Self help messiah, p.19
Self-help Messiah, page 19
The jaunty writing style of Carnegie’s new book also struck the reader. Freed from earlier constraints imposed by editors, collaborators, and his own inexperience, Carnegie now developed a mode of expression that was uniquely his own. He utilized several elements: a conversational, even breezy tone; frequent dashes of inspiration; an abundance of anecdotes; and many informal asides and flashes of dry humor. An opening passage in the book, dealing with the development of confidence, illustrated the emerging Carnegie style. “Is there the faintest shadow of a reason why you should not be able to think as well in a perpendicular position before an audience as you can when sitting down? Surely, you know there is not,” he wrote.
Do not imagine that your case is unusually difficult … William Jennings Bryan, battle-marked veteran that he was, admitted that in his first attempts his knees fairly smote together. Mark Twain, the first time he stood up to lecture, felt as if his mouth were filled with cotton and his pulse was speeding for some prize cup. Grant took Vicksburg and led one of the greatest armies the world had ever seen, yet when he attempted to speak in public, he admitted he had something very like locomotor ataxia … So take heart.9
But much of the significance of Public Speaking: A Practical Course for Business Men lay in its subtitle. With clear intent, he shaped a volume aimed squarely at the desires, perspectives, and needs of millions of men who were trying to make their way in American business. From its sensibility to its examples, its references to its style, its techniques to its conclusions, the author envisioned his reader as an individual seeking to navigate a course through the dynamic business atmosphere of 1920s America.
This struck a chord as the pulsating commercial climate of the decade proved enormously receptive to Carnegie’s efforts. The 1920s marked an era of business prosperity when, in the aftermath of World War I, the manufacture, sale, and consumption of goods reached unprecedented heights in American history. The pursuit of business became identified in the public imagination not only with the advancement of the striving individual but with the advancement of the country. Calvin Coolidge, having acceded to the presidency in 1923 after the death of Warren G. Harding, helped set the dominant tone of public discussion with his pronouncements. “The chief business of the American people is business,” he declared in a much-publicized 1925 speech. Another commentary elevated business activity to the level of religion. “The man who builds a factory builds a temple. The man who works there worships there, and to each is due not scorn and blame, but reverence and praise,” Coolidge intoned.10
Indeed, booming business expansion had become a fact of life in the United States in the 1920s and its impact appeared everywhere. Most significantly, the consumer economy that had been slowly gathering force since the 1890s reached a takeoff stage and rocketed into the economic stratosphere. With the spread of electricity to more than 60 percent of the nation’s homes by 1925, and the perfection of mass-production techniques in many industries, the factory system churned out a vast array of goods ranging from canned food to ready-made clothing, furniture to washing machines, vacuum cleaners to golf clubs, all of which were eagerly consumed by the middle class. From 1922 to 1929, unemployment dropped to around 3 percent, prices held steady, and the gross national product swelled from $70 billion to $100 billion. In this bountiful atmosphere, the automobile emerged as both a leading commodity within and a larger symbol of the consumer revolution. As the pioneering automaker Henry Ford put it during the 1920s, his popular product (first the Model T, replaced by the more stylish Model A in 1927) was moving the nation closer to realizing a utopian vision of abundance. “The automobile, by enabling people to get about quickly and easily, gives them a chance to find out what is going on in the world,” he wrote, “which leads them to a larger life that requires more food, more and better goods, more books, more music, more of everything.”11
The consumer surge of the 1920s altered the American landscape. Under its influence, certain institutions and ideas achieved a newfound prominence. Department stores and grocery chains became staples of middle-class economic life in urban areas, serving as commercial conduits for the flood of goods from factories to homes. The A&P grocery stores, for instance, expanded from 5,000 sites in 1922 to 17,500 in 1928. The discipline of “domestic science”—which trained young women to become efficient managers of the consumer-centered home and masters of newfangled techniques involving electric appliances, cleaning products, and nutritious diets—emerged as a mainstay of the educational curriculum. Installment buying became ubiquitous, with consumer credit purchases rising dramatically, from $4.5 billion at the start of the decade to $7.1 billion at its conclusion. On the cultural front, the allure of material goods helped shape a new set of values, replacing Victorian self-restraint with self-fulfillment, salvation with self-realization, and scarcity with plenty. By the 1920s, as one historian has described, American society had become “preoccupied with consumption, with comforts and bodily well-being, with luxury, spending, and acquisition.”12
