Self-help Messiah Read online

  Carnegie’s labors to shape his persona also contributed to the new social ethos proclaimed in How to Win Friends. While maintaining the old Protestant tradition of self-regulation—dating back to the Puritans, it enjoined individuals to examine themselves obsessively for evidence of virtuous values and behavior—Carnegie gave it a modern twist. Maintaining a file entitled “Damned Fool Things I Have Done” throughout much of his adult life, he recorded dozens of mistakes in his conduct that he vowed to correct. But whereas traditional Protestants had identified moral or spiritual failings, Carnegie focused on social faux pas that gave offense to others—forgetting people’s names, blurting out negative comments, failing to make friends feel comfortable, arguing instead of tactfully suggesting, overlooking others’ viewpoints, making sweeping statements that irritated someone. With Carnegie, the stress shifted from shaping one’s inner moral character to shaping the impressions that one made upon other people—what he described in his diary as “the biggest problem I shall ever face: the management of Dale Carnegie.” Therein lay the central project of his private life, and also of America’s modern culture of self-fulfillment: presenting a positive personal image and pleasing personality.

  Thus the story of Dale Carnegie is, in essence, the story of America itself in a dynamic era of change. Throughout the early twentieth century he helped redefine the American Dream and plotted a new pathway by which to get there. A self-made man, he became the successor to Franklin and Alger as the modern formulator of success in a society devoted to its pursuit. Dismantling older attachments to economic self-sufficiency, stern moral character, and self-denial, he glorified new attractions of material abundance, human relations, and self-fulfillment. The first great popularizer of the modern cult of personality, he helped weave psychological viewpoints and therapeutic uplift into the fabric of modern life. As the father of the self-help movement, he launched a massive crusade promoting personal reinvention that swept through modern life during the twentieth century and reshaped our basic values. Carnegie did not leave American culture where he found it.

  But the tale of this central figure in modern American life began in a rather unlikely place. In the late 1800s, the rural country of northwestern Missouri was deeply provincial—in fact, barely removed from the frontier—and remained far from the bustling urban centers that were beginning to alter the nineteenth-century republic. There, a second son was born to a pious but impoverished farm family struggling to survive in a rather forbidding environment. From his parents, and from his surroundings, the boy imbibed a traditional set of values that would shape his entire life. Some of them would remain a source of profound inspiration. But others would trigger a passionate reaction and slowly push him in new directions.

  Poverty and Piety

  In How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie lionized a prominent business figure in early twentieth-century America. Charles Schwab, he wrote, the top manager at Andrew Carnegie’s huge steel company before becoming head of U.S. Steel, was perhaps the first person in the country “paid a salary of a million dollars a year, or more than three thousand dollars a day.” Why this beneficent sum? Because he knew more about steel manufacturing than other executives? Nonsense, said Dale Carnegie. Schwab had told him that there were many men working at Carnegie Steel with more knowledge about making this product. Instead, wrote Carnegie, Schwab believed that “he was paid this salary largely because of his ability to deal with people.” The wealthy executive elaborated, claiming that “his smile had been worth a million dollars.” In Carnegie’s words, Schwab’s “personality, his charm, his ability to make people like him were almost wholly responsible for his extraordinary success.” But it was that million dollars a year that stuck in Carnegie’s head, the result that provided ultimate confirmation of this individual’s worth and achievement.1

  In his second influential advice book, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Carnegie promoted another principle he held dear: the need for spiritual values to provide emotional peace of mind. He carefully explained that he was not embracing traditional Christianity but had “gone forward to a new concept of religion. I no longer have the faintest interest in the differences in creeds that divide the churches. But I am enormously interested in what religion does for me” in creating “a new zest for life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life.” Carnegie noted that during his workaday life he would frequently drop into a church—the denomination did not matter—and engage in quiet meditation and prayer. As he explained, “doing this helps calm my nerves, rests my body, clarifies my perspective, and helps me revalue my values.”2

