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Tavis: Scott Sandage is an Associate Professor of History at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University. He's also served as a consultant to the Smithsonian Institution and the National Archives. His new book is called "Born Losers: A History of Failure in America." Professor, nice to have you on the program.

Scott Sandage: Thank you for having me.

Tavis: You're a bold brother to write a book about losers. Who wants to read a book about losers?

Sandage: Well, I hope somebody wants to read it. It is, I think, the first book about failure in America.

Tavis: Yeah. Tell me, though, why a book about losers? Why would you want to write a book about--

Sandage: Well, there are a lot of books about success, so I stared writing it about 10-12 years ago when the mega-bookstore phenomenon began, and you walk into Borders or Barnes and Noble, and the biggest section there is the self-help section. And I began to wonder what was the history of failure in America and what did it feel like to be a loser back in the day.

Tavis: If success--and I'm borrowing this. This is not Tavis' creation--but if success is what each of us determines it to be, then what is failure?

Sandage: Well, success and failure are what each of us determine it to be.

Tavis: Uh-huh.

Sandage: But there are also situations in which others have the opportunity to determine what happens to you because of their attitudes of your success or your failure. Credit, for example, is one example. Do you get credit, or you don't? Do you get a job, or you don't? So on one hand, on an existential level, I guess, each of us determine our own success and failure. But in other ways, other people make those judgments about us.

Tavis: Let's talk about people making those judgments, because we live in a society where folk, in fact, do make judgments, and one can be labeled a failure by others, even when one thinks he or she didn't fail. One can be labeled a loser by other folk even if you think you were not a loser. Talk to me about how we define people and label people as failures or losers in our society, in a contemporary sense, and how that compares historically.

Sandage: Well, I think today when people use the word "loser," they're talking about someone who's aimless, who doesn't have a good vision of their life, who is perhaps not as ambitious as they should be. And the thing that surprised me most in writing this book, which is about ordinary people, ordinary people in American life who fail, is that 100-200 years ago, loser and failure were words that referred to people who were too ambitious, who were trying to do too much, trying to go too far too quickly, and therefore, had a setback. So we've come 180 degrees around in terms of the way we define failure to someone who's aimless versus someone, 100 or 200 years ago, who was too ambitious.

Tavis: There's a fascinating story in this book where you talk about watching CNN on a particular evening and saying one of the commentators there, one of the newspersons there, who shall remain nameless, used the word "loser" in reference to a criminal. Tell the story and why that particular piece of news footage got your attention.

Sandage: Well, I think anytime today we apprehend a notorious criminal, a serial rapist or a murderer or a serial killer of any kind, if you watch the coverage long enough, eventually, someone will use the word "loser." Either they're talking to the neighbors or the friends of this person. "He was kind of a loser." In fact, recently, when the BTK killer was apprehended in Kansas, the surprising thing about him was that he wasn't a loser. There seems to be an assumption that the worst criminals in our society are all losers in one way or another. And I think the problem with that is that if you try to have a good attitude about failure--and especially if you're a parent, you try to teach children that failure is OK, that failure is, uh... that risk-taking is something that you need to do in order to grow as a person. It's difficult to maintain that losing is OK when we hear "the loser" used as such a pejorative term in so many situations. On CNN, what I heard was a description of a man in Texas who had raped, tortured, and murdered his own daughter, and after the report was finished, the anchorman muttered under his breath, "loser." And I thought that was remarkable, that although we try to say that each of us determines whether we are successes or failures, when you are called a loser, it's about the worst thing that you can be in this country.

Tavis: Although one would argue that if there ever was a loser, that criminal would certainly fit the description. Could not one argue that legitimately?

Sandage: Well, I don't know what he lost. I don't know what he won or he lost. He might be a monster, he might be a criminal. Certainly he's a criminal, but if we're talking about a loser as someone who tried something admirable, something ambitious, and it didn't work out, I don't think that that fits the case.

Tavis: It's a fascinating point, since losing is--since losing in life and failure in life is inevitable, I think, as I've certainly learned, that you really can't enjoy success anyway unless you've had some failures along the way to make you really appreciate it more. Since losing is inevitable, where and when did it happen that failure--losing became such a pejorative? How did that happen, since it's a part of life? You can't avoid it, so how did we become so negative about losing and not being number one all the time?

Sandage: That was the thing that surprised me the most in doing the research for this book. And I looked in libraries and archives for documents left behind by ordinary people, and what I learned was that 200 years ago, failure was something that happened to you, rather than today when we talk about failure, we often mean it as something that defines who you are. So it's a difference between an ordeal, let's say, and an identity. So when failure began to define who you are internally, that you are a fundamentally worthless person, that, I think, was a major change. And that happened in the 1800s, for a variety of reasons.

