The core ideas of individualism—that a person’s fate should be in his (or her) own hands and that freedom gave citizens the opportunity and the responsibility to make of themselves what they could—seemed almost quaint in the new, urban, and industrial United States. When industrial work crippled and epidemic diseases killed, and where chance—freaks of fortune—produced what John Maynard Keynes, the economist, would later call “the radical uncertainties of capitalism,” luck as much as effort seemed to dictate outcomes.
