A keen observer of human nature even as a youth, Carnagey perceived that people derived meaning and fulfillment from things other than wealth. His father’s Duroc hogs and white-faced cattle won a number of blue ribbons over the years at county fairs and livestock shows. James mounted the ribbons on a sheet of white muslin, and whenever a visitor came by the house he would proudly exhibit the prizes. Dale drew an important conclusion: Each individual seeks a feeling of distinction, of being recognized for some kind of achievement, worthiness, or attractiveness, no matter how small. The lesson would stick with him.34

  Struggling to accommodate piety and poverty, virtue and failure, hard work and humiliation, Dale Carnagey reached a turning point in his youth. In the spring of 1904, when he was sixteen, his family left their rented farm near Maryville, loaded their belongings into a railroad boxcar, and headed toward Warrensburg, Missouri, about a hundred and seventy miles to the southeast. The farmland there was no better than in northwest Missouri, but his parents had a larger aim. They wanted to give their sons a college education, and a state teachers college was nearby. For the first time, the poor farm boy from the rural margins of society came into direct contact with the larger world he had only envisioned up to this point. It would be the first step on his own road to success.35

  Rebellion and Recovery

  Among the many principles of self-improvement strewn throughout How to Win Friends and Influence People, the importance of taking up fresh ideas and considering a new approach to life stood high on Dale Carnegie’s list. He talked frequently about the need to abandon an archaic, ineffective worldview and adopt a new mind-set more conducive to success. The “indispensible requirement” for getting the most out of his book, Carnegie stressed, was having “a deep, driving desire to learn, a vigorous determination to increase your ability to deal with people.” He urged readers to keep in mind “the rich possibilities for improvement that still lie in the offing” and reminded them, “You are attempting to form new habits, you are attempting a new way of life.” But Carnegie recognized that adopting new viewpoints was extremely difficult because of innate human intransigence. “Most of us are prejudiced and biased. Most of us are blighted with preconceived notions,” Carnegie wrote. “And most citizens don’t want to change their minds about their religion or their haircut or Communism or Clark Gable.”1

  Adopting new ideas depended on generating sufficient self-confidence and self-esteem, both in yourself and in others. Carnegie saw it as a fundamental impulse in human nature that everyone wanted a feeling of distinction. “You want the approval of those with whom you come in contact. You want recognition of your true worth,” he contended. “You want a feeling that you are important in your little world.” Thus the sensitive, or perhaps shrewd, success seeker must approach the world confidently but with a determination to “make the other person feel important, and do it sincerely.” At all times you must tell yourself to be “hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.” After all, Carnegie observed, “We nourish the bodies of our children and friends and employees; but how seldom do we nourish their self-esteem.”2

  This twin emphasis on rethinking one’s approach to the world and bolstering self-esteem stemmed from the author’s difficult adolescence. At age sixteen, he enrolled at a small Missouri college and almost immediately suffered an intense personal crisis. Fueled by his academic studies, he began to question the religious principles he had been taught during childhood. Humiliated by family poverty that was all too clearly reflected in his threadbare personal appearance, he suffered an “inferiority complex” with regard to his fellow students, an emotional malady that sent him reeling. These challenges propelled him into outright rebellion against the traditions with which he had grown up and created a tense conflict with his family, particularly with his pious mother. Yet young Carnegie soon found relief, and a strong measure of self-esteem, by embracing public speaking. He discovered a talent for addressing and convincing others, and success in this popular collegiate activity eventually made him one of the most respected students on campus. Moreover, his embrace of a progressive version of public speech—it stressed communication, a conversational style, and the expression of personality over old-fashioned, theatrical oratory—laid the foundation for his later career. Ridding himself of much of the baggage of nineteenth-century cultural tradition, and possessed of a new sense of self-worth, young Carnegie took another important step on his journey to success. Reshaping his own worldview became the basis for convincing others to do so too.

