Self help messiah, p.12
Self-help Messiah, page 12
Carnagey’s journalistic efforts reached their apex in the last magazine article he wrote during the 1910s. In November 1918, he published “My Triumph Over Fears That Cost Me $10,000 a Year” in American Magazine. The story of an anonymous businessman who overcame his fears and climbed to the top of his profession, the piece detailed how learning to speak in public provided an important means to acquiring distinction. Its theme—a method for the individual to climb to success—reflected the larger concern that was coming to dominate its author’s worldview.24
The tale opened, in soon-to-be vintage Carnagey style, with the protagonist confessing that feelings of embarrassment, loneliness, and mental anxiety had dampened his enthusiasm for life and imprisoned him in a dead-end job. Then one day his new bride spoke out as they sat moldering in a dingy boardinghouse. “Did you ever notice that most of the boarders here are failures?” she declared. “These people stay on here because they are failures and they are failures because they do stay. Let’s get out of here and think success!” Shaken by her outburst and realizing that he “was not a good advertiser” of himself, he decided to transform his life. The couple put up portraits of Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and William Gladstone to provide examples of self-confidence. He began a program of nightly study while his wife spent evenings reading aloud from “inspirational books” such as James Allen’s As a Man Thinketh. When his wife gently pointed out that he did not speak well and impress people, he enrolled in a public-speaking course at the local YMCA. Soon his career took off as he spoke compellingly about policy issues in his company and attracted attention with his “enthusiasm” and “human interest stories.” He was soon appointed manager of the company’s St. Louis operation and a year later was sent to New York to take charge of the biggest office in the company. Finally, a prominent industrialist hired him as the vice president of one of his companies at a large salary. Now the happy couple sat in their opulent apartment on Central Park West and he credited his wife as the one who “banished my fears and inspired me with confidence.”25
Obviously, this “true story” of success was a thinly disguised parable about the usefulness of Carnagey’s own course on public speaking. Having taken to heart the lesson of self-promotion, he wasted little time in distributing hundreds of reprints of this article. He added to the original manuscript by pointing out that Dale Carnagey was the teacher of the public-speaking course and appended a postscript: “The Y.M.C.A. in your city conducts the nationally known Carnagey Course in Public Speaking—the course studied by the man whose story you have just read. You are invited to attend, without any obligation on your part, one of the sessions of this course at your Y.M.C.A.”26
Thus Carnagey, in both his teaching and writing in the mid-1910s, examined modern American culture and its emergent calculus of success. He sensed that moving upward now involved not so much determined labor, prudent self-control, and thrift as another constellation of qualities—human relations, advertising, self-promotion, and enthusiasm. As he wrote his parents in the spring of 1913 after his father sold ten acres of land at a considerable profit after holding on to it for several years: “Now you see how money is made,” Carnagey noted. “It is not by hard work.”27
Carnagey’s pedagogical and journalistic endeavors, however, soon inspired a more extensive writing project that would take up a good deal of time. Having launched his YMCA courses in 1912, and his magazine articles the following year, he sought to combine his passion for writing with his interest in teaching public speech in innovative ways. The result was his first book.
In 1915, Carnagey co-authored with Joseph Berg Esenwein, a popular “how-to” writer, a book entitled The Art of Public Speaking. It aimed for a broad audience of readers who had a yearning for self-improvement, much like his YMCA courses and magazine articles. Published by the Home Correspondence School of Springfield, Massachusetts, the volume was designed to fit into its adult-education program and encompassed many of Carnagey’s developing notions about the road to success in modern America.28
It is unclear how Carnagey became linked with the Home Correspondence School—probably either through his earlier association with the International Correspondence School or through his growing reputation from teaching evening classes at the YMCA—but there is little doubt that an association with this leading institution in the field of adult schooling gave a stamp of approval to his expertise. The Home Correspondence School had been established in 1897 and by 1910 it had grown to become one of the largest distance education schools in the United States. Enrolling more than fifty thousand students during its first dozen years, the HCS offered more than one hundred courses organized in five departments—Academic and Preparatory, Agricultural, Commercial, Normal, and Civil Service—while enlisting the services of professors from prestigious schools such as Amherst, Harvard, Brown, Hartford Theological Seminary, Cornell, Wesleyan, Dartmouth, and New York University. Typically, an HCS course, at a cost of $20, comprised forty weekly lessons involving reports or tests on each lesson that were graded, commented upon, and returned by instructors. The school clearly aimed to reach aspiring adults who had not attended college but now wanted to enhance their education so they could move upward.29
Carnagey’s co-author played a prominent role in the HCS program. A native Philadelphian, Esenwein had earned a college degree, worked for the YMCA, and served as a professor of English at Pennsylvania Military College. He then moved into journalism, becoming the manager of The Booklovers Magazine; the editor of Lippincott’s Magazine, an esteemed literary journal, from 1904 to 1914; and the editor of The Writer’s Monthly in 1915. But he became increasingly devoted to adult education, publishing instructional books on how to address popular audiences, write short stories, and create screenplays for movies. As the director of the Home Correspondence School’s literary offerings, he taught a course on short-story writing that promised a chance for potential students to “pull out of the mire of mediocrity; to be a force in the world; to take a new social position.” People with imagination and ambition could learn to write “stories that carry his or her personality out into the world.” Here was a natural partner for Carnagey.30
Carnagey and Esenwein’s The Art of Public Speaking was intended to serve both as a textbook for an HCS course and as an independent guidebook for aspiring speakers. Throughout its thirty-one chapters, Esenwein focused on technique by discussing “Efficiency Through Change of Pitch,” “Fluency Through Preparation,” “The Voice,” “Influencing by Persuasion,” among others. Carnagey eschewed technical advice in his sections to focus on themes that stressed mental preparation and emotional projection—“Feeling and Enthusiasm,” “Force,” “The Truth About Gesture,” “Thought and Reserve Power,” “Right Thinking and Personality.”
