Self help messiah, p.30
Self-help Messiah, page 30
Carnegie brushed off such scornful evaluations. He dismissed his critics as elitists who were jealous of his popular appeal and insulated from the demands facing ordinary people who sought success in the real world of business competition. In 1938, he described a recent appearance before the Dutch Treat Club in New York where its president introduced him rather ungraciously by noting that most of his listeners were antagonistic to the principles in his book. Taking it in stride, Carnegie made a charming presentation. In private, however, he described the club as a gathering of the “intelligentsia who would sneer at any popular book … If a man can take a book that has been rather popular and attack it—it gives him a feeling of importance.” Another time, when a prominent minister denounced How to Win Friends as “the most immoral book of this generation,” Carnegie retorted that the attack merely gave the attacker “an opportunity to get in the limelight himself.”2
But in fact, Carnegie often struggled noticeably with certain aspects or implications of his own creed. As critical controversy unfolded, discussion highlighted several important moral, social, and political ambiguities embedded in the book. The author, for example, insisted that readers not see his recommendations as a cynical strategy for flattering your way to the top, but then instructed, “Three-fourths of the people you will meet tomorrow are hungering and thirsting for sympathy. Give it to them and they will love you.” He urged the reader to “Make the other person feel important—and do it sincerely,” but then advised them to promote their own agendas by taking advantage of this malleability in others. In his words, “every act you ever performed since the day you were born is because you wanted something.” Carnegie confronted the old dilemma of the Protestant Ethic—how to square virtue with wealth—and reacted uncomfortably. He liked to declare, “Don’t get the foolish idea that happiness depends on money,” but then repeatedly assured readers that his book would enhance their “earning power” and produce “increased sales” and “increased pay,” and he filled the text with admiring references to the wealthy tycoons.3
Such issues generated considerable contention. As controversy enveloped How to Win Friends, critics zeroed in on several conundrums in the Carnegie creed. Even as the book took the country by storm, and skyrocketing sales made its author one of the most famous and influential people in the country, larger questions arose about the accuracy of Carnegie’s portrait of modern America and his method for achieving success in it. Easy answers proved elusive.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Never did this old dictum appear truer than seven months after the publication of How to Win Friends and Influence People, when Irving Tressler presented a very funny parody of it entitled How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. Turning the Carnegie volume on its head, Tressler satirized it chapter for chapter, theme for theme, illustration for illustration, sometimes word for word. As Time magazine quipped, this cranky volume was “the only book which is today offsetting the 20-year drive by American advertisers to make everyone in this country popular with everyone else.”4
Tressler began with a dedication mocking Carnegie’s perky, positive thinking: “This Book Is Dedicated to a Man Who Doesn’t Need to Read It: Adolf Hitler.” It continued with an introduction by “Thomas Lowell” entitled “A Short Cut to Indistinction,” which related the excitement surrounding a recent fictitious gathering at a New York hotel of several hundred people who had come to hear a lecture by Irving K. Tressler, head of the “Institute of Human Relations Up to a Certain Point and How to Keep Them at that Point.” This meeting exemplified “the new movement stampeding across the country today—a movement to help people gain the privacy and seclusion they have wanted all their lives, and leave them unpestered by ‘friends.’ ” Tressler’s teachings were becoming legendary, the introduction claimed facetiously. He had helped thousands learn that “some of us are born with the ability to make others peeved, but most of us aren’t … The trouble with most of us is that we don’t talk enough. We let the other person get in his views and opinions and permit him to think that we are interested in what he has to say. As a result, we have ‘friends’ who drop in to say hello, corner us on streets to point out what we already know about the weather, invite us to boring dinners.” This great teacher counted “each course lost which doesn’t end in a free-for-all fist fight. He is proud that today he is unable to travel anywhere without a bodyguard, proud that thousands of ex-pupils have sworn to ‘get that son of a - - - -!’ ”5
Tressler had an impressive background in journalism. Born in 1908 and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, he had worked in the Washington bureau of the Minneapolis Journal in the early 1930s before becoming an associate editor of Life magazine. A humorist and commentator on social affairs, Tressler contributed many articles to magazines such as Look, Scribner’s, Coronet, Esquire, Mademoiselle, and Parent’s Magazine. He wrote several books that pilloried American foibles, including With Malice Toward All (1939), Horse and Buggy Daze (1940), and Readers Digest Very Little (1941). Sadly, he would commit suicide in 1944. Suffering from a severe form of epilepsy, which at the time was still misunderstood as a mental disorder, he had been dismissed from a number of positions in the magazine world. After psychiatrists were unable to help him understand, or cure, his uncontrollable fits, he finally fell victim to depression and ended his life.6
In How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, however, Tressler’s satirical talents emerged full-blown. He gleefully mocked Carnegie’s principles, cultural style, and goals. “This book is the outgrowth of years of experience in being bored,” he declared at the outset. “It is the result of thousands of statements commencing, ‘We know you’re terribly busy, so we’re only staying a minute—!’ ” He granted Carnegie’s assumption that everyone wanted to feel important but drew a different conclusion: “It is this feeling of importance that must be deflated in every person we meet and don’t want to meet again.” He offered a warped version of human relations: “Be generous with your acid and lavish with your contempt. If you do, people will remember your words—remember them long after they have ceased speaking with you.” A jovial, if caustic, critic of everything Carnegie stood for, he unfolded a friend-destroying strategy in chapters entitled “Always Turn a Conversation into an Argument,” “How to Make People Dislike You Instantly,” and “How to Discourage Overnight Guests.”7
Other critics eschewed the jokes and mockery but followed Tressler’s lead in attacking How to Win Friends for its principles of human conduct. The targets were there. Beneath Carnegie’s breezy, anecdotal style and enthusiastic recommendations for success lay several disturbing tendencies that made the book a troubling, occasionally treacherous guide to social behavior in the modern world. Foremost among them was the issue of sincerity.