  In 1904, when the Carnagey family pulled into Warrensburg, they found a modest town of around five thousand inhabitants nestled among gently rolling hills on the western edge of the Ozark Mountains as they began to flatten out approaching the Kansas plains. The governmental seat of Johnson County, it sat in west central Missouri about sixty-five miles southeast of Kansas City. It had been founded in the 1830s, and then gained an economic boost in 1864 when the Missouri Pacific Railroad established a depot there, and by the turn of the century it had become a typical, prosperous small Midwestern town. It contained several churches representing every Protestant denomination, a grain elevator and flour mill, a foundry, a small woolens factory, three hotels, a number of banks, a library, two newspapers, and small merchants of every variety.3

  But its central feature, and the reason the Carnageys had moved there, was a college. The State Normal School in Warrensburg had been founded in 1871—one of two in the state devoted to training teachers for an emerging public system of grammar schools and secondary schools—and by late in the decade it was thriving. Tuition was free, and in return students were expected to take a teaching position in Missouri after graduation. In the fall of 1904, a student body of around eight hundred and a faculty of forty met for classes on a compact campus consisting of several large, sandstone buildings constructed in the Lombard-Venetian style of late-Victorian architecture. A large pond and an open athletic field added attractive physical features to the layout.4

  The State Normal School described its mission as contributing to “an educated citizenship” in Missouri by training qualified teachers for the public schools. It drew students from around the state, particularly rural areas in the central agricultural region and Kansas City. In the early 1900s, as was typical of most normal schools in this era, freshman and sophomore students took classes at the level of what today we would call the eleventh and twelfth grades, while juniors and seniors studied at the modern-day equivalent of the first two years of college. Students pursuing the elementary course, such as Carnagey, graduated with Regents Certificates while more advanced students received a Bachelor of Pedagogy. Typically, students proceeded lockstep through a variety of courses in rhetoric, mathematics, psychology, history, literature, and science during the first two years, followed by more advanced elective courses and ever larger doses of teacher training in the final two years. By providing well-rounded educations to future teachers and then dispersing them throughout the state, the school aimed its efforts “with the general welfare always in view.”5

  In the spring of 1904, James and Amanda Carnagey settled about three miles south of Warrensburg. They had secured a small farm that had a traditional two-story clapboard house along with a barn and a scattering of outbuildings. James continued his lifelong struggle to eke out a living on the land, as he had in earlier years, by cultivating mixed crops and raising livestock, while Amanda managed the household and became involved in local church activity. But the reason the couple had moved from Maryville was to provide educational opportunity for their sons, and that fall both boys enrolled in college. Clifton was an indifferent student, but Dale was delighted to be on a college campus. It greatly broadened his view of the world and satisfied a yearning for new experiences that the isolated youth had first glimpsed through some of his mother’s books and in his conversations with Mr. Sowder. His college studies in science, history, and literature took him into intellectual realms far removed from the one-room schoolhouses and the Sunday school classes in small country churches of his youth. They changed the trajectory of his life and, in his words, “altered my sights and widened my horizons.”6

  At the same time, however, college life presented a stern trial for the farm boy. It offered a daily ritual of humiliation that was rooted in the old bugaboo of his family: poverty. Only a handful of students lacked the modest funds necessary for room and board in Warrensburg, and Carnagey was one of them. He had to ride a horse to campus every morning to attend classes. An obvious problem emerged—what to do with the animal during the day and how to feed him? So the youth found a man with a barn and a vacant stall near the college, and every week James would bring in a load of grain and hay for his son to use for his horse. Then in the afternoon, after classes, Dale would ride home. Back on the farm, he would slip on his overalls, milk the cows, cut the wood, slop the hogs, and then study late into the night by the light of a coal-oil lamp. His equine transportation and rustic schedule were impossible to hide from his classmates, and the smirks of more sophisticated students soon caused him great embarrassment. He began to see himself as a social outcast and, as he recalled years later, developed “an inferiority complex.”7

