Self help messiah, p.20
Self-help Messiah, page 20
But a practical development proved equally influential—a revolutionary change in the business structure. By the time Public Speaking: A Practical Course for Business Men appeared in 1926, a sweeping transformation from old-fashioned entrepreneurship to complex corporate bureaucracies was nearly complete. Beginning in the late 1800s, the individually owned companies, partnerships, and small businesses that had characterized the market revolution of the earlier nineteenth century were giving way to large corporations. In every important segment of the economy, huge business organizations with thousands of employees, dozens of managers, numerous stockholders, and complex divisions of authority and responsibility had achieved positions of dominance by the 1920s. In these rationalized business structures, a “managerial revolution” created complex bureaucracies where hosts of salaried, white-collar employees staffed various offices and groups whose endeavors ultimately converged to create and dispense the corporation’s products. “Managers were responsible for hiring and organizing the increasingly large number of white-collar workers who processed the reams of paper the corporations used,” a historian of this trend has written. These office laborers comprised “new groups of middle-class Americans who filled hierarchical corporate structures and promoted new ways of working, living, and interacting with one another.” This was precisely Carnegie’s audience by the 1920s, and he took the lead in defining new ways of acting, working, and striving for advancement in this bureaucratized business atmosphere.25
The author clearly sensed a prevailing need in his business audience. The white-collar world of corporate bureaucracy no longer valued the headstrong, self-directed entrepreneur striving diligently for his own profit and success. Instead, it valued the team player who could work with others—often many others—in a highly rationalized system for the good of the corporation. At the same time, of course, the drive for individual advancement still ran strong in this new white-collar world of modern business. Such a complex situation demanded fresh approaches at every turn—new modes of behavior, new strategies for success, new social skills attuned to bureaucracy, and new personal qualities. Carnegie repeatedly addressed such topics throughout Public Speaking: A Practical Course for Business Men. And he relentlessly advanced a central argument: the development of personality would smooth one’s interactions with others in a modern, white-collar business setting, and thus smooth the way for upward advancement and career success.
To a certain extent, Carnegie had grasped the broad direction of this economic and cultural shift in his earlier efforts. In the late 1910s, he had begun to offer advice aimed at the enhancement of personal qualities. A 1919 syllabus for his YMCA course, for example, contained brief sections on “The Power of Personality” and “Personality Can Be Developed.” Then his 1920 YMCA textbook offered tips on “Building Personality.” “Most successful men radiate achievement in their tones and their manners. When you meet them you, immediately and unconsciously, feel that they are accustomed to putting things across,” he wrote. The successful speaker, he urged, should address his audience with confidence, authority, and enthusiasm. “So when you speak, speak with might and sincerity,” the author enjoined. “Let your tones be colored with your feelings and the power of your personality will be trebled.”26
By 1926, however, personality development had become the centerpiece of Carnegie’s program. From the beginning, Public Speaking: A Practical Course for Business Men bombarded the reader with instructions for mobilizing personal traits to shape effective speech. Putting together a compelling talk, he insisted, consisted largely of “digging away down deep into your own mind and heart and life, and bringing forth some convictions and enthusiasms that are essentially yours! Yours! YOURS! Dig. Dig. Dig. It is there. Never doubt it.” He continued, “Always remember that you are the most important factor in your talk. Hear these golden words from Emerson! They contain a world of wisdom: ‘Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.’ ”27
Everyone’s personality was unique, Carnegie insisted, and no one “will talk and express themselves just as you do when you are speaking naturally. In other words, you have an individuality. As a speaker, it is your most precious possession. Cling to it. Cherish it. Develop it. It is the spark that will put force and sincerity into your speaking.” Indeed, the author maintained, instead of restraining emotion or repressing impulses one should use them in trying to reach others. “When a man is under the influence of his feelings, his real self comes to the surface,” he wrote. “The bars are down. The heat of his emotions has burned all barriers away. He acts spontaneously. He talks spontaneously. He is natural.”28
Such exhortations reached a culmination about halfway through the book in a chapter entitled “Platform Presence and Personality.” Carnegie opened with an audacious statement: “Personality—with the exception of preparation—is probably the most important factor in public address.” Personality was an elusive thing that almost defied analysis, he admitted, but its existence (and importance) was very real. Personality expressed “the whole combination of the man, the physical, the spiritual, the mental; his traits, his predilections, his tendencies, his temperament, his cast of mind, his vigor, his experience, his training, his life.” Moreover, although many personal traits were inherited, the striving individual still could improve his natural personality and “strengthen it to some extent and make it more forceful, more attractive. We can strive to get the utmost possible out of this strange thing that nature has given us. The subject is of vast importance to every one of us.”29
