Success and the Single Man Daniel H. Borus (bio) Judy Hilkey. Character is Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ix + 210 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95 (cloth); $17.95 (paper). “Whoever dies with the most toys,” the bumper sticker reads, “wins.” For all the profit-seeking and conspicuous consumption of the Gilded Age, it is unlikely that the upwardly mobile of the late nineteenth century would have openly declared such sentiments, even ironically. Elton John and Stevie Wonder may entertain the Hollywood rich and famous at a White House dinner for British Prime Minister Tony Blair with the refrain, “Money, that’s what I want,” but nineteenth-century ideology was more circumspect. As Irvin Wyllie and John Cawelti have demonstrated, past success ideals aimed at harmonizing moral and economic imperatives. 1 Those in the last century who preached that wealth was no vice and poverty no virtue did so because they believed there was transcendental ethical purpose in accumulation. Barely mentioning the sensuous pleasures of goods or the commanding power of money, success tracts concentrated instead on the moral virtues of wealth. Wealth in this rendition expanded human power, provided a means to alleviate suffering, and eventually gave, not took. When Emerson proclaimed that Man “is born to be rich,” he had in mind precisely these ethical consequences of accumulation. 2 Radicals, of course, saw no ethics in the pursuit by individuals of wealth. Such talk, they contended, was so much prattle designed to dupe the unwary into believing an oppressive regime of competitive acquisition was just. Capitalists’ invocation of God and virtue was, they thundered, sheer hypocrisy, obscuring their own complicity in suffering. “The business of the Clerical Department of the Merchants’ and Manufacturer Association is to justify the process of trade, and to preach to clerks and employees the slave-virtues of frugality, humility, and loyalty to the profit system,” exclaimed Upton Sinclair in The Profits of Religion. 3 If Sinclair saw manipulation, Judy Hilkey’s Character is Capital, a study of 144 success manuals published between 1870 and 1910, finds manufacture of consent. Based on a 1980 Rutgers dissertation, the book treats the success manual—a pastiche of moral maxims, didactic narratives, [End Page 581] and inspirational illustrations—as “part of the cultural apparatus that helped legitimize and establish the hegemony of the new industrial order that emerged in the Gilded Age” (p. 7). Sold in great quantities by subscription to rural young men of the middling sort, the manual inadvertently affirmed industrial capitalism, Hilkey concludes, by applying “Jeffersonian” virtues to a decidedly non-agrarian society. Hilkey takes as her task elucidating the worldview that the manuals promulgated. She sets her sights on Wyllie’s consensus interpretation, which, she holds, regards manuals as emanating from a unitary American mind. Behind the exhortations to be stoic, work hard, and save which were common to all manuals of the period, she avers, was an uncertainty that the old ways would suffice in a thoroughly disrupted environment. In her view, success manuals are best understood as engaged in a debate for cultural supremacy with Populism, socialism, and such dissident treatises as Looking Backward and Progress and Poverty rather than as celebrations of dominance. Their bid for consensus, Hilkey maintains, involved a concerted effort to see the new world of corporate growth, burgeoning bureaucracy, the permanency of wage labor, and the de-skilling of work as amenable to the actions of young men of character. Duly acknowledging failure and inequality, which Hilkey regards as her crucial discovery, manuals nonetheless persisted in the assertion that the world was constructed so as to honor independence and self-discipline. Those honors, however, might not be tangible ones. Those who lived in humble circumstances but lived morally received instead the compensation of middle-class respectability. As she puts it, success writers defined character “not only as the means to success but as success itself” (p. 5). As Hilkey tells the tale, success writers were not fully secure in their notion that character was the poor man’s capital and supplemented it with a masculinized willpower that enabled them to eroticize success...