  One issue particularly embodied the boy’s social anxiety. “Above all else I was ashamed of my clothes,” he confessed. “I was growing rapidly. When I first got my clothes they were too large—then they fit perfectly for several months and finally they were too little.” Not only were his clothes ill fitting, they were shabby—home sewn, with threadbare cloth and washed-out colors from long use, and even patched on occasion. For a rural youth trying to fit in on a college campus that he viewed as the epitome of sophistication and knowledge, the situation opened a raw psychological wound. He was so self-conscious about his attire that going to the front of the class for blackboard exercises became mortifying. “I can’t think of the problem [at hand],” he burst out to his mother at one point. “I am only conscious of the fact that my clothes don’t fit and that the students are laughing at me behind my back.” Amanda broke down in tears upon hearing this. “Oh Dale, I wish we could get better clothes for you but we just can’t!” she cried. In turn, this lament filled the son with remorse about “how cruel I was without intending to be.”8

  A dawning attraction to young women further sharpened Carnagey’s acute sensitivity to his outsider status. After settling into life at the State Normal School, he began to notice the array of pretty, intelligent coeds in his classes and asked a number of them to go out on dates. A long series of rebuffs ensued. “I remember a girl by the name of Patsy Thurber,” he reported ruefully. “I asked her to go buggy riding with me and she turned me down. And some of the other girls in town turned me down.” Such rejection not only underlined his feelings of inferiority but made him even more tongue-tied when he tried to chat up his female classmates. Soon his anxiety became obsessive. “I worried for fear no girl would ever be willing to marry me,” he explained later. “I worried about what I would say to my wife immediately after we were married. I imagined that we would be married in some country church and then get in a surrey with fringe on the top and ride back to the farm. But how would I be able to keep the conversation going on that ride back to the farm? How? How? I pondered over that earth-shaking problem for many an hour as I walked behind the plow.” For a boy in the throes of adolescent angst, romantic rejection made life appear bleak.9

  While social strains undermined his self-confidence, Carnagey underwent an intellectual trial of equal magnitude, one that threatened the very foundation of his upbringing. As he advanced through the State Normal School curriculum, he suffered a crisis of religious faith. His studies called into question the traditional Protestant doctrine with which he had been raised and shed new, unflattering light on the intense religious beliefs of his mother. In later years, he described how the familiar worldview of his boyhood began to collapse around him:

  I studied biology, science, philosophy, and comparative religions. I read books on how the Bible was written. I began to question many of its assertions. I began to doubt many of the narrow doctrines taught by the country preachers of that day. I was bewildered … I didn’t know what to believe. I saw no purpose in life. I stopped praying. I became an agnostic. I believed that all life was planless and aimless. I believed that human beings had no more divine purpose than had the dinosaurs that roamed the earth some two hundred million years ago. I felt that someday the human race would perish—just as the dinosaurs had … I sneered at the idea of a beneficent God who had created man in his own likeness.10

  By the time he left college, Carnagey’s turn against traditional religion became so strong that he began to openly proclaim it to his horrified mother. When Amanda objected to the theater, for instance, he replied mockingly, “I’ll bet that the plays of Shakespeare and the play Ben Hur, by Lew Wallace, have preached more sermons and touched the lives of more people than the preaching of the evangelists you mention.” When Amanda denounced dancing as a pathway to damnation, now her son could barely conceal his contempt. “If there is any place that they are going to keep me out of after death because I danced and went to the theatre, I am frank to say that I want to be kept out, for I never could be happy and congenial with such people holding such views,” he declared. “They don’t do those things in my heaven.” The church as an institution was a hundred years behind the times, young Carnagey now insisted, and its narrow policies not only were alienating young people but were “too absurd to be countenanced by any intelligent person.” He proclaimed indignantly, “Most of these God-given laws that we hear so much about were made by some ignorant fogey and then attributed to God.”11