Carnagey argued that the aspiring public speaker should cultivate attitudes and attributes that created a persona of positive, willful, focused energy. These qualities, he insisted, would enhance a reader’s performance when he was called upon to address others, whether in work conferences, on social occasions, or at formal professional gatherings. He stressed several specific principles in The Art of Public Speaking.
First, Carnagey underlined the importance of projecting a confident air. As he knew from his YMCA courses, fear of simply standing before others and speaking coherently was the major roadblock hindering his students. So in this book he urged speakers to “banish the fear-attitude; acquire the confident attitude.” Confidence came from focusing “mental energy” and appearing confident and authoritative: “remember that the only way to acquire it is—to acquire it.” Willpower and resolve were essential. “Never tolerate for an instant the suggestion that your will is not absolutely efficient,” wrote Carnagey. “The way to will is to will—and the very first time you are tempted to break a worthy resolution, and you will be, you can be certain of that—make your fight then and there. You cannot afford to lose that fight.”31
He contended that controlling your thoughts offered the best way to create a confident persona. Citing the Book of Proverbs—“As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he”—Carnagey repeatedly insisted that a speaker literally could use his mental powers to shape reality. “All that a man is, all his happiness, his sorrow, his achievements, his failures, his magnetism, his weakness, all are in an amazingly large measure the direct results of his thinking … [W]e choose our characters by choosing our thoughts,” he wrote at one point. “Our trains of thoughts are hurrying us on to our destiny.” He related the story of a student in one of his classes who declared, “I will not be discouraged!” after a string of poor speeches, and worked even harder to improve his performance. “There is no power under the stars that can defeat a man with that attitude,” he concluded.32
Second, Carnagey maintained that the public speaker should use enthusiasm to create a vital connection to his audience. Insisting that “sincerity is the very soul of eloquence,” he urged readers to be absorbed in their subject and to choose language that conveyed their conviction. In one passionate passage, Carnagey drew upon his acting background. “There is only one way to get feeling into your speaking: you must actually ENTER INTO the character you impersonate, the cause you advocate, the case you argue—enter into it so deeply that it clothes you, enthralls you, possesses you wholly,” he declared. “Genuine feeling in a speech is bone and blood of the speech itself and not something that may be added to it or subtracted at will.” Not only audiences but modern society demanded enthusiasm. “Effective speech must reflect the era,” he contended. “This is not a rose water age … This is the century of trip hammers, of overland expresses that dash under cities and through mountain tunnels, and you must instill this spirit into your speech if you would move a popular audience.”33
Third, Carnagey insisted that effective speech demanded a projection of inner strength by the speaker. He must realize that “the true source of power lies within himself” and, accordingly, gather, strengthen, and focus his mental resources to truly communicate with an audience. “If the thought beneath your words is warm, fresh, spontaneous, a part of your self, your utterance will have breath and life,” he maintained. For Carnagey, “The man within is the final factor. He must supply the fuel. The audience, or even the man himself, may add the match—it matters little which, only so that there be fire … If your speech lacks fire, it is dead.”34
Fourth, Carnagey contended that compelling speakers must recognize the limitations of self-assertion and avoid the appearance of conceit and egoism that could alienate an audience. He quoted Voltaire—“we must conceal self-love”—and offered this aphorism: “Self-preservation is the first law of life, but self-abnegation is the first law of greatness—and of art.” A shrewd speaker persuaded people by appealing to their interests and points of view. “The successful pleader must convert his arguments into terms of his hearers’ advantage,” Carnagey contended. “Mankind are still selfish. They are interested in what will serve them. Expunge from your address your own personal concern and present your appeal in terms of the general good.” This notion of deploying oneself in light of other people’s interests and concerns fascinated Carnagey. “A good conversationalist who monopolizes all the conversation will be voted a bore because he denies others the enjoyment of self-expression, while a mediocre talker who listens interestedly may be considered a good conversationalist because he permits his companions to please themselves through self-expression,” he wrote. “Dynamite the ‘I’ out of your conversation.”35
