1 2 4 Wilson Quarterly

Current Books

plans as if we were not under a death sen-tence. It is by these fictions—shall we say,these lies—that we stride confidently intothe future.

—Jacob Stein

BIG COTTON: How a Humble Fiber CreatedFortunes, Wrecked Civilizations, andPut America on the Map. By Stephen Yafa. Viking. 398 pp.$ 2 5 . 9 5

In his 14th-century bestseller V o y a g eand Travels, the English knight Sir JohnMandeville described a half-animal, half-plant he called the “Vegetable Lamb.”Each pod on this amazing Scythian shrub,he wrote, contained a tiny lamb, and lintfrom the animals could be harvested andspun into a light fabric. For many Euro-peans, this fanciful account representedthe first encounter with cotton, a crop thatwould transform their clothing, theirworking lives, and their place in the polit-ical world.

In Big Cotton, journalist Stephen Yafatraces the history of the plant and its prod-ucts, beginning with the near-simultane-ous domestication of wild cotton in Africa,South America, India, and Mexico around3500 b . c . Cotton fabric woven in Indiawas a luxury in ancientGreece and Rome, andin the 1660s a craze forIndian cotton chintz in-fected central and north-ern Europe. The popu-larity of the fabric helpeddrive the English inva-sion of India; the colo-nial government prompt-ly outlawed the Indianmanufacture of cottonfabric, requiring insteadthat raw domestic cottonbe shipped to Englishmills. “By deprivingIndia of the fruits of itsown labor,” Yafa writes,“England all but guaran-teed that the crop wouldone day come to symbol-

ize colonial subjugation and provide a ral-lying point against it.”

The overwhelming demand for cottongoods in Europe also spurred the develop-ment of the first factory system and, in thewords of one contemporary admirer,forced “human beings to renounce theirdesultory work habits.” In the late 1700s,fear of industrial piracy was so intense thatthe British refused to let cotton mill work-ers leave the country. But American en-trepreneurs eventually smuggled some se-crets out and, with the help of EliWhitney’s cotton gin (patented in 1794),launched a homegrown industry. The na-tion’s textile center of Lowell, Massachu-setts, hired thousands of New Englandfarm girls to work 14-hour days with littlerespite, and thereby planted the seeds ofthe labor movement.

Northern industrialists, dependent onSouthern slave labor for raw materials,were latecomers to the cause of abolition,but by the end of the 1850s, Yafa writes,many were “no longer willing to pay fortheir conscience with their cotton.” Fortheir part, many Southerners believed cot-ton exports would underwrite their ulti-mate independence. In the decades afterthe Civil War, farmers attempted to re-build the devastated Southern cottoneconomy, but they were stymied by low

Workers open cotton bales at North Carolina’s White Oak Mill inthe early 1900s—one of the few mill jobs available to blacks.

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prices and the invasion of the boll weevil. American cotton continued to domi-

nate for a time. Some growers moved west,and in the late 1800s a Bavarian immi-grant named Levi Strauss bolstered theconsumer demand for sturdy cotton fabric.Today, however, domestic production ofcotton (like that of some other crops) sur-vives mainly on federal subsidies, and theU.S. textile industry is swiftly disappear-ing; more than 210,000 of its workers have

lost their jobs since 2000. China has pro-duced more cotton than the United Statesin recent decades; indeed, its mills are byfar the most productive in the world.

Yafa has a weakness for trite metaphorsand puns, and his eagerness to entertain oc-casionally gets in the way of the story. Still,his tale is ably constructed, dense with well-described heroes and villains, and largelyworthy of its substantial subject.

—Michelle Nijhuis

H i s t o r yBORN LOSERS:A History of Failure in America.By Scott A. Sandage. Harvard Univ.Press. 362 pp. $35

Stock options, year-end bonuses, vaca-tion houses, designer clothes—these arethe measures of American achievement.The winners in this relentlessly aggressivegame get lionized. Donald Trump, for in-stance, is the author or subject of some 15books, not to mention his starring role in thereality-TV show The Apprentice. But whatof those who fall short? In this importantand entertaining work, Scott Sandage setsout to chronicle some of “America’s un-sung losers: men who failed in a nationthat worships success.”

A history professor at Carnegie MellonUniversity, Sandage focuses on the 19thcentury, an era of much economic up-heaval in America. While industrialistsand robber barons built their fortunes, fi-nancial panics occurred regularly. Bankclosings, crop failures, and other disasterscould impoverish families overnight. Di-aries and letters reveal that many peoplewere haunted by a fear of failure. “I havestruggled very hard to get along and sacri-ficed all my comforts,” a Philadelphiamerchant wrote during the panic of 1819,but “what is to become of us . . . I knownot.” When he went bankrupt soon after,the merchant declared that his “days ofsentiment have gone”; from now on, “thesine qua non is money.”

Money became the sine qua non ofself-worth, too. Even though the volatile

worlds of business and finance took almostno account of personal merit, failure wascommonly deemed to be your fault. Alongthe way, the 19th-century economy trans-formed the nation’s criteria for evaluatingindividuals: “Character,” a set of traitsrooted in traditional morality, graduallygave way to “personality,” a more amor-phous set of traits thought likely to bringprosperity. The expression “I feel like afailure,” Sandage notes, “comes so natu-rally that we forget it is a figure of speech:the language of business applied to thes o u l . ”

In the archives of New York’s MercantileAgency, a predecessor to Dun & Brad-street, Sandage unearthed red-leather vol-umes that recount the financial affairs ofthousands of businesses and individuals.Beginning in 1841, the Mercantile pack-aged and sold the era’s most sophisticatedcommercial intelligence. It gathered dataon almost every triumph and reversal offortune from a network of informers, in-cluding a young lawyer named AbrahamLincoln. The Mercantile’s reports exem-plify the emerging cult of success, withtheir combination of empirical rigor,bourgeois moralism, and unsparing criti-cism of those who fell short (“has no ener-gy & will never make a dollar”). Sandage’srecovery of these riches alone is worth theprice of the book.

From college admissions to unemploy-ment, success remains the Americanbarometer of individual worth. How doesit feel to be Willy Loman in a nation that