  Staggered by social rejection and floundering in intellectual doubt, Carnagey sought a way out. He desperately wanted to overcome the stigma of poverty and funnel his intellectual stirrings into positive action. Roiling in uncertainty, he searched for a course of action to overcome his inferiority complex and achieve success. In his words, “I looked around unconsciously for a compensation for my life, whether it was because my clothes didn’t fit, or that girls turned me down for dates, or the fact that I had to live on a farm. I was determined to put myself on the map.” More deeply, he also sought a measure of respect from his fellow students: to prove “I was just as good as they were.”12

  Unexpectedly, he received a jolt of inspirational energy. Two visiting speakers to the school touched a nerve in this young man trying to find his way in the world and find himself in the process. One evening he went to hear a Chautauqua speaker at the college—Carnagey described him admiringly as “riding around in trains and living in hotels and wearing a white collar and all”—who told a story about a boy who worked as a janitor to pay for his college education, was ashamed of his clothes, and could not muster enough money to take a girl on a respectable date. After detailing this grim scenario for fifteen minutes, he proclaimed, “That boy is standing before you tonight!” A short time later, Carnagey heard another lecture delivered by a vice president of the Chicago and Alton Railroad, which described his rise to prominence after beginning as a lowly brakeman. The student was mesmerized by these tales of opportunity awaiting in the outside world. Previously, he believed that “you had to be a rich man’s son to get to the top and that a poor boy didn’t have much of an opportunity.” But now he felt a surge of courage and hope from this pair of speakers. “The first, because I felt that if he could push himself out of poverty and make his living as a speaker, I could do the same,” he explained. “The second, because he assured me that poverty at the beginning did not stop a determined man from reaching the top.”13

  Fired by these visions of a brighter future, Carnagey had an epiphany. Many of the popular students on campus, of course, were the football, baseball, and basketball players, and the farm boy admitted that he had neither skills in, nor a flair for, sports. But then he noticed something else:

  I looked around and saw that the men who had won the debating and public speaking contests were regarded as the intellectual leaders in college. They were in the limelight; they stood up and addressed an audience of a thousand people. Everybody knew them! Everybody knew their names! They were pointed to as they walked across campus. I said, “maybe I can do that” because my mother had taken me around to Sunday School affairs and I had spoken pieces, and I had engaged in amateur [theatrical] performances. I had discovered that I could at least stand up and speak with a little more vitality and enthusiasm than the average speaker.

  So he plunged ahead by drawing upon a happier legacy from boyhood—his way with the spoken word—and moved it to the center of his endeavors. Public speaking became his means to respectability and success.14

  But he struggled mightily in his quest to find redemption through oratory. There were a number of annual, hotly fought campus-wide speaking competitions—a debating contest, a declamatory contest, and a general public-speaking contest—but entering them was no simple matter. In this era, when social fraternities were only just appearing, “literary societies” dominated the social map at the State Normal School. There were six of them that were officially recognized: the Athenian, the Baconian, and the Irving for young men; and the Campbell, the Osborne, and the Periclean for young women. Controlled by the faculty and supervised by the head of the Department of Expression, each society had a hall of its own and convened a regular series of programs that included readings, orations, debates, and choral singing. Every year, the literary societies also organized the various campus contests in oratory, debate, and declamation. To win the campus prizes, a student first had to emerge as a winner from this sextet of organizations, a difficult task for a relatively untutored and inexperienced student like Carnagey.15

  He had joined the Irving Literary Society, named after the popular early nineteenth-century Knickerbocker writer Washington Irving. The Irvings stressed the strong fellowship and enviable achievements within their group, as they proudly described it in The Rhetor, the State Normal School yearbook: “Irving! What a suggestion of strength, courage, perseverance, patience, endurance!” During his first two years on campus, Carnagey entered the public-speaking competition within the Irvings, hoping to emerge as its representative in the campus contests. He failed miserably. On top of his social frustrations, these setbacks were terribly discouraging and he grew increasingly morose. His defeat in 1906 was particularly devastating. “I was so crushed, so beaten, so despondent, that I literally thought of suicide,” he recalled many years later. “Sounds silly? Not when you are seventeen or eighteen and suffering from an inferiority complex!”16

 

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