A particularly telling indicator of consumer prosperity in the 1920s appeared in social and political ideology, as prominent spokesmen for corporate America articulated a business ideology often described as a “people’s capitalism.” This position, according to its leading historian, represented “an enhanced vision of enlightened private orders enlisting in the national service and working with public agencies to advance the public good.” Figures such as Owen D. Young of General Electric, Edward A. Filene of Filene’s Department Stores, and Secretary of Commerce (and then president) Herbert Hoover, rather than defending the unfettered pursuit of profit, promoted a capitalist creed that embraced rapprochement with organized labor, efficient production and management, and collaboration with government. This approach of enlightened self-interest, they argued, would overwhelm all social divisions and economic problems with a flood of prosperity. From such developments sprang a full-blown culture of consumerism that dominated 1920s America. This bountiful “land of desire,” as merchant John Wanamaker once termed it, promised a heightened standard of living, sought public policies to achieve that goal, and redefined happiness in terms of material abundance.13
To a certain extent, of course, Carnegie had been aware of America’s evolving business dynamism in his earlier career and intermittently had addressed issues emerging from the maelstrom of corporate competition and business success. In his YMCA textbook, he had praised Worthington C. Holman’s Ginger Talks: The Talks of a Sales Manager to His Men (1905), a collection of inspiring pep talks for salesmen. “Selling goods is a battle and only fighters can win out in it,” Holman had written. “Take your courage with you when you enter the selling game.” Carnegie also explicated the case of John H. Patterson, the president of the National Cash Register Company, who had demonstrated modern management skills by clearly explaining the advantages of the company’s latest, and more expensive, cash register model “that ended with the agents on their feet and cheering wildly.” Carnegie’s growing awareness of his business clientele also informed the promotional literature for his course. In a 1917 advertising pamphlet, he had noted that many students profited from his course in “their business interviews, sales letters, and advertisements. This training is so valuable for business intercourse that New York City banks have employed Mr. Carnagey to drill their employees in public speaking.” The pamphlet also included endorsement letters from several course graduates in the real estate, advertising, and insurance fields.14
But now, after returning from Europe with a revived dedication to his teaching career, Carnegie embraced America’s vibrant business culture completely and enthusiastically. Public Speaking: A Practical Course for Business Men presented numerous guidelines for success in the commercial world, which were woven seamlessly into the fabric of 1920s business boosterism. From the beginning of the project, the author explained, he had aimed the book at a business audience. “In my opinion, the ideal text on this subject for businessmen must have something besides colorless knowledge,” he wrote in a 1925 letter. “It must have sweep and scope and spirit. It must have inspiration as well as perspiration. It must have sentences that glow and breathe and march. Such has been my ideal.”15
Carnegie’s basic argument was simple. His new book contended that public-speaking skills would propel their holder upward in the business structure of 1920s America. “More than eighteen thousand businessmen, since 1912, have been members of the various public speaking courses conducted by the author,” Carnegie stated in the opening sentence of his book. And most of them enrolled for the same reason. He quoted one of his students: “I want to get my thoughts together in a logical order and I want to be able to say my say clearly and convincingly before a business group or audience.” Carnegie’s first example was the head of a Philadelphia manufacturing establishment, who parlayed techniques learned from the Carnegie course into a high-profile position in the business and civic life of his city. “Think of what additional self-confidence and the ability to talk more convincingly in business will mean to you,” Carnegie declared. “Think of what it may mean and what it ought to mean, in dollars and cents.” In fact, he added, many of the country’s leading business figures endorsed the value of public speaking, as quotes from the steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, the railroad kingpin and later U.S. senator Chauncey M. Depew, and the meatpacking magnate Philip D. Armour illustrated.16
