were
printed in the February through May 1930 editions of the Pittsburgh Courier. See
Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons: A Centennial Companion to the Marcus Garvey and
Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, ed. Robert A. Hill (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1987), 33–114. In the tradition of Ben Franklin’s memoirs,
Garvey stated: “I am giving this rehearsal of what ha[s] happened to the Black Star
Line with the hope of helping other business men” (69).
7. Robert A. Hill, “General Introduction,” in The Marcus Garvey and Univer-
sal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 1, lxxxiii.
8. Marcus Garvey, “The Negro’s Greatest Enemy,” Current History 18 (Sep-
tember 1923): 951.
9. Ibid., 952.

146
 Notes to Chapter 4

10. Ibid.
11. Booker T. Washington to Marcus Garvey, 27 April 1915. The letter is repro-
duced in The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers,
vol. 1, 118.
12. Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 281.
13. On 3 August 1915, the Jamaican Daily Chronicle reported: “The Universal
Negro Improvement Association is about taking up and putting through a scheme
to establish in Jamaica a large industrial farm and institution on the same plan as
the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute of which Dr. Booker T. Washington
is head” (The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers,
vol. 1, 128).
14. Roscoe Simmons, Chicago Defender, 6 September 1924; quoted in Ed-
mund David Cronon, Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal
Negro Improvement Association (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1955), 122.
15. New York News, 7 February 1925; quoted in Cronon, Black Moses, 136.
16. Garvey, quoted in Du Bois’s January 1921 Crisis editorial titled “Marcus
Garvey”; see W. E. B. Du Bois, Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library
of America), 976 n. 1.
17. Cronon, Black Moses, 51.
18. It is next to impossible to estimate the number of followers of Marcus Gar-
vey during his residency in the United States. While Garvey repeatedly boasted that
membership in the Universal Negro Improvement Association was in the millions,
Du Bois suggested that the UNIA had approximately eighty thousand members in
1920 (see W. E. B. Du Bois, “Back to Africa,” Century 105 [February 1923]: 543). Re-
gardless, as Edmund David Cronon points out, “the actual dues-paying member-
ship of the [UNIA] was far smaller than the number of Negroes who identified
themselves with the exciting emotional atmosphere of the movement and gave its
aim vigorous if informal support” (Cronon, Black Moses, 204). Garvey’s popularity
in the United States peaked sometime between the First UNIA International Con-
vention, held in 1920, and his arrest on mail fraud charges in 1922.
19. Negro World, 1 November 1919, in The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro
Improvement Association Papers, vol. 2, 94.
20. Garvey, quoted in Hartt, “The Negro Moses and His Campaign to Lead
the Black Millions into Their Promised Land,” 218.
21. Negro World, 8 April 1922, in The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Im-
provement Association Papers, vol. 4, 594.
22. In Garvey’s postdeportation writings, he states that enterprising women
like Madam Walker “have employed thousands of Negroes and found bread for
them, thereby helping to lif[t] the economic standard of the race” (Marcus Garvey:
Life and Lessons, 100).
23. Negro World, 17 July 1920, in The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Im-
provement Association Papers, vol. 2, 416.
24. Marcus Garvey, “A Talk with Afro-West Indians,” circa July–August 1914,
in ibid., vol. 1, 55.
25. Garvey, Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, vol. 2, 23.

147
 Notes to Chapter 4

26. Daily Chronicle, 26 August 1915, in ibid., vol. 1, 132–36.

27. Daily Chronicle, 8 September 1915, in ibid., 138.
28. Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 11.
29. Ibid., 64–66.
30. Cronon, Black Moses, 52.
31. Negro World, 1 February 1919, in The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro
Improvement Association Papers, vol. 1, 352. In 1930, a few years after leaving the
United States, Garvey wistfully reflected on the lost opportunity for black Ameri-
can entrepreneurial imperialism in Africa and elsewhere: “our trade relationship
would have been established between our races in Africa, in the United States, in
South and Central America and the West Indies; we would have been removing raw
materials from plantations of far-off Africa, from South and Central America, and
the West Indies, to our factories in the United States, thus giving employment to
millions of Negroes in America . . . to millions more in tropical Africa and South
and Central America, and the West Indies” (Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons, 91).
32. Quoted from Garvey’s speech before the Mount Carmel Baptist Church
(Washington, D.C.), 24 July 1920, in The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Im-
provement Association Papers, vol. 2, 458. For an analysis of Garveyism within a
transnational framework, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double
Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
33. Negro World, 9 September 1922, in The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro
Improvement Association Papers, vol. 4, 1055.
34. Hill, “General Introduction,” in ibid., vol. 1, 1.
35. Garvey, Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, vol. 2, 65.
36. Ibid., vol. 1, 68.
37. Ibid., 67.
38. See Marcus Garvey, “Hail! United States of Africa!” in The Tragedy of White
Injustice, ed. Amy Jacques Garvey (New York: Amy Jacques Garvey, 1927), 20–21.
39. Negro World, 17 July 1920, in The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Im-
provement Association Papers, vol. 2, 414.
40. In the 1880s, the peak decade of nineteenth-century immigration, 72 per-
cent of the immigrants still originated from northern and western Europe. By the
first decade of the twentieth century, the peak decade in the history of American
immigration, 72 percent were from southern and eastern Europe. See U.S., Con-
gress, Senate, Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission, with Conclusions
and Recommendations and Views of the Minority, S Doc. 747, 61 Cong. 3d sess., 1911,
1:57, 64.
41. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism,
1860–1925, 2d ed. (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 33.
42. Andrew Carnegie, Triumphant Democracy; or, Fifty Years’ March of the Re-
public (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1886), 23. Carnegie calculated that four
out of five Americans had British ancestry, while the other fifth was principally Ger-
man. Although he professed in the mid-1880s that immigration from other coun-
tries was “scarcely worth taking into account,” he assured his audience of the benign
and even beneficial influence of “foreign races” on the national character: “It may,

148
 Notes to Chapter 4

however, safely be averred that the small mixture of foreign races is a decided advan-
tage to the new [American] race, for even the British race is improved by a slight
cross.” The American people, Carnegie optimistically concluded, “are ever becom-
ing more purely British in origin” (25–26, 34).
43. Higham, Strangers in the Land, chapter 6.
44. U.S., Congress, Senate, Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission,
1:12–14.
45. Mary Antin, They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigra-
tion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 98, 9–10.
46. Nevertheless, Antin probably could not help but notice that, during the
Gilded Age, although Wall Street financier J. P. Morgan might be a household
name, Bank of America founder A. P. Giannini (son of northern Italian immi-
grants) climbed the ladder of success in relative obscurity.
47. Antin, They Who Knock at Our Gates, 76.
48. Mary Antin, The Promised Land (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), xix. All
further references to this work will be included in the text.
49. Oscar Handlin reports that, at the time of the publication of The Promised
Land, Antin was “a young and virtually unknown author.” After being serialized in
the Atlantic Monthly, the book “met an enthusiastic reception and sold some 85,000
copies in 34 printings.” See Handlin’s 1969 Foreword to The Promised Land (Prince-
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), v.
50. Allen Guttmann, for example, in his seminal analysis of Jewish writers in
the United States, concludes that Antin’s “gratitude for her own success had, of
course, led her to considerable underestimation of the difficulties faced by less
gifted immigrants” (Guttmann, The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the
Crisis of Identity [New York: Oxford University Press, 1971], 28).
51. Late in The Promised Land we learn that, unlike Mary, Dora gladly joins a
club designed to instruct girls in domestic science: “The leader of this club, under
pretense of teaching the little girls the proper way to sweep and make beds, artfully
teaches them how to beautify a tenement home by means of noble living” (325).
52. Emerson describes the higher laws of the Oversoul in the following way:
“that great nature in which we rest . . . that Unity, that Over-soul, within which
every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other” (Ralph
Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
[Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904], vol. 2, 268).
53. Emerson invokes the “self-helping man” in his essay “Self-Reliance,” in
ibid., 78. For an extended treatment of Emerson as a philosopher of self-reliance
and success, see John G. Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1965), 86–98.
54. The fact that Kang’s novels East Goes West and The Grass Roof are thinly
veiled autobiographies is confirmed in an autobiographical essay titled “Oriental
Yankee,” Common Ground 1 (winter 1941): 59–63.
55. Younghill Kang, East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee (New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937), 5. All further references to this work will be in-
cluded in the text.
56. Younghill Kang,The Grass Roof (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,1931),339.

