Self help messiah, p.23
Self-help Messiah, page 23
This litany of disappointment continued during his presidency, with a succession of Union military disasters during the early years of the Civil War. “Failure and defeat were not new experiences to Lincoln,” wrote Carnegie. “He had known them all his life; they did not crush him; his faith in the ultimate triumph of his cause remained firm, his confidence unshaken.” By 1864, when General Ulysses S. Grant’s dogged pursuit of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had run up enormous casualties, many Northerners denounced him as a heartless butcher. “Year by year his laughter had grown less frequent; the furrows in his face had deepened; his shoulders had stooped,” wrote Carnegie. “He said to a friend, ‘I feel as though I shall never be glad again.’ ”21
Lincoln’s proclivity for melancholia exacerbated such ordeals. In New Salem during the 1830s, the death of his sweetheart, Ann Rutledge, sent him plummeting into depression. “He couldn’t sleep. He wouldn’t eat,” Carnegie related. “He repeatedly said that he didn’t want to live, and he threatened to kill himself. His friends became alarmed, took his pocket-knife away, and watched to keep him from throwing himself into the river.” An unhappy marriage drained him emotionally, and the death of perhaps his favorite son, Willie, sank him into a profound despair. One of his best friends, law partner William Herndon, claimed, “If Lincoln ever had a happy day in twenty years, I never knew of it. A perpetual look of sadness was his most prominent feature. Melancholy dripped from him as he walked.”22
But Lincoln overcame the great disappointments of his life, Carnegie stressed, by means of several habits that he cultivated over the years. In early life, he imbibed a capacity for hard work. Life on the frontier demanded unceasing labor, and when his family moved to Illinois “Abe helped to fell trees, erect a cabin, cut brush, clear the land, break fifteen acres of sod with a yoke of oxen, plant it in corn, split rails and fence the property in. The next year he worked as a hired man in the neighborhood, doing odd jobs for farmers: plowing, pitching hay, mauling rails, butchering hogs.” Lincoln also discovered a thirst for knowledge as he studied hard and, because of the high cost of paper, “wrote on a board, with a charcoal stick. Sometimes he ciphered on the flat sides of the hewn logs that formed the cabin walls.” Lincoln devoured books by Shakespeare, Burns, Blackstone, Gibbon, and Tom Paine, often walking around with an open book in his hand. “When he struck a knotty passage, he shuffled to a standstill, and concentrated on it until he had mastered the sense,” Carnegie wrote. “He kept on studying, until he had conquered twenty or thirty pages, kept on until dusk fell and he could no longer see to read.”23
Lincoln also survived and prospered because of his devotion to several principles that Carnegie also cherished. He fought melancholy with humor and a determination to think positively about the future, whether it was his legal career or the conclusion of the Civil War. Like the author, Lincoln became a skilled public speaker as a method of gaining self-confidence and reaching people. As a youth, out working in the fields, “he would now and then drop the grub-hoe or hay-fork, mount a fence, and repeat the speeches he had heard the lawyers make down at Rockport or Boonville. At other times he mimicked the shouting, hard-shell Baptist preachers who held forth in the Little Pigeon Creek church on Sundays.” Upon moving to New Salem and deciding to seek political office, he learned to speak in public and “discovered that he had an unusual ability to influence other men by his speech.” In the 1850s, in heated debates over the expansion of slavery, he spoke passionately as a man “stirred to the depths by a mighty wrong, a Lincoln pleading for an oppressed race, a Lincoln touched and moved and lifted up by a moral grandeur.” In Carnegie’s view, this rhetorical trajectory peaked in the president’s second inaugural address, where he presented “an address that sounded like the speech of some great character in drama. It was like a sacred poem.”24
Finally, Carnegie’s Lincoln achieved success through an understanding of human relations. He grasped the importance of several principles that enhanced his ability to influence people: appreciating others’ point of view, soliciting positive responses, handling people deftly instead of denigrating or attacking them. Once, when a subordinate carried an order to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the voluble, strong-willed cabinet officer burst out, “If the President gave such an order he is a damned fool.” Upon hearing this, Lincoln replied mildly, “If Stanton said I was a damned fool, then I must be, for he is nearly always right. I’ll just step over and see him.” When Stanton convinced him the order was harmful, the president withdrew it. Lincoln explained, “I cannot add to Mr. Stanton’s troubles. His position is the most difficult in the world … The pressure upon him is immeasurable and unending … I do not see how he survives, why he is not crushed and torn to pieces. Without him I would be destroyed.” Another time, after the Battle of Gettysburg, when General George Meade let the Southern general Robert E. Lee escape with his army, a furious Lincoln fired off a chastising letter to the Union commander. But after pondering the situation, he never sent the missive. According to Carnegie, Lincoln concluded that “if I had been awake as many nights as he had, and had seen as much blood, I might have let Lee escape, too.” Through such actions, the president won the respect and loyalty of nearly everyone in the government and army.25
If Carnegie’s portrait of Lincoln as a modern success icon inspired an audience whose confidence had been shaken by the Great Depression, another dimension of Lincoln the Unknown proved equally appealing. Throughout the text, the author presented his subject as a man of the people. Carnegie’s Lincoln was a heroic figure, to be sure, but one whose triumph amid the greatest crisis in American history could be traced to his profound respect for and identification with the common man. The ability to surmount overwhelming public problems, the author suggested, lay in the virtues and decency of ordinary Americans.
