Self help messiah, p.46
Self-help Messiah, page 46
Then Dr. George W. Diemer, the president of the college, conferred the degree on Carnegie, and Mrs. J. Howard Hart, a regent and former classmate of the honoree, added a few words. “It occurs to me that no other alumnus has more completely fulfilled the meaning of the motto of this college, ‘Education for Service,’ than has Mr. Carnegie,” she said. “He has given to men and women alike, throughout the world, faith in themselves, hope in their future, and joy and confidence in their relationships with their fellow man.”44
Carnegie a few months before his death, proudly accepting an honorary degree in July 1955 from his alma mater, Central Missouri State College.
Carnegie then arose to read his speech on “The Value of Enthusiasm,” a favorite topic. Mustering some of the mental energy that had sustained him for years, he contended that enthusiasm was a little-recognized key to success and quoted the late Frederick E. Williamson, then president of the New York Central Railroad Company: “The longer I live, the more certain I am that enthusiasm is the little recognized secret of success … [A] man of second-rate ability with enthusiasm will often outstrip a man of first-rate ability without enthusiasm.” Carnegie told one of his favorite stories about a student, many years ago, who made a speech about how he threw wood ashes into his yard and got bluegrass the next spring, and spoke so passionately on the point that the students actually believed him. “If enthusiasm can make a group of apparently intelligent businessmen believe that you can produce bluegrass with nothing but hickory wood ashes, what can’t enthusiasm produce if you have a tiny molecule of common sense behind what you are saying?” he said.45
But Carnegie also suggested, unintentionally in a lighthearted passage, that the power of enthusiasm had a downside. It could be used to scam people. He recalled his days as a young salesman, when he came across a crowd at a street corner in a small, South Dakota town where a street barker was pushing a product with great enthusiasm. The barker proclaimed that men who wore thick-soled shoes became bald because they did not establish good electrical connections with the earth. His product, a small steel plate to be tacked to the heels of men’s shoes, would remedy this and stave off baldness. Carnegie described how some people were buying it, then joked, “I had spent four years in college and I knew that this claim was absolutely ridiculous. But the man was so enthusiastic that … Well, I did just what you think. And look, it worked!” He pointed to his own head of hair.46
After extolling the virtue of being eagerly committed to your work—“Yes, to an enthusiastic man, his work is always part play, no matter how hard or demanding it is”—Carnegie ended on a note of therapeutic uplift. He observed that Douglas MacArthur, a man who had made himself into a great American general, had led troops through many dark days of fierce fighting before triumphing in the Pacific theater during World War II. The plaque hanging on the wall of his office told the secret of his success: “You are as young as your faith; as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence; as old as your fear; as young as your hope; as old as your despair. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.”47
Carnegie sat down as the crowd responded with a loud ovation. The reporter for Newsweek concluded, “He spoke with his usual firmness and enthusiasm, in an accent still of the Midwest. His natural body gestures were well timed, and his persuasive content was high. No doubt only the dignity of the occasion restrained his listeners from encouraging shouts of ‘Atta boy?’ ” Appropriately, given his treasured Midwestern roots, Carnegie’s address in Warrensburg would be his last public appearance.48
Over the next few months, Carnegie deteriorated rapidly. He developed a bad case of shingles and this painful condition seemed to sap his strength. He slowly recovered, however, and Dorothy decided to take him to Bermuda for rest and recuperation, hoping that sunshine and sea air would restore some of his energy. Later, Donna Dale would recall “evenings in Bermuda, the sand and drinking milk on the front porch with him and picnics on the beach.” But instead he grew weaker, and after a few days had to be flown back to a New York hospital on a chartered airplane, where uremia, an acute illness triggered by kidney failure, swept through his system.49
After an operation proved unsuccessful, Carnegie suffered an infection that brought on an intense, unrelenting fever. When it became obvious that he was dying, Dorothy brought him home to Wendover Road. Homer Croy, his best friend, visited his bedside. “Dale’s later days were sad, indeed,” he wrote a short time later. “The last nine days I went out to see him, he did not know me, so greatly did the fever have him. If infection from the operation had not come upon him, he would have fought off everything else and survived. But day after day of fever, fever that no powerful drug could allay. Very sad.” Carnegie died at 6:10 in the morning on November 1, 1955, three weeks before his sixty-seventh birthday.50