  Carnegie’s enthusiastic endorsement of economic abundance and emotional well-being—in fact, they were two halves of his modern creed of success-seeking—sprang directly out of his childhood experiences. As a boy, he suffered the consequences of persistent poverty as his father, a hardscrabble dirt farmer with a dogged work ethic, struggled mightily but unsuccessfully to earn a living. From his mother, a devout and dynamic lay preacher of the Gospel, he learned the virtues of evangelical Protestantism and self-examination. This tense juxtaposition of stern religiosity and economic failure, hard work and hard times, self-control and personal defeat produced a profound ambiguity in Carnegie’s experience of childhood. On the one hand, in later life he waxed lyrical about joyful romps in rural pastures, woods, and creeks where he would “smell the apple blossoms in the orchard and listen to the song of the brown thrasher.” He cherished memories of a pious mother who read from the Bible and offered prayers of thanks for their modest food and shelter, and a generous father who, even while his own family had little, went to the local town and gave “the children of poor families shoes and warm clothing” at Christmas. On the other hand, he bitterly recalled a grim childhood characterized by a struggle to survive on a small farm. “My parents slaved sixteen hours a day, yet we constantly were oppressed by debts and harassed by hard luck,” he wrote.

  One of my earliest memories is watching the floodwaters of the 102 River rolling over our corn and hayfields, destroying everything. The floods destroyed our crops six years out of seven. Year after year, our hogs died of cholera and we burned them. I can close my eyes now and recall the pungent odor of burning hog flesh … After ten years of hard, grueling work, we were not only penniless; we were heavily in debt. Our farm was mortgaged … No matter what we did, we lost money.3

  Not surprisingly, the ongoing tension between poverty and piety during Carnegie’s childhood nourished doubts and anxieties. As he admitted later, “I was full of worry in those days.” Affection for his parents and respect for their traditional virtues—industriousness, family solidarity, spiritual striving, persistence in the face of daunting odds—provided a sense of basic morality and emotional grounding that stabilized him throughout life. At the same time, this sensitive child could not understand why their efforts, and their upstanding values, seemed to produce only failure. This painful disjuncture in his youthful psyche became one of the most important factors in his life. It provided the impetus, and the raw emotional material, for what would gradually emerge as his life’s project: reformulating the meaning of success in modern America, and blazing a new trail by which to get there.

  James Carnagey and Amanda Harbison first became acquainted in a fashion common among rural folk in the late 1800s. They both boarded at the Lynch farm near the town of Maryville, in extreme northwest Missouri not far from the Iowa border, where he worked as a hired hand and she as a schoolteacher who also did sewing and other domestic labor in return for a room and food. Mrs. Lynch told Miss Harbison, when she first arrived, about a nice-looking, hardworking young man who helped her husband with chores and recommended that she “set [her] cap for him.” Her words proved prophetic. Within a short time, the young people became enamored of each other and struck up a romance.4

  James William Carnagey was the eldest child in a large family of six sisters and three brothers. He had been born in February 1852 and raised
in rural Indiana. Like most farm boys in the nineteenth century, he received only a rudimentary education. Attending school for portions of five or six years, he learned the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, but “never heard of Dickens or Shakespeare,” as his son later discovered. Instead, James devoted himself to the backbreaking work that marked the typical small-farm regimen—milking cows, feeding hogs, planting corn, harvesting wheat and oats, threshing grain, chopping firewood, repairing fences, and a hundred other daily tasks. But rural life suited him. In the mid-1870s, James left Indiana to work at a sawmill owned by the Montana Beaverhead Company in Trapper Gulch, Montana, where he “snaked” logs down mountainsides and tended charcoal pits. After several years there, at his father’s suggestion, he returned to the Midwest to check out the farm land in northwest Missouri, which was considerably cheaper than land in Indiana. The young man decided to stay in the area.5

