Self-help Messiah Read online

  ALSO BY STEVEN WATTS

  Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream

  The People’s Tycoon:

  Henry Ford and the American Century

  The Magic Kingdom:

  Walt Disney and the American Way of Life

  The Romance of Real Life:

  Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture

  The Republic Reborn:

  War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790–1820

  Copyright © 2013 Steven Watts

  All of the photos are courtesy of Dale Carnegie & Associates, Inc., except for those of Carnegie and Frieda Offenbach, and Carnegie and Linda Offenbach, which are courtesy of Linda Polsby.

  Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Watts, Steven, 1952-

  Self-help Messiah : Dale Carnegie and success in modern America / by Steven Watts.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-1-59051-503-7

  1. Carnegie, Dale, 1888-1955. 2. Success. 3. Conduct of life. 4. Teachers—United States—Biography. 5. Orators—United States—Biography.

  6. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  CT275.C3114W37 2013

  973.91092—dc23

  [B]

  2013003227

  v3.1

  For all of my teachers, friends, and colleagues at the University of Missouri

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction: Helping Yourself in Modern America

  PART ONE: FROM CHARACTER TO PERSONALITY

  1 Poverty and Piety

  2 Rebellion and Recovery

  3 Selling Products, Selling Yourself

  4 Go East, Young Man

  5 Teaching and Writing

  6 Mind Power and Positive Thinking

  7 Rebellion and the Lost Generation

  8 Business and Self-Regulation

  PART TWO: WINNING FRIENDS AND INFLUENCING PEOPLE

  9 “Do the Thing You Fear to Do”

  10 “Men and Women, Hungry for Self-Improvement”

  11 “We Are Dealing with Creatures of Emotion”

  12 “Every Act You Ever Performed Is Because You Wanted Something”

  13 “Give a Man a Fine Reputation to Live Up To”

  14 “Find Work That You Enjoy”

  15 “He Has the Whole World with Him”

  16 “Businessmen Who Do Not Fight Worry Die Young”

  17 “Enthusiasm Is His Most Endearing Quality”

  Epilogue: The Self-Help Legacy of Dale Carnegie

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Introduction

  Helping Yourself in Modern America

  On a cold January evening in 1936, a great horde descended on the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. Three thousand people crammed into the grand ballroom and onto the balcony encircling it, while hundreds more stood shivering on the sidewalk outside, unable to find even standing room as the hotel staff frantically wedged the doors shut and hoped the fire marshal would not appear. The throng was responding to a series of full-page ads in the New York Sun that promised “Increase Your Income,” “Learn to Speak Effectively,” “Prepare for Leadership.”

  Yet the crowd did not spring from the ranks of the working class or the desperately unemployed who were struggling to survive in the dark days of the Great Depression. It came from a more prosperous stratum, but one equally anxious about sliding into failure—entrepreneurs, businessmen, shopkeepers, salesmen, middle managers, white-collar executives, professional men. As the audience listened attentively for the next hour, fifteen figures paraded before the single microphone on the stage and gave three-minute testimonials. Understanding the principles of human relations, the speakers proclaimed, had pointed them toward success. A druggist, a chain-store manager, an insurance man, a truck salesman, a dentist, an architect, a lawyer, a banker, and several others explained that learning how to deal with people had dramatically enhanced their careers and changed their lives.

  After these endorsements, a short, trim man with steel-rimmed glasses, ramrod posture, and a sincere, soothing voice with a slight Midwestern twang took the stage. Dale Carnegie, creator of the self-improvement course being praised, admitted that he was gratified by the large audience. But, he added quickly, “I have no doubt as to why you are here. You are not here because you are interested in me. You are here because you are interested in yourself and the solution to your problems.” He assured the crowd that each listener could learn the techniques that had improved so many lives. Each could understand how to be a good listener, make people like them instantly, develop an enthusiastic attitude, handle difficult personal situations, and win others to their way of thinking. Each could be successful. Every student taking his course, he declared in conclusion, “begins to get self-confidence. After all, why shouldn’t they—and why shouldn’t you?” The throng leapt to its feet in thunderous applause and most of them rushed to tables at the back of the room to sign up for the class. In subsequent years, more than eight million students would graduate from the Dale Carnegie Course in Effective Speaking and Human Relations.1

  One year later, an even bigger event sent Carnegie rocketing to national fame. In January 1937, his book How to Win Friends and Influence People, which codified the lessons of the Carnegie Course, shot to the top of the best-seller list. It would go through seventeen editions its first year, and Leon Shimkin, Carnegie’s editor, sent him a somewhat dazed letter in March 1937, after the book had already sold a quarter of a million copies in only three months. “If one year ago a friend of mine were to have told me that today I was going to send to an author the 250,000th copy of his book I would have either referred him to the nearest psychiatrist or to Robert Ripley for a believe-it-or-not-cartoon,” he wrote. How to Win Friends would go through dozens of reprintings in subsequent years, ultimately selling more than thirty million copies worldwide over the next few decades. It became one of the best selling nonfiction books in American history—it sells in the six figures yearly even now—with some ranking it only behind the Bible and Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Practical Guide to Baby and Child Care.2