Here Carnegie did not labor alone. In fact, he was part of a larger cultural crusade launched by a host of writers, artists, journalists, and public leaders during the Depression era to locate national survival in the traditions of hardworking, simple citizens who formed the backbone of the republic. As popular poet Carl Sandburg decreed in his 1936 book-length poem The People, Yes:
The people yes,
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it.
The historian Warren Susman has pointed out that 1930s culture became obsessed with “finding and glorifying an American Way of Life” rooted in the practices and loyalties of common folk. This “myth of the people,” as he termed it, was part of a “larger search for mythic and symbolic sources of identity.” The trauma brought on by economic collapse in the 1930s, many believed, could be ameliorated by reliance on the hardy values and practices that had sustained “the folk” in the past.26
Indeed, evidence of Depression-era “sentimental populism” appeared everywhere in American life. A great wave of nostalgia and tradition washed over the United States as a variety of cultural detectives uncovered and investigated the sturdy elements of ordinary American life. Norman Rockwell, the people’s artist, dispensed sentimental paintings of village life and middle-class rituals throughout the decade while the popular folksinger Woody Guthrie conveyed a democratic optimism in his music. Politician Huey Long’s “every man a king” rhetoric invoked the virtue of the people as did composer Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. Critic Van Wyck Brooks’s Makers and Finders series exalted the democratic tradition of American letters while regionalist painters such as Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry depicted the workaday heroism of rural Midwesterners. Archibald MacLeish called for a new poetry in the mold of everyday public speech while Lewis Mumford promoted his agenda for reintegrating industrial technology with the “culture of the folk.” Industrialist Henry Ford created Greenfield Village, a collection of historical homes, churches, public buildings, and artifacts of common life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and made it into one of the premiere tourist attractions in the nation. This sentimental populist upsurge, according to one assessment, “embodied a fascination with the folk and its culture, past and present … a kind of collective identification with all of America and its people.”27
Carnegie fully embraced this culture of the folk. In fact, he immersed himself in it, destroying the few chapter drafts of his Lincoln book he had completed in Europe and, instead, traveling to rural central Illinois, where he “met, walked, talked, and dreamed with folks who knew authentic tales [about Lincoln]. He came to know the man as he was—not as he might have been, or as historians think he should have been.” He came to “almost worship Lincoln,” as he admitted to one journalist, as “the simple railsplitter who made his most dramatic speeches in short-legged trousers and minus a collar.” He haunted Lincoln’s home and law office in Springfield, stomped through the woods and fields in areas adjacent to where Lincoln had lived as a younger man, and wrote part of the book under branches of massive oak trees at New Salem where his subject had strolled decades earlier. Indeed, Carnegie’s near-mystical encounters at New Salem—“I used to go there alone on summer nights when the whip-poor-wills were crying in the woods along the bank of the Sangamon, when the moonlight outlined Rutledge’s tavern against the sky; and it stirred me to realize that on just such nights, about a hundred years ago, young Abe Lincoln and Ann Rutledge had walked over this same ground arm in arm in the moonlight”—unwittingly reflected the larger populist impulses of the 1930s. The pioneer village that captured the author’s imagination was, in fact, a historical reconstruction funded by Roosevelt’s New Deal and completed by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the early 1930s.28
Carnegie displaying his lifelong love of dogs, dating back to his boyhood days on the farm and his pet, Tippy.
Carnegie’s Lincoln took shape as a product of the American folk and their sturdy, unpretentious, and virtuous habits. He came from a desperately poor background, born in the winter of 1809 “on a bed of poles covered with corn husks … [as] the February wind blew the snow through the cracks between the logs and drifted it across the bearskin that covered Nancy Hanks and her baby.” He endured terrible poverty as a youth and struggled to make a livelihood through early adulthood in the pioneer environs of rural Illinois. But in New Salem he plunged into the democratic political process, “going from cabin to cabin, shaking hands, telling stories, agreeing with every one, and making speeches whenever and wherever he could find a crowd.” Even after becoming a successful lawyer in Springfield, he maintained common habits and could be seen walking about town without a coat or collar, with “only one gallus holding up his trousers, and when a button came off he whittled a peg and pinned things together with that.”29
During the 1858 debates with Douglas, Lincoln’s supporters drove him about in a farm wagon pulled by mules while his opponent traveled the state in a fine carriage drawn by white horses and appeared in fashionable suits and hats. Lincoln, in Carnegie’s words, “detesting what he called ‘fizzlegigs and fireworks,’ traveled in day coaches and freight trains and carried a battered old carpet-bag, and green cotton umbrella with a handle gone and a string tied around the middle to keep it from flapping open.” He kept a common touch after assuming the presidency, frequently demonstrating great leniency to ordinary solders in the Union Army who had broken military rules and appealed to him for pardon. While Lincoln distrusted the highhanded impulses of professional military officers, “he loved the volunteers on whom he had to depend for winning the war—men who, like himself, had come from the forest and the farm.”30
Thus Carnegie’s mining of a usable past as a writer paralleled his efforts as a teacher in the early 1930s. Both undertakings sought to help Americans survive the travails of the Depression by providing emotional sustenance and principles for coping. So, too, did another project. In this same era, he became involved with radio, a medium having an increasingly powerful impact on popular life in America. As with President Roosevelt and his fireside chats, Carnegie used it to broadcast his belief in the power of personality and to reach new heights of influence.