  Amanda Elizabeth Harbison was a native Missourian. Born in February 1858 in the northern part of the state, she was the eldest girl among eight siblings. In 1861, with the outbreak of the Civil War, her father, Abraham, moved the family to Henderson County, Illinois, just across the Mississippi River—he was drafted during the conflict but hired a substitute—before returning to northwest Missouri around 1870. As a youth, Amanda imbibed stern religious principles and a love for education, both of which would stay with her throughout her life. Around 1880, she accepted a position as a teacher at a small country schoolhouse near Maryville and met the young man who would become her husband.6

  James and Amanda began courting soon after her arrival at the Lynch farm, but the relationship (again in the fashion of traditional rural folk) evinced more pragmatism than passion. The couple began planning marriage, but Amanda developed deep second thoughts before receiving reassurances from her father. “Jim Carnagey is a very good man,” he told his eldest daughter. “He is honest. He works hard. He doesn’t drink or gamble or chew or smoke. I know he’ll make you a good husband. He is one of the finest men I know.” Dale put it more descriptively several decades later. His parents’ courtship was “far from being a Romeo and Juliet of the cornfields,” he related. “It was, instead, a solid, kindly, cooperative, and Christ-like union.” The couple married on January 1, 1882, and it proved to be a suitable pairing. “If they ever had one quarrel or spoke one unkind word to each other, I do not remember hearing it,” Dale noted.7

  In November 1886, a first child, Clifton, arrived to the young couple. They were living on a small farm near a crossroads hamlet named Harmony Church, which stood about ten miles northeast of Maryville and only seven miles from the Iowa state line. Two years later, Dale Harbison Carnagey was born on November 24, 1888. One of the worst blizzards in recent memory was raging, and when Amanda went into labor a neighbor galloped away on horseback through the snow to summon the nearest doctor from the village of Parnell, Missouri. “I have always been in a hurry, so I arrived before the doctor did,” Dale liked to say.8

  In many ways, Dale led an idyllic youth deep in the rural hinterland. When he was old enough to walk, he loved to be outdoors, enjoying the beauties of nature on a daily basis. This experience was amplified when his father tried to advance the family fortunes in the early 1890s. “When I was five years old, father bought a beautiful farm that I shall remember all my life,” Carnagey recalled. It featured a house and a barn perched on a high hill that sloped down to beautiful, level farmland that was accented with a sluggish stream meandering through it. Dale particularly remembered “gorgeous sunsets that splashed the sky with the colors of a painting by Turner.” He spent endless hours fishing and swimming in the 102 River, so named by the Mormons because it was the 102nd river or stream they crossed on their journey from Nauvoo, Illinois, to Great Salt Lake, Utah. He trekked to grammar school with nearby farm kids and enjoyed picnics with them in Coulter’s Woods. Dale had a special fondness for local patches full of large, juicy watermelons that were cooled in a water tank before being devoured on warm summer evenings. Even when the weather turned cold, the natural world could seem enchanted to the impressionable boy. He would awaken to a snow-covered “fairyland” where the tracks of rabbits and wild birds could be seen everywhere. “When father put on his felt boots and rubbers and started for the barn to feed the stock,” Dale recalled, “the scene was a living Currier and Ives print.”9

  Dale Carnagey as a toddler (holding the hatchet), posing with older brother, Clifton.

