Book review: Something for Nothing

I originally reviewed this for the Pennsylvania Review of History. As you’ll see, it’s a provocative book that might make you rethink just how lucky you are.

Jackson Lears. Something for Nothing: Luck in America. New York: Viking, 2003. xi, 365 p. Illustrations, notes, index. $27.95.

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.

Originally reviewed March 2003.

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