Self help messiah, p.21
Self-help Messiah, page 21
But Carnegie’s “Damned Fool Things I Have Done” file was of a different sort. “I put in that folder, month after month, written records of the damned fool things I have been guilty of,” he wrote. “I sometimes dictate these memos to my secretary, but sometimes they are so personal, so stupid that I am ashamed to dictate them, so I write them out in longhand.” The exercise shared the traditional impulse to closely examine one’s conduct and some of the entries listed customary concerns: wasting time, inefficient work habits, tardiness, sloth. But the great majority of Carnegie’s concerns, in contrast to his predecessors, did not weigh spiritual shortcomings, lapses of virtue, or character defects. Instead, they painstakingly detailed faux pas that might have offended others and lowered the esteem in which they held him.42
The entries ran the gamut of social slights and professional blunders. In December 1927, he chastised himself for verbal repetitions while instructing: “Caught myself saying ‘by the way’ at least four times when teaching the class of dentists.” Procrastination also drew his ire, as when he delayed contacting potential students to whom he had promised a course and hence offended them: “I should have written them in the middle of October, and instead I procrastinated until the 25th of November and some of them felt that I didn’t intend to fulfill my contract.” Outbursts of anger were noted: “Wasted ten minutes in an unnecessary harangue with the phone company about their shortcomings.” Failure to appreciate others drew a reprimand: “H. P. Gant made an extraordinary success as toastmaster tonight. I should have complimented him highly but I was so absorbed in myself that I neglected to speak any words of appreciation.”
The following year, Carnegie touched upon a recurring personal weakness: bursting out with generalizations that hurt or angered others. In an entry entitled “Don’t make sweeping statements that may offend someone,” he offered these details: “In the spring of 1928, I said, while teaching the 5–7 PM class, that ‘all Tammany politicians are crooks,’ or something very nearly that.” He noted that “Joseph Davern, an ardent Catholic, took a feeling exception to it. It was just at the time that the religious controversy regarding Al Smith’s religion was developing. Davern made a most excellent speech on intolerance, decrying the fact that I should make such an unguarded and unfounded accusation. I apologized.” Then in August 1928, Carnegie lamented his failure to show patience and appreciation, a defect that made a “welcoming in” response from others impossible. He visited an American Express office and grew annoyed when the clerks continued a conversation and were slow to help him. “I was peeved. My voice showed it,” he wrote. “I irritated the clerk and got very poor service in return … It effected nothing desirable whatever. I, who take money from people for telling them how to handle human nature, was as crude and ineffective as a cave man. I was ashamed of the incident.”
Carnegie regularly chastised himself for bungling interactions with others that tarnished his image. An insipid inaugural talk at one of his courses earned this rebuke: “If there’s to be any enthusiasm in these meetings, Dale Carnegie and Dale Carnegie alone must supply it … Whatever success I have had in my work has been done more by enthusiasm than any other one thing and yet I tried to open a course without this indispensible quality.” Another time, when an acquaintance complimented him on an advertisement for the course in The New York Times, he replied that it had produced disappointing results, and then overcompensated by suggesting that the man sign up for his course. “It looked like a whipped and defeated man grasping at straws, and I’m sure it had a very bad psychological effect,” he wrote. In late 1928, Carnegie botched a presentation before the board of directors of the Elks Club by standing to talk. “I immediately noticed that it was too small a group for that. In fact, one of the men asked me to sit down and be comfortable. I should have sensed this myself,” he reported. “I believe it would have been wiser for me to have seen each member of the board personally before this meeting and acquainted him with my idea.”
Carnegie drew important lessons from the self-admonishments in his “Damned Fool Things I Have Done” file. “When I get out my D.F.T. folders and re-read the criticisms I have written of myself, they do more to help and direct me than anything Solomon could have written,” he admitted. “They help me to deal with the biggest problem I shall ever face: the management of Dale Carnegie.” This sustained effort at self-management—smoothing the rough edges of relations with others, burnishing one’s personal image for maximum impact and influence—had a profound historical resonance. It represented the culture of personality’s growing power in business, one that the author had promoted publicly and now attempted to inculcate in his own life.
At the same time Carnegie was striving to internalize his own advice from Public Speaking: A Practical Course for Business Men about the necessity of shaping personality, the success of that book (and the attendant classes) dramatically raised his public profile. For the first time, Carnegie became a widely recognized authority in corporate America. A much-in-demand teacher and speaker with a growing reputation as a trusted counselor, he began to move easily in corporate circles and among business organizations.
