ABSTRACT
The United States of America has had many inspiring meanings for peoples around the globe. Liberty, freedom, democracy, and equality come immediately to mind. Greater, however, than even these is the magnetism of individual success. For, the American Gospel of Success continues to be “without doubt America’s persistent claim to the fealty of every man.” This cult, this belief in the agency of success, in the self-made man, has become, especially in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a reality unto itself. So much so, in fact, that William James once labeled success the “American bitch-goddess.”
