Self help messiah, p.47
Self-help Messiah, page 47
By the mid-twentieth century, modern education was adopting much of Carnegie’s therapeutic self-help model. In the 1960s, experts began building self-esteem into the curriculum nationwide as they linked students’ self-image to their educational attainment. Punishment, authority, and strict standards were increasingly branded as harmful in the classroom while identity reinforcement and interpersonal relations were deemed essential to achievement. Educational leaders insisted that “lowered self-esteem” among students made them “more submissive and withdrawn, though occasionally veering to the opposite extreme of aggression and domination.” With the psychological development of students moving to the fore in curriculum and pedagogy, new paradigms emerged. Schools increasingly stressed extra-academic activities where children could demonstrate competence or mastery, or new kinds of testing, such as portfolio programs, which encouraged self-expression and were sensitive to different “learning styles.” Meanwhile, teachers were urged to reinforce good behavior rather than to castigate bad behavior, and to provide positive commentary on student work to encourage self-confidence. In this new landscape of progressive, child-centered education, building the self-worth of students emerged as the central goal. Thus in 1990, a special California task force on education issued an influential report entitled “The Social Importance of Self-Esteem,” which argued that “lack of self-esteem” lay at the heart of most modern social and personal problems and that educational reforms placing student self-affirmation at the heart of the curriculum provided the remedy. In that same year, the New York State Board of Regents endorsed “A Curriculum of Inclusion,” a report claiming that traditional school curricula had damaged the psyches of young people, particularly females and minorities, and that a new multicultural model was needed to instill “higher self-esteem and self-respect” among students.7
Carnegian principles influenced modern child-rearing models. Dr. Benjamin Spock’s popular Baby and Child Care (1946), which he described as a combination of “sound pediatrics with sound psychology,” provided a benchmark in this development with its guidelines for parents on fostering interpersonal relations, social skills, and spontaneous personality in their offspring. In subsequent years, child-rearing literature continued to shift emphasis away from an older, moral stress on learning right from wrong, building character, and recognizing community responsibility and toward a new therapeutic calculus of emotional fulfillment, personality development, and mental health. By 1970, experts such as Dorothy C. Briggs, in Your Child’s Self-Esteem: The Key to His Life, were offering parents a step-by-step process for building “a solid sense of self-worth in your child,” insisting that if he “has high self-esteem, he has it made.” Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish’s popular How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk (1980) stressed “the importance of acknowledging youngsters’ feelings,” while Louise Hart, in the popular The Winning Family: Increasing Self-Esteem in Your Children and Yourself (1987), told parents that “self-esteem is the greatest gift you can give your child … [I]t is the cornerstone of mental health, learning, and happiness.”8
Great swaths of corporate America steadily adopted Carnegie’s ethos of emotional sensitivity and mental health. As early as the 1920s, Elton Mayo, in his famous study of a General Electric plant in Chicago, had advanced a “human relations” model of management that underlined the importance of group relationships and a sense of belonging. By the 1950s, Peter Drucker had formulated an influential management model based on decentralization and the empowerment of laborers, wherein managers helped liberate modern “knowledge workers” and guided them in a common direction. Then TQM (total quality management) reformers such as W. Edwards Deming advocated a therapeutic environment defined by “worker empowerment,” cooperative work groups, and “win-win” thinking. Tom Chappell, in Managing Upside Down: The Seven Intentions of Values-Centered Leadership (1999), offered a later version of the sensitized corporation where self-actualized individuals found meaning in their work, sought human connection, and pledged to be aware of others’ feelings. But Stephen Covey eventually swept the field to become the king of modern business gurus. In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1990), he promoted a psychologized management approach based on self-awareness, emotional empathy, and personal transformation. He stressed the need for reexamining how we interact with the world (a “paradigm shift”) and working creatively and collaboratively with others (“synergize”). Covey’s seventh and final “habit,” which he termed “sharpen the saw,” expressed a salient value of Carnegie’s broader self-help agenda: use the lessons of experience to foster constant self-renewal.9
In fact, Carnegie’s vision of therapeutic self-help flourished just about everywhere on America’s modern cultural landscape in the last half of the twentieth century. It pushed New Age thinkers such as Deepak Chopra to the top of the best-seller list and television therapists such as Dr. Phil McGraw to a pinnacle of media popularity. It informed conservative crusades such as the Promise Keepers, which aimed to nurture “Godly men” through a combination of Biblical teaching, emotional empowerment, and support-group bonding. It influenced feminist thinking, where theorists such as Carol Gilligan, in In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (1982), and Gloria Steinem, Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (1993), stressed therapeutic issues of identity and emotional recovery as key to women’s advancement. It shaped racial formulations, where figures such as Cornel West argued that African Americans needed not only an activist agenda of democratic socialism and revolutionary Christianity but a program of self-love to counteract the “profound sense of psychological depression, personal worthlessness, and social despair” that has devastated their community. Similarly, it inspired the Million Man March in October 1995, where African American males embraced a remedy of identity politics, male bonding, and recovery-group atonement. Even political discourse increasingly adopted a sensibility of therapeutic remedy and personal uplift. Bill Clinton, for example, swept into the White House announcing “I Feel Your Pain” and then, during subsequent crises during his presidency, summoned self-help gurus and New Age advisers such as Tony Robbins, Marianne Williamson, and Stephen Covey to meet him at Camp David for personal revitalization sessions.10
