"Born Losers: A History of Failure in America"
by Scott A. Sandage
Harvard University Press, 362 pp., $35

With the passing of playwright Arthur Miller, the airwaves and print media have been filled with recollections of Willy Loman, the central character in Miller's "Death of a Salesman," whose suicide seems to represent the dying life of all unblessed, hard-luck seekers of the American Dream.

Now comes the real-life, nonfiction Willy Loman story. In "Born Losers: A History of Failure in America," Scott Sandage pays attention to the way our system creates losers, disdains them and attributes their failure to moral weakness, "something in the man" that creates failure. He draws frequently on Willy and Linda Loman, and other writings by Miller concerning the "little guys" who tried and didn't make it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson sets the tone for the book with an ungracious eulogy for his close friend Henry David Thoreau. "He seemed born for greatness," Emerson said regretfully at Thoreau's graveside. "I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition."

Sandage chronicles the "go-ahead" culture's contempt for those who strive and fail, from the early 19th century to our own time. No matter that so many of those failures grew from external forces and events the "losers" could not control and often were not aware of.

For example, an entry — often fallacious, even libelous — in Lewis Tappan's "big red book of third rate men."

Sandage mines the archives of Tappan's Mercantile Agency, the nation's first credit-rating service and a direct ancestor of the renowned firm of Dun and Bradstreet.

Tappan's network of secret "correspondents" throughout the country spied on their hometown businessmen. They recorded rumors about their marriages, their children, their drinking, their financial condition, then sold the intelligence to the Mercantile Agency.

The information was entered in the firm's huge red books — they grew to 2,800 volumes — to be resold to manufacturers, transporters and wholesalers of goods, and used in deciding whether to extend credit to the targeted businessmen. A small-town grocer in Ohio might suddenly find himself unable to buy goods from his New York wholesalers but would never know the name of the one who ruined him.

Sandage also examined collections of begging letters, written to J.D. Rockefeller, P.T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and others, from losers or from their wives. Poignantly, these "epistolary beggars" seldom asked for handouts. They wanted jobs. They hoped to trade what Sandage calls "sentimental capital" — their moral worthiness as humans — for one more chance to strive.

National celebrities, some in ironic postures, color what could have been a drab collection of case studies. Walt Whitman wrote "vivas" of praise for losers, at the same time admiring the Tappan family and marveling at their financial success. Abraham Lincoln became, for a time, one of Tappan's secret agents; also a target, a man whose affairs "would bear looking into." Mark Twain found the begging letters hilarious and sought to borrow P.T. Barnum's collection as humor material.

The book concentrates on the 19th century, with its many financial panics, when thousands failed and hundreds of failures committed suicide, and when contempt for losers was developing as a cultural trait. He covers in less detail the Great Depression of the 1930s, when in a single year 4,004 banks closed, 20,000 businesses failed, and leading psychiatrists blamed the failures on "a wrong attitude toward life."

An associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, Sandage has impressively documented his history of failure with 60 pages of citations. The book is tightly packed; you might wish for more storytelling.

Sandage really gets going in his epilogue, an eloquent essay that describes how the stigma of failure, the unforgiving ideologies of shame and blame, extend into the present time. The isolation and exclusion of losers, he argues, has led to some of our nation's most terrible crimes: the shootings at Columbine High and other schools, the murders of John Kennedy and Medgar Evars, the Oklahoma City bombing.

The rhetoric of failure extends even to the World Trade Center murders. All the victims were declared heroes, but their survivors collect differing amounts of reparations, depending on whether the victims were "rising stars or complacent plodders."

Our insistence on imputing failure to some intrinsic fault of individual character appears to have changed little since 1819, Sandage observes. "We need the loser, the word and the person, to sort out our own defeats and dreams. ... Failure is not the dark side of the American dream; it is the foundation of it."

Bob Simmons spent more than four decades as a full-time broadcast and print journalist. He is a former commentator for KING-TV and former writer for the Seattle Weekly.