149
 Notes to Chapter 4

57. Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted, 2d ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 223.
58. Elaine H. Kim, “Searching for a Door to America: Younghill Kang, Korean
American Writer,” Korea Journal 17 (April 1977): 39.
59. Kang, The Grass Roof, 149.
60. Ibid., 362.
61. See Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925).
62. For an extended treatment of the relation between narrative forms and
Taylorization within the period under consideration, see Martha Banta’s Taylored
Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1993).
63. In East Goes West, Kang details the descending hierarchy of department
store employment, where women almost always occupy the lowest-paying jobs. The
result is a work environment at Boshnack’s in which men stereotype women work-
ers as sex objects.
64. Kang, “Oriental Yankee,” 61. Toward the end of East Goes West, Kang’s
autobiographical narrator briefly alludes to the fact that noncommercial interests
finally displaced his entrepreneurial ambitions. Employed as an expert on Eastern
affairs for the Encyclopedia Britannica in the late 1920s, Han reflects: “I had aimed. I
had dropped. I had captured my little opening . . . in the professional intellectual
world” (348). In the autobiographical essay “Oriental Yankee,” Kang claimed that
(with degrees from Harvard and Boston universities) he devoted his adulthood to
“waiting and watching constantly for an opening whereby I, too, might become a
part of American intellectual life” (61). However, opportunities in academia never
fully opened to him. While a staff member at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
the late 1920s, he taught freshman composition at New York University. At this
time his literary talents were “discovered” by Thomas Wolfe, who, after reading his
autobiographies, befriended Kang and dubbed him an “Oriental Yankee” (63). Al-
though Kang gained some notoriety and awards during the 1930s for his auto-
biographical fiction, his inability to secure a tenured position at an American col-
lege remained a source of frustration throughout his life. He died in December
1972, at age sixty-nine, in relative obscurity.
65. Sui Sin Far [Edith Maud Eaton], “Tian Shan’s Kindred Spirit,” in Mrs.
Spring Fragrance (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1912), 234.
66. Although there exists scant recent criticism on East Goes West, it is unani-
mous in its dismissal of the book’s conclusion as foolish and lame. See Kim, “Search-
ing for a Door to America,” 46; and, James Wade, “Younghill Kang’s Unwritten
Third Act,” in West Meets East: An Encounter with Korea (n.p.: Pomso Publishers,
1975), 115.
67. My explication of specific Buddhist principles in this paragraph and the
next is indebted to Peter Harvey’s An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History
and Practices (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 44–46, 50–53, 60–61,
65–68.
68. In The Grass Roof, Kang offers his fullest account of Nirvana in the form of
young Chungpa’s instruction by a Buddhist monk: “He tried to teach me the way
of Nirvana, which means a ‘blowing out,’ like a candle.” Etched in Han’s memory is

150
 Notes to Chapter 5

a poem inscribed on a monastery’s pillar: “Make no evil deed, / All good obediently
do. / Purge the mind of self, / This is all Buddha’s teaching” (166).

5. Individual Enterprise in the Postfrontier Nation

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 6. All
further references to this work will be included in the text.
2. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
1950), 251. William Troy, in his 1945 essay “Scott Fitzgerald—the Authority of Fail-
ure” (Accent 6 [1945]: 56–60), was the first critic to use the term “American dream”
in an interpretation of The Great Gatsby.
3. Edwin S. Fussell, “Fitzgerald’s Brave New World,” ELH 19 (1952): 295.
4. Nowhere, institutionally or pedagogically speaking, is the use of these ana-
lytical binaries more evident than in the criticism contained under the section head-
ings “Crime and Corruption” and “The American Dream” in the well-worn Scrib-
ner Research Anthology titled Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby: The Novel, the Critics, the
Background, ed. Henry Dan Piper (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970).
5. Marius Bewley, “Scott Fitzgerald’s Criticism of America,” Sewanee Review
62 (1954): 223, 245–46. Bewley’s model for interpreting The Great Gatsby has found
numerous restatements during the subsequent decades.
6. Walter Benn Michaels, “The Vanishing American,” American Literary His-
tory 2 (summer 1990): 224. In the simplest terms, the principal task of Michaels’s
commentary on classic American literature of the 1920s is to prove his hypothesis
that the segregationist question “Are you white?” is “replaced” by the nativist query
“Are you American?” Armed with this presupposition, Michaels is unable to ade-
quately account for the irrepressible significance of black/white difference in Jazz
Age fiction. See Michaels’s “Anti-Imperial Americanism,” Cultures of United States
Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 1993), 366; “The Souls of White Folk,” Literature and the Body: Essays on
Populations and Persons, ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1988), 192; “The Vanishing American,” 235.
7. Fitzgerald confessed the influence of Joseph Conrad on his craft in the In-
troduction to the 1934 Modern Library Edition of The Great Gatsby. Note that Nick
echoes no one so much as Conrad’s narrator Marlow, and, like Heart of Darkness,
Fitzgerald’s novel neither embraces white supremacy nor ultimately rejects imperial-
ist thought. As Terry Eagleton describes it, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness conveys the
“‘message’ . . . that Western civilisation is at base as barbarous as African society—a
viewpoint which disturbs imperialist assumptions to the precise degree that it re-
inforces them” (Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study of Marxist Literary
Theory [London: Verso, 1978], 135).
8. Eric Lott demonstrates how the minstrel show is structured by “interracial
recognitions and identifications no less than the imperative to disavow them” (Eric
Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class [New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 35).
9. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925,
2d ed. (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 311.

151
 Notes to Chapter 5

10. Warren Harding, quoted in W. E. B. Du Bois, “President Harding and

Social Equality,” in Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America,
1986), 1194.
11. Ibid.
12. Marcus Garvey, quoted in Robert A. Hill, “General Introduction,” in The
Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, ed. Robert A.
Hill, 10 vols. projected (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983–), vol. 1,
lxxxii.
13. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 266–67. This trend was best exemplified in
the changing philosophy, membership, and activities of the Ku Klux Klan. The first
official postwar Klan appearance did not occur until 1920 and, with the “Red Sum-
mer” of 1919 behind it (which witnessed numerous race riots and lynchings), the or-
ganization began focusing its attacks on white foreigners. The Klan was not less
race-conscious than before but it did introduce a number of changes into its fold.
The Knights of the Invisible Empire made extensive use of eugenics to justify its
new interest in nativism. Klan activity shifted from exclusive attacks on Negroes to
a broad-based hatred of foreigners who seemed less than white, particularly Italians
and Jews. For the first time, Klan membership was extended only to native-born
Protestant whites. The spread of Klan activities at this moment was reflected in the
geographical expansion of its membership from the rural South to the small Mid-
western town and the urban North. Moreover, the ranks of Klansmen swelled to
unprecedented numbers, estimated at 4.5 million in 1924.
14. Ibid., 265, 273.
15. Kenneth L. Roberts, Why Europe Leaves Home (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1922), 22.
16. Calvin Coolidge, quoted in Madison Grant, “America for the Americans,”
Forum 74 (September 1925): 347.
17. C. M. Timpson, “Perverted History,” New York Times, 30 June 1922, 16.
18. John B. Kennedy, “Who ‘Discovered’ America,” New York Times, 4 July
1922, 12.
19. Clinton Stoddard Burr, America’s Race Heritage (New York: National His-
torical Society, 1922), 208.
20. Gatsby takes place precisely two years after Brolaski ran his illicit alcohol
trade from California. On approximately the same date that Fitzgerald has Nick
meet Gatsby for the first time (mid- to late June 1922), the New York Times pub-
lished an exposé headlined “Brolaski, Bootleg King—Man Named by Caraway in
Senate Attack a Real Millionaire Bootlegger” (Henry J. Rogers, “Brolaski, Bootleg
King—Man Named by Caraway in Senate Attack a Real Millionaire Bootlegger”
New York Times, 18 June 1922 [sec. 7], 6). Perhaps this was additional source mater-
ial for Fitzgerald’s representation of both his narrator and his American hero. Al-
though he does not mention either Harry Brolaski or Senator Caraway, Joseph
Corso uncovers other potential sources for Fitzgerald’s characters in his “One Not-
Forgotten Summer Night: Sources for Fictional Symbols of American Character in
The Great Gatsby,” in Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1976, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli
(Englewood, Colo.: Information Handling Services, 1978), 9–33.
21. John M. Kenny Jr., “The Great Gatsby,” Commonweal, 3 June 1925, 110.