Tavis: Let me ask you a question, and this is not a trick question, I'll tell you up front. But as I listen to you talk, I wonder whether or not it is possible--I made the case on this program the other night in a tribute that we did to Pope John Paul II--that I believe, as my friend professor cornel west argues, that there's a big distinction between success and greatness. You can be successful without being great. You can be great--you can be great--you can be successful and not be great, but you cannot be great and not be successful. There are a lot of folk who are successful by today's definitions. If you have money, if you have fortune, if you have fame, you are successful by the universal definition that we have about success. I raise that because I wonder, in the context of this conversation, whether or not it is possible to be successful...and still be a loser.

Sandage: That's a very good question, and I think it's the operative question. When people began talking 150 years ago about what it meant to be a loser, one of the questions that was central to that discussion was, can you be morally successful, or financially successful, and have the opposite outcome? So, can you be a rich man, but morally a pauper? Can you be a very moral person...

Tavis: The bible talks about this.

Sandage: But financially so? And there are a lot of cases like that that I explored in my book. The one that always strikes me is a man named William Henry Brisbane, whom Dunn & Bradstreet rated a failure in an early credit rating in the 1840s because he had inherited $100,000, and run through the whole fortune in just a couple of years. When I investigated what actually had happened in this man's life, it turned out that he had inherited a slave plantation in Beaufort, South Carolina, had come to the conclusion that slavery was wrong, had sold all of his slaves and moved to the north, and then was racked by guilt about the people he had left behind. So he spent his fortune to purchase back the slaves that he had sold when he left the south, and bring them north into freedom. So he's an example of someone who is truly a great emancipator, but financially and professionally ended up a failure.

Tavis: That's what I was talking about. You described it brilliantly--the difference between success and greatness. Since you mention slavery, there's a fascinating chapter in the book here where you delve into the issue, or the institution, I should say...-the institution of slavery and how definitions of success and failure changed for African-Americans in particular. Care to explain?

Sandage: Yes. The issue of failure in American life, which is something that we don't like to talk about, and yet it's always there, is very much connected to the changing meanings of freedom in America, and recently there's been some discussion on Capitol Hill about restricting the bankruptcy legislation. And I found that during the Civil War, when Congress passed what was basically the first bankruptcy law in American history that really created a comprehensive system, the central issue was slavery and the idea that if the government passes a bankruptcy law, it means the government says, "We're gonna take property away from the legal owners of that property--the creditors--because it's better for everyone if we do that." And in the Civil War, the same issue regarding emancipation came up. If the government were to emancipate the slaves, that would amount to taking legal property away from slave owners under the laws of that time because it was deemed in the best interest of everyone. And so what I learned was that it was not until the United States took the issue of slavery by the horns and solved it through emancipation and the Civil War, that we were ever able to pass a bankruptcy law, because the parallels in the legal and constitutional theory were too strong.

Tavis: Let me ask you again, in a contemporary sense, whether or not it is your belief that for most of us we still define success based upon one's salary index, and if, in fact, that is the case, what's the danger in that in this particular part of our history?

Sandage: I think most people, if you asked them point blank, would say, "No, my salary is not the definition of my success or my failure," but I think if you asked us as a culture and as a nation, we would all say, "Well, I don't think this personally, but everybody else thinks that." and you can see it in what I referred to a moment ago, the revision of the bankruptcy laws right now, the speeches that are being given on Capitol Hill about people who go through bankruptcy being irresponsible, they have no sense of personal responsibility, they run up debts extravagantly, they're spendthrifts, they have no intention of ever being able to pay their debts. These were things that were said in 1820 when America considered passing bankruptcy legislation. And I think any time you hear politicians spouting 200-year old boilerplate, it's appropriate to stop and wonder what's actually happening.

Tavis: Let me offer this as an extra question. I'm fascinated. I could do more of this. Our time is up. I know that it is clearly the title of the book, "Born Losers," a history of failure in America, and it's a catchy title, but is anyone really, truly, born a loser?

Sandage: No, I don't think so. And it's a title that expresses the opposite of what is argued in the book. The reason it's called "Born Losers" is it tries to tell how Americans came to believe that some people are born to be failures.

Tavis: I figured as much. I just wanted to give you a chance to explain that. Nice to have you on, professor.

Sandage: Thank you very much for having me.

Tavis: Glad to have you here. Up next on this program, actor Malcolm-Jamal Warner. No born loser here. Stay with us.