Numerous asides in his 1926 book indicated how, just months after his return from Europe, he was emerging as a familiar figure in corporate America. Carnegie noted that he “conducted a course in public speaking for the senior officers of New York City banks,” attended luncheons at the New York Rotary Club to hear talks “in which almost every New York businessman was interested,” and trained men “in the New York City chapter of the American Institute of Banking to speak during a thrift campaign.” Further afield, he addressed the Thirteenth Annual Convention of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce, and taught a course in public speaking sponsored by that same Midwestern body.43
By 1930, Carnegie had lengthened his reach by establishing connections with some of America’s biggest corporations. A 1930 publicity pamphlet offered a photo of the teacher-author attired in a pin-striped suit with a crisp white shirt and tie, and listed the companies and business groups for whom he had conducted classes: the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, New York Credit Association, Philadelphia Association of Life Underwriters, Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania, Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, Brooklyn Union Gas Company, the Manufacturers’ Club, and many others. It also noted that his Public Speaking: A Practical Course for Business Men had become the official text of the American Banking Association and was used in educational programs in one hundred of its chapters nationally.44
Testimonial letters from corporate clients also began to pour in. A 1930 promotion for a Carnegie course sponsored by the Engineers’ Club of Philadelphia contained endorsements by delighted graduates from companies such as American Telephone and Telegraph, Westinghouse, and New York Edison Company. “It is no exaggeration to state that this course marked a definite turning point in my life,” wrote an executive from the National Broadcasting Company. A manager from the General Electric Company was almost worshipful: “This training has been a God-send to me. Many of us here at General Electric have often said, ‘Dale Carnegie will never be forgotten in our lives.’ ”45
Carnegie at a New York City newsstand around 1930, after resuming his teaching career.
Carnegie’s growing business cachet found further confirmation in a pair of articles he published in venues directed at a corporate audience. “Public Speaking for Plant Executives” appeared in the professional journal Factory and Industrial Management. Then in January 1927, he published “Why a Banker Should Study Public Speaking” in the Bulletin of the American Institute of Banking. After assuring readers of his many contacts with highly placed bankers in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, he covered many familiar bases in arguing for bankers to take a public-speaking class (preferably his): the cultivation of enthusiasm and sincerity, the assistance in overcoming fear, and the development of self-confidence. True to form, he also stressed personal qualities: “superior personality has more to do with business success than does superior knowledge … [T]he most important questions that any bank man can ask himself is, ‘How can I develop my personality?’ ” The qualities learned in a public-speaking class, he maintained, were precisely those required by the white-collar organizations in which most bankers worked: “Have you ever had the experience of sitting in these organizations and letting some man with perhaps less knowledge and less ability than yourself, stand up and run things simply because he had the courage and the knack of expressing his ideas clearly and with conviction?” The author knew they had.46
Carnegie’s prominent position as an adviser to and analyst of American business also appeared clearly in a more popular venue. From 1929 to 1931, he presented a series of pieces in American Magazine entitled “How They Got There.” Teaming with notable Kansas cartoonist Albert T. Reid—whose drawings had appeared in the Kansas City Star, Chicago Record, and New York Herald as well as national magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and McClure’s—Carnegie composed a dozen text-and-drawing panels (they covered the top one-third of a page in the magazine) that extolled the career success of many leading American business figures. These brief, colorful sketches celebrated men such as William Durant of General Motors, George Eastman of Eastman Kodak Company, Owen D. Young of General Electric, Walter Chrysler of Chrysler Motors, James G. Harbord of the Radio Corporation of American, Adolph Zukor of Paramount Pictures, and George F. Baker, the “dean of Wall street bankers.” Carnegie provided snippets of information about their private lives, brief notes on their interests and hobbies, and then tied their success to determination, a keen eye for opportunity, and a compelling personality.47
His sketch of Charles Schwab, the chairman of U.S. Steel, was typical. The business magnate had been raised in rural Pennsylvania where he had delighted in acting as ringmaster for small county fairs. Driving a hackney from railroad stations to various points, he studied in his spare time and gave music lessons to supplement his meager income. Schwab then started as a common laborer at the Carnegie Steel Mill, owned by Andrew Carnegie, and within fifteen years had risen to become president of the company. Schwab then tore up his contract for a million dollars a year in salary to ease the acquisition of Carnegie Steel by U.S. Steel Corporation, of which he was appointed chairman.48
Thus by the late 1920s, Dale Carnegie had stepped onto the national stage for the first time. Assembling a worldview attuned to a dynamic new society of consumer abundance, corporate bureaucracy, and personal fulfillment, he emerged as a skilled interpreter of modern American business culture who understood both its demands and its opportunities. Left far behind was the old “Carnagey” culture instilled by his parents, with its Victorian demands for self-denial and thrift, piety and propriety, self-control and personal character. Now the new “Carnegie” program confidently endorsed the notion that advancement depended on a twofold ability: first, to project a compelling personal image to others; and second, to interact smoothly and skillfully with them.
Carnegie’s profound insights into modern America in the late 1920s culminated the first stage of his life, one that had swept him from rural regions of the Protestant Midwest to the dynamic consumer-oriented, bureaucratic society of the urban northeast. These insights formed the building blocks of a new success ethic that began to assume a dim shape in his mind before being formulated into a wildly popular book that would take the country by storm a few years later. But the initial setting for the second stage of Carnegie’s life came in an unforeseen event. Like all Americans, he was forced to confront an economic and social disaster of unprecedented magnitude. This trauma, while unsettling, also provided great opportunity.