152
 Notes to Chapter 5

22. Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race,

and Madness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 18.
23. In the early 1920s, Nordic philosophers indirectly used the discovery of
Indo-European languages as evidence to support their own claims. By tracing
America’s northwestern European origins to a remote Aryan past, nativist writers of
the early twenties distanced the nation’s race heritage from what, prior to this dis-
covery, would have been its previous point of departure: Semitic civilization. For in-
stance, Clinton Stoddard Burr opens America’s Race Heritage with a reference to “the
race migrations in Eurasia as a prelude to the racial history of America.” In the
course of his study, Burr draws the distinction between a superior Aryan Europe
family of man and an inferior Hebrew race. See Burr, America’s Race Heritage, 19.
24. Ibid., 195. It is important to remember that, with a loss of faith in Progres-
sive Era efforts to assimilate immigrants, Jews (as much as if not more than any
other new immigrant group) became a national menace in the eyes of postwar na-
tivists. For example, in the early months of 1920, Henry Ford—the country’s lead-
ing industrialist, folk hero to millions, and onetime melting-pot model advocate—
began using his company organ, the Dearborn Independent, to wage an anti-Semitic
propaganda campaign against what he called “international Financiers” operating
in America.
25. Thomas Caldecot Chubb,“Bagdad-on-Subway,”Forum 74 (August 1925): 311.
26. Gatsby’s struggle upward is structured, according to Nick’s narrative, along
the lines of Horatio Alger Jr.’s popular formula. For a discussion of the relationship
between The Great Gatsby and Alger’s stories, see Gary Scharnhorst, “Scribbling
Upward: Fitzgerald’s Debt of Honor to Horatio Alger, Jr.,” in Fitzgerald/Hemingway
Annual 1978, eds. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Richard Layman (Detroit: Gale Re-
search, 1979), 161–69.
27. Floyd C. Watkins was the first critic to give extensive treatment to the in-
fluence of Franklin’s writing on The Great Gatsby; see his “Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatz and
Young Ben Franklin,” New England Quarterly 17 (1954): 249–52.
28. Richard Weiss, The American Myth of Success: From Horatio Alger to Nor-
man Vincent Peale (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 216.
29. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 155–56.
30. Grant and his disciples were not alone among nativists in deploying eugen-
ics to construct a national identity base on narrowing definitions of whiteness. The
“expert” services of eugenicist Harry H. Laughlin were retained by Congressman
Albert Johnson’s House Committee on Immigration Restriction, where he testified
that new European immigrants were bad breeding stock due to their “inborn so-
cially inadequate qualities.” Even presidential hopeful Calvin Coolidge lent his sig-
nature to a popular piece on immigration restriction, published in a 1921 issue of
Good Housekeeping, which used biological laws to argue that Nordic stock degener-
ates when mixed with other races (ibid., 314, 318).
31. For a discussion of nativist uses of popular images of the New Woman, see
Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 104–39.
32. William Rose Benét, “An Admirable Novel,” Saturday Review of Literature 1
(9 May 1925): 740.

153
 Notes to Chapter 5

33. Critics have overlooked the possibility that, in addition to Stoddard’s book,
the well-known geneticist Henry Goddard might also be a source of Tom’s ideas.
The work of Goddard and other geneticists was circulated among nativists, and used
by the latter to make arguments against the excesses of democracy, which were
thought to be manifested in the failure of the melting pot to assimilate new immi-
grants into American society. In a book widely reprinted around 1920, Goddard stud-
ied degeneracy in an American family he called the “Kallikaks.” The Kallikaks are “a
family of good English blood of the middle class.” However, Goddard explains, “a
scion of this family, in an unguarded moment, step[ped] aside from the paths of rec-
titude and with the help of a feeble-minded girl, start[ed] a line of mental defectives
that is truly appalling.” The “degeneracy” of the Kallikak family is thus “the result of
the defective mentality and bad blood,” from the feeble-minded prostitute, “having
been brought into the normal family of good blood.” Goddard concludes by decry-
ing the effects of mixing good and bad genes, reasoning that it can only produce
mental and moral defects, such as feeble-mindedness, madness, alcoholism, sexual
perversity, and criminality. See Henry Herbert Goddard, The Kallikak Family: A
Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 50, 69.
34. The nativist accusation that new immigrants did not earn their wealth ac-
cording to the virtuous ethics of Protestant work qualifies Michaels’s argument that,
during the twenties, citizenship was no longer imagined to be “a condition that
could be achieved through one’s own actions” but, rather, “an identity that could
better be understood as inherited” (Michaels, “The Vanishing American,” 223).
35. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 172.
36. Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), 288.
37. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 265.
38. Michaels, “The Souls of White Folk,” 195.
39. Charles W. Gold, America: A Family Matter (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1922), 149–50, 165.
40. Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color, 266.
41. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 322–23.
42. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New
York: Avon, 1965), 660.
43. My formulation is drawn from Tom Nairn, who persuasively argues that
nationalism, like the old Roman god Janus, watches over the passage to modernity.
“As human kind is forced through its strait doorway, it must look desperately back
into the past, to gather strength wherever it can be found for the ordeal of ‘develop-
ment.’” (Tom Nairn,The Break-Up of Britain, rev. ed. [London: Verso, 1981], 348–49).
44. Adams later claimed to have always been aware of the originality of the term
“American dream,” and to have lobbied his publisher to use the term in the book’s
title. In a letter composed fifteen years after the initial publication of The Epic of
America, Adams wrote: “Ellery Sedgwick [editor of the Atlantic Monthly] said that I
could not call my ‘Epic of America,’ ‘The American Dream’ as I wanted to. His objec-
tion was that no red-blooded American would pay $3.50 for a dream. Red-blooded
Americans have always been willing to gamble their last peso on a dream and the
one phrase from my whole book which has become journalese is ‘the American

154
 Notes to Chapter 6

dream’” (letter to Leland Case, 13 May 1946, in Allan Nevins, James Truslow Adams:
Historian of the American Dream [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968], 296).
45. Publishers’ Weekly 155 (11 June 1949): 2396. The Epic of America was trans-
lated into more than a dozen foreign languages and republished in numerous Ameri-
can editions through the 1960s.
46. Fredric Jameson offers this formulation in a different context; see his “Crit-
icism in History,” in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986, vol. 1, Situations of
Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 125.
47. This helps account for why, at the time of the book’s initial printing, an ex-
cerpt from The Epic appeared in the ecumenical journal Catholic World under the
title “Our American Dream” (see Catholic World [November 1931]: 216–18). Further-
more, the first book to use the term “American dream” in its title was by Raymond
C. Knox and called Religion and the American Dream (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1934). Knox dedicated his book to James Truslow Adams.
48. On communitarian concerns during the Great Depression, see Warren I.
Susman, “The Culture of the Thirties,” in Culture as History: The Transformation of
American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 175. On
moral economics and American values in the thirties, see Robert S. McElvaine, The
Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (New York: Times Books, 1984), 196–223.
49. James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1931),
411. All further references to this work will be included in the text.
50. As Adams’s biographer suggests, the author of The Epic of America “carried
the principles of T[heodore] R[oosevelt]’s New Nationalism and Wilson’s New Free-
dom into the years of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal” (Nevins, James Truslow
Adams, 90).
51. Although The Epic of America is littered with references to the virtues of
rugged frontier individualism, Adams’s most explicit commentary on frontier self-
making can be found in his essay “Rugged Individualism,” New York Times Maga-
zine (18 March 1934): 1–2, 11.
52. As Kenneth Lynn points out, in The Robber Barons Josephson “strikes the
most sympathetic cord in his book by his reference to ‘the poverty which darkened
the lives of all of them, save [J. P.] Morgan’” (Lynn, “Allan Nevins: An Algerine
Captive,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History 2 [1949–50]: 249).
53. Satirizing the self-made man has found a number of outlets in American
literature since Nathanael West’s A Cool Million (1934). The most outrageous novel
in this tradition may be Ishmael Reed’s Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967).

6. The Ends of Self-Making

1. John G. Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1965), 209–18.
2. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Char-
acter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 158–61.
3. Robert L. Heilbroner, The Quest for Wealth: A Study of Acquisitive Man (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), 241.

