Self-help Messiah Page 3

  The winter season could send temperatures plummeting to painful depths. After emerging from a frigid house in the early-morning hours, the boy had to walk more than a mile to school in bone-chilling temperatures and often through deep snow. “Until I was fourteen, I never had any rubbers or overshoes. During the long, cold winters, my feet were always wet and cold,” he reported. “As a child, I never dreamed that anyone had warm, dry feet in the winter.” And the frigid temperatures, of course, made farm work even more difficult during this season. His father raised Duroc hogs, for instance, and the sows often had their litters in February, when temperatures commonly hovered near zero. To keep the piglets from freezing to death, James would bring them into the house and put them in a basket behind the kitchen stove, covered with a burlap sack. It was Dale’s job to take care of them. Just before bed, he would take the basket of piglets out to their mother in the barn to nurse. “Then I went to bed, set the alarm for three o’clock; when it went off I got out of bed in the bitter cold, took the pigs out for another hot meal, brought them back, set the alarm for six o’clock, and got up to study … At the time I thought that was a great hardship.”15

  Boyhood accidents illustrated the dangers of rural life. Once, young Carnagey mounted a horse on a cold winter day and as he swung into the saddle the animal bolted. Falling backward, he had one foot stuck in a stirrup and was dragged quite a distance at high speed through the frozen mud before he was able to extricate his foot. The encounter left him bruised and a bit dazed. Another time he was less fortunate. On the day after Christmas 1899, he was playing with his cousin in the attic of an abandoned log cabin down the road from his house. He was wearing on the forefinger of his left hand a ring—a family heirloom—that his father had given him. Urged on by his cousin, he stood on the windowsill of the attic and jumped to the ground, but when he did so the ring caught on a nail embedded in the log he had been grasping. His finger was torn off. The terrified youth ran to his house bleeding profusely and shouting for help. His mother wrapped the stump tight as his father hitched up a team to the wagon, and they drove hurriedly to Maryville. “I prayed and yelled and screamed every step the horses took in that hour-long trip to town. I was taken to Dr. Nash’s office in Maryville,” he remembered fifty years later. “As he took off the handkerchief that had been wrapped around my bleeding finger, some of it clung to the bone. The agony was terrible.” The doctor sedated the boy with chloroform before cleaning the wound and making a neater amputation. For the rest of his life, Carnagey would gesture with his right hand while subtly hiding his left one.16

  But another factor created the deepest, most enduring emotional pain for this Missouri farm boy: his family’s poverty. Unable to make a profit and increasingly mired in debt, like many small farmers in the late 1800s, James Carnagey’s hard work took him nowhere. Floods washed out his crops periodically, diseases killed his hogs, and the vagaries of the agricultural market brought little or no profit at harvest time. Once, he tried raising cattle but was unable to sell them for what it cost to fatten them up. Another time, he bought a group of young, untrained mules and labored prodigiously to break them for farm use, only to find that, once again, he was unable to sell them for enough to cover the cost of their feed. James complained bitterly that “he would be better off financially if he had taken a shotgun and killed the mules the day he bought them.”17

  As a schoolboy in the mid-1890s, Dale already displayed a wide-eyed curiosity about the world.

  Desperate, the family did its best to survive through self-sufficiency and barter. The Carnageys raised their own fruit and vegetables, and smoked their own ham and bacon. They traded butter and eggs for coffee, sugar, and salt at Kirk’s Grocery and for shoes from the local cobbler. But such efforts brought little beyond bare survival. Homer Croy, a lifelong friend of Dale’s who grew up nearby, recalled an embarrassing sign of the Carnageys’ economic hardship. “My first memory of his family was seeing them drive into town Sunday morning with a horse on one side of the pole and a mule on the other,” he wrote. This mismatch displayed to all “how impoverished the family was.”18

