Challenging the Myth of Self-Made Success
Oliver Cromwell was a stern, Puritan dictator from the seventeenth century, and Kylie Jenner is a twenty-first-century pop culture princess and lipstick mogul. They could not be more different, yet they have in common that they’ve been tagged with the provocative and powerful label “self-made.” Their stories book-end the history of how that identity, once considered a mark of sin, was forged into a destructive accolade.
To begin at the end, “Forbes” magazine announced in early 2019 that 21-year-old Kylie Jenner was the “youngest-ever self-made billionaire.” Even before Jenner’s coronation, the magazine had featured her on its August 2018 cover for an issue on “America’s Women Billionaires.” A considerable uproar followed, not about whether or not the “self-made” label was a compliment – everyone agreed on that point – but about whether or not Jenner, who grew up in a high-profile family of celebrities, deserved it.
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How could the daughter of Olympic champion Bruce (now Caitlyn) Jenner and celebrity queen Kris Kardashian be self-made? For more than two decades, Kris Kardashian had brilliantly cultivated the family’s fortunes and celebrity, and Kylie Jenner grew up on reality television, as millions watched and fantasized about “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” As the youngest member of a family of glamorous celebrities and entrepreneurs, she has a mind-boggling public profile and vast connections. Building on what she calls her “platform,” she has cleverly exploited her star status on social media, posting countless selfies for almost 200 million social media followers, beguiling money from them as an “influencer.” “Welcome to the era of extreme fame leverage,” read the 2018 cover. A “Forbes” defender even referred to her as the “first selfie-made billionaire”!
The popular culture controversy over Jenner’s trophy underscored values that have developed and evolved along with America’s capitalist culture, including the modern belief that being self-made is both possible and a positive attribute, as well as the now-common assumption that making a lot of money is enough to qualify someone as self-made. There are other routes, such as political or moral leadership, but nothing now does the trick as crisply as does piling up a lot of money. But this was not always so.
For instance, the hero of the popular 1843 novel “Allen Lucas: The Self-Made Man” applied his hard-won education to serve his family and small-town community. In contrast, his ambitious schoolmate became a powerful and wealthy politician, only to suffer a lonely decline. Likewise, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1872 “Lives and Deeds of Our Self-Made Men” praises “some of the leading public men of our times” for the “frugality, strict temperance, self-reliance and indomitable industry” that made them models for “the young men of America.” Not one of the nineteen men she portrayed was known for his wealth.
“I work really hard,” Kylie Jenner firmly responded to her critics to justify her acclaim. She recognized that work is a fundamental criterion for claiming to be self-made, whether for celebrities or anyone else. But, what is “work”? Is money the measure of how hard someone works? When Jenner was interviewed about her new stature in 2019, she described her marketing efforts this way: “I popped up at a few stores, I did my usual social media – I did what I usually do, and it just worked.” Does it make sense to equate the well-remunerated work that celebrities do posing with their fans for selfies, facing stage lights, or sitting through hours of make-up sessions with cleaning other people’s houses, slaughtering cattle, or extracting coal from the earth? Or, in the realm of non-physical labor, how should we compare financiers’ machinations with data-enterers’ monotonies? A long list of comparisons like this presents a challenge for those who explain self-made success by heralding someone’s “work ethic,” but who don’t take into account the range of workers’ opportunities, conditions, and rewards.
Turning now to the beginning of this story four centuries earlier, Oliver Cromwell, in stark contrast to Jenner, believed that he had nothing to gain and everything to lose –including his soul– if he or his contemporaries judged his remarkable successes to be self-made, that is, to be of his own making. And yet, unlike Jenner, he did indeed rise out of the modest ranks of England’s rural gentry in the seventeenth century with astounding rapidity in political and military circles. He led revolutionary armies that never lost a battle on their way to defeating and beheading King Charles I and forming the short-lived Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Cromwell then ruled with the misleadingly benign title of Lord Protector of the Commonwealth from December 1653 until he died in 1658.
“Self-Made: The Stories That Forged an American Myth”
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Rather than take credit for his extraordinary rise to power, however, Cromwell vehemently rejected his foes’ accusations of worldly ambition and accepted no credit for his feats. In a one-and-a-half-hour speech to Parliament in 1654, he made his case repeatedly: “I called not myself to this place; of that, God is witness.” Instead, the “Lord’s providence. . . will give occasion for the ordering of things for the best interest of the people.”
Cromwell and his contemporaries in both Old and New England assumed that the individual ambition that underlies worldly gain is selfish and dangerous. At the time, there was no favorable phrase for “self-made success,” and words linked to “self” typically carried negative, even sinful, associations, such as “self-seeking,” “self-ambition,” and“self-pride.” In that light, a “conscientious” Protestant minister condemned those who beheaded Charles I, including Cromwell, as “the supreme, self-made authority.” Still close to medieval traditions, the English typically avowed that success on one’s own was impossible. Worse, attempting it disrupted communities as well as God’s order.