A funeral service was held at the Church-in-the-Gardens in Forest Hills. Condolences and flowers arrived from all over the world, and Croy noted that prominently displayed was “a great wreath—from one of his classes in South Africa. The radio had carried the word, and the class had cabled money to a New York florist.” During his remarks, the pastor observed that while Carnegie had idolized Abraham Lincoln, he also had displayed many of “the Lincolnesque qualities of wisdom, patience, tolerance, humor, humility, and faith.” Obituaries appeared in Newsweek, Time, the Kansas City Star, and The New York Times, all of which noted that his influence had spread from the United States around the world. Perhaps the most insightful summing up came in an obituary in a Washington newspaper. “In his books and in his classes, he sought to teach the average man how to overcome his feelings of inadequacy, how to speak,” it said. “Dale Carnegie solved none of the profound mysteries of the universe. But, perhaps more than anyone of his generation, he helped human beings learn how to get along together—which seems to sometimes to be the greatest need of all.”51
Befitting his heritage and unassuming manner, Carnegie’s body was transported to Belton, Missouri, after the funeral where he was buried next to his parents in a small graveyard. The plain marble slab marking the site was inscribed simply “Dale Carnegie, 1888–1955.” This modest interment belied the great significance of the man. In fact, his teaching and writing over several decades had profoundly influenced the development of modern American culture. He had taken the lead in fomenting a revolution in values and attitudes, manners and morals that had arisen in the early decades of the twentieth century. In the years after his death, it would sweep through modern life with irresistible force.
Epilogue
The Self-Help Legacy of Dale Carnegie
On September 23, 2001, almost two weeks after the devastating terrorist attacks that brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center, a commemoration service was held at Yankee Stadium. Tens of thousands of grieving citizens, along with dozens of national dignitaries such as former president Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Clinton, Senator Edward Kennedy, Governor George Pataki, and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, filed somberly into the stadium. The crowd, waving American flags and clutching photos of the victims, listened tearfully to a program of speeches, songs, and prayers that honored the victims of the most deadly attack on the United States in six decades.
One aspect of the gathering stood out. Organizers had appointed as master of ceremonies Oprah Winfrey, an African American talk-show host and self-help guru whose empathetic, inspiring, and charismatic style had galvanized millions and made her the most popular woman in the country. After introducing a parade of speakers and performers, she read aloud from her own “A Prayer for America.” The country had been attacked, but “we, Americans, refuse to be shattered,” she declared. “What was meant to divide us has drawn us together and we shall not be moved.” But the lessons of the assault also ascended to a higher plane. “When you lose a loved one, you gain an angel whose name you know,” she explained. “May we leave this place determined to now use every moment that we yet live to turn up the volume in our own lives, to create deeper meaning, to know what really matters.” Winfrey closed her remarks with a trademark combination of pathos and uplift: “We all know for sure now how fragile, how uncertain, yet extraordinary life can be. May we always remember.”1
It was a telling moment. In this time of national tragedy, instead of a political or religious leader striding forward to seize the moment, it was America’s leading representative of the modern self-help culture who salved the nation’s wounds and affirmed its highest aspirations. Such a thing would have seemed preposterous in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor in 1941, or even after the assassinations of John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s. But it seemed perfectly appropriate at the dawn of the twenty-first century. For many Americans, a self-help ideology of self-esteem, personal growth, mental health, and positive thinking had become deeply embedded in their worldview. It provided a natural framework for coming to grips with the devastation that had descended on the United States on that September day. Winfrey expressed this pervasive worldview brilliantly.