  Dale, intelligent and sensitive, found it hard to face the deprivation and small humiliations that accompanied his family’s poverty. The Carnagey boys had very little. Amanda made all of their clothes out of cloth bartered from local stores and they had to endure holes in the bottom of shoes and patches on the seat of pants. Toys and treats, of course, came only rarely. Dale would cry when his father came home from town without bringing him a cheap piece of candy, which deeply hurt James. One Christmas, his parents gave him a tiny trunk less than a foot high, which included a little tray, and the boy treasured it as one of his most prized possessions. An enormous thrill came from riding in the wagon into Maryville on occasion, and his father giving him a dime to spend in whatever way he wished. But such extravagances were rare, and the abiding sense of physical want and emotional trauma was palpable. “I was ashamed of our poverty,” he admitted later.19

  Eventually dwindling economic resources caught up to the Carnagey family. In early 1900, after several years of heartbreaking failures, James was so deeply in debt that he was forced to sell the farm he had purchased with such high hopes in the early 1890s. After paying off his creditors, the family was left with a few pieces of furniture, a wagon, and a couple of horses. Even Dale’s stalwart mother broke down, hugging her sons as she sobbed, “You boys are the only things we have left in the world now.” The family rented another farm in the Maryville area and tried to start over. But “Father’s spirit was broken at the failure he was making of his life,” the son described, and this image of failure burned itself into his youthful psyche.20

  The crisis affected his parents differently. James turned to politics by associating with the Populist movement. Many small farmers scrambling to survive in the 1880s and 1890s had determined that the financial and political power structure of Gilded Age America—particularly the banks, the railroads, and a Republican Party devoted to the protective tariff favoring manufacturers and the gold standard—were responsible for their economic problems. They revolted. Organizing politically, they pushed forward by organizing the People’s Party in the early 1890s and then backing William Jennings Bryan as a Populist standard-bearer in the Democratic Party a bit later. The Populists sought redress for their grievances in free silver, government regulation of railroads and financial institutions, and collective tactics in the marketplace. James became an ardent supporter of Bryan in his 1896 presidential bid against Republican William McKinley. He took a wooden box top, wrote “Bryan and Prosperity” on it, and nailed it to a tree by the road. But the election turned out badly; James and his boys heard the news of Bryan’s defeat while gathered around the telephone in the local general store on election night. Disgusted, James turned his sign over, wrote “McKinley and Starvation, Farm for Sale,” and nailed it back on the tree.21

  Eventually James gave way to despair. Mired in debt with no escape route in sight, he grew depressed. Threats and intimations of self-harm became frequent as he suggested he might hang himself from the branches of a large oak tree on their farm. Amanda worried that whenever her husband went to the barn to feed livestock and took longer than expected in returning, “she would find his body dangling from the end of a rope.” James himself admitted to his son that after returning from a bank in Maryville, which had threatened to foreclose on his farm, he stopped his wagon on a bridge over the 102 River, got out, “and stood for a long time looking down at the water, debating with himself whether he should jump in and end it all.”22

  Amanda responded to the family’s economic adversity in a strikingly different fashion. Already a religious woman, she raised her piety to an even higher pitch. Forbidding both dancing and card-playing, she turned her home into a fortress of faith and a bastion of strict morality. She led her family in frequent prayers for God’s love and protection and read a Bible chapter aloud to her sons every night before they went to bed. A great su
pporter of reading and education, she subscribed to the Moody Colportage Library, a series of inexpensive religious books endorsed by the noted evangelist Dwight L. Moody, and acquainted her husband and sons with its didactic volumes. One of her favorites was an anti-dancing tract, From the Ballroom to Hell, which Dale read with misplaced energy—he reported later that he had been entranced in a decidedly non-pious way by the “pictures of girls in short skirts going to hell.” Amanda also served as a disciplinarian. Endorsing the Bible injunction to “spare the rod and spoil the child,” she switched both of her sons when they misbehaved, although it pained her to do so. But Amanda’s moral firmness produced a sunny, optimistic outlook toward life rather than a sour, pinched one. As Dale recounted, “Neither floods nor debts nor disaster could suppress her happy, radiant, and victorious spirit.”23

