Something for Nothing: Luck in America [Bargain Price] [Paperback]

Jackson Lears (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 27, 2004

Jackson Lears has won accolades for his skill in identifying the rich and unexpected layers of meaning beneath the familiar and mundane in our lives. Now, he challenges the conventional wisdom that the Protestant ethic of perseverance, industry, and disciplined achievement is what made America great. Turning to the deep, seldom acknowledged reverence for luck that runs through our entire history from colonial times to the early twenty-first century, Lears traces how luck, chance, and gambling have shaped and, at times, defined our national character.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Public moralists cannot abide the obsessive gambler. They bemoan the disintegration of a solid work ethic and condemn the search for the quick buck, the belief that it's possible to get something for nothing. But Lears, a historian at Rutgers and editor of the journal Raritan, finds a much more complex issue at the heart of gambling in America, one that raises fundamental ethical, religious and philosophical questions that strike at the very core of our culture. He writes, "Debate about gambling reveals fundamental fault lines in American character, sharp tensions between an impulse toward risk and a zeal for control. Those tensions may be universal, but seldom have they been so sharply opposed as in the United States, where longings for a lucky strike have been counterbalanced by a secular Protestant Ethic that has questioned the very existence of luck." Lears offers a history of conflicting attitudes toward luck, beginning with early English settlers and continuing up to September 11, 2001. The book often reads like a course in Western Civilization, moving easily among the disciplines of religion, history, literature, art, economics, philosophy and science. And yet the vast assemblage of information becomes so overwhelming, it's easy to lose the book's primary thread; i.e., the ways that gambling, chance and luck have shaped American culture. Furthermore, the emphasis on men as the primary actors is too narrow; where are the women in this cultural history? Despite its flaws, however, this challenging, erudite and original book is a significant contribution to American cultural studies.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The New Yorker

The belief that there is luck in the world, and that some people can "work it," appears to be something that no amount of Enlightenment rationality can completely do away with. In a narrative so sweeping that there is a fresh example in nearly every paragraph, Lears, a distinguished historian with a special interest in the quirky cultures of protest and dissent that percolate beneath the sleek official culture of competence and control in America, examines our persistent fascination with chance. If you work hard, it is modest and becoming to ascribe your success to luck; but if you really are lucky, and get something for nothing, your success is tainted. Lears emphasizes the paradoxes: gambling is immoral and voodoo is a superstition, but trading on margin and going to confession enjoy social approval. From sacred palm nuts to John Cage's aleatory art, this book is a reminder that modernity is a project forever incomplete.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 408 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (July 27, 2004)
• ISBN-10: 0142003875
• ASIN: B000HWZ2IQ
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,723,345 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Gambling for Grace, February 20, 2003

By 

[e-mail] (Edmonton, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Something for Nothing: Luck in America (Hardcover)

This is the third book by Jackson Lears and it confirms his status as one of the most innovative of American intellectual historians. Like his previous books "No Place of Grace" about late 19th century conservative intellectuals, and "Fables of Abundance" about American advertising, his approach is idiosyncratic, and not easily summarized. His work uses a large amount of literary allusion, so as "Fables" invoked Little Nemo and examined Henry James and Joseph Cornell, in "Something" Cornell makes a return appearance, along with Mark Twain, Damon Runyon (of course) and a special examination of "Invisible Man."

Lears' book is based on a contrast between a "Culture of Chance" and a "Culture of Control." Naturally, the growth of science has helped to vastly strengthen the latter against the former. But it is not that simple. There is a clash between differing Christian, indeed Protestant, views of grace. Is grace granted unconditionally, freely, like the winner of a game of chance? Or is it a matter of Divine Providence which, if not saying salvation is earned by merit, does strongly state that the hard working self made man either will get success or deserves the success he gets. Lears discusses this in a nuanced and subtle reading of the theologian Paul Tillich. One the one hand he was promiscuous and power-hungry ("not an attractive combination, in a theologian or anyone else") and his view of grace could be fashionable, dangerously naive and convenient. But there was something important, that recognized the link between grace and chance. "...Tillich had recaptured a key element in the religion of Jesus..."

It is at this point that one must demur. As a Jew, and as a critical historian I must object to any view that attributes to Jesus the ideas of grace that were developed by Paul, Augustine, Luther, Calvin or by American theologians. If there is one constant flaw of American Protestantism, both liberal and conservative, whether evangelically Orthodox or Mormon/Jehovah's Witness heterodox, it is to attribute to first century Palestine beliefs which could only have developed in the United States. Although more sophisticated than most, Lears (and the late Christopher Lasch) fall to this temptation. Another problem is that Lears does not discuss the flip side of grace. Damnation can also be awarded freely, and with no right of appeal. And if most Protestants believe they will be saved, for much of the first few centuries of Protestantism its theologians assumed most of their fellow Christians were doomed, while the non-Christian majority of humanity did not have a chance. To the extent that American Protestants no longer believe this, it is not simply the result of glib positivism, complacent pro-capitalism or sinister and sentimental "therapeutic" motifs.