155
 Notes to Chapter 6

4. William H. Whyte Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1956), 182.
5. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press,
1956), 349.
6. Ibid., 343, 117.
7. Fortune (circa 1960), quoted in John Keats, Howard Hughes (New York:
Random House, 1966), 289.
8. Hughes’s 1948 interview with Dwight Whitney is quoted in James R. Phe-
lan, “Howard Hughes: He Battles for His Empire,” Saturday Evening Post 236
(9 February 1963): 22.
9. This pattern repeated itself for almost half a century, a period in which
Hughes maintained sole ownership of his financial empire by establishing himself
as the sole shareholder. Furthermore, over the next thirty-three years Hughes em-
ployed an outstanding accountant, named Noah Dietrich, to help guide his wholly
owned interests in industries as diverse as movie studios and airlines. Later, Dietrich
and others would act as public stand-ins for the recluse Hughes.
10. Quoted in Phelan, “Howard Hughes,” 18.
11. Quoted in ibid., 19.
12. See Stephen Fay, Lewis Chester, and Magnus Linklater, Hoax: The Inside
Story of the Howard Hughes-Clifford Irving Affair (New York: Viking, 1972), 32.
13. The story of Rosemont Enterprises, Inc. is expounded in ibid., 154, 202.
14. Quotation from Newsweek cited in Albert B. Gerber, Bashful Billionaire:
The Story of Howard Hughes (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1967), 349.
15. There may have been another motivation as well. Hughes had been losing
dominion over his empire since 1970 and, before the end of 1972, the Hughes Tool
Company (founded by his father and the flagship of his financial enterprises) was
offered to the public under a new name, the Summa Corporation. The fact that all
of this was accomplished largely without Hughes’s consent suggests the degree to
which he had lost control over himself and his corporate empire. These details re-
garding Hughes’s life can be found in Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Em-
pire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes (New York: Norton, 1979).
16. Excerpts from the transcript of the televised telephone interview with
Hughes are reproduced in the 10 January 1972 editions of the New York Times and
the Los Angeles Times.
17. Fay et al., Hoax, 142.
18. Despite Hughes’s apparent bad memory, the panel of journalists unani-
mously agreed that the disembodied voice sounded authentic. Later, voice-print
analysis experts agreed that the voice was, indeed, Howard Hughes’s.
19. Fay et al., Hoax, 154, 202. As it turned out, the “as told to” autobiography
of Howard Hughes was never published. A month after Hughes’s 9 January 1972
telecommunicated interview, evidence was uncovered that forced the publishers to
openly acknowledge that the book was not authentic but, rather, essentially a prod-
uct of Clifford Irving’s skills as a plagiarist.
20. Lee Iacocca with William Novak, Iacocca: An Autobiography (New York:
Bantam, 1984), xv. All further references to this work will be included in the text.
21. Iacocca confirms his silence when, in the autobiography, he explains that

156
 Notes to Chapter 6

only when he is “safely out of camera range” did he allow himself to mutter an ex-
pletive (ibid., xiv).
22. Chrysler television commercial, 2 June 1982, quoted in James A. Benson
and Judith M. Thorpe, “Chrysler’s Success Story: Advertising as Anecdotes,” Jour-
nal of Popular Culture 25 (winter 1991): 129.
23. Only when he was forced to wear “ragged” clothes during the Great De-
pression does Iacocca directly apply the rags-to-riches formula to himself (8).
24. Amanda Bennett, “President Iacocca?” Wall Street Journal, 28 June 1982, 1.
25. Excerpts from Ross Perot’s news conference are reproduced in the New
York Times, 2 October 1992, A20.
26. Although her frame of reference—Frank Capra films—is different from
my own, see Linda Schulte-Sasse’s “Meet Ross Perot: The Lasting Legacy of Capra-
esque Populism,” Cultural Critique 25 (fall 1993): 104–5, for an overlapping analysis
of Perot’s speech.
27. Susan Powter, Stop the Insanity! (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 10.
All further references to this work will be included in the text. Powter repeats the
mantra “I call myself: a housewife who figured it out” in many forums, including
her book The Pocket Powter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 250.
28. Stuart Hirsch, president of A-Vision (the entertainment company that dis-
tributes Susan Powter videos) and former chief operating officer of King World
(which distributes the Oprah Winfrey Show), comments on Powter’s celebrity poten-
tial with direct reference to Oprah: “I haven’t dealt with a star with her potential
since Oprah.” Hirsch is quoted in Steve McClellan, “Multimedia Taps Powter,”
Broadcasting & Cable 123 (1 November 1993): 24.
29. Harry F. Waters and Patricia King, “Chicago’s Grand New Oprah,” News-
week 104 (31 December 1984): 51.
30. Although the majority of their viewers are white women, both Oprah and
Powter reach diverse audiences. Much has been made, for example, about the dis-
cord between Oprah and her black female viewership over her romance with Sted-
man Graham, a onetime fashion model. Powter’s first husband (the “Prince”) is
Mexican American, which has reportedly helped her generate a sizable following
among Latino women.
31. Jean Baudrillard also calls this “the satellitization of the real,” which col-
lapses the distinction between the private and the public realm and sends the do-
mestic sphere into orbit. See his essay “The Ecstasy of Communication,” trans.
John Johnston, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster
(Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), 128.
32. Oprah Winfrey, quoted in Robert Waldron, Oprah! (New York: St. Mar-
tin’s Press, 1987), 191.
33. Audience share statistics quoted in Pat Colander, “Oprah Winfrey’s
Odyssey,” New York Times, 12 March 1989, sec. 2, 37.
34. Oprah Winfrey, quoted in Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, “The Importance of
Being Oprah,” New York Times Magazine, 11 June 1989: 54, and Marcia Ann Gilles-
pie, “Winfrey Takes All,” Ms. 17 (November 1988): 50.
35. My explanation of the New Age movement’s concept of “prosperity con-
sciousness”—including its indebtedness to the older New Thought movement—is

157
 Notes to Epilogue

drawn from J. Gordon Melton, New Age Almanac (New York: Visible Ink Press,
1991), 433.
36. “Oprah’s Story” is the opening section of Bob Greene and Oprah Winfrey’s
Make the Connection: Ten Steps to a Better Body—and a Better Life (New York: Hy-
perion, 1996), 13–17. The sketch, which is the only sustained autobiographical state-
ment published by Winfrey to date, basically transcribes Oprah’s 22 November 1993
“Weight Loss Show.” It is symptomatic of current manuals on success that Make the
Connection puts New Age self-awareness into the service of changing one’s body
image.
37. Susan Powter, quoted in Mary McNamara, “She Says,” Ms. 7 (July–August
1996): 72.
38. Susan Powter, quoted in Alex Witchel, “Susan Powter,” New York Times
Magazine (31 October 1993): 61.
39. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of
Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978), 53.
40. A year later, Powter settled with the Frankels by agreeing to pay the latter
$2.8 million, mostly in future earnings, in order to sever business ties with the pair.
41. Susan Powter, quoted in Jill Jordan Sieder, “A Painful Business Exercise,”
U.S. News & World Report 120 (18 March 1996): 66–67.
42. Gerald Frankel, quoted in Lisa Faye Kaplan, “Fitness Sage: Take a Powter
and Rule the World,” Gannett News Service (31 January 1995).
43. Susan Powter, quoted in Jeannine Stein, “Powter Keg,” Los Angeles Times,
14 September 1994, E5.
44. Powter, quoted in Sieder, “A Painful Business Exercise,” 67.
45. In fact, Powter anticipates the likelihood that the viewer will misrecognize
her “after” portrait in the pages of Stop the Insanity!; the caption under the photo
reads, in part: “Nobody will believe it’s me? Who else could it be? Look at the hair”
(280).

Epilogue: The Return of the Self-Made Man

1. Arnold Schwarzenegger with Douglas Kent Hall, Arnold: The Education of
a Bodybuilder (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977), 3. All further references to
this work will be included in the text.
2. Arnold Schwarzenegger, quoted in George Butler, Arnold Schwarzenegger:
A Portrait (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 96.
3. J. Hoberman, “Terminal Systems,” review of Terminator 2: Judgment Day,
Village Voice 36 (9 July 1991), 49. For an overview of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movie
career prior to the release of Terminator 2, see Hoberman’s essay “The Self-Made
Man,” Village Voice 36 (12 February 1991), 53ff.
4. Schwarzenegger, quoted in Butler, Arnold Schwarzenegger, 99.
5. George Butler, quoted in Molly O’Neill, “The Arm Fetish,” New York
Times, 3 May 1992, sec. 9, 1.
6. Steve Michalik, quoted in Paul Solotaroff, “The Power and the Gory,” Vil-
lage Voice 36 (29 October 1991), 33. My discussion of Michalik’s self-making and

158
 Notes to Epilogue

self-destruction is taken from Solotaroff ’s engaging account of the bodybuilder’s

bout with steroids.
7. Ibid., 156.
8. Michalik, quoted in ibid., 30.
9. Ibid., 156.

