| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4

Book Review

Something for Nothing: Luck in America. By Jackson Lears. (New York: Viking, 2003. xvi, 392 pp. $27.95, ISBN 0-670-03173-9.)

From the earliest settlements of British North America to present-day Wall Street, American life has been shaped by a tension between the culture of control, personified by the self-made man whose hard work and self-discipline command success in a coherent moral universe, and the culture of chance, figured in the confidence man whose speculative gambles manipulate luck in a contingent and capricious universe. In Something for Nothing, Jackson Lears tracks those competing but interdependent cultures across four centuries, arguing that Americans have tended to highlight the self-made man at the expense of the confidence man. He writes,

In a public discourse dominated by the culture of control, this book is in part an attempt to redress the rhetorical balance by resurrecting the culture of chance, taking it seriously but not uncritically, reasserting the claims of luck against the hubris of human will. (p. 22)

As in Lears's two previous works, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (1981) and Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (1994), cultural history mingles with cultural criticism in ways that illuminate the past even as they bring new insights to bear on contemporary—and especially post–September 11—American life. This is an ambitious book whose reach does not exceed its grasp. It offers a brilliant, wide-ranging, and provocative new synthesis of American culture by one of its most gifted historians.

Early American attitudes toward luck were shaped by a mixture of divinatory rituals from European, African, and Native American cultures, which shared a common focus on mana, the spiritual power that pervades the universe and can be materialized in any form. Igbo slaves cast cowrie shells on the wharves of New England; eastern Woodland Indians played the sacred bowl game; the Tidewater gentry gambled on horses and cards; and even English Puritans—who were supposed to have rejected chance in a providentially guided universe—practiced bibliomancy. Though Enlightenment rationalism pushed the culture of chance to the racial and social margins, the pursuit of luck continued to flourish, encouraged by the postrevolutionary transition "from a society where everyone was supposed to know his place to one where everyone was supposed to pull himself up by his bootstraps" (p. 55). With the expansion of market capitalism in the early nineteenth century, "All enterprises were enveloped by the atmosphere of risk" (p. 100). Even as the self-made man was being canonized by Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance," the proliferation of lotteries, race tracks, and riverboat card games testified to the growing allure of chance. And though the ghastly mishap of the Civil War was officially explained as a useful opportunity for national redemption, ordinary soldiers placed their battlefield faith in lucky charms.

The Gilded Age offered unprecedented rewards for risk taking by businessmen and gamblers alike, promoting the idea that "worldly success often had little to do with human effort and even less with human morality" (p. 157). New immigrant groups brought their own traditions of reliance on luck, and black freed people continued to synthesize Christianity with African magic. The late nineteenth century nevertheless marked "the triumphant epoch of evangelical rationality" (p. 168) founded on the positivist belief in a universe "ruled by deterministic laws discoverable through scientific inquiry" (p. 176). But positivism was haunted by the randomness of Darwinian natural selection, and though liberal Protestants tried to recast the thought of Charles Darwin to preserve providential progress, writers such as Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, and Frank Norris began to confront "the power of amoral chance, as resistant to ritual conjuring as it was to the doctrines of Providence" (p. 186). Many educated Americans grew fascinated by the creative possibilities of chance. Turn-of-the-century folklorists collected "primitive" beliefs and practices as valuable remnants of a vanishing world; children, African Americans, and those cultures labeled savage by Western imperialists drew admiration and envy for their freedom of play. The magical beliefs buried in the "civilized" unconscious received growing attention, and some psychologists came to understand the "gambling instinct" as inseparable from the life force. This "intellectual recovery of Fortuna" (p. 215), Lears argues, culminated in the thought of William James, "our greatest philosopher of chance" (p. 220), for whom cosmic randomness offered "an escape hatch from the prison house of Victorian certainty" (p. 221).

In response to the chaos of late-nineteenth-century capitalism, a "new managerial outlook" emerged as "the main foundation of the twentieth-century culture of control" (p. 187). The aim of the managerial thinkers was not to deny chance, but to tame it through a range of strategies including monopolies designed to ensure predictable profitability, insurance operations and market research based in probability theory, and various Progressive programs geared to social efficiency and social engineering. But even as managerialists were trying to stamp out superstition in service to capitalist efficiency, William James's philosophy of chance was inspiring several generations of twentieth-century modernists to embrace the "power of randomness" (p. 273) in a world where total wars and totalitarian systems were exposing the most terrible consequences of the faith in human mastery. From Joseph Cornell's collages and Jackson Pollock's gesture paintings to Jack Kerouac's "spontaneous bop prosody" and the composer John Cage's "Happenings," the "aesthetic of accident" (p. 306) offered "an avenue of escape from mechanistic determinism" (p. 274) and, for some modernists, the possibility of meaning in the face of moral chaos. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Lears argues, expressed "the supreme achievement of the mid-century aesthetic of accident—an idiosyncratic synthesis of high and vernacular cultures of chance" (p. 319)—by creating a trickster protagonist "who won his humanity by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat" (p. 319).

By synthesizing the high with the vernacular culture of chance, Ralph Ellison serves as a linchpin for Lears's entire study, which is sometimes hard-pressed to establish clear historical connections between the two. Linking African American numbers runners and gypsy fortune-tellers with Werner Heisenberg and Paul Tillich poses a challenge, which is met largely by Lears's deft use of the overarching concept of mana and by his own conviction that the larger culture of chance is comparable in sweep to the more familiar culture of control. In the end, his gamble succeeds, largely because of the interpretive force of his treatment of the modernists, which is dazzlingly—not to say enchantingly—persuasive. In the epilogue, Lears offers a quiet observation that returns full circle to his first book and reveals the theological underpinning of all his scholarship: "The longing for grace remains at the heart of the culture of chance." That is the powerful insight his study has succeeded in uncovering, by illuminating "a powerful alternative tradition, a countervailing force against the dominant American ethos of control" (p. 332). "Maybe we'll get lucky," he closes, then offers us his subtly upturned thumb in the author's photograph on the back flap of the book jacket. It's a good omen.

Karen Halttunen

University of California
Davis, California

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