"Something" is also weaker than "Fables" because it is often repetitive and less coherent. Nevertheless there is much of value for the reader here. He discusses the culture of chance in America and its roots among Europeans, Africans, and Indian Americans (rather tellingly, there was a "virtually complete absence" of cheating among the last group). Although gambling is often addictive and harmful, and clearly an unjust way of raising revenues, the culture of control's critique is often moralistic, and fatally unimaginative. There is much discussion of the social pretensions of gamblers, and their tendency to cheat. Particularly interesting is how the culture of control slowly increased its influence in the 19th century, while at the same time euphemizing or ignoring those trends in science which undermined it. Chance could be tamed by the scientific study of probability, and later public opinion poll surveys and Tayloristic management. Darwinism's undermining of conscious design and teleology could be ignored. But ultimately anthropologists developed more sophisticated understandings of what people had long dismissed as "superstition." The crude positivist certainties were undermined as non-Euclidean mathematics and quantum physics arose.

The best chapter is the penultimate one, "The Persistent Allure of Accident," in which Lears notes the recovery of chance in modernist literature like Joyce and Proust. We see the influence of Chance in Cubism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. And we see Chance's sway in Abstract Expressionism, the Beats and John Cage. But this allure has its own weaknesses. Lears points out that the risk-taking persona could degenerate into a pose. In particularly nuanced readings Lears points out that the Beats could collapse into misogyny and solipism, and Cage's work could contribute to postmodernist triviality. But there was another, more fruitful side in both Cage and the Beats, a theme best represented in Robert Motherwell's desire not to be the slave of chance, but its partner. If chance and grace are not to by synonoms for solipsism, that we have to remember "to recognize the role of other people in the creation of grace." Now that is a gamble we all have to take.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The analysis of luck, August 4, 2006

By 

David G. Schwartz "writer, historian" (Las Vegas, Nevada) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Something for Nothing: Luck in America (Hardcover)

It is patently obvious that Americans have always been a gambling people. But in Something for Nothing, Jackson Lears takes a further analytical leap, looking at how the "culture of chance" has been central to American life and thought. Though In Lears' summation the self-made man has been more influential than the confidence man in American, an America shorn of hereditary privilege and deference to one's betters was a fruitful breeding ground for the legions of Americans-from land speculators to day traders-seeking something for nothing.

Lears takes an interesting approach, admitting at the beginning that he is not writing a history of gambling but of chance, which he sees as a sort of anti-virtue, a shortcut to grace for those not willing to put in long hours at the hard work of self-betterment. Lears sees an Apollonian/Hermetic dialectic throughout much of Western culture, with the trickster Hermes, patron of the lucky rounder, pitted against the rationalist Apollo. The rampant gambling found in most periods of American history is symptomatic of a deeper struggle within the American psyche between chance and control.

Along the way, Lears hits all of the signature spots of any gambling history: Dostoyevsky's manic Roulettenberg, Jamestown settlers "bowling in the streets" while starving, itinerant blacklegs like Canada Bill Jones and George Devol, and many more. But he ties these evergreens to a larger cultural force that also shaped the sermons of Jonathan Edwards, the philosophy of William James, the writing of Ralph Ellison, and the music of John Cage. Lears also pulls in an impressive mass of cross-cultural analysis of luck and chance as a means to break down the components of the American culture of chance into its European, African, and Native American components. The wild nut diviners of Ghana, white and black American bibliomantics (those who used the Bible for divinatory purposes), and the Runyonesque craps shooter fingering a lucky rabbit's foot are equal parts of the same culture of lucky superstition.

One of the real strengths of Something for Nothing is that it democratizes luck-trailer park denizens at Tuesday night bingo have an equal place at the table with Marcel Proust. An America where gambling in its many manifestations is an increasingly powerful revenue producer and job provider needs such an honest look at the culture of chance. There is undoubtedly a reason why many Americans choose casinos over tax increases most of the time, and Lears comes as close as any historian to understanding why. According to him, there is a fundamental tension throughout much of American life between the managers and those entranced by accident and chance. Though Lears focuses more on this struggle in letters and ideas, it is easy to see how the struggle for control seeped from the boardrooms and workfloors of America into popular culture and life. Gamblers like Titanic Thompson and aleatory artists like Joseph Cornell stand out as cultural heroes in a struggle against the rational production standards of Frederick Winslow Taylor and World Standard Time.