159
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 Index

Abbott, Jacob, xix, 67 Alger, Horatio, Jr., xx, xxvi, 1–3, 5,

Adams, James Truslow, 97–101, 10–11, 15–17, 27, 30, 67, 78, 122,
154–55 n. 44, 155 n. 50; The Epic 130, 139 n. 1, 143 n. 6; Mark, the
of America, 97–101, 154–55, Matchboy, 5; Ragged Dick, xx–xxi,
n. 44–45, 155 n. 47, 155 n. 51; 1–2, 5, 11, 137 n. 29, 139 n. 13,
“Our American Dream,” 155 n. 47; 143 n. 6; Tattered Tom, 15–17, 67.
“Rugged Individualism,” See also formulas—class mobility:
155 n. 51 “luck-and-pluck”
advertisements. See autobiography American dream, xii, xv, 79–80,
African Americans, xiv, xxii–xxiii, 65, 97–101, 109, 111–12, 114,
81–85, 95, 152 n. 13; and black na- 151 nn. 2, 4; origins of, xxix, 80, 97,
tionalism, xxix, 43, 51–62, 84; and 101, 154–55 n. 44
black womanhood, 42–49, 52, 58, Anderson, Benedict, 136 n. 25
117; and business enterprise, xv–xvi, anticommunism, 13, 98, 101
xxvi–xxix, 102, 133, 146 n. 53, Antin, Mary, xiv, 64–69, 90, 114,
146 n. 6; and the Great Migration, 149 nn. 49–50; and Atlantic
53; and individualism, xxviii, 35–38, Monthly, 149 n. 49; and educational
53–56; and individualism, limits of, uplift, 65–66, 68; and Hale House
xxviii, 32, 54, 56; middle-class, 43, Natural History Club, 69; and Pro-
47, 144 n. 28; and racial integration gressive Era, xx, 62, 65; The Prom-
(ak a “social equality”), 52, 84; ised Land, 64–71, 99, 149 nn. 49,
working-class, 43–44, 47, 58–59, 51; They Who Knock at Our Gates,
144 n. 30. See also formulas— 64; and Transcendentalism, 69, 99.
class mobility: “rags-to-riches,” See also salesmanship
nontraditional appropriation of; anti-Semitism, 81–82, 89, 91, 110,
formulas—racial uplift; formulas— 112, 153 n. 24. See also nativism;
slave narrative; imperialism, and racism; stereotypes
Africa; lynching; segregation Armstrong, Nancy, 25
Aiken, Albert, 10 Asian Americans. See immigrants;
Alcott, Louisa, 67 Chinese, Japanese, Korean

161
 Index

Astor, John J., xxvii 74. See also African Americans;

autobiography, xv, xxvii, 65, 105–7; formulas—class mobility; immi-
and advertisements, xxvii, 18, grants; self-made man; women
20–21, 50–51, 108–9; and business Butler, George, 130
convention reports, xxvii, 42–44,
47–49; and campaign speeches, 111; Cahan, Abraham, 65–66; The Rise of
delimiting, xxvii, 21, 42; and in- David Levinsky, 101
fomercials (television), xxvii, 112 Calvinism. See religion
Ayer, Harriet Hubbard, xxvi, 18–24, Carby, Hazel V., 47
42, 45, 98, 113; and Récamier Carnegie, Andrew, xxiv, xxvii, 3–9, 37,
Preparations, 19–22. See also auto- 39, 41, 49, 60–64, 99, 109,
biography, and advertisements; 139–40 nn. 16–17, 143 n. 17,
salesmanship 144 n. 23; “The Advantages of
Ayer, Margaret Hubbard, 141 n. 15 Poverty,” 139 n. 6, 143 n. 17; Auto-
biography of Andrew Carnegie, 4–9,
Bacchus, D. Lampton, 46–47 17, 41, 140 n. 18, 144 n. 23; The
Banta, Martha, 150 n. 62, 153 n. 31 Empire of Business, xxv; and Home-
Barnum, P. T.: The Life of P. T. Barnum stead, 6–7; Triumphant Democracy,
(1855), 138 n. 45; Struggles and 63, 137 n. 41; 148–49 n. 42; and
Triumphs (1869), 138 n. 45 U.S. Steel Corporation, 3
Barton, Bruce: The Man Nobody Carnegie, Dale: and the Dale Carnegie
Knows, xxv, 72; and Woman’s Home Institute, 110; How to Win Friends
Companion, xxv and Influence People, 102
Beecher, Henry Ward, xxiv Catholicism. See religion
Bewley, Marius, 79–80, 151 n. 5 Cawelti, John G., xiii, xix, 2, 5, 102,
Bird, Caroline, 17, 141 nn. 5, 16 149 n. 53
blackface minstrelsy, 81–83, 151 n. 8 celebrity, xxix, 104, 112, 117–20, 125,
black nationalism. See African Ameri- 133, 157 n. 28. See also formulas—
cans; Garvey, Marcus, and Garveyism class mobility; image
bodybuilding. See formulas—class mo- character, xv, xxii–xxv, xxix, 2, 5, 17,
bility: and physical fitness; image 36–37, 54, 74, 91–92, 133, 138 n. 45;
Brace, Charles Loring: and Children’s effacement of, xiii, xxii–xxiii, 90–92,
Aid Society, 16, 140 n. 3 102, 110, 114, 122, 127, 132; moral
Brolaski, Harry, 88, 152 n. 20 (or virtuous), xiii–xv, xxii–xxv,
Buddhism. See religion xxix, 3–5, 7–8, 16–17, 30, 120;
Bundles, A’Lelia Perry, 52, 146 n. 54 premodern definition of, xxiii;
Burr, Clinton Stoddard: America’s Race and women, 16–17, 30. See also
Heritage, 87, 89, 153 n. 23 formulas—class mobility;
Bush, George, xv–xvi, 128 formulas—spiritual uplift; residual
business enterprise (entrepreneurs), Cher, 112
xiii, xxvi–xxix, 2–3, 10, 17, 29, 32, Christianity. See religion
35, 44, 53–54, 67–68, 70–71, Chubb, Thomas, 90
78–79, 83, 108, 130; and corrup- class mobility. See formulas
tion, 78–79, 85, 87–89, 94, colonialism (neo-). See imperialism
97–101; and Mammon, 34, 50–51, Columbus, Christopher, 86–87, 97

162
 Index

Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness, 81, Eagleton, Terry, 151 n. 7

151 n. 7 education. See Antin, Mary; formulas—
consumerism, xv, xxi–xxiii, xxvi, xxix, class mobility; Washington, Booker T.
17, 26–27, 29, 31, 46, 50–51, 72, Emerson, Ralph Waldo, xxiv, 69;
74, 92–93, 99, 102, 109, 111, “The Over-Soul,” 149 n. 52; “Self-
113, 117, 119, 126; and anti- Reliance,” 149 n. 53
consumerism, xiv, 4, 23, 37, 43, enterprise (entrepreneurs). See business
98, 101. See also personality enterprise; self-made man
Coolidge, Calvin, 86, 99, 153 n. 30 Eriksson, Leif, 81, 86–87
Cooper, Anna Julia, 47 ethnicity, 77, 79, 109. See also
corporations, xx, xxvii, xxix, 2–3, 6, immigrants
28–29, 60–61, 75, 93, 99, 101, 103–4,
110, 123, 132, 137 n. 28, 139 n. 16; fashion. See formulas—class mobility
effacement of self-made man within, femininity. See African Americans,
xxix, 102–3, 133; faceless, xxix, and black womanhood; formulas—
103–5, 107, 110–11; and media class mobility: and cross-dressing;
(electronic), xv, xxix, 107, 125, 133 formulas—class mobility: and
Corso, Joseph, 152 n. 20 masculinized female; women
cosmetic surgery. See formulas—class feminism. See Ferber, Edna; Powter,
mobility Susan; women
Cronon, Edmund David, 57, Ferber, Edna, xxi, xxvi, 24–30,
147 n. 18 142 nn. 24, 40; and American Mag-
cross-dressing. See formulas—class azine, 25, 28, 142 n. 30; Emma
mobility McChesney & Co., xxi, 25, 27–30,
Crummell, Alexander, 144 n. 28 142 n. 28; and feminism, 28,
cult of true womanhood. See women, 142 n. 28; Personality Plus, xxvi, 25,
and domestic ideal 27–28; Roast Beef, Medium, 25–28;
Cushman, Robert C.: Elements of and Theodore Roosevelt, 28,
Success, xxiv 142 n. 30. See also salesmanship
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 78–81, 85–97,
Davies, Wallace Evan, xix 151 n. 7; The Great Gatsby, 78–83,
Davis, James J., 10–14; Industrial 85–97, 151 n. 7, 152 n. 20,
Management, 12; The Iron Puddler, 153 n. 26; and Jazz Age, 81, 151 n. 6;
10–14; “Our Labor Shortage and and Saturday Evening Post, 85
Immigration,” 140 n. 25 Ford, Henry, 61, 99–100, 103, 110;
Denning, Michael, 10 and Dearborn Independent, 153 n. 24;
dime novel, 1, 91. See also formulas and River Rouge, 100
Dole, Robert J., xv Ford, Henry, II, 108, 110
domestic ideal. See women formulas
Douglass, Frederick, 36 —class mobility: and celebrity, xxiii,
Dreiser, Theodore: Sister Carrie, 101 105, 107, 111, 113, 124, 127–32;
Du Bois, W. E. B., 37, 43, 83–84; and cosmetic surgery, 113, 115,
“Back to Africa,” 147 n. 18; and 120; and cross-dressing, 15–16;
Crisis, 83; “Marcus Garvey,” 147 n. 16; and education, 5, 36–37, 39–41,
The Negro in Business (1899), 31 43, 56, 65–66, 68, 70, 72–73,

