At the same time that "self-made" entered the nation's lexicon, so did the notion of abject failure. Once reserved to describe a discrete financial episode-"I made a failure," a merchant would say after losing his shop-"failure" in antebellum America became a matter of identity, describing not an event but a person. As the historian Scott Sandage explains in Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, the phrase "I feel like a failure" comes to us so naturally today "that we forget it is a figure of speech: the language of business applied to the soul." It became conventional wisdom in the early nineteenth century, Sandage explains, that people who failed had a problem native to their constitution. They weren't just losers; they were "born losers.
( Joshua Wolf Shenk )
[ Lincoln's Melancholy: How ]
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