Most impressively, Lears is able to look into how folk culture has molded the ideas of American thinkers. Ralph Ellison, who Lears believes bridges the gap between "numbers running and philosophical debate" (312), benefits from an exceptionally well-honed analysis. Invisible Man, obviously a novel about a young black man's adventures into adulthood, is, according to Lears, more deeply a story of a vernacular culture of chance triumphing over ethics of mastery and control, be they individualism or collectivism. This insight is emblematic of many within Something for Nothing.

As with any work as all-encompassing as this one, there are inevitably areas that beg a greater focus from the author. America's paramount holy of holies of luck, Las Vegas, is parenthetically dismissed as a high-roller heaven and "efficient money machine for fugitive crime bosses" (243) in less than a sentence. One wishes the Las Vegas story, in which an entire city has prospered on Americans' hunger to gamble, might have been afforded a more sophisticated analysis than this.

But the incredible power of Lears's analysis, which ranges from the prosaic objects of everyday superstition to the rarefied air of positivist philosophy, is no less rich for not having taken a more literal look at some of the more obvious manifestations of the culture of chance. Lears instead has produced a brilliant work of history that ties together many divergent strands in American life into a common culture of chance.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Grace of Beginning Again and Ever Again, January 13, 2012

By 

A Certain Bibliophile (San Antonio, Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Something for Nothing: Luck in America (Paperback)

Jackson Lears' "Something for Nothing" is an interesting and thought-provoking work written in the vein of social and cultural history, much like his "No Place of Grace," now some thirty years old. It looks at a wide swath of subjects from gambling, the rise of the market, and various Native American and slave folk traditions related to chance and luck.

According to Lears, two contradictory forces have always been at the heart of American experience: that of the speculative confidence man who has his eye on "main chance rather than moral imperative" and the other which "exalts a disciplined self-made man whose success comes through the careful cultivation of Protestant values" (p. 3). He calls these two instincts the "culture of chance" and "culture of control" respectively. Even though the growth of Protestantism and especially Puritanism damaged a vernacular culture of luck (by trying to impose a Providential reason and rationality upon it, instead of allowing for the free flow of play embodied by Fortuna), the split between the elite idea that Providence was superior and the more popular, demotic idea of divination persisted throughout the culture. Lears looks at the cultural importations of African slaves and Indians that created complex social relations with whites. As John Greenleaf Whittier asked rhetorically in 1847 "Is it not strange that the desire to lift the great veil of the mystery before us should overcome, in some degree, our peculiar and most republican prejudice against color, and reconcile us to the necessity of looking at Futurity through a black medium?"

By the late eighteenth century, luck had become less providential and more secularized, and the idea that "misfortune fell upon the worthy as on the licentious" became more widespread. This is related to the American idea of secular reinvention, or as Martin Buber put it, "the grace of beginning again and ever again." But as chance was secularized, it was simultaneously driven into the underbelly of society. There were gentlemen who took pride in their flirtation with luck for luck's sake, while sharpers (that is, swindlers, gamblers, and confidence men) would cheat the game for a dollar. The bourgeois ethic of what Lears calls "evangelical rationality" demonized gambling, thereby giving rise to the "masculinity of moderation" and the domestication of gambling.

The last couple of chapters cover the increasing trends in Taylorism and bureaucratic rationality that Lears claims were always at odds with the cultural idioms of chance and fortune; still another covers how various thinkers, artists, and musicians used these ideas during the rise of Modernism. While Lears clearly roots on the side of chance for the entire book, he is intellectually honest enough to admit that neither side has definitely won a victory. In fact, our age, much like any other, might be ruled by the uneasy co-rule of both luck and control.

Lears is a superb historian and a professor at Rutgers who has gained considerable mastery over his sources; the body of scholarship that he draws from is impressive. However, the one major complaint I have about the book is that some of it is very repetitive: it seems like the idea of "luck versus control" pops up over and over again, sometimes with so little variation that it doesn't really need recapitulation. This makes the first two-thirds of the book move very slowly, even though the last third picks up, though this may just have been because of the shift toward cultural toward a more narrow kind of intellectual history.

A note on my rating: for someone only passingly interested in this kind of history, I would only give it three stars; for someone with a less casual interest, I think it deserves another star. Most people will probably not enjoy this as beach reading; it's not a popular history that the cover might have you think it is. However, if you're interested in the topic, Lears handles it with a scholarly, thorough care that he has fostered throughout his career.