An Analysis of Success and Failure in Early America

Analysis, Pages 5 (1123 words)

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In order to understand better what constituted success or failure in Early America, it is necessary to understand what would have been the primary cause of that success or failure. This essay will attempt to show that success or failure in early America was a result of the actions and conditions of the individual family unit. By analyzing the individual family unit of early America, we will see that much of the economy depended on the success or failure of it, which has clear implications for our current capitalist economy.

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Analyzing “The American Frugal Housewife” as our first primary source by Lydia Marie Child, we can see that both economic success and economic failure stem primarily from one agent: the household. Additionally, this leads to not just the failure of the household, but of the entire American economy as well. As explained by Child, the household, when living beyond its means (not frugally) fails economically as a result of value not being created by such activities.

Conversely, according to Child, when frugality is practiced, both in terms of ensuring economies of materials and economies of time, economic success is met both for the household unit and for the country. From the following quote, we can see from this source just how heavily the success of a household, in Child's view, depended upon its specific economic actions: "Economy is generally despised as a low virtue, tending to make people ungenerous and selfish.

This is true of avarice; but it is not so of economy.

The man who is economical, is laying up for himself the permanent power of being useful and generous. He who thoughtlessly gives away ten dollars, when he owes a hundred more than he can pay, deserves no praise, -he obeys a sudden impulse, more like instinct than reason: it would be real charity to check this feeling; because the good he does may be doubtful, while the injury he does his family and creditors is certain.”1 From this, we see can better grasp Child's argument for the behavior of individuals to affect household economic success or failure. Still to be examined here, however, is the formation of the family unit and the circumstances under which it may fail or succeed.

In order to gain a clearer view of how something like marriage might affect household economics and therefore larger economies, we can analyze T.S. Arthur's writing, “Is She Rich?” Through the characters he writes about, we see how the character in question responds when asked why he wants to marry into wealth: “Because I wish my wife to live in a much better style than twelve hundred dollars will afford. I have no wish to make the woman I marry a mere slave to household affairs, as she would have to be, under the best arrangements that could be made with such a salary.”2 Here, through Arthur's writing, we can see Child's admonition against living beyond one's means more illustratively.

The character in question realizes that the circumstances under which the family unit forms (marriage) is instrumental to its success. Beyond this, he also recognizes capital's importance later on in the excerpt in regards to financing a business, making marrying into wealth an important starter for succeeding in commerce as well as in the home. By marrying into wealth, he is able to obtain capital for commercial activities and therefore fuel the economy. In this way, the family unit is again linkable to the success of the overall economy. In order to further assess household impact on the early American economy, it is necessary to contextualize the primary sources above with further secondary analyses.

Below is an excerpt from John Lauritz Larson's “The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good,” which further explains household impact on larger economies. "What really stimulated production in American workshops, however, was the relentless surge in demand produced by the growth and extension of the domestic marketplace itself. Take boots and shoes, for example, one of the hand manufactures to undergo significant reorganization without big changes in tools or machinery. In Lynn, Massachusetts, cordwainers manufactured shoes with the help of apprentices working in "ten footers" - small workshops attached to the shoemaker's home."

The key takeaway from this passage is demand-specifically, the household demand that allowed from the “growth and extension”3 of the larger surrounding economy. If households had not been economically successful enough to support the kind of demand that Larson is describing, the surrounding economy would not have been able to correspondingly succeed. Again, we see that household success is directly linked to the success of a larger economy.

Household success in relation to market success can also be better understood by looking more closely at market panics and subsequent failures. To contextualize and analyze this, we can look at Jessica M. Lepler's document "The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis." An important group identified by Lepler-women —are important enough to the household that Lepler identifies them separately, saying "The responsibility for keeping a family solvent, according to Green, fell on the wife's shoulders or, more accurately, on her ability to calculate the family's cash flow.

Here, it was understood by women, the purveyors of their households, that market panics began at a micro level with the solvency of their own household. If their households went under as a result of economic indebtedness, not only would they be to blame for that, but it would by proxy affect the entire market. Another group, as analyzed by Lepler, were households themselves, not just the women in them. Quoting the authoress Lydia Maria Child, Lepler explicates “Child's real target, however, was not miscalculation but extravagance. 'Living beyond (one's] income' was, according to Child, unproductive because 'it does not in fact procure a man valuable friends, or extensive interests.'

'More than that,' she shouted from the page, 'it is wrong - morally wrong, so far as the individual is concerned; and injurious beyond calculation to the interests of our country.'22”4 As explained by Lepler by way of Child, this concept places the burden of market failure not just on women, but on the entire household, likely the largest group of early Americans. By having individual households collapse into ruin, the entire economy and country by extension eventually endures penury. By examining this final linkage between household success and failure and market success and failure, we can see that there are numerous quality evidences to show how and in what ways households were proxies for market health, a concept still relevant in today's consumer economy.