3. Mildred Pierce and the Morality of Success

Mildred Pierce

This is the third post in the yet-to-be-named series on the history of American money values.

In the previous post we considered David Brooks’ observation that the new wave of American anti-intellectualism or populism is chiefly concerned with opposing shared beliefs of the new privileged elite class, which he refers to as the “educated class” to emphasize the higher value it places on academic achievement than it did before the 1960s. I speculated that this new wave of populism seeks to remove the privileged elite from power for same ideological reasons previous American populist movements have opposed the privileged elite, but also in this case as a backlash against elites letting the economy run amok.

The point was to try to understand the nature of American ant-intellectualism; focusing on those times when anti-intellectualism opposes the power elite can help us identify common themes in populist rhetoric, but it doesn’t really help us understand the sources of anti-intellectualism in our culture or its impact on financial literacy.

Anti-intellectualism is deeply rooted in American pragmatism and capitalist enterprise. As Michael Novak writes in the National Review article Wealth and Virtue, “the distinctive, defining difference of the capitalist economy is enterprise: the habit of employing human wit to invent new goods and services, and to discover new and better ways to bring them to the broadest possible public,” and “its main resource is human capital: knowledge, know-how, skill, the knack of insight into new possibilities for making life easier and better for as many others as possible. Its primary dynamic force is human wit.”

The emphasis is on knowledge that’s useful, practical, and readily applicable to commerce. In The American Mind, Henry Steel Commager describes the American approach to education as similar to his approach to religion, expecting it to be “practical and pay dividends.” Education was expected to “prepare for life—by which he meant, increasingly, jobs and professions. His attitude toward higher education was something of a paradox. Nowhere else in the western world did colleges multiply and flourish as in America, yet not until Eliot reformed Harvard and Gilman built The Johns Hopkins did he have a real university. No people was more avid of college degrees, yet nowhere else were intellectuals held in such contempt or relegated to so inferior a position; and in America alone the professor—invariably long haired and absent minded—was an object of humor.”

And Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education authors William G. Bowen, Martin A. Kurzweil and Eugene M. Tobin describe the “Jacksonians’ contempt for privilege, the persistent popular sentiment that a college education was an unnecessary—even dilettantish—pursuit.”

Personal finance may not have been considered a practical topic of study for the majority of Americans, although according to Financial Literacy in America: Individual Choices, National Consequences, financial education was more common in American schools in the early 20th century, disappearing from school curricula only after the nation transitioned from a culture of saving to one of spending and responsibility for long-term planning shifted from the individual to government and industry. When personal investment choices were few and relatively uncomplicated and you could rely on government Social Security and an employer pension plan for retirement income, study of personal finance had no obvious practical use—you could get by with a casual understanding.

At this point the need for financial literacy is glaringly obvious, but still a challenge. For example, one of the primary concepts of finance, the time value of money, requires an understanding of the formula for compound interest, a formula not formally introduced until second-semester Calculus, while most Americans not only struggle to master high-school Algebra, but don’t really understand why it’s important. Algebra is taught at a point when American students are the least financially literate, making it difficult to link these two related areas of accomplishment.

I would argue that there is also a cultural attitude linking mastery of finance with the elite class, thereby making it a suspicious endeavor. It’s ok to succeed in commerce through hard work and business acumen, but not ok to succeed via channels primarily accessible to the privileged elite.

Over the weekend we watched the 1945 movie Mildred Pierce, essentially a morality play instructing on good and bad ways to get ahead in American life. The wealthy characters are clearly bad, either obsessed with protecting social position or loafing around and frivolously spending inherited money. The character Mildred Pierce is ambitious for the social advancement of her daughter Veda, but she and her husband are living beyond their means keeping up the appearances of an upper-middle class lifestyle. The husband protests and this conflict leads to divorce, at which point Mildred is forced to work at menial but honorable jobs to support Veda’s voracious appetite for the finer things of life. Veda’s social striving goes from bad to worse, but I won’t spoil the ending. The lesson is that social striving can go too far, that success must be obtained by honorable means no matter how humble, and that the privileged elite are not of high moral character.

To increase financial literacy in this country, we will need to culturally unlink the study of finance from the rarefied world of the privileged elite and bring it back down to earth, to the world of ordinary people trying to get ahead through learning, hard work and enterprise.