  Amanda’s religious enthusiasm also prompted her to widespread involvement in church affairs in the community around Maryville. She played the organ in a variety of country churches and taught Sunday school throughout her adult life. More important, she became a skilled lay preacher who, in the words of a family friend, “could get up on the platform and speak as well as any man. And she did. Sometimes she came to Brother Lytle’s pulpit at our Methodist Church and preached sermons as good as his … She put fire and drive and earnestness into them.” As her fame spread, Amanda traveled into nearby Iowa and Nebraska for speaking engagements and once even to Illinois when friends raised enough money to send her there to participate in revival meetings. She particularly embraced the temperance movement and its crusade to root out demon rum—Carrie Nation, the hatchet-wielding opponent of liquor establishments, became a special hero—and Amanda fought local saloons “tooth and nail,” in the words of one observer.24

  Young Dale absorbed one positive lesson from his parents’ struggles: a profound regard for their selflessness. Even in the depths of their poverty, he reported, his father and mother somehow would scrape together some money every year to send to the Christian Home, a nearby orphanage in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Later in life, when the prosperous son sent his parents a Christmas check for a few small luxuries, he would shake his head to learn of how his parents would use part of the money to buy groceries or coal for local families who were struggling. Such virtue made an indelible impact. After Dale became famous, he gave a talk in New York in which he described his parents’ selfless natures. He choked up and tears ran down his face. “My parents gave me no money nor financial inheritance,” he said after regaining his composure, “but they gave me something of much greater value—the blessing of faith and sturdy character.”25

  Thus Carnagey grew up immersed in the traditional culture of nineteenth-century America as he internalized a strong religious ethic. Eventually he would reject many of the specifics of Protestant theology—he would joke that he “had been brought up to believe that only Methodists were sure to get into heaven”—but a yearning for spiritual solace and connection would endure. “My mother wanted me to devote my life to religious work. I thought seriously of becoming a foreign missionary,” he noted. While he had no interest in a religious career, he nurtured this didactic impulse in a different form. In his hands, the cultivation of human relations and the achievement of success became a kind of secular salvation. As he wrote exuberantly in How to Win Friends and Influence People, the adoption of his techniques would create a kind of transformative religious experience: “I have seen the application of these principles literally revolutionize the lives of many people.”26

  As a youth, Dale also developed an affinity for verbal expression and contention. His schoolteacher mother had a way with words that rubbed off. “I was a born arguer. For years I loved a verbal joust. I argued at home, in school, and on the playground,” he admitted. “I had the typical ‘I’m from Missouri, you have to show me’ attitude.” In the same vein, he absorbed from his mother a taste for performing in public as “she always had me speaking pieces in Sunday School and church entertainments.” These expressive qualities, which he came to see as “a blessing in disguise,” would shape a future interest in debating and his career in public speaking.27

  Young Carnagey exhibited a large element of charm in his personality, another trait that he inherited from Amanda. As a young boy, after caught misbehaving, he sweet-talked his mother as she was about to apply the switch. “I asked her if I couldn’t have a cookie and lie down on the couch and rest a while before she switched me,” he reported. “That got the better of her. She had to laugh, and I got out of the switching.” Lighthearted and an occasional prankster, he once caused great hilarity at his small country school when he killed a rabbit, skinned it and cut up the carcass, and stealthily put the meat in a bucket sealed with a lid atop the heat stove. By the time the teacher and his fellow students became aware of the odd smell, it was too late. A surge of steam blew off the lid as hot water and pieces of boiled rabbit shot up to the ceiling. The teacher was not amused but the other students certainly were. “Education ought to be fun,” he remarked. “It was—that afternoon.”28