163
 Index

90; and fashion, xx–xxii, xxvi, 2, help, xvi, 2, 34, 37, 39, 54, 58,
6, 11–12, 15–16, 72, 122; “luck- 69, 92; and self-improvement, 10,
and-pluck” (Horatio Alger), xvi, 91–92, 102, 110, 113, 127, 129,
xx, 1–2, 10, 15, 32, 42, 66, 90, 107, 131, 136 n. 25, 137 n. 31; and
109, 123, 143 n. 6, 153 n. 26; time management, xviii, 39–41,
“luck-and-pluck” (Horatio Alger), 74, 91, 110, 123, 129–30,
limits of, 11–12, 17, 100–102, 121, 150 n. 62; and tomboy, 15–17;
133; and masculinity, xxiii–xxiv, and U.S. national identity,
xxviii, 2, 29–30, 58, 62, 100, 114; xiii–xiv, xvii, xix–xxii, xxiv, 3, 58,
and masculinized female, 44; 64, 73, 79, 128; and whiteness,
middle-class, xiv, xiii, xxviii, 1–6, xxviii, 2, 5, 35, 38–41, 51, 62,
9–12, 16, 36; and moral luck, 112; and work ethic, xiv, xviii,
xxviii, 2–6, 16–17, 107, 109, xxiv, 9, 35, 38, 74, 91, 94, 109,
111–12; and moral luck, limits of, 112, 121, 123, 130, 154 n. 34
xxviii, 2, 5, 7–10, 12, 27, 38, 41, —dime novel (working-class), 10
101; and moral luck, nontradi- —racial uplift (African-American),
tional appropriation of, 51; and xxviii–xxix, 35, 37, 39, 47–48,
New Age (“prosperity conscious- 51, 54, 58, 60, 144 n. 23
ness”), 118, 157–58 nn. 35–36; —slave narrative, 36
and New Thought (“positive —spiritual uplift, xxiii–xxv, 3, 99,
thinking”), xxv, 60, 92, 102, 118; and antebellum period,
119–21, 129–30, 157 n. 35; and xix–xx, 2; and Puritans, xxiii
physical fitness via bodybuilding, —television talk show (Oprah Win-
127–30, 132; and physical fitness frey, Susan Powter), 117, 157 n. 30
via bodybuilding, limits of, Foucault, Michel, xvii–xviii, 40
130–31; and physical fitness via Franklin, Benjamin: Autobiography,
weight loss, 115, 118–24, 126; xviii–xxiv, xxvii, 36, 40, 65, 71–72,
and physical fitness via weight 78, 91–92, 138 n. 45, 146 n. 6,
loss, failure to achieve, 115, 153 n. 27
119–20; and prostitution, 122–23, Freud, Sigmund: The Interpretation of
125; “rags-to-riches,” xiv–xvi, Dreams, 96
xxv–xxix, 1–2, 5–6, 15, 36–37, frontier, 90, 98–99, 155 n. 51; and
39, 68, 75, 101, 104, 109, 112, postfrontier, xxi, 29, 93
117–18, 121, 123–24, 133, Fussell, Edwin S., 79–80
143 n. 17, 144 n. 23, 157 n. 23;
“rags-to-riches,” crisis in, xv, xxii, Garvey, Marcus, xxi, xxviii, 39, 51–62,
xxv, xxvii, 90–92, 97, 100, 102–3, 84, 147 n. 22; and Back-to-Africa
133; “rags-to-riches,” failure to movement, 53, 59, 62, 84; and
achieve, xvi, 68–69, 71, 75, 77, Black Star Line (BSL), 56–57,
99, 150 n. 64; “rags-to-riches,” 59–60, 146 n. 6; debt to Booker T.
limits of, 6, 17–18, 40–41, 67–68; Washington, 53–57, 59, 147 n. 13;
“rags-to-riches,” nontraditional and Garveyism, 51, 53–54, 81, 147
appropriation of, xiv–xv, n. 18, 148 n. 32; and International
xxvi–xxix, 15, 20–21, 24–29, 34, League of Darker Peoples (ILDP),
42–44, 49, 64–97, 102; and self- 51; and Jamaican Daily Chronicle,

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 Index

59, 147 n. 13; “The Negro’s Greatest Hollywood, 104, 108, 111, 127–28,
Enemy,” 55–56; and Negro Factory 130, 156 n. 9. See also media
Corporation, 57; and Negro World, Homestead strike. See strikes
58, 84, 146 n. 4; and Pittsburgh Hoyt, Edwin P., 143 n. 6
Courier, 146 n. 6; and Universal Hudson, Henry, 81
Negro Improvement Association Hughes, Howard, 103–7, 156 nn. 9,
(UNIA), 53, 56–60, 84, 18–19; and Clifford Irving, 106,
147 nn. 13, 18 156 n. 19; and Fortune, 103, 105;
Giannini, A. P., 149 n. 46 and Hoax, 106; and Howard
Gibbs, Katherine, 141 n. 5 Hughes Sr., 103–4; and
Gilded Age, xxviii–xxix, 1, 3, 62, 99, “Hughesiana,” 105; and Hughes
132, 149 n. 46 Tool Company, 103–4, 156 n. 15;
Gilman, Sander L., 89 and Life, 105–6; and Rosemont
Gilroy, Paul, 148 n. 32 Enterprises, Inc., 105, 156 n. 13
Goddard, Henry Herbert: The Kallikak
Family, 154 n. 33 Iacocca, Lee, xviii, 107–11; and Chrys-
Gold, Charles W.: America, 95–96 ler Motor Company, 107–11; and
Gould, Helen, 49 Ford Motor Company, 108, 110;
Gould, Jay, xxi, xxvii Iacocca (with William Novak),
Grant, Madison, 85, 92, 153 n. 30 107–11, 156–57 n. 21, 157 n. 23;
Great Depression, xv, xxvii, xxix, 2, 7, and Nicola Iacocca, 109–10. See also
80, 97–98, 100, 102, 157 n. 23; and salesmanship
communitarianism, 97–98, 101, image, xxiii, xxix, 125–27, 139 n. 45;
155 n. 48 body, xxix, 112, 115–23, 126–27,
Green, Hetty, 141 n. 16 129–32; 158 n. 36; celebrity, xiv–xv,
Guttmann, Allen, 149 n. 50 104–5, 107–8, 110–11, 113–14,
116–20, 124–28, 132. See also
Handlin, Oscar, 70, 149 n. 49 celebrity; formulas—class mobility:
Harding, Warren, 12, 83–84, 94–95 and celebrity; formulas—class
Harlan, Louis R., 143 n. 16, 144 n. 27 mobility: and cosmetic surgery;
Harper, Frances, 47 formulas—class mobility: and
Harriman, Edward H., xxi physical fitness via body-building;
Harvey, Peter, 150 n. 67 formulas—class mobility: and
Heilbroner, Robert L.: The Quest for physical fitness via weight loss
Wealth, 103 immigrants, xiv, xxii–xxiv; and assimi-
Hendrick, Burton J., 140 n. 20 lation, 5–6, 39, 41, 62–65, 78, 91,
Higham, John, 62–63, 85, 92, 96 95, 110, 128, 137–38 n. 41,
Hill, Napoleon: Think and Grow Rich, 153 n. 24; Australian, 113–14, 117;
102 Austrian, 127–28, 130; and business
Hill, Robert A., 55, 60, 146 n. 6 enterprise, xv, xxvi, 53–97, 102,
Hirsch, Stuart, 157 n. 28 110–11, 133, 149 n. 46, 153 n. 24;
Hoberman, J., 128, 158 n. 3 Chinese, xxi, 76; English, 62–63,
Hoerle, Helen, and Florence Saltzberg: 86–87, 148 n. 42; and gangsterism,
The Girl and the Job, 26–27, 78–79, 81–82, 85, 87–91, 93, 95,
142 nn. 23–24. See also salesmanship 97; German, 62, 86, 148 n. 42;