  At the heart of How to Win Friends lay a message that massive numbers of readers found irresistible: One could find success in the modern world by developing attractive personal traits, bolstering self-confidence, improving skills in human relations, getting people to like you, and adopting a psychological perspective in assessing and meeting human needs. Carnegie insisted that getting ahead in life—securing a better job, making more money, enjoying the esteem of your peers—was simply a matter of retooling your personality. With contagious enthusiasm, he promised that his advice book would help any individual to “get out of a mental rut, think new thoughts, acquire new visions, new ambitions … Win people to your way of thinking. Increase your influence, your prestige, your ability to get things done. Win new clients, new customers … Handle complaints, avoid arguments, keep your human contacts smooth and pleasant … Make the principles of psychology easy for you to apply in y
our daily contacts.”3

  In such a fashion, Carnegie became one of the most popular and influential figures in modern American history. His message promoting sparkling personality, self-esteem, human relations, and psychological well-being resonated widely and deeply in society, attracting millions of acolytes and elevating him to a pinnacle of influence in shaping modern values. And his legacy was a lasting one. Life magazine named him one of the “Most Important Americans of the Twentieth Century.” A Library of Congress survey placed How to Win Friends and Influence People as the seventh most influential book in American history. In 1985, American Heritage, the popular history magazine, chose ten books that had most shaped the American character—“not its political life but its cultural, social, and domestic life.” Predictably, the list included stalwart volumes such as Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. It also included Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.4

  So what explains Carnegie’s meteoric rise? Why did millions of ordinary citizens flock to his message of personality development, human relations, and success? Why was he able to become a major cultural figure in modern America? Answers to these questions lay partly embedded in a massive reorientation of American life in the early decades of the twentieth century, the remarkable era during which Carnegie labored and wrote. The United States found itself in the throes of rapid change as it transformed from a rural village republic to an urban society of jarring ethnic diversity, imposing bureaucratic structures, and bewildering social problems. From the 1880s to the 1920s, precisely the years of Carnegie’s youth and young manhood, the United States experienced not only massive industrialization, mass immigration, and the closing of the frontier but the rapid growth of a modern consumer economy. In contrast to a nineteenth-century landscape of vigorous market exchange regulated by an economic calculus of scarcity, the early twentieth century presented an expansive new world of material abundance where the purchase and accumulation of consumer goods became the new yardstick for measuring achievement.

  More immediately for Carnegie, however, the transformation of the United States from 1880 to 1920 brought a crisis in cultural values. In the Victorian nineteenth century, a mainstream creed of stern morality and studied self-control had defined private morality and regulated public conduct. But by the early 1900s this tradition was unraveling. In a society increasingly devoted to consumer abundance, leisure, and entertainment, a new ethos of self-fulfillment (rather than self-denial) gained growing legions of adherents. The hidebound strictures of “character” receded while sparkling images of “personality” became central to a new code of individualism. The shaping of a healthy, magnetic, charismatic personal image (as opposed to an older tradition stressing internalized moral principles) became crucial to success in an age where self-fulfillment had replaced self-control as the emotional nexus of American behavior. The powers of personality gained additional traction from new bureaucratic institutions and large corporations, with their hundreds of employees engaging in complex interactions, which were employing growing numbers of white-collar workers.

  Not surprisingly, in this dynamic new atmosphere, the old American tradition of success seeking became irrelevant. In an earlier era, influential figures such as Benjamin Franklin, in his Autobiography and essays such as “The Way to Wealth,” and Horatio Alger, in novels such as Mark, the Match Boy and Struggling Upward, had instructed ambitious Americans that the road to prosperity and respectability lay in forming a solid character based on thrift, industry, self-denial, and moral respectability. But such prudential qualities no longer seemed sufficient in a world where material affluence and personal self-fulfillment, bureaucratic imperatives and leisure opportunities, vast cities and far-flung markets held sway.