As the chapter unfolded, Carnegie explored how personal images could be shaped and projected toward others in a compelling manner. He began with the trait of enthusiasm. “Do nothing to dull your energy. It is magnetic. Vitality, aliveness, enthusiasm” are crucial, he wrote. Physical appearance also mattered, since good grooming and neat attire instilled self-confidence in the speaker and garnered respect from an audience. Other techniques helped enhance personality: displaying a winning smile, maintaining an upright posture with chest held high, sitting on the dais in a calm fashion, assuming a dignified manner. Indeed, Carnegie stressed, a convincing speaker must remember to “stand still and control yourself physically and that will give you an impression of mental control, of poise.” Even gestures were an expression of personality. A person’s gesture “is merely an outward expression of inward condition,” Carnegie contended. “A man’s gestures, like his toothbrush, should be very personal things. And, as all men are different, their gestures will be individual if they will only act natural.”30
The power of personality, however, consisted of more than the projection of a magnetic, forceful image. As with conducting electricity, the process of personal connection required another pole—the audience—to complete the circuit and create the charge of energy. And establishing a relationship with an audience, whether it consisted of one person or many, Carnegie insisted, required sensitivity to others’ feelings, interests, and perspectives. The three most interesting subjects in the world were sex, property, and religion, he proposed, because they involved creating, sustaining, and continuing life. But the important point to remember was “it is our sex, our property, our religion that interests us. Our interests swarm about our own egos … So remember that the people you are to talk to spend most of their time, when they are not concerned with the problems of business, in thinking about and justifying and glorifying themselves.”31
This social fact had profound implications for creating an attractive personality. “Aren’t you constantly trying to win people to your way of thinking—at home, in the office, in the market place? How do you begin?” Carnegie queried. The answer lay in “thinking about the other fellow’s views and desires, trying to find a common ground of agreement.” The personable businessman avoided confronting people verbally because that made them feel defensive. Arguing with another person, Carnegie contended, only made people more obstinate in opposition because it challenged “his opinions, and his precious, indispensable self-esteem would have been threatened; his pride would have been at stake.” Thus the shaping of a compelling, charismatic personality involved a special sensitivity to others’ feelings, a psychological awareness of the foibles of human nature that eased one’s connection with them.32
Indeed, psychology, one of Carnegie’s keen interests since the 1910s, comprised an important part of his endorsement of the personality paradigm. The connection was a natural one. The cultural shift from character to personality in early twentieth-century America was tightly intertwined with a solidifying zeitgeist stressing psychological understandings of human behavior. In the 1800s, a historian wrote, “Inspirationalists of the old school sought to nurture conscience and install virtue” as a code of conduct for individuals but by the early 1900s, “inspirationalists of the new concentrate on the cultivation of personal power and self-mastery.” In Freudian terms, he continues, through this “important shift in emphasis, the new success ideology places the enhancement of ego rather than the super-ego at the center of its message.” Carnegie stepped forward as a practical philosopher of the new personality-as-ego movement. As he asked rhetorically in a chapter devoted to making the speaker appear impressive and convincing, “Has psychology any suggestions that will prove useful to you in this connection? Emphatically, yes. Let us see what they are.”33
Carnegie’s psychological techniques included having “something to say worthwhile and to say it with contagious conviction” because of the emotional impact. As he phrased it, “the stupendously important thing in making a talk is the psychological aspect of it.” He also accented the merits of positive thought: “Think success in this course. See yourself in your imagination talking in public with perfect self-control. It is easily in your power to do this. Believe that you will succeed. Believe it firmly and you will then do what is necessary to bring success about.” He urged the successful speaker to impress upon listeners a central concept and, through repetition and suggestion, negate the influence of any antithetical, distracting concepts.34
In fact, modern business, the arena to which Carnegie turned time and again throughout Public Speaking: A Practical Course for Business Men, provided abundant opportunities for realizing the potential of personality and psychology. Shrewdly, he focused on a pair of crucial endeavors in the maturing consumer economy: selling and advertising. He pointed out that “salesmanship and modern advertising are based chiefly on suggestion,” and plunged into books such as Arthur Dunn’s Scientific Selling and Advertising (1919), which had laid out a scheme for attracting attention, winning confidence, and appealing to the egotism and pride of consumers and clients. The result was a plan that stressed personal appeal and psychological maneuver, a template for appealing to “the motives that made men act.”35
Carnegie insisted that successful salesmanship, for example, often relied on suggestion rather than logic. A novice waitress at a restaurant, Carnegie explained, might say to a customer at the end of the meal “You don’t want coffee, do you?,” thus making it simple to answer no. A more experienced waitress might ask “Would you like coffee?” and set up arguments for and against in the customer’s mind. But the best waitress always asks, “ ‘Will you have your coffee now or later?’ What happens? She has subtly assumed that there is no question about your wanting it, and she concentrates your entire attention on when you wished it served.” This strategy of encouraging positive responses, he asserted, brought results in any kind of sales.36
Carnegie posed advertising as another example of the influence of personality and psychology on modern business culture. Advertising, of course, had been developing as a vital lubricant in the smooth operation of a modern consumer economy since the late 1800s. In a 1926 address to the American Association of Advertising Agencies, President Calvin Coolidge recognized its importance, describing it as “the method by which the desire is created for better things.”
