Gender and the Economics of the Sentimental Market in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

This essay explores the cultural history of nineteenth-century business failure as based on textual analysis of five hundred “begging letters” from strangers who sought assistance from John D. Rockefeller between the Panics of 1873 and 1893. Failure was an economic crisis as well as an identity crisis that stripped men of their opportunities to achieve normative ideals such as independence and family breadwinning. Sandage analyzes begging letters as an epistolary genre, a mode of surveillance, and a declaration of “the political economy of the Forgotten Man.” Businessmen and their wives reinscribed masculine selfhood by conceiving market relations as an inseparable mixture of both gift and commodity exchange, an amalgam of sentiment and economic rationality. Begging letters illuminate the persistence of informal economies—a black market in alms conceived in opposition to the bureaucratic surveillance of “scientific charity.” By showing how beggars preferred the language of commodity exchange to that of gift or charity, Sandage analyzes masculinity as a transactional status, wherein esteem depended on being adjudged worthy to buy, sell, borrow, and repay. By creating an informal economy, failed men and their wives deployed sentiment as a form of capital to buy back manly self-respect and to reacquire the resources and credentials necessary for striving in the formal, commodity market.