A telling set of statistics reveals the extent to which Carnegie’s vision of therapeutic self-improvement has come to dominate modern values and sensibility. In the late 1940s, the United States had roughly 2,500 clinical psychologists, 30,000 social workers, and less than 500 marriage and family therapists. Sixty years later in 2010, however, the country had 77,000 clinical psychologists, 192,000 clinical social workers, 105,000 mental health counselors, 50,000 marriage and family therapists, 17,000 nurse psychotherapists, and 30,000 life coaches. Recently the omnivorous appetite for therapeutic self-help has prompted therapeutic entrepreneurs to develop “psychotherapy apps” for the treatment of various anxieties and emotional problems. Patients, by working through smartphone programs twice a week for four to six weeks, have been promised marked progress in overcoming their mental health issues.11
But the victory of therapeutic, self-help values in American culture has become most evident, perhaps, in that female figure who presided over the New York City memorial service in the aftermath of 9/11. It is now, incontrovertibly, the Age of Oprah. Beginning in the 1980s, Oprah Winfrey emerged as an unparalleled cultural force in modern America. With a top-rated, nationally syndicated television talk show bringing enormous influence and profits (she would be, perhaps, the wealthiest woman in the world by 2002), Winfrey branched out to found her own production company that churned out a long list of movies, television miniseries, inspirational seminars, radio shows, books, and magazines. She also gained plaudits as a high-profile philanthropist. Appearing on the cover of magazines such as Newsweek, Vogue, The Saturday Evening Post, The New Republic, Ladies’ Home Journal, and People, she was crowned the “Queen of All Media” in a 1998 Time cover story.
But the secret of Winfrey’s remarkable career and tremendous influence lay in the unique way she has synthesized a compelling creed of therapeutic self-fulfillment and New Age spirituality. Shaping her television show into a vast group-therapy session, she dealt with a tremendous variety of personal problems afflicting her guests while confessing her own struggles to overcome child abuse, crack cocaine, and compulsive weight gain. She invoked a litany of inspirational concepts for her vast audience—“Live Your Best Life,” “Be More Splendid, More Extraordinary,” “Evolve into the Complete Person You Were Intended to Be”—and emerged as the spokesperson for the modern self-help tradition. With her message of personal empowerment, Winfrey became America’s therapist. Historically, she has completed what Dale Carnegie began in the first half of the twentieth century.12
So what does the final balance sheet indicate about Carnegie’s far-reaching cultural legacy? By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the worldview of therapeutic self-help developed by this modest Missourian stood triumphant in modern America. Due to his writing and teaching efforts—as well as those of his disciples and other like-minded figures—mental health replaced morality, personality replaced character, human relations replaced authority, sensitivity replaced virtue, and self-esteem replaced community expectations as guides to behavior. Psychologized values permeated dominant institutions and liberation movements alike. This cultural transformation brought weighty consequences.
On the one hand, Carnegie’s ethos of therapeutic self-help has produced notable benefits. First, by helping to alleviate individual pathologies and private misery, which too often were left to fester in earlier eras, it has encouraged a greater sensitivity to human emotional needs. In new ways, Carnegie and his followers sought to aid ordinary people in remedying the torments of personal life. Second, this ethos has erected a standard of “psychological man” in modern life, a more capacious model for understanding human behavior and impulses than earlier notions of “religious man” or “economic man” or “ideological man,” where loyalties and endeavors were seen as narrowly spiritual, materialistic, or political. Third, in a practical vein, Carnegie’s broad principles have encouraged a social standard of kindness, sensitivity, good humor, and patience with the foibles of others. This is no small achievement. In a modern environment too often shaped by careerism, arrogance, greed, and disregard for others, or hamstrung by social ineptness and ignorance, the prospect of well-adjusted personalities, solicitous conduct, and mentally healthy individuals has its attractions. Finally, the Carnegie vision of the good life as one of abundance, both emotionally and materially, draws upon deep wellsprings in American life. Since the founding of the colonies in the seventeenth century, and reinforced by the founding of the republic in the late eighteenth century, the notion of America as a land of opportunity for striving individuals to find prosperity and contentment has drawn tens of millions of immigrants from all over the globe. It is, perhaps, the central component of America’s self-definition and Carnegie became one its most influential advocates.
On the other hand, however, the triumph of Carnegie’s therapeutic model of self-help has come at a heavy cost. It has created an omnivorous, perpetual appetite for “feeling good about yourself.” Like drug addicts who must ingest larger and larger doses to get high, too many modern Americans harbor outlandish emotional expectations that require ever more self-fulfillment to achieve satisfaction. This unrealistic mind-set encourages wild swings between a grandiose pole of “empowerment,” where individuals believe they can generate the personal capacity to do anything, and a pathetic pole of “victimization,” where outside forces consistently conspire to frustrate one’s entitlement to bliss. Moreover, the Carnegie code has undermined people’s capacity to think about the world in terms that transcend personal feelings. Its stress on human relations, sensitivity, and nonjudgmentalism has pushed aside frameworks of morality, social justice, and even economic well-being while the needs of emotionally injured individuals become paramount.