It is the most potent influence in adopting and changing the habits and modes of life, affecting what we eat, what we wear, and the work and play of the whole nation … Mass production is only possible where there is mass demand. Mass demand has been created almost entirely through the development of advertising … Modern business constantly requires publicity. It is not enough that goods are made—a demand for them must also be made.37
For Carnegie, however, advertising did more than simply sell consumer goods through publicity. It involved a deeper process of linking personal meaning, image, and self-fulfillment to the consumption of certain kinds of goods. “We are creatures of feeling, who long for comforts and pleasures,” he wrote. “We drink coffee and wear silk socks and go to the theater and sleep on the bed instead of the floor, not because we have reasoned out that these things are good for us, but because they are pleasant. So show that the things you propose will add to our comforts and pleasure, and you have touched a powerful spring of action.” More often than not, advertising utilized the psychological power of suggestion to precisely this end, subtly appealing to people’s emotions and impulses rather than to their reason. “We have come to regard Arrow collars, Royal baking powder, Heinz pickles, Gold Medal flour, Ivory soap as among the leading, if not the best, products of their kind. Why? Have we adequate reason for these judgments?” he wrote. “We have come to believe things for which no proof has been given. Prejudiced, biased, and reiterated assertions, not logic, have formulated our beliefs. We are creatures of suggestion.”38
The linkage of advertising, psychology, and the cult of personality was not peculiar to Carnegie in this period. Other cultural pioneers were making the same connection, including a popular writer immersed in the business culture of the 1920s. Bruce Barton, in The Man Nobody Knows (1925), authored a best-selling biography of Jesus that presented him as a businessman, advertising genius, and fascinating personality. He described Jesus as “the founder of modern business,” interpreting the Messiah as a corporate organizer who took “untrained men, simple men with elementary weaknesses and passions” and “molded them into an organization which carried on victoriously.” Jesus strode from the pages of the book as a skilled salesman who understood people and human motivation; indeed, “every one of the ‘principles of modern salesmanship’ on which businessmen so pride themselves, are brilliantly exemplified in Jesus’ talk and work,” wrote Barton. Jesus was also, according to the author, a shrewd ad man who understood the value of big stories, colorful language, and spreading messages. Through trenchant parables and astounding miracles, he was, in Barton’s phrase, “the great advertiser of his own day.” Perhaps most important, however, Jesus became successful because of his sparkling personality. Barton described him not as a prudish moral icon but as a fascinating, charismatic figure who had “an all-embracing fondness for folks” and attracted them with his “personal magnetism” and “consuming sincerity,” “manly vigor,” “blazing conviction,” “unwavering patience,” and a “marvelous instinct for uncovering others’ latent powers.” Ultimately, Barton contended, Jesus carried the message that God was not a punishing, wrathful entity interested only in spiritual justice but “a great Companion, a wonderful Friend, a kindly, indulgent, joy-loving Father.”39
Carnegie offered a less grandiose object lesson on the importance of personality and business success. Rather than expropriating Jesus of Nazareth, he told a more modest tale of two businessmen who had been classmates in college as engineering students. One was bright and hardworking but very old-fashioned and “conservative,” the kind of man who bought shirts at different stores in town and then kept a chart indicating which ones “laundered best, wore longest, and gave the most service per dollar invested … His mind was always on pennies.” Proud and confident of his own abilities, he nonetheless languished in a minor job after graduation, waiting for an advancement that never came. In contrast, his classmate was “a good mixer. Everyone liked him.” He looked for opportunity, worked well with others, and moved to a different city at the request of his employer to take on a special project. “Through his agreeable personality,” wrote Carnegie, this executive won the friendship of a local businessman, went into a partnership in the contracting business, and began to amass a fortune. “Today he is a multi-millionaire,” observed the author, “and one of the principal owners of Western Union.”40
Ultimately, Carnegie’s appeal to businessmen in Public Speaking: A Practical Course for Business Men bore fruit. The book’s nexus of advice on professional behavior, personal aspiration, and the social presentation of self proved well suited to white-collar workers operating in the dynamic, expanding commercial environment of 1920s America. Carnegie’s practical instructions on using speech to influence others in corporate bureaucracies rang true to his students and readers. So, too, did his more abstract reflections on the need to develop personality as a means of advancing in this commercial milieu.
But Carnegie’s authorial injunctions, in turn, rebounded to impact his own life. At a personal level, they prompted a shift in his code of behavior. At a broader level, they brought recognition and acclaim among the audience he cultivated as he became a trusted, widely recognized adviser in the very corporate culture he was helping to shape.
In December 1927, Carnegie began keeping a new file amid the voluminous collection of article clippings, interview transcripts, class syllabi, and speech notes that piled up in his office. Entitled “Damned Fool Things I Have Done,” it was a kind of irregular diary with entries listing areas in which he could improve his personal qualities and conduct. This endeavor represented an old tradition in Protestant culture, of course, dating back centuries. In the seventeenth century the Puritans had engaged in disciplined self-examination to gauge their religious purity and, it was hoped, chart their steady progress toward salvation. In the eighteenth century, figures such as Benjamin Franklin secularized the process to measure one’s “republican virtue” as both a civic responsibility and “The Way to Wealth.” In the nineteenth century, Victorian “Christian Gentlemen” constantly assessed their conduct in terms of a bourgeois character ethic of self-control, hard work, thrift, and genteel manners.41