This incident also revealed the legacy of Dale Carnegie. He had established the template for the modern self-help culture in the 1930s and 1940s with How to Win Friends and Influence People, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, and his popular adult-education courses. He had linked success and happiness to the individual’s capacity to develop several characteristics—a compelling personality, positive thinking, tightly focused mental resources, vague spirituality, and skill in human relations. Carnegie popularized the notion that pleasure and satisfaction flowed from fulfilling, rather than repressing, one’s internal needs and desires. In his hands, character and moral certitude gave way to personality and the search for an abundant life, both materially and emotionally. The scope and significance of this sea change in American culture became increasingly evident in the years after his death.
In mid-twentieth-century America, signs of Carnegie’s spreading influence appeared everywhere on the cultural landscape. His famous course produced businessmen such as Warren Buffett and Lee Iacocca, both of whom attributed their success and influence to their Carnegie training in the 1950s. In a very different venue, both President Lyndon Johnson and radical Jerry Rubin, bitter enemies during the great political upheavals of the 1960s, drew upon the Carnegie model. Johnson’s assertive, powerful personality had gained a boost from his efforts as a Carnegie instructor in Houston in 1930 and ’31. Rubin, radical leader of the Youth International Party (Yippies) and one of the Chicago Seven, imbibed Carnegie’s How to Win Friends to help overcome his dread of making political speeches. In popular culture, Carnegie’s ideas triggered several parodies—always a signal of influence—that appeared to great acclaim. Shepherd Mead’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1952), first a best-selling book and then a fashionable Broadway musical, poked fun at Carnegie’s success methods, while controversial comedian Lenny Bruce’s How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (1965) played off the success writer’s best-selling book title to present a scathing critique of middle-class social conventions.2
Carnegie also anticipated several developments in modern cognitive psychology and neuropsychology that reached out to a broader audience. His emphasis on discerning and appreciating the submerged emotional needs and processes of human beings surfaced in several popular, influential works appearing around the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century: Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow; Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ; Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness; Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein’s Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness; and Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. In various but complementary ways, these works have suggested that the cognitive processes of human beings, rather than their rationality, help them navigate through society according to wants and needs they understand only dimly, if at all. In parallel fashion, adherents of modern “positive psychology”—such as Martin Seligman in Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment, and Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener in Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth—have followed a Carnegian path in arguing that an embrace of close-knit social ties, spirituality, and the interpersonal virtues of kindness, sincerity, gratitude, and the capacity for love paves the psychological path to human happiness.3
In a broader and deeper vein, however, the therapeutic culture of self-help pioneered by Carnegie became his greatest legacy. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, a host of disciples carried versions of it into every nook and cranny of modern life and wove it into the fabric of American values. This crusade demolished the last vestiges of an older Victorian standard of self-control and hardy, self-reliant morality and nurtured a fresh set of values based on the search for personal growth, abundant health, and radiant personality. By adopting a model of psychological sickness and recovery, advocates of therapeutic self-help posed the individual’s struggle to overcome victimization and establish self-esteem as the central drama of life. They presented emotional empowerment as the key to happiness. Of course, Carnegie was not the only inspiration for this cultural revolution—other important contributors included the “positive thinking” preacher and author Norman Vincent Peale; the psychologist and sociologist of modern work Elton Mayo; the advertising executive and biographer Bruce Barton; and the child-rearing expert Dr. Benjamin Spock. But Carnegie, the wildly popular success writer and teacher, served as its leader, its formulator, and its greatest popularizer.