Upon this foundation, the book constructed an edifice that was part instruction, part inspiration. Carnegie’s practical advice for businessmen centered on the techniques that he had been advancing over the past fourteen years: speaking plainly yet forcefully, preparing assiduously, briskly opening a talk, convincingly closing one, keeping an audience’s attention, exuding confidence, utilizing dramatic or colorful illustrations of main points, and using natural gestures. He also included much advice on warming up and loosening the vocal cords, relaxing the throat, and improving articulation. At the same time, the author larded his text with exhortations aimed at exciting the emotions and pumping up the enthusiasm of his readers-cum-speakers. Those who successfully addressed others, Carnegie insisted, projected conviction. “Aren’t you unconsciously drawn to the speaker who, you feel, has a real message in his head and heart that he zealously desires to communicate to your head and heart? That is half the secret of speaking,” he contended. “People cluster around the energetic speaker, the human dynamo of energy like wild geese around a field of autumn wheat.”17
While delineating such skills provided the structure of the book, its basic energy flowed from their application to the business world. Carnegie peppered readers with a barrage of quotations from literary figures such as William Shakespeare, William Butler Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, and Mark Twain; politicians such as Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Ulysses S. Grant, William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, and, most often, Abraham Lincoln; religious figures such as Martin Luther, Dwight L. Moody, Henry Ward Beecher, and Harry Emerson Fosdick; and philosophers Herbert Spencer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James. But time and time again, he brought the discussion around to the modern business world and its issues, needs, and perspectives.
From the outset, Carnegie defined businessmen as his natural audience, as the group most likely to utilize the gratifying results to be garnered from his course. “It has been the author’s professional duty as well as his pleasure to listen to and criticize six thousand speeches a year each season since 1912,” he explained near the beginning of the text. “These were made, not by college students, but by mature business and professional men.” Observers at the closing banquet of one of his speaking classes in New Jersey were astonished to hear a series of poised, confident speeches “made by businessmen who had been tongue-tied with audience fear a few months previously. They were not incipient Ciceros, those New Jersey businessmen; they were typical of the businessmen one finds in any American city.” Indeed, the author continued, his successful students were not unusually brilliant. “For the most part, they were the ordinary run of businessmen that you will find in your own home town.”18
As he proceeded through his lessons, Carnegie consistently drew upon business situations or dilemmas to explain techniques in the art of constructing persuasive oral presentations. “Let us suppose that you have decided to speak on your business or profession” was a typical preface for an instructional point. When discussing the advantages of clear, concise organization over memorization when addressing others, he asked, “When you have an important business interview, do you sit down and memorize, verbatim, what you are going to say? Of course not. You reflect until you get your main ideas clearly in mind.” Upon considering the importance of presenting a firm conclusion, he wrote, “Your problem, perhaps, will be how to close a simple talk before a group of businessmen. How shall you set about it?” The issue of putting figures and sums in the most favorable light elicited this illustration: “For example, a life insurance president, addressing the sales organization of his company, impressed his men with the low cost of insurance in this fashion. ‘The man of thirty-four who smokes a quarter’s worth of cigars daily can stay with his family longer, and leave them three thousand dollars more, by spending his cigar money for insurance.’ ”19