In a Carnegie world, where advancement and achievement are often the result of psychological maneuver, a fear of insincerity and emotional gamesmanship has been woven into our modern cultural fabric. The shift from character to personality has drawn a very fine line—indeed, it often seems to disappear entirely—between appreciation and flattery, sensitivity and artful control, human relations and human manipulation. Most broadly, perhaps, the culture of therapeutic self-help has isolated the individual from a larger sense of community. With concern focused so intensely on the private emotional needs of the self, many modern Americans have found it difficult, if not impossible, to conceptualize their relationship to common concerns. In the modern culture of self-fulfillment, notions of legitimate authority or civic obligation or community standards have become nearly oxymoronic.
Thus Carnegie’s capture of modern American culture has encouraged a democratization of feelings where everyone has an equal right to happiness. At the same time, it has encouraged a pathologizing of democracy where private baggage is transported wholesale into the public realm. Personal desires, fears, and problems tend to overwhelm all considerations of the public good as much human interaction and governance is forced into the mold of the psychotherapy session or the support group or the therapeutic state.
In the face of this overwrought modern scene dominated by therapeutic self-help, a certain redress beckons. A more balanced, nuanced view of human endeavor appreciates reason as well as emotion, healthy instincts as well as dysfunctional states, dangerous impulses that require correction as well as self-esteem that deserves enhancement. It emphasizes morality and justice as grounds for acting upon the world and brings them into parity with claims of emotional need. It sees the complex, multifaceted connection between public and private realms and understands private life as an arena where values and traits are shaped in preparation for our shared social life, and not merely as a seedbed for personal pathologies and identity issues to be foisted on others. It recognizes duty as well as dysfunction, achievement as well as angst, the value of a useful life as well as recovery from emotional distress, the need for limitation as well as endless self-fulfillment.13
But regardless of any critical assessment of Carnegie’s influence, there can be no question of his enormous impact on modern American life. Born into a late-Victorian culture of self-control, he played a leading role in constructing a modern culture of self-fulfillment. The messiah of the modern self-help movement, he created the framework for our contemporary commitment to therapeutic uplift and abundant living. His books and teachings revealed both the evident strengths (a sensitivity to people’s emotional needs) and abiding weaknesses (a narcissistic preoccupation with the self) of this creed. Whatever one makes of the therapeutic culture of self-esteem, one must acknowledge the crucial efforts of a modest farm boy from Missouri in shaping its powerful role. Long ago, Thomas Jefferson coined that most American of phrases: “the pursuit of happiness.” Dale Carnegie defined its modern meaning.
Acknowledgments
I am delighted to acknowledge the many debts incurred in the completion of this biography. Several members of Dale Carnegie’s family and organization kindly assisted me during the process of research and writing. Brenda Leigh Johnson, his granddaughter, helped me get started, hosted several research trips to Long Island, shared her extensive knowledge of Carnegie’s life and career, and funneled many useful materials my way. Donna Carnegie, his daughter, staunchly supported the project, provided a very informative interview and extensive written comments, and offered much warm encouragement and help in the book’s final stage of completion. Oliver Crom, Carnegie’s son-in-law, sat for an interview and shared many insights into Dale and Dorothy Carnegie and their enterprise. Muriel Goldstein stepped in near the end to provide invaluable help in gathering photographs for the book.
Special appreciation is extended to Linda Polsby, who graciously opened to a stranger a cache of previously unknown letters between Carnegie and her, and Carnegie and her mother, Freida Offenbach. She also was generous enough to discuss—at length, in detail, and with great honesty—the long and extremely complex relationship between Carnegie and her family. At the end, she granted the use of several family photographs. Her assistance proved invaluable as it helped open a new window on the life and career of this important cultural figure. Thanks also to Vivian Richardson, who assisted with gathering materials on Carnegie’s college career at the Arthur F. McClure II Archives at the University of Central Missouri, and to John Ansley and Nancy Decker at the Marist College Archives and Special Collections for forwarding material on Carnegie from its Lowell Thomas Collection.
At the Other Press, Judith Gurewich performed the role of editor with great enthusiasm and intellectual zest. In many fascinating and provocative conversations, she prodded me to think about Carnegie, modern intellectual history, and American culture in big ways. Then in more detailed work on the manuscript itself, she offered much shrewd advice on organizing a mountain of material and clearly expressing the ideas within. A bit later in the process, Marjorie DeWitt deployed her considerable editorial skills to help trim and tighten the prose and clarify the argument. My appreciation extends to Yvonne E. Cárdenas and Tynan Kogane, who handled a host of production tasks. And, as usual, my friend and agent, Ronald Goldfarb, did yeoman’s work in making this book happen. From its inception through its completion, he tendered much good advice on matters contractual, authorial, and personal.