  But Dale also developed a powerful sensitivity to humiliation. As a youngster first going to school, he was embarrassed to use the communal outhouse because the older boys would stand around and jeer at the younger ones. Instead, in an act of desperation he lay down on the far side of the schoolhouse when nature called. “Presently, a little stream of water began to trickle out from under me in the dust,” he described. “Some of the older boys spotted this. They all began to whoop and holler, and point at me and call me names. Never before or since have I been so humiliated. It brought tears of shame.” The schoolyard also brought relentless teasing about his large, protruding ears—years later he remembered the name of his primary tormentor, an older student named Sam White—which reduced him to cringing. His family’s poverty, of course, provided an abiding source of distress and he felt a growing sense of inferiority about his rustic background and rough manners. Around age thirteen, for instance, while working in the fields, he spied a pretty girl coming down the road in a buggy and decided to attempt gallantry by tipping his hat. When she got to him, however, panic set in and he missed the brim and knocked his hat completely off. The girl laughed mockingly and drove off, leaving him acutely embarrassed.29

  Revealingly, for an individual who later would develop a blueprint for success in the corporate, urban, white-collar world of the twentieth century, Dale also developed a pronounced aversion to the physical labor necessary to rural success in the nineteenth century. “As a young lad, I hated anything that even remotely resembled work,” he freely admitted. “The work I loathed was churning the cream into butter, cleaning out the hen house, cutting weeds, and milking cows. Above all else, I hated to chop wood. I despised it so bitterly that we would never have any firewood stored up in advance.” James continually lectured his youngest son about the necessity of hard work and made him perform a regular regimen of chores. But the boy’s heart was not in it.30

  Gradually, and portentously for his future, Carnagey grew aware of the profound limitations of his rural existence. The occasional trips to Maryville delighted and depressed him in equal measure. He perceived the town to be a bustling metropolis and was enormously impressed with figures such as Daniel Eversole, the proprietor of the local dry goods store, who was a man of great presence and personality. The Linville Hotel seemed an icon of sophistication as Dale peered through the windows and observed well-dressed town dignitaries and visitors sitting in the lobby’s plush chairs and smoking fat cigars. This dawning awareness of a bigger world outside of rural Missouri was underlined when he saw a motion picture for the first time in 1899 at his small school. A short Western film, its dazzling climax featured a train hurtling along with two cowboys galloping beside it. The boy was thrilled.31

  One influence loomed particularly large in expanding Dale’s worldview. In the winter of 1901, Nicholas M. Sowder began teaching at the rural school and also became a boarder with the Carnagey family. He first made a
n impression by directing a dramatic, four-act student play entitled Imogene, or the Witch’s Secret. Dale played the part of Snooks, the newsboy, and was enthralled, particularly when the play’s success prompted Sowder to “go highhat” and rent a hall in nearby Parnell, Missouri, for several performances and charge admission. This exposure to acting gave young Carnagey “a taste of the thrill that comes from appearing before a crowd,” an emotion that would loom large in his future career. Sowder also had important personal interactions with Dale at the Carnagey home. The teacher owned a typewriter and an adding machine, neither of which the youngster had ever seen, and Sowder engaged in long discussions with his bright pupil using complex words such as “intuitive” and “psychology.” The wide-eyed student viewed the teacher as a door opening onto a wider world, and years later described Sowder as his “first inspiration.”32

  Ultimately, Dale’s boyhood experiences led him to confront a topic that would become central to his later career: What it meant to be successful in America, and how to go about achieving it. Traumatized by his family’s failure to prosper, he grew determined to escape the trap of rural poverty and “live in a big city and wear a white collar seven days a week.” At the same time, he struggled to accommodate his yearning for affluence with a genuine respect for moral virtues. He was inclined to judge the man with the biggest farm and the most money as the biggest success. But then he noticed that one of the Carnageys’ neighbors, a prosperous farmer, was greedy and drove his farmhands relentlessly to work harder. “The poor devil was devoured by a blind, fanatical desire for more money, more money, more money! If he had accumulated a million dollars, he would still have been driven for more,” he wrote. When compared to the unselfishness of his parents and many other ordinary farm folk, such values seemed less attractive.33