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Greek, 82; and individualism, limits 150 nn. 63–64, 66; The Grass Roof,
of, 71, 77; Irish, xxi, 5, 90; Italian, 71, 76, 149 n. 54, 150–51 n. 68;
63–64, 107, 109–10, 149 n. 46, “Oriental Yankee,” 149 n. 54,
152 n. 13; Japanese, 85, 94; Jewish, 150 n. 64. See also salesmanship
xx, 63–64, 82, 85, 88–89, 112, 152 Kemiläinen, Aira, 136 n. 20
n. 13, 153 n. 24; Korean, 65, 70–77; Kim, Elaine H., 71, 150 n. 66
Scandinavian, 86–87; Scottish, 3, King, Henrietta, 141 n. 5
5–6, 39, 62, 64, 109; Welsh, 10; Knox, Raymond C.: Religion and the
West Indian, xxviii, 52–53, 62, 84. American Dream, 155 n. 47
See also ethnicity; formulas—class Krause, Paul, 140 n. 16
mobility: “rags-to-riches,” non- Ku Klux Klan, 35, 84, 152 n. 13
traditional appropriation of; na-
tivism; religion labor unions. See strikes
immigration, xvii; northwestern Euro- Lasch, Christopher: The Culture of
pean, 62, 92, 96–97; Dillingham Narcissism, xiii–xiv, 122–23
Commission on, 63–64; Johnson- Laughlin, Harry H., 153 n. 30
Reed Act, 94, 96; restriction on, Lincoln, Abraham, xix, xxvii, 36, 72
12–13, 63, 70, 83, 85, 94; south- Lott, Eric, 151 n. 8
eastern European, 13, 62–63, 80, “luck-and-pluck.” See formulas—class
82–83, 86, 88–89, 91–92, 94–97, mobility
148 n. 40 lynching, xxviii, 32–35, 52, 75–76,
imperialism (United States), xxi–xxii, 143 nn. 11, 14; 152 n. 13
59–61, 90, 93, 151 n. 7; and Africa, Lynn, Kenneth S., 155 n. 52
43, 51–52, 58–62, 144 nn. 27, 28;
148 n. 31; and Korea, 70, 73; and Madonna, 112, 132
South America, xxi–xxii, 29 Martin, Emma Mae, xvi–xvii
individual, xxii, 3, 6, 12, 35, 42, 54, masculinity. See formulas—class
71, 77; end of (in postmodernity), mobility
103, 108, 113, 129, 132; and indi- McDowell, Calvin, 33, 35
vidualism, xviii–xiv, xxviii, 2, 4, 57, McElvaine, Robert S., 155 n. 47
90, 136 n. 15, 139 n. 16, 155 n. 51; McLuckie, (“Honest”) John, 6–9
modern definition of, xviii–xiv; pre- media (electronic), xiv, xxix, 104–5,
modern definition, xvii, xxiii. See 111, 118, 122, 124–27; and Jean
also African Americans; immigrants Baudrillard, 117, 157 n. 31; and
inheritance. See women Marshall McLuhan, 107; and the
media event, 106–8. See also
Jameson, Fredric, 155 n. 46 corporations
Jesus Christ, xxv, 72 Meier, August, 144 n. 20
Jones, Jacqueline, 144 n. 30 Melton, J. Gordon, 158 n. 35
Josephson, Matthew: The Robber Michaels, Walter Benn, 80, 95,
Barons, 101, 155 n. 52 151 n. 6, 154 n. 34
Judaism. See religion Michalik, Steve, 130–32, 158–59 n. 6
middle class, xx. See also African Ameri-
Kang, Younghill, xiv, 39, 65, 70–77; cans; formulas—class mobility; indi-
East Goes West, xxvi, 70–77, 149 n. 54, vidual; morality; women, reformers

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Mills, C. Wright: The Power Elite, 103, 92–95, 128, 153 nn. 23, 30. See also
105 anti-Semitism; racism
mind control. See formulas—class mo- New Age. See formulas—class mobility
bility: and New Thought; personality New Thought. See formulas—class
Molly Maguires, 10, 139 n. 13 mobility; personality
Moon, Michael, 15 Nicholson, Eliza, 141 n. 5
morality, xiii, xv, xviii, xxiii, 10, 25, Nordicism. See nativism
38–39, 41–43, 65, 78–81, 87, 91, normative power, xiv, xvii, 5, 41, 129,
94, 97–101, 136 n. 15, 139 n. 16, 133
141 n. 16, 144 n. 23; eclipse of (in
postmodernity), 132–33. See also Oliver Optic (William T. Adams), 32,
character; formulas—class mobility: 143 n. 6
and moral luck; formulas—spiritual Osborn, Henry Fairfield, 86–87
uplift; women
moral luck. See formulas—class Perot, Ross, 111–12; “Conversation
mobility with Ross Perot” (infomercial), 112;
Morgan, J. P., xxi, 57, 155 n. 52 and Electronic Data Systems, 112
Morrison, Toni, xv personality, xiv–xv, xxii–xxiii, xxv–xxvi,
Moses, Wilson Jeremiah, 43, 144 n. 28 xxix, 24, 27, 29, 47, 51, 55, 72, 74,
Moss, Thomas, 33, 35, 54, 75; and 98, 102–4, 110, 120; and image,
People’s Grocery Company, 33 xxv, 51, 91–92, 107, 110–11, 114,
motherhood. See women 120; and New Thought, xxv, 91–92;
muckraking, xxv, 98 psychoanalytic, xxiii, xxix, 103; and
myth, xiii–xiv, 93, 96, 98, 135 n. 2 women, xxvi, 17, 27–29
physical fitness. See formulas—class
Nairn, Tom, xx, 154 n. 43 mobility
narrative, xiv, 79, 135 n. 2, 138 n. 55 Pinkham, Lydia, 141 n. 5
narrative codes. See formulas popular fiction, 2–3, 15–17, 24–30,
nationalism, xx, 58, 96, 136 nn. 19–20, 139 n. 1; and imaginative possibili-
25; 137–38 n. 41, 154 n. 43; United ties, xxviii, 1–2, 27
States, xvii, xix–xxii, xxiv, 85, 96–97, Powter, Susan, 113–17, 120–26, 157
100–101, 132; “woman” as sign for, nn. 28, 30; and Dolly Parton, 126;
93, 97. See also African Americans, and feminism, 121; and Inside Edi-
and black nationalism; Garvey, Mar- tion, 125; Lean, Strong, and Healthy
cus, and Garveyism; formulas—class (video), 117, 126; The Pocket Powter,
mobility; working class 157 n. 27; and prostitution, 122–23,
National Negro Business League 125; “Stop the Insanity!” (info-
(NNBL). See Walker, Madam C. J.; mercial), 113–14, 116; Stop the In-
Washington, Booker T. sanity!, 113–17, 120–26, 158 n. 45;
Native Americans, 39 and Susan Powter Corporation,
nativism, xiv, xxi, xxix, 6, 63–64, 124–25; and The Susan Powter
70–72, 78–81, 83–84, 89, 94–97, Show, 117, 157 n. 30. See also
110, 133, 151 n. 6, 152 n. 13, 153 salesmanship
n. 24, 153–54 nn. 30–34; and Progressive Era, xv, xx, xxii, xxv,
Nordicism, 12–13, 80–81, 85–87, xxvii–xxix, 1, 24, 44, 49, 62, 65, 76,

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 Index

86, 90, 95, 98–99, 101, 133, Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 127–32,