A central theme of Carnegie’s best seller, of course, was the message of appreciation and sincerity. Repeatedly he instructed readers to “Give honest, sincere appreciation. Be ‘hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise,’ and people will cherish your words and treasure them and repeat them over a lifetime.” Developing sensitivity to the concerns of acquaintances and associates—let a person know that “you recognize his importance in his little world, and recognize it sincerely”—became a mantra throughout the text. But Carnegie subtly suggested that the real object of such concern was priming others to act to your advantage. In an almost symmetrical pattern, instructions on how to make others receptive to your agenda appeared side by side with appeals for sensitivity. In other words, calculation often appeared to be the driving force behind empathy. “Tomorrow you will want to persuade somebody to do something. Before you speak, pause and ask: How can I make him want to do it?” Carnegie noted at one point. At another, he observed, “if a salesman can show us how his services or his merchandise will help us solve our problems, he won’t need to sell us. We’ll buy.”8
Indeed, Carnegie sometimes exhibited outright cynicism about human relations in How to Win Friends. While explaining how to become a good conversationalist by encouraging others to talk about themselves, he recounted a recent experience at a cocktail party. After discussing travel with a woman and listening intently, he concluded tartly, “All she wanted was an interested listener, so she could expand her ego and tell about where she had been.” While urging the male reader to improve his home life by complimenting his wife, praising her fashion sense, and offering appreciation of her cooking and housecleaning, he gave the game away by cautioning, “Don’t begin too suddenly—or she’ll be suspicious.” Carnegie frequently endorsed a method of strategic losing on small matters in order to conquer on large matters: “Let’s let our customers and sweethearts and husbands and wives beat us in the little discussions that may arise”—thus giving in to another viewpoint was not so much a technique for humility as a ploy for gaining ultimate advantage by letting others feel superior. “I have quit telling people they are wrong,” he wrote. “And I find that it pays.” In Carnegie’s view of society, every individual has two reasons for taking an action, “one that sounds good and a real one.” While in our hearts we know the real reason for our actions, we “like to think of the motives that sound good.”9
Carnegie even admitted that his central principle—making others feel important—was at bottom a tactic of emotional one-upsmanship. After telling a story about how he had complimented someone on their appearance to make them feel good, he explained that the maneuver put him in a superior position: “I got the feeling that I had done something for him without his being able to do anything whatever in return for me. That is a feeling that glows and sings in your memory long after the incident is passed.” He related another tale of how a mistake on his radio show solicited a scorching rebuke from a member of the Colonial Dames. Although angry at the woman’s rudeness, he controlled his emotions, called her, admitted his unforgiveable blunder, thanked her profusely for pointing it out, and begged her forgiveness. Soon he had her apologizing for her rashness and complimenting him for being so gracious. “I had the satisfaction of controlling my temper, the satisfaction of returning kindness for an insult,” he smugly related of this ploy. “I got infinitely more real fun out of making her like me than I could ever have gotten out of telling her to go and take a jump in the Schuylkill River.”10
Carnegie’s ambiguous treatment of sincerity caused many critics to pan How to Win Friends as a primer on the cynical, self-regarding manipulation of others. In a scathing evaluation, Dr. John Haynes Holmes, the pastor of the Community Church in New York City, assailed Carnegie’s principles as “mockeries of friendship, insults to virtue, and conspiracies of scorn for human kind.” He summarized the book’s strategy as “Play up to your friend’s weaknesses, and you’ll trap them … He tells us people want just two things—praise and feeling of importance. Therefore, he says, give them praise. They want it, so lay it on thick. Then you’ll be able to do anything you want with them. What could be simpler?” As Holmes contemptuously concluded, “the thought that one should flatter, cajole, and lie to win a friend is disreputable.”11
Others expressed similar complaints. “There is a subtle cynicism, to be sure, in directions which depend so largely upon flattering the other man’s egotism,” observed a reviewer for The New York Times. He complained that Carnegie had substituted smoothness for substance with his notion that “the superficial cultivation of ‘personality’ may take the place of—or even be more important than—a sound foundation of knowledge, intelligence, and ability.” In the New York Daily News, Doris Blake contended that Carnegie was teaching people how to “sell a bill of goods … whether an egg beater or a suburban estate” with instructions to “sneak up on your victim with a spoken tribute to the importance of his or her position in the world.” A reviewer for the Paterson Morning Call, a New Jersey paper, warned that the book advocated “the constant application of a cagey brand of soft-soap.” But papering over differences of opinion created a toxic atmosphere of dishonesty in social intercourse. “I think there are times when it is in order to snarl, show your teeth, and keep full sail ahead … When I hear a man loudly championing all the philosophies which seem to me hollow and preposterous, I am likely to get my five cents into the pot sooner or later,” he wrote. “I am for the man who speaks his mind when there is any occasion for him to speak his mind, and lets the chips fall and the eyebrows rise where they may.”12