In the late summer of 1933, a series of newspaper stories around the United States announced a new radio show set to appear on the NBC network’s flagship station in New York, WEAF. On August 20, the popular lecturer, teacher, and author Dale Carnegie would begin hosting a weekly half-hour program entitled Little Known Facts About Well Known People. Each Sunday afternoon starting at five thirty, he would treat famous individuals from the past and present, and “endeavor to stress the human side of his subjects, bringing to the microphone interesting facts about each with which the general public is not familiar.” The show, sponsored by Maltex Cereal and promoted by the Samuel C. Croot Advertising Company, also featured announcer John Holbrook and the Harold Sanford Orchestra. This foray into radio gave a great boost to Carnegie’s national stature. Not only did his entry into a wildly popular new medium support his efforts as a teacher and lecturer but it enhanced his writing career when a number of his radio stories were collected and published as a book in 1934.31
Lowell Thomas had given Carnegie a powerful assist in this undertaking. Already established with Today’s News, his own daily program on NBC, Thomas had begun attracting a mass audience that would make him one of the most popular figures in American radio over the next forty years. His patented greeting (“Good evening, everybody”) and sign-off (“So long until tomorrow”) were already becoming hallmarks, as was his warm, resonant voice. Thomas had urged NBC to give his ex–business manager a shot. The Croot Company had convinced Thomas to appear on Carnegie’s first show and introduce him to the radio audience. In return, the new radio host featured him as his first biographical subject, asserting, “Lowell Thomas is one of the most extraordinary men I have ever known.”32
Carnegie as he launches his NBC radio show, Little Known Facts About Well Known People, in 1933.
Carnegie’s show launched successfully, although with a shaky beginning. Initially, he was knocked off-kilter by the unfamiliar shock of the broadcasting studio’s barely controlled chaos. “My first broadcast was far from satisfactory to me,” he wrote; “there was a tremendous amount of confusion in the room and the orchestra leader was going around talking to all the members of the orchestra while I was speaking. It was my first time on the air and the result was that I was a bit confused. In fact, all of this noise and talking darned near drove me nuts.” He derived solace from the fact, however, that the Maltex Company and the advertising agency seemed pleased with the show. A friend, J. R. Bolton of the Advertising Club of New York, also judged the initial effort successful and complimented its host on “the wonderful broadcast last Sunday afternoon, and the splendid start you have made in the series.” Carnegie hit his stride in the second broadcast as he adapted to studio conditions, tightened his material, and improved his delivery. Radio success, he quickly concluded, relied on the same thing as public-speaking success. “You have got to put your own personality in it,” he related. “If I had Kipling writing my speeches for me, he would probably write speeches that were a thousand times better than mine, but I couldn’t get up before the microphone and put any enthusiasm in them because they wouldn’t fit me any more than Kipling’s clothes would fit me. The more I study the art of self-expression, the more I am convinced that each man must be himself, with all his faults, and not imitate others.”33
Over the next two years, Little Known Facts About Well Known People offered radio listeners an array of biographical sketches deftly drawn and shaded with the Carnegie touch. They ranged from historical giants such as Cleopatra, Christopher Columbus, and Lenin to writers and artists such as Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, and Mozart, to contemporary figures such as Greta Garbo, George Gershwin, and Albert Einstein. Regardless of his subject, however, Carnegie maintained a persistent focus: human-interest angles, sentimental or comical aspects, or quirks and oddities that illuminated their personalities. Focusing more on breadth than depth, he and his assistants scoured magazine articles, pored through published biographies, and occasionally conducted interviews. As he emphasized in a promotion for the show, “he spends two hours in research for every sixty seconds on the radio.”34
Carnegie studied the medium he was seeking to master. He immediately perceived an important difference between delivering talks before a live audience, where he was tremendously experienced, and speaking into a radio microphone, where he was a novice. The latter was more difficult, he decided. “When you deliver a lecture, you know that the people are generally there because they really want to be. They’ve come to hear you talk and they listen attentively. But with radio, it’s different. You never know whether or not you’re a welcome visitor. Your audience is invisible and you have no way of gauging the reactions while you’re speaking.” Nonetheless, Carnegie became convinced that a common denominator linked any form of communication—delivering “a series of startling and interesting statements” with enthusiasm held the key to reaching any mass audience. “When I broadcast, I have the word ‘joy’ written in red ink at the top of each page of my script. That word symbolizes my own pleasure in what I am doing.” The radio host attributed some of his own radio success to his training as an actor. The technique he had learned for the theater—“stage presence, diction, the power to attract and hold an audience—all these lessons proved invaluable.”35