Finally, Carnagey urged readers to understand that people’s psychological makeup offered a key to reaching them. Convinced that people are essentially emotional beings, he maintained that “the public speaker’s ability to arouse men to action depends almost wholly on his ability to touch their emotions … The speeches that will live have been charged with emotional force.” Contrary to old-fashioned thinking, modern research had shown that people seldom relied on reason and logic but were propelled by impulses of which they were only vaguely aware: a “natural respect” for authority, a tendency “to follow the line of least resistance” in mental efforts, emotional reactions that had been shaped by “our environments.” So speakers should think like modern advertisers, Carnagey argued, who created publicity slogans that conveyed confidence and relied on the power of suggestion, as with a large department store that spent “fortunes on one advertising slogan: ‘Everybody is going to the big store.’ That makes everybody want to go.”36
Carnagey’s battery of recommendations culminated in a chapter entitled “Right Thinking and Personality.” He announced the main point in the first sentence: “The speaker’s most valuable possession is personality—that indefinable, imponderable which sums up what we are, and makes us different from others; that distinctive force of self which operates appreciably on those whose lives we touch,” he wrote. “It is personality alone that makes us long for higher things.” Here, again, was a marked departure from the Victorian standard of “character”—the set of internalized moral principles that kept the individual on the path of virtue—in favor of a more modern creed. “Let it not be suspected for one moment that all this is merely a preachment on the question of morals,” he wrote. Achievement in the modern world “touches the whole man—his imaginative nature, his ability to control his feelings, the mastery of his thinking faculties, and—perhaps most largely—his power to will and to carry his volitions into effective action.”37
For Carnagey, in other words, “personality” embodied self-expression rather than self-denial. It projected inner emotions and imagination, expressed mental energy and desires, and presented a set of magnetic, authoritative images that would seduce the audience into accepting what the speaker was saying. And he urged aspiring readers to focus their thoughts and willpower with this goal in mind. “You must fight just as though life depended on the victory,” he declared, “and indeed your personality may actually lie in the balance.”38
Thus in the mid-1910s—through new methods of teaching, magazine writing, and his first book—Dale Carnagey created the foundation for the work that would take him to worldwide fame and make him an exemplar of modern American success. At the YMCA, he first engaged a new white-collar corporate world whose inhabitants were hungry for techniques to guide them through an unfamiliar bureaucratic maze of meetings, group work, and human relations. In popular magazines, he engaged a new urban culture of commercialized leisure where audiences were eagerly embracing celebrity, inspiration, and entertainment. In his book, he connected public speech to personality and the dynamics of modern achievement. Such concerns would engage him for the rest of his life.
Mind Power and Positive Thinking
In How to Win Friends and Influence People, there appeared on the first printed page, even before the title page, a promise that the book would “make the principles of psychology easy for you to apply in your daily contacts.” Then in his introduction, a few pages later, famed broadcaster Lowell Thomas described the book’s author as a master of “applied psychology.” Dale Carnegie explained in his preface that he had prepared for writing the book by “plowing through erudite tomes on psychology.” He quoted an observation from William James, the famous psychologist, that most of us make use of only a small part of our “mental resources,” and declared, “the sole purpose of this book is to help you discover, develop, and profit by those dormant and unused assets.”1
This strong psychological emphasis continued throughout the book. Carnegie quoted frequently from James, other theorists such as Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler, and psychological writers such as Harry A. Overstreet and Henry C. Link. He discussed the impact of mental influences on the workings of human relations, admonishing people for their lack of awareness about the great power of psychological impulses in human affairs. He contended that even the most educated individuals often “learn to read Virgil and master the mysteries of calculus without ever discovering how their own minds function.” Carnegie reserved his greatest enthusiasm, however, for a popular strain of psychological thought that had swept through American culture in the early 1900s: New Thought, or positive thinking. This school maintained that the mind, by focusing on affirmative thoughts, could shape beneficial events in the material world. Carnegie quoted an influential acolyte of New Thought—“Picture in your mind the able, earnest, useful person you desire to be, and the thought you hold is hourly transforming you into that particular person.”2
Where did Carnegie’s preoccupation with psychology—it was a crucial element in everything he advocated in his best-selling book—come from? It originated in the mid-1910s, when the aspiring teacher and writer began a program of intellectual self-improvement that first brought him into contact with this revolution in modern thinking initially launched by Freud, James, and others. As he prepared to write a textbook for his expanding YMCA courses, he immersed himself in popular psychology, particularly New Thought. The result was a cast of mind that stressed mental impulses, emotional needs, and unconscious desires in human behavior. This way of thinking would persist for the rest of his life and influence everything Carnegie wrote about the pursuit of success in modern America.