In the realm of success literature, several popular figures carried forward the torch lit by Carnegie. In an avalanche of how-to-succeed publications, they advocated myriad psychological strategies aimed at creating self-confidence, enhancing personality, thinking positively, and marshaling emotional resources in order to achieve social and material advancement. In 1967, for example, Thomas Harris’s I’m Okay, You’re Okay, which swept to the top of the best-seller list, advocated a technique of “transactional analysis” to help individuals adjust their relationships with others and overcome psychological debilitation. Some years later, Tony Robbins, in books such as Unlimited Power (1986) and Awaken the Giant Within (1992), as well as in hundreds of infomercials and seminars on “Personal Power” and “Power Talk,” promoted a strategy of neurolinguistic programming, or light-trance hypnosis, to rewire the subconscious in order to eliminate fear, enhance self-confidence, and acquire profits, a fuller life, and better relationships. Susan Jeffers, a PhD in psychology who has been dubbed the “Queen of Self-Help,” used Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway (1987) as a springboard to launch her message of positive thinking and overcoming timidity. Dr. Joyce Brothers in How to Get Whatever You Want Out of Life (1978), Dr. Wayne W. Dyer in Your Erroneous Zones: Step-by-Step Advice for Escaping the Trap of Negative Thinking and Taking Control of Your Life (1976), and Rhonda Byrne in The Secret (2006) are only a few among the host of self-help gurus garnering popular acclaim for their psychology-tinged formulas to achieve success.4
Another genre of popular books descended from the Carnegie cultural bloodline made self-esteem the central component of modern happiness and achievement. Melody Beattie’s Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself (1986)—this runaway bestseller began, “This book is dedicated to me”—urged readers to overcome “co-dependency” with others and concentrate on cultivating their own emotional lives. John Bradshaw, in Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child (1990), argued that individuals needed to work their way through the pain, neglect, shame, or grief of childhood in order to achieve “recovery” and find self-esteem. Jack Canfield’s Chicken Soup for the Soul book series, first launched in 1993 and now numbering more than two hundred titles with total sales of five hundred million volumes, compiled inspirational stories for readers. Canfield, the head of the Foundation for Self-Esteem and convener of numerous Self-Esteem Seminars, employed the Chicken Soup volumes to nurture that quality. Indeed, the self-esteem paradigm became so pervasive that in the 1990s Saturday Night Live featured a comedy sketch starring comedian Al Franken (now a U.S. senator from Minnesota) as Stuart Smalley, a hapless young man addicted to recovery programs. With his life in shambles but inspired by numerous support groups, he faced every difficulty by looking in the mirror and intoning his mantra: “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!”5
Modern religion increasingly displayed Carnegie’s imprint of spirituality as therapy. In 1993, a perplexed Christianity Today noted that a powerful “therapeutic revolution” had transformed modern Protestantism: “Almost without anyone paying attention, Christian psychology has moved to the center of evangelicalism.” Norman Vincent Peale had pioneered this trend, of course, first establishing the influential Religio-Psychiatric Clinic at Marble Collegiate Church, then writing the 1952 best seller The Power of Positive Thinking, which became the foundation of a vast organization. Other ministers followed in his wake. They included Robert Schuller, with his “Theology of Self-Esteem” and Hour of Power television broadcasts from his Crystal Cathedral in Southern California, and televangelist Joel Osteen, the pastor of the mammoth Lakewood Church in Houston and author of Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential (2004). Another important stone in the edifice of therapeutic religion came from M. Scott Peck, whose massively popular book The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (1988) promoted a nondenominational, nonjudgmental fusion of psychology and spirituality. By the early twenty-first century, observers such as Kenda Creasy Dean, in Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church (2010), concluded that “moralistic therapeutic deism” had become the centerpiece of modern Christianity. This vague, psychologized, non-theological spirituality, cut from Carnegie cloth, comprised a “gospel of niceness” wherein God appeared as a benevolent power for boosting the self-esteem of believers. It also featured, in many cases, a variant of the “prosperity gospel,” which claimed that faith in God would bring financial blessings. In this modern model of Christianity, the standard of judgment shifted from sin to sickness as spiritual longing transformed into a recovery movement combining self-help, material abundance, and mental health.6