  Carnegie stepped into this cultural breach. By the 1930s, he had begun to develop a vibrant new formulation of rules for gaining success in this daunting new world. His How to Win Friends and Influence People expressed these principles in a breathless, anecdotal style and became the guidebook for getting ahead in modern America. In Carnegie’s telling words, one could “no longer put much faith in the old adage that hard work alone is the magic key that will unlock the door to our desires.” The ability to handle people, he insisted repeatedly, was now the key to achievement, status, and prosperity in this complex urban and bureaucratic society. Modern success depended upon getting along with others, working smoothly in a bureaucratic milieu, and subtly maneuvering to assume leadership among groups of people. Carnegie tailored his advice to fit these demands: “make the other person feel important,” “don’t criticize others,” “establish a positive atmosphere and avoid arguments,” “be hearty in approbation and lavish in praise,” “let the other fellow feel that the idea is his,” and “make people like you.” A bit later, when the United States was awash in material prosperity in the aftermath of World War II, Carnegie’s second blockbuster book, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, presented strategies for coping with the unexpected emotional pressures and angst accompanying consumer comfort. Such advice, with its reliance on human relations and personality appeal rather than hardy individualism and unflinching morality, found a receptive modern audience.

  Yet Carnegie also did more than he knew. The tremendous appeal of his success message gained much of its power from a subtle appropriation of psychological perspectives and techniques. This impulse, once again, embodied an important cultural shift. As a number of critics and historians have observed—most famously, Philip Rieff in The Triumph of the Therapeutic—the slow erosion of community ties and religious faith under the pressures of modernity produced “psychological man.” This dominant character type grew preoccupied with self-awareness, personal growth, self-esteem, and an unceasing quest for a state of emotional well-being. Psychological man jettisoned morality for therapy. This new therapeutic sensibility spread throughout America during the early 1900s and became a powerful influence on education, child-rearing, political activity, family life, religion, and many other areas of modern life.

  Carnegie, who often presented himself as an expert in “practical psychology,” emerged as the first great popularizer of this newfound stress on mental health and self-esteem. The popular Carnegie Course tried to eradicate “the inferiority complex” and advertised its reliance on “the significant discoveries of modern psychology.” How to Win Friends and Influence People instructed readers that when dealing with people “we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion.” Invoking the psychological ideas of William James, Alfred Adler, and Sigmund Freud, as well as many lesser figures, the text promised that “positive thinking” and the art of “appreciation—the easiest of all psychological techniques,” would create among adherents “a new way of life.”

  From this collection of cultural ingredients—success ideology, charismatic personality and self-fulfillment, positive thought, human relations, therapeutic well-being—Carnegie ultimately created his greatest legacy: the establishment of a robust self-help movement that has shaped modern American values in fundamental ways. In the wake of his stunning success, a host of dazzling, popular self-help gurus—Norman Vincent Peale, Dr. Joyce Brothers, Dr. Wayne Dryer, Tony Robbins, Robert Schuller, Marianne Williamson, M. Scott Peck, Deepak Chopra, Stephen Covey, Oprah Winfrey, and many others—fanned out over the American landscape in subsequent decades, spreading the message that therapeutic adjustment and personal improvement would produce career success, material prosperity, and emotional self-fulfillment. Carnegie’s basic notion, embodied in How to Win Friends—that the individual who learns “the fine art of getting along with people in everyday business and social contacts” will enjoy “more profit, more leisure, and, what is infinitely more important, more happiness in his business and his home”—became the urtext of this modern American success creed.


  But however powerful the links between Carnegie’s success message of therapeutic self-help and the changing circumstances of twentieth-century history, that does not explain all. The compelling ideas in How to Win Friends and How to Stop Worrying did not appear suddenly, as if by magic, from some process of cultural alchemy. Nor was Carnegie an intellectual who systematically thought his way to new conclusions. Instead, his revolutionary notions about success in the modern world took shape, in part, from his unique genius for soaking up new, controversial ideas that were floating around in the broader cultural atmosphere and synthesizing them into a popular form. But they also appeared from a more direct source: the cauldron of his own experience, the events of his own remarkable personal life. For Carnegie had a rags-to-riches story rivaling anything in a Horatio Alger novel.

  Born deep in the American rural hinterland, he grew up in grinding poverty surrounded by religious revivals, temperance crusades, and political Populism—the dissenting spasms of a beleaguered rural population being pushed to the margins of a modernizing nation. After fleeing this tradition in search of opportunity, he cycled through a series of jobs in search of a vocation suited to the volatile, transformative society of the early 1900s. He tried to be an automobile salesman in a new age of mobility; a dramatic actor and tabloid journalist in a culture increasingly devoted to images and impressions; an adult-education teacher for those seeking practical guidance in navigating an unfamiliar world; an entertainment manager in a new culture celebrating leisure and celebrity; an alienated, expatriate novelist looking for inspiration abroad; a business guru catering to economic expansion and prosperity in the 1920s. Carnegie’s varied endeavors—from delivering boyhood speeches against “demon rum” at fiery tent meetings to popularizing Lawrence of Arabia in the aftermath of World War I, from teaching public speaking to restless white-collar clerks to joining the Lost Generation of American writers abroad, from publishing magazine sketches of successful entrepreneurs to advising giant American corporations—illuminated the swirling changes, the opportunities and dislocations, of America’s changing milieu in this era and provided the basic stuff of his formulations.