Supernatural and social forces determined successes and failures. To proclaim himself publicly as self-made and to feel personal pride in his achievements, Cromwell would have had to defy those powerful forces and the proper balance of individual ambition and community obligations. He shared the prevailing deep faith in providential authority, according to which God governs all human actions and their outcomes. A brother-in-law marveled after an important victory that God “alone is the Lord of Hosts;. . . it is himselfe that hath raised you up amongst men, and hath called you to high imployments.”
This highest of praises recognized godliness and service, not personal achievement. Such providentialism also protected Cromwell and his allies against the sinfulness of regicide, they believed, although their foes sensed more profane forces at play. Whether for good or evil, genuine fears of damnation and worldly censure prevented the assertion of self-agency – the belief that human beings can determine their own fates – even if they could not prevent ambition itself.
A self-made label also would have unwisely spurned the earthly social networks on which all political actors have always relied. Cromwell’s family had once been prominent and still had valuable political connections that he nurtured alongside his Puritan networks; both had propelled the civil revolution that created his opportunities. Moreover, both publicly and privately, he boasted of his loyalty to those networks and of his status within them rather than independence from them.
He, therefore, insisted, early in his 1654 Parliamentary speech, “I was by birth a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height, nor yet in obscurity.” He had to avoid the political and social costs of portraying his rise as from too low a rank to command respect. In short, there was more danger than glory in a grand and self-made rise to power.
This comparison of beliefs about self-agency challenges claims that the meanings of “self-made success” are eternal verities. To understand how we got from attitudes of the seventeenth century to those of the twentieth, we will look across these four centuries at how the myth of self-made success was entangled with many different beliefs and actions, all within changing contexts.
Daniel T. Rodgers explained that the joint evolution of the work ethic and its economic context “took shape together as values and practice fused and collided, quarreled with and reinforced one another, in an inextricably tangled relationship.” Because the strands in the history of every important idea are tangled, simple stories inevitably mislead. Yet, simplicity and directness maximize stories’ persuasiveness.
More effective than complex narratives, myths are simple tales that can align individuals’ identities with collective identities, individuals’ ambitions with group ambitions, and individuals’ values with group values. Truly, one of the reasons for the impact of the modern myth of self-made success is that it became a frame for overly simple stories that filter out the intricacies of people’s real lives.
Those simple stories also filter out most people. They focus on a narrow foreground – a particular “hero” or heroic type. Everyone else is either an enemy to be conquered or an underling to be slighted, even when their work makes all heroes’ triumphs possible. Of course, all of the people working in the background have their own stories, but they rarely reach or appeal to dominant groups.
This book recovers some of those narratives to challenge the myth of self-made success and to highlight alternatives to the dominant stories. These can help us reimagine the dynamics between individuals and communities beyond the judgmental terms of self-made success, according to which successful individuals owe nothing and everyone else deserves nothing.
To challenge the myth of self-made success, this book looks to its long history and to the people who conjured its simplistic stories. This meant tracking four centuries of storytelling about the idea of self-agency from its days as a sin against God and community through its evolution into a dominant narrative, one driven by ambitions of many sorts. Because the people who could most successfully compete for cultural authority in the mainstream have belonged to its dominant groups, they are the book’s protagonists.
Therefore, this is mostly a history of how people who dominated the mainstream – especially elite White Protestant males – created, shaped, and exploited ideas about self-making to advocate for themselves and their allies. Although marginalized groups have contested dominant ideologies, this book’s purpose is to expose what’s behind the myth and the storytellers who built it. Those historical actors are not the whole nation, but their myths have swayed it powerfully.
Simple, persuasive mythology to the contrary, self-made success is impossible. We live and act in a profoundly interconnected world, and our professional lives, like so much else, depend on social capital and our access to many other types of resources, as well as how diligently we work. Given that reality, how did ideas about self-making evolve into a myth that people can and should succeed on their own?
Like all evolutionary processes, this one has been competitive, and the prize is cultural authority, which frames what we accept as realistic and ethical. In turn, cultural authority confers the trust and social esteem on which political authority and power depend. Through this evolution, notions about self-making became a shared framework to explain what people experience and how they judge themselves and others. Like any ideology, the myth’s rise has depended on its usefulness to persuade and motivate, which has never hinged on its alignment with reality.
Pamela Walker Laird is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Colorado Denver. Her publications include “Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin,” which won the Hagley Prize; and “Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing.” Laird has spent almost half her life in Colorado, which has been a great base for working with others here and elsewhere to foster communities that improve people’s professional lives.
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