“Do the Thing You Fear to Do”
In the fall of 1929, the United States was devastated by biggest economic disaster in its history. The stock market plummeted in late October and then crashed as investors, businessmen, and average holders of bank accounts all over the United States panicked at the precipitous fall in prices and value. A recovery failed to materialize over the next few months. Instead the economy spiraled steadily downward into a calamitous economic failure. By the early 1930s, the Great Depression had settled in with millions of lost jobs and home foreclosures, thousands of bank failures and business bankruptcies, and a stunning expansion of poverty in every corner of the country. The figures were staggering: unemployment hovered around 25 percent, investment stood nearly 90 percent below 1929 levels, and the gross national product and consumer price index remained at about 25 percent below pre-crash figures. In this context of evaporating wealth and opportunity, an atmosphere of despair and dread settled over the United States.1
This economic tsunami hit Dale Carnegie hard but not fatally. He lost a substantial portion of his savings in the 1929 crash, joking grimly in a letter that “when I think of my record in the stock market, it seems a joke for me to be giving anybody financial advice about anything.” But over the next few years he saved “a new though small nest egg” and managed to hold on to the house he had purchased at 27 Wendover Road in Forest Hills, Queens, in New York City. His good friend Homer Croy was not so lucky. The Missouri novelist owned a home not far from Carnegie in Forest Hills, and in 1933 the sheriff evicted the Croy family when the bank foreclosed on the mortgage for nonpayment. Several unwise investments in real estate had doomed Croy, and now, in his words, “the great depression swept down upon me like a Kansas cyclone and shook me as a tornado would shake a chicken coop.”2
Several personal experiences made Carnegie acutely aware of the spreading poverty. When the parents of his devoted secretary, Abbie Connell, were about to lose their farm through foreclosure, he loaned them the large sum of $200 to save their property and told her to pay it back as she could. In late 1930, he raised about $120—mostly from his classes, with $25 from his own pocket—and purchased twelve hundred dimes to distribute at the “City Poor House” in New York. “I wish you and father could have been with me. You would have come away thanking Almighty God for the rest of your lives that you are situated as you are,” he wrote his mother. “It was pitiful to see those people living in such poverty … One old woman, a Negro, said to me, ‘I dreamed that I had a silver coin, and now you have given me one’ … Another man broke down and wept when I gave him the money … There were over 2500 people there. If you could have been with me on Christmas Day, Mother, you would never complain again.”3
But ultimately for Carnegie, the Depression loomed less as an economic trauma than as a mental and emotional challenge. Neither politically inclined nor ideologically oriented, he did not see this disaster as a crisis in capitalism, a dangerous incitement to class warfare, or a prod to rethink the regulatory role of the federal government. Instead he viewed it as a test case for the efficacy of his basic principles: positive thinking, enthusiasm, and personality development. In light of the joblessness, homelessness, and economic desperation settling in during the early 1930s, such a view may appear rather otherworldly to modern eyes. But Carnegie’s attitude, in fact, highlighted a pervasive trend in Depression-era America. Millions of middle-class citizens also saw the Depression mainly as a challenge to the resiliency of their individual fiber, as an emotional trial that required courage, confidence, and adjustment to surmount. As the historian Warren I. Susman has explained with great insight, the middle-class in the United States reacted to hard times in a conservative fashion: unsettled and shamed by failure, either actual or threatened, they did not embrace radicalism but sought to define and defend an “American Way of Life” that was threatened by circumstances and to adjust their own efforts to sustain it. In Susman’s words, the Great Depression produced “a middle-class America frightened and humiliated, sensing a lack of any order they understood in the world around them, and tending so often to internalize the blame for their fears, tending to feel shame at the inability to cope rather than overt hostility to a technological and economic order they did not always understand.” Americans did not seek to overthrow the system but to reform and repair it; they did not desire to abandon individualism for collectivism but to repair their battered sense of personal efficacy.4
Carnegie shared this middle-class reaction to the Great Depression, and he responded in several ways that reflected the middle class’s sensibilities and values. He revamped his public-speaking course to stress methods for overcoming the rampant anxieties and insecurities of the age. He wrote a celebratory book on an American folk hero, which captured a common impulse of the 1930s—the embrace of an unswerving, sentimental faith in common people. Finally, he hosted a radio show that highlighted another powerful cultural current in an atmosphere of looming economic failure: the escapist allure of celebrity. In all of these ways, Carnegie aligned himself with a mainstream culture seeking to rescue the American Way of Life from perhaps its greatest modern challenge. Ironically, the Great Depression, for all its privations, provided a great opportunity for Carnegie to begin forging a new creed of survival and success.
