“[E]ven while the 1870s depression reinforced the seedy reputation of speculators, a new and even more mysterious form of money manipulation was emerging in the commodities markets of the Middle West. Their epicenter was the Chicago Board of Trade (founded in 1848), where traders transformed the solid realities of wheat, corn, cattle, and hogs into airy abstractions with unpredictably fluctuating money value. The new practice of trading in ‘futures’ involved betting on the prospective rise or fall in the price of beef or pork, without ever having to deliver the steak or bacon. A successful bet could produce plenty of hard cash, but the rules of the game remained opaque to the uninitiated. A guidebook to the Chicago Board of Trade, published in 1891, put the matter bluntly: ‘from this [visitors’] gallery a perfect view may be had of the operations on the floor, operations which it would be impossible to describe, and impossible for the average visitor to understand.’ Seldom had the power of money to beget money been so flagrantly mystified.
“The alchemical promise of sudden self-transformation gave money a centrifugal force and a corrosive edge. It could dissolve settled communities and social bonds, send young men spinning off from their ancestral seats in search of fresh possibilities, clothe reprobates and rakes in raiments of respectability. A universal standard of value, money was also a universal solvent of other standards of value. Custom, tradition, morality — all dissolved, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels said, ‘in the icy waters of egotistical calculation.’ This was the heartless world from which, moralists urged, the Victorian home could be a haven. Still, the market had more alluring connotations as well. Since the early Middle Ages, the marketplace had been associated with openness to unsettling experience, to encounters with the strange, the foreign, the new. Exotic spices, silks, oils, and elixirs offered unfamiliar forms of sensuous enjoyment, possibly even personal transformation. Peddlers and other trickster figures proliferated on the margins, evoking visions of an endlessly liminal self — a self in constant transition from one identity to another. The marketplace exuded a carnival spirit of excess, Indeed, in European towns the market was often located on the same town square where carnival itself was held, where the Lord of Misrule was crowned and traditional hierarchies upended.
“When market exchange spilled over the boundaries of a particular time and place, as it did in the fluid expansive economy of the mid-nineteenth-century United States, sales were not confined to Saturdays on the square. The carnival was in town all the time. American society began to approximate Melville’s vision — a milling mob of conniving confidence men and questing consumers, rendered credulous by their dream of magical self-transformation through purchase. Money was more than merely a means of keeping people afloat, more even than the key to new realms of pleasure; it was also a mechanism for reinventing the self. It financed fresh starts, new sets of surface appearances.
“In a mobile, anonymous society, apparently trivial impressions acquired heavier cultural weight. How often, in late-nineteenth-century literature and life, does an article of clothing hold the key to a transformation of one’s condition in life? One thinks of the new suit that signified Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick had achieved respectability, the soft gloves that embodied sensuous experience and status ascent for Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, or the light brown hat coveted by the young Hamlin Garland — his emblem of longings for escape from a bleak prairie boyhood. Fashion, so often dismissed as mere superficial display by moralists, turned out to be an instrument for refashioning the self.
“Often the promise of personal transformation went deeper, toward an inner alchemical change, a regeneration. Indeed, by the mid-nineteenth century, patent-medicine advertising began to resemble a materialist version of the Protestant devotional literature surrounding the conversion experience. Testimonials from satisfied customers resembled the cries of the converted, rescued from spiritual torment. Many advertisements asserted that before ingesting the elixir in question, the patent-medicine customer had suffered from boredom, lassitude, apathy, and overwhelming depression — the dark night of the soul that Protestant believers experienced before conversion. But in the patent-medicine literature, the root of this soul-sickness was physical, and so was its remedy. A Childs catarrh tonic advertisement from 1877 promised nothing less than relief from despair: if catarrh is allowed to persist, untreated by Childs, ‘the patient becomes nervous, his voice is harsh and unnatural; he feels disheartened; memory loses her power; judgment her seat, and gloomy forebodings hang overhead — hundreds, yea, thousands in such circumstances feel that to die would be a relief — and many do even cut the thread of life to end their sorrows.’ The point is not that everyone took this hyperbole literally but that the language of rebirth had begun to refocus from soul to body, and from religion to commerce. Selves could be revitalized through consumption as well as conversion. So the advertising industry claimed.
“Not everyone was convinced. Believing Christians insisted that there was no regeneration apart from conversion; the patent-medicine version was little more than parody-reinvention, if anything, rather than rebirth. And while money allowed for the reinvention of the self, it also threatened the cherished belief that there was any true or enduring sense of self apart from the realm of manipulated appearances. The animating impulse of Protestantism was a distrust of display and ritual as foolish mummery that only distracted the believer from the direct encounter with God. From this view, the truly regenerated self was a sincere and transparent self, whose outward conduct corresponded perfectly with his inner experience of grace. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Protestant desire for individual sincerity had been extended through the encounter with market exchange into a vision of social transparency, of a society of plain speakers who said what they meant and meant what they said.
“At about the same time, theology and morality merged in the Protestant ethic of disciplined achievement. The sincere self was also a hardworking self — so hardworking, in fact, that he produced his own success, his own social identity. He was, in short, a self-made man. For moralists, this paragon of autonomy provided a crucial centripetal force against the centrifugal energies of markets and monies. The ideals embodied in self-made manhood, it was hoped, would diffuse throughout society and stabilize the sorcery of the marketplace, contain its carnival spirit. Yet the sorcery kept resurfacing. After all, ascent to the lordship of capital required more than diligence — and less than sincerity. Success was a slippery business. Titans of industry, who seemed the apotheosis of solidity and reliability, turned out at crucial moments to be confidence men.”
— from Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (Harper, 2009)