  A warm, secure family atmosphere enhanced his childhood experience. Dale appreciated his father’s work ethic, noting a few years later that “if father built a fence it would last forever, for I used to think that he was the most particular man in the world about getting the posts straight and building the fence as though it was to hold mad bulls.” But it was with his mother that he enjoyed a special bond. “I was greatly influenced by her in every way,” he once declared. “No one ever had a more loving mother than I did … I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I had not had Amanda Elizabeth Harbison Carnagey for my mother.” She especially influenced his education. In Dale’s view, she was “one of the most exciting teachers I have ever known,” regularly reading favorite books aloud to him: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, The Prince of the House of David, David—the Way of the Cross, Black Beauty, and the temperance novel Ten Nights in a Barroom. She also trained him to memorize and recite religious “pieces” for church gatherings. “The first time I ever made an appearance on the platform, facing the audience, Mother said as I walked up the aisle, ‘Here comes my boy, my precious boy,’ ” her son recalled later. But then when he began to speak “my memory failed me and I said to my mother, ‘My, ain’t it hot up here.’ ” A bit later, the youngster made his first public address and, reflecting his mother’s religious fervor, it was entitled “The Saloon, the Offspring of Hell.”10

  Dale as a little boy (front), Clifton, and his parents, James and Amanda.

  The son also inherited the mother’s enthusiasm for life, a key trait that would define him as an adult. He described her as “the sparkplug of our family” and observed that he “either inherited or acquired her boundless energy and excitement about life … She did everything with earnestness. She often sang as she worked.” Through example and instruction alike, Amanda conveyed to her bright offspring a sense that life was something to be embraced as an opportunity and molded by action. She personified steadfastness in facing the world—he would later describe Amanda as having “the courage of 17 Bengal tigers”—and her perseverance served as a “shining example” to her son.11

  But another factor sullied Dale Carnagey’s childhood. Life was hard in rural Missouri in the late 1800s, and reminders of its fragility, hardships, and dangers came often. His maternal grandmother, who was in her nineties, lived with the family for several years and would entrance the boy with scary stories of life on the frontier, such as when her brother was kidnapped by Indians and forced to live with them for fourteen years. Disease provided a constant threat as various maladies regularly swept through the local population and carried off vulnerable children. The Mizingo family, who lived across the road from the Carnageys, lost a daughter to smallpox and the horrifying details burned themselves into the boy’s memory. “Her dead body was so foul and stinking that two men held their noses as they rushed into her bedroom, picked up the four corners of the sheet, and dropped her body into a crude wooden box,” he remembered. “She was buried at night under the apple trees in a nearby orchard. Since I lived directly across the road, I could hear the clods rattle down on her coffin.” For days Dale’s mother lived in terror because her son had visited the Mizingo house only a day before the disease appeared. In a region only barely removed from its frontier atmosphere, violence also exploded with disturbing frequency. For decades, Carnagey carried with him the memory of murders, rapes, and violent family feuds that exploded nearby with disturbing regularity.12

  Farm life also presented the boy a brutal work
regimen with few amenities. From a young age, he hauled manure from the barn, cowshed, and chicken houses and helped milk the cows and chop and stack firewood. He found farm labor to be dirty and exhausting, and distastefully remembered being covered in dust from plowing the fields behind a horse. Running water did not exist, of course, and like all farmers the Carnageys had no inside toilet. Later, Dale vividly remembered the first time he used an inside flush toilet at a dry goods store in Maryville. “There was a roar. Everyone in the store could hear it. To me it sounded as if the town’s water tower had fallen down. I walked out of the store, my face burning with embarrassment,” he recalled. A single wood stove provided the only source of heat in the Carnagey farmhouse, and the boy spent many winter nights huddled under the covers in a freezing bedroom.13

  The same forces of nature that inspired euphoric visions of beauty in his youth also induced spasms of fear. During the spring and summer seasons, violent storms with high winds and thunder would sweep in from the west and fill the horizon with violent flashes of lightning. The Carnageys would rush from the house into the storm cellar, which would be lined with preserved food, to ride things out. After one such event, Dale couldn’t find his little dog, Tippy. He finally saw his lifeless body laying near the porch—the animal had been struck by lightning. He pleaded with his pious mother to pray to God for the return of his little dog, but she replied gently that the Almighty did not raise dogs from the dead. “But Tippy is a lot better than many people,” the heartbroken youngster replied. “This was the greatest tragedy of my early life,” he recalled later.14