James Thurber, the popular author and humorist, focused on the vexed issue of sincerity in a review in the Saturday Review of Literature. Noting the author’s profound ambivalence regarding the crucial matter of genuine regard for others versus the use of praise to find their soft spot, Thurber decided that manipulation overrode authenticity in the book. “Mr. Carnegie loudly protests that one can be sincere and at the same time versed in the tricks of influencing people,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, the disingenuities in his set of rules and in his case histories stand out like ghosts at a banquet.” Carnegie’s emotional insistence that he was not urging people to get something out of others—“What was I trying to get out of him!!!” he exploded in exasperation at one point—did not sway Thurber from this conclusion. As he acerbically concluded, “exclamation points, even three in a row, do not successfully convey depth of sincerity or intensity of feeling.”13
Attacks on Carnegie for promoting an ethic of social deception also came in private venues. In a letter to the popular author, W. W. Woodruff of Chattanooga, Tennessee, denounced How to Win Friends as a reflection of the same “philosophy of dishonesty” that had taken over the advertising industry and the legal profession. The notion of playing to people’s weaknesses and flattering their sense of self-importance was a kind of trickery that “is reflected throughout your entire scheme of influencing people … We don’t need to inflate personal egotism; it needs deflation. We don’t need ‘smart’ businessmen; we need honest ones with guts and some sense of humanity and responsibility.” This rather cranky old-fashioned moralist advised Carnegie to in the future “use your talents toward influencing people against intellectual dishonesty rather than toward it, and … help to abate this flood of infectious poison [flowing] into the intellectual bloodstream of our nation.”14
For some commentators, Carnegie’s take on sincerity prompted surrealistic humor. They envisioned a bizarre scene where acolytes of How to Win Friends would gather in a cacophony of mutual praise where everyone’s build-up of others would ultimately cancel each other out. In Carnegie’s world, wrote columnist Heywood Broun, the good salesman never talks about himself, and the good customer highlights the virtues of the salesman, so finally “the whole thing comes out just the same as if each had talked about himself in the normal manner.” Similarly, the New York World-Telegram questioned the value of an encounter between ardent disciples where “two people kept on agreeing with each other, congratulating each other, and insisting that the other talk about himself.”15
In many ways, however, the Carnegie ethic was no laughing matter. Fears of deception grew especially intense when he urged the use of psychological manipulation in even the most intimate of relationships. The final section of How to Win Friends provided readers with a formula for domestic tranquillity. It was vintage Carnegie but left a sour aftertaste. He told women readers to become adept in “the art of handling men,” the first rule of which was to realize that males “are not looking for executives but for someone with allure and willingness to flatter their vanity and make them feel superior.” The ideal was not the female office manager who wanted to talk about modern philosophy and insisted on paying her own bill, for “she thereafter lunches alone.” Instead, men preferred the company of “the non-collegiate typist [who], when invited to luncheon, fixes an incandescent gaze on her escort, and says yearningly, ‘Now tell me more about yourself.’ ”16
Similarly, Carnegie instructed husbands to consistently compliment their wives on housekeeping skills, attractive appearance, and fashion sense. He argued that women had provided men, or at least those who were alert enough to notice, “a complete book on how to work her.” “Every man knows that he can jolly his wife into doing anything, and doing without anything. He knows that if he hands her a few cheap compliments about what a wonderful manager she is, and how she helps him, she will squeeze every nickel,” he maintained. “Every man knows that he can kiss his wife’s eyes shut until she will be blind as a bat, and that he has only to give her a warm smack on the lips to make her dumb as an oyster.”17
In both cases, the problem was less sexism—in fairness, only a tiny minority of men in the mid-1930s would not have believed in innate male superiority—than manipulation. Carnegie’s images—of a female approaching a male armed with “incandescent gazes” and techniques for “flattering their vanity,” and a man approaching his wife dispensing cheap compliments and a few kisses to make her “dumb as an oyster”—paints an unsettling portrait of love and personal relationships. Tact, affection, and appreciation are one thing; techniques for how to “work” your spouse are something quite different.