139 n. 1, 153 n. 24; and Success, 2; 158 n. 3; Arnold (with Douglas Kent
and World’s Work, 2 Hall), 127, 129–30, 132; and Kinder-
prostitution. See formulas—class garten Cop, 128; and Pumping Iron,
mobility 128, 130; and The Terminator, 128;
Protestantism. See religion, Christianity and Terminator 2, 128; and Twins, 128
segregation (racial), xiv, xxviii, 31–62,
race, xvii, xxiv 65, 76, 80–81, 83–85, 95, 133,
racism, 12, 65, 70–72, 75, 81, 110. 151 n. 6; and accommodationism,
See also anti-Semitism; lynching; 35–36, 39
nativism; stereotypes self-help. See formulas—class mobility
“rags-to-riches.” See formulas—class self-improvement. See formulas—class
mobility mobility
Randolph, A. Philip, 51 self-made man, xiii–xv, xvii–xiii, xx,
Reed, Ishmael: The Free-Lance Pall- xxii–xxix, 3–5, 8–9, 24, 26–27, 31,
bearers, 155 n. 53 35–36, 38, 50, 60, 62, 64, 67,
religion, xxiv; Buddhism, 71, 76–77, 69–71, 73, 77–78, 90, 92, 113,
150–51 nn. 67–68; Calvinism, xxiii; 123, 129; decline of (in modernity),
Catholicism, 64, 85, 90, 114, 129; xiii, xv, xxiii, xxv, xxviii–xxix, 78–79,
Christianity (Protestantism), xix–xx, 85, 90–92, 99–101; ends of (in
2, 54, 61, 64, 72–74, 96, 109; postmodernity), xxix, 102–4, 108,
Judaism, 85. See also character; 114, 124, 133, 155 n. 53; return
formulas—class mobility: and New of (in postmodernity), xv, xxiii,
Age; formulas—spiritual uplift xxix, 107, 111, 127, 130. See also
residual, xxv, 2, 18, 30, 36–37, 79; business enterprise; corporations;
definition of, xxv individual
Riesman, David: The Lonely Crowd, 102 self-making. See formulas—class
River Rouge. See strikes mobility
Roberts, Kenneth L .: Why Europe self-reliance. See Emerson, Ralph
Leaves Home, 85–86 Waldo; formulas—class mobility:
Rockefeller, John D., xxvii, 49, 60–61, and self-help
99 separate spheres (gender), xiv, 15–30,
Rodgers, Daniel T., 10 43–52, 65–68, 133
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 155 n. 50 Solotaroff, Paul, 131, 159 n. 6
Roosevelt, Theodore, xxiv–xxv, 28, 99, spiritual uplift. See formulas
137 n. 41, 142 n. 30, 155 n. 50; Stansell, Christine, 140 n. 3
“Character and Success,” xxiv Stein, Judith, 59
stereotypes, 26, 34–35, 44, 81–82, 89,
salesmanship, 14, 19–22, 24–30, 117, 150 n. 63
47–48, 67–68, 72–75, 110–11, 113, Stewart, Henry, 33, 35
117, 124, 141 n. 20, 142 nn. 23–24. Stoddard, Lothrop: The Rising Tide of
See also formulas—class mobility Color, 93–94, 96, 154 n. 33
Scharnhorst, Gary, 139 n. 1, 140 n. 3, strikes, 10; Homestead, 6–9, 100,
153 n. 26 140 nn. 17–18; River Rouge, 100.
Schulte-Sasse, Linda, 157 n. 26 See also Molly Maguires

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 Index

success. See formulas Woman in Business,” 48; and phil-

Sui Sin Far (Edith Maud Eaton), 76 anthropy, 47, 49, 146 n. 53; and
Susman, Warren I., xxiii, 155 n. 48 Walker Manufacturing Company,
symptomatic reading, xv–xvi, 2, 7, Inc., 50, 145 n. 32. See also
10, 21, 65, 69, 81, 97, 123, 132, salesmanship
158 n. 36; definition of, xv Wall, Joseph Frazier, 8, 140 n. 18
Washington, Booker T., xiv–xvi, xviii,
Taylorism. See formulas—class mobil- xx, xxv, 35–42, 47, 49, 51–57, 59,
ity: and time management 143 n. 17, 144 nn. 20, 23, 27–28;
television. See formulas—television Black-Belt Diamonds, 144 n. 22; and
talk show; media industrial education, 36–37, 39–40,
Thomas, Clarence, xv–xvii, 128–29 43, 51, 54, 56; and National Negro
Thoreau, Henry David, 69 Business League (NNBL), 41–43,
time management. See formulas—class 46, 48–49, 56–57, 145 n. 35; The
mobility Negro in Business (1907), 38; Tuske-
Tocqueville, Alexis de, xviii–xix, gee Institute, 39–40, 43, 54, 56; Up
136 n. 15 From Slavery, xxv, 35–41, 55, 57
Trachtenberg, Alan, 137 n. 28 Washington, George, xx–xxi, 66,
tradition (invented), xix, 101. See also 72–73
nationalism Watkins, Floyd C., 153 n. 27
Tribal Twenties, xxix, 12–13, 65, 78, Weider, Ben, 128
80, 96–97 weight loss. See formulas—class mobil-
Trilling, Lionel, 79 ity: and physical fitness via weight
Troy, William, 151 n. 2 loss
Turner, Frederick Jackson: 90, 98; Weiss, Richard, 92
“Frontier Thesis,” 137–38 n. 41 Wells, Ida B., 32–34, 67; Crusade for
Tuthill, Louisa M., xx Justice, 32; and Free Speech, 33–34;
Mob Rule in New Orleans, 143 n. 14;
uplift. See formulas—spiritual uplift A Red Record, 33; “Self Help,” 34;
Southern Horrors, 143 n. 11
Vanderbilt, Commodore, xxvii West, Nathanael: A Cool Million, 101,
155 n. 53
Wade, James, 150 n. 67 white ethnicity, xxviii, 89; and
Walker, Madam C. J., xiv, xxvi, 31, post–Civil Rights era, 107, 109
42–52, 58, 98, 113, 118, 145 n. 43, whiteness, 5, 87, 93, 129; narrowing
147 n. 22; and Association of definition of (in Tribal Twenties),
Colored Women, 52; and Ebony, 92, 95, 97, 152 n. 13, 153 n. 30;
146 n. 53; Indianapolis Freeman, and U.S. national identity, 97. See
44–45, 50, 145 n. 32; and Interna- also formulas—class mobility;
tional League of Darker Peoples morality; white ethnicity
(ILDP), 51; and National Association Whittaker, Frederick, 10
for the Advancement of Colored Whyte, William H., Jr.: The Organiza-
People (NAACP), 52, 146 n. 54; tion Man, 102–3
and National Negro Business League Williams, Bernard, 3–4
(NNBL), 42–51; “The Negro Williams, Raymond, xvii, xxv, 136 n. 19

169
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Williams, William Carlos: In the Ameri- 121, 142 n. 28; and inheritance,
can Grain, 86 17–18, 46; and marriage, 17–18,
Wills, Garry, 136 n. 17; Nixon Ago- 20–21, 23–25, 28–30, 45–46, 49,
nistes, xiii 114–15, 123, 125, 145 n. 35,
Wilson, Elizabeth, xxvi 157 n. 30; and motherhood, 17–18,
Wilson, Woodrow, 51, 83, 99, 21, 23–24, 27, 30, 45, 49, 66, 114,
155 n. 50 121; reformers, 46–47, 140 n. 3,
Winfrey, Oprah, 117–20, 132, 142 n. 28. See also African Ameri-
157 nn. 28, 30; and Ann-Margret, cans; character; formulas—class
118–19; and The Color Purple, 117; mobility: and cosmetic surgery;
“Diet Show,” 118; “Oprah’s Story,” formulas—class mobility: and cross-
119, 158 n. 36; and The Oprah Win- dressing; formulas—class mobility:
frey Show, 117, 125, 157 nn. 28, 30; and masculinized female; formu-
and TV Guide, 118–19; “Weight las—class mobility: and physical fit-
Loss Show,” 117, 119, 158 n. 36. See ness via weight loss; formulas—class
also formulas—television talk show mobility: and prostitution; formu-
Winter, Nevin O., 137 n. 31 las—class mobility: “rags-to-riches,”
Wolfe, Thomas, 150 n. 64 nontraditional appropriation of; for-
women, xiv–xvi, xxii–xxiii, 15, 65, mulas—class mobility: and tomboy;
150 n. 63, 153 n. 31, 157 n. 30; nationalism; personality
and autonomy (from men), 17–25, work ethic. See formulas—class
28–30, 45–46, 113, 121; and beauti- mobility
fication, 17–21, 23–24, 42–43, 45, working class, xx, xxviii, 1–2, 6–15, 47,
48, 50, 58, 113–26; and business 53, 63–64, 66, 140 n. 17, 142 n. 28;
enterprise, xxvi–xxviii, 16–30, and U.S. nationalism, 12. See also
42–52, 65, 67–68, 74, 102, 112, African Americans; formulas—dime
115–26, 133, 141 n. 16; and domes- novel; Molly Maguires; strikes
tic ideal (cult of true womanhood), Wyllie, Irvin G., xiii, xxiv, 17,
xxviii, 15–18, 20–25, 27–30, 45, 136 n. 25
47, 66–68, 114, 121–26, 141 n. 16,
149 n. 51; and feminism, 18, 28, Zangwill, Israel, 64

170
Jeffrey Louis Decker received a doctorate in American Civilization
from Brown University. He was an Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fel-
low in the Humanities at Harvard University, and teaches American
studies and American literature at the University of California, Los
Angeles.