On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America. By Brian P. Luskey. (New York: New York University Press, 2010. x, 278 pp. $48.00, ISBN 978-0-8147-5228-9.)

Abstract

Edgar Allan Poe's famous tour of the modern metropolis in “The Man of the Crowd” (1840) presents a physiognomy of gamblers, Jew peddlers, and bejeweled “women of the town,” collective testimony to the breakdown of patriarchal protections in an age of social progress. Poe made special note in his story of another representative of the times, a dandified tribe of clerks whose “deskism” similarly signaled a world of new dangers. Clerks were not a new phenomenon. Someone had been keeping the books and managing the correspondence since the late Middle Ages. In colonial America there was enough such activity going on to justify Benjamin Franklin's publication of an instruction manual on those same subjects. But capitalism now begat a giant class of scriveners whose long hours at the office heralded the rise of a knowledge economy that relied on paper work more than the sweat of the farmer's brow and so ushered in the giant business bureaucracy so essential to the industrial commodity.