Finally, throughout Public Speaking: A Practical Course for Business Men, Carnegie summoned famous American businessmen as expert witnesses to buttress his arguments. At the outset of many chapters, for example, he presented their epigrammatic statements. John G. Shedd, the president of Marshall Field and Company, and Walter H. Cottingham, the president of the Sherwin-Williams Company, both testified to the value of enthusiasm at the beginning of a chapter entitled “Keeping the Audience Awake.” The railroad mogul E. H. Harriman commented on the need for commitment and hard work for the chapter “Essential Elements in Successful Speaking.” Eugene Grace, the president of Bethlehem Steel Corporation, prefaced “The Secret of Good Delivery” by stressing the importance of concentrated energy: “Do one thing at a time, and do that one thing as if your life depended on it.”20
Carnegie often drew on the examples of legendary business figures to illustrate his contention that wealthy men tended to lead very simple lives and cultivate plain habits, qualities that readers should emulate. “John D. Rockefeller, Sr., had a leather couch in his office at 26 Broadway, and took a midday nap each day. The late J. Ogden Armour used to retire at nine o’clock, and get up at six,” the author wrote. “The late John H. Patterson, President of the National Cash Register Company, neither smoked nor drank. Frank Vanderlip, at one time president of the largest bank in America, eats only two meals a day. Milk and old-fashioned ginger wafers constituted Harriman’s midday meal … Andrew Carnegie’s favorite dish was oatmeal and cream.”21
One of Carnegie’s deployments of legendary American businessmen, however, reached to a deeper level of analysis. Discussing the need for using concrete cases to support generalizations, he quoted from a business article that showed how leading executives were developing extensive organizations. “Woolworth once told me that his was essentially a one-man business for years. Then he ruined his health, and he awakened to the fact that if his business was to expand as he hoped, he would have to share the managerial responsibilities,” wrote the author. “Eastman Kodak in its earlier stages consisted mainly of George Eastman, but he was wise enough to create an efficient organization long ago … Standard Oil, contrary to the popular notion, never was a one man organization after it grew to large dimensions. J. P. Morgan, although a towering giant, was an ardent believer in choosing the most capable partners and sharing the burden with them.”22
This observation on a broader trend in modern business highlighted an important aspect of Carnegie’s message. In the extensive new business structures that had evolved in 1920s America, indeed throughout the early twentieth century, an unfamiliar figure had appeared: the white-collar executive. Trying to maneuver in a strange new world, he stood badly in need of a new prescription for career advancement. Carnegie provided one.
Carnegie believed that in the modern business world a fresh requirement had emerged for moving ahead. “According to experiments conducted by the Carnegie Institute of Technology, personality has more to do with business success than has superior knowledge,” he explained. “This pronouncement is as true of speaking as of business.” As a result, Public Speaking: A Practical Course for Business Men bombarded readers with advice on how to cultivate and project attractive personal images. A compelling speech, Carnegie insisted, expressed your personality. Putting it together, in his words, meant “the assembling of your thoughts, your ideas, your convictions, your urges … Your whole existence has been filled with feelings and experiences. These things are lying deep in your subconscious mind as thick as pebbles on the seashore. Preparation means thinking, brooding, recalling, selecting the ones that appeal to you the most, polishing them, working them into a pattern, a mosaic of your own.” In order to reach listeners—especially colleagues, clients, buyers, and consumers—the modern businessman must go beyond professional competence, mastery of facts, a determined work ethic, and commitment to quality. He must do more than sell his product; he must sell himself.23
Where did this growing emphasis on personality come from? In part, it stemmed from the broader culture, where the relentless process of erosion that had been under way since the late 1800s had gradually undermined the old Victorian mind-set. With the decline of a producer-oriented economy of scarcity with its attendant values of hard work, self-control, self-denial, thrift, and character, an emerging consumer economy of abundance had emerged to create a “culture of personality” that stressed self-fulfillment, self-expression, and self-gratification. Thus a changing socioeconomic structure and a redefinition of self intersected. “The older vision [of character] no longer suited personal or social needs,” one historian concluded; “the newer vision [of personality] seemed particularly suited for the problems of self in a changed social order, the developing consumer mass society.”24
