Self help messiah, p.5
Self-help Messiah, page 5
Added pressure came from the fact that the State Normal School nurtured a tradition of oratorical excellence. The spoken word was highly valued among these prospective teachers, and students vied for distinction and attended the competitions in large numbers. One observer claimed that in Warrensburg “oratory was more highly esteemed than in any town in the state” and that each year the winners “were carried on the shoulders of the crowd and bonfires sent aloft in their honor.” In fact, one of the most famous addresses in nineteenth-century America had been delivered in the town. In 1869, lawyer George Vest—he would go on to win election to the United States Senate from Missouri ten years later—represented a client who had sued a neighboring sheep farmer for shooting his beloved hunting dog, Old Drum. In his summation, Vest presented an eloquent “Tribute to the Dog” that reduced the jury to tears and won the case. Its famous phrase, “man’s best friend,” quickly entered the popular lexicon. The speech itself soon rolled off the printing press and became a staple of American rhetoric as thousands of schoolboys around the country set to memorizing and reciting it in countless oratory contests. The speech certainly embedded itself in Carnagey’s mind—thirty years later he featured it in his syndicated newspaper column, reprinting the text and urging readers to “cut it out and paste it in your scrapbook.”17
Eventually, however, through sheer hard work, Carnagey began to scramble upward in the public-speaking hierarchy at the State Normal School. He pushed ahead, in his own words, with “the inspirational example of my mother always before me.” He memorized a number of surefire pieces—not only “Tribute to the Dog” but Richard Harding Davis’s “The Boy Orator of Zapata City” and Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address”—and practiced them fervently in every spare moment. He declaimed to the woods and pastures as he rode his horse to and from the college campus. He practiced his delivery while milking the cows on the family farm. When finished with evening chores, he mounted a bale of hay and delivered eloquent speeches to the curious livestock bedding down in the barn. The fledgling orator also critiqued visiting lecturers. A speaker on Alaska, he noticed, frequently lost his audience when “he neglected to talk in terms of what his audience knew.” The visitor described this massive territory as having an area of half a million square miles and a population of sixty-five thousand, statistics that meant little to the average listener. Carnagey concluded that a better approach would have been to note that Alaska was the size of Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, and Tennessee put together, with a population only the size of St. Joseph, Missouri. Listeners, he speculated, would have instantly grasped this comparison and been awed.18
Carnagey’s persistence soon paid off. Listeners began to notice that this rough-edged, ill-clad farm boy, while presenting a set piece identical to his competitors, “could recite it with more fire and pathos than any of the others.” To his delight, he finally won the competition within the Irving Literary Society and then ascended to the campus contests. In 1907 he claimed victory in the declamatory contest, which involved memorizing a piece of literature and then interpreting it in front of an audience. Then he won the debating contest the following year. Equally gratifying to his self-esteem, in the wake of these successes other students began to come to him for tips and training. During his final year in college, Carnagey won the debating contest while one of his trainees won the public-speaking contest and another the declamatory contest. With his profile elevated by these triumphs, he branched out by writing pieces of his own and delivering them at country churches and social gatherings in the area. With a new sense of self-confidence, he confessed, “I got a thrill out of appearing before audiences and I was determined from then on that I would make my livelihood doing that.”19
Success as a public speaker also changed Carnagey’s social life. The self-conscious, poorly dressed rube, who had been an object of condescension or mockery only a short time before, now became a big man on campus. In 1907, classmates elected him vice president of the sophomore class and he was memorialized in the yearbook with this bit of doggerel: “Our Vice President, Carnagey, is sure to win fame / makes all of us students think he can declaim.” Another sign of a growing reputation came when classmates began to tease him about his enthusiasm, a now-characteristic trait that occasionally could go to excess.20
The following year brought further acclaim as the Irving Literary Society held him up as an example of their organizational excellence. “Mr. Carnagey has been striving for honors ever since he entered this institution—not for himself alone, but for the Society—and he has now, though yet a junior in the course, succeeded in carrying off first honors in two contests, last year in declamation and this year in debate,” they wrote proudly in a campus publication. In the 1908 Rhetor, he was proclaimed one of the “Junior Stars” of the class: “Dale Carnagey—As Winning Debater.” He also became the object of more playful swipes from fellow students. Under the title “We Wonder,” The Rhetor pondered “What Dale Carnagey’s next scheme to work the faculty for a holiday will be.” It named him a member of the facetious “Ever-Active Investigation Committee” and poked fun at his self-confidence in a section entitled “Constant Companions … Dale Carnagey and ‘Egoism.’ ” The most prophetic comment, however, came in the listing of the junior class members along with a characteristic saying: “Dale Carnagey … ‘I will sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear me.’ ” Perhaps most gratifying to this adolescent, as he admitted in an interview many years later, “the girls began buzzing with compliments for that nice Carnagey boy with all the talent.”21
But there was more to his success. While Carnagey’s emergence as a public-speaking star at the State Normal School was primarily a product of his personal emotional needs and determination to succeed, it also resonated more broadly. His private victory, in fact, reflected an important public trend in American education. In concert with other developments, it hastened the collapse of traditional Victorian culture.
At the turn of the century, as historian Daniel Boorstin has noted, American public speech was still dominated by a standard of formal oratory in place since the early 1800s. The popular McGuffey Readers, for instance, which first appeared in the 1830s and went on to shape education for several generations, had instructed boys and girls in the proper method of “reading as a rhetorical exercise” and delineated the rules for oral presentation regarding “Articulation, Inflection, Accent, Emphasis, Modulation, and Poetic Pauses.” Mastery of these rules of formal declamation helped determine advancement through the primary and secondary grades, while universities stressed rhetoric, elocution, and oratory as essential subjects and drew upon the classical models of Cicero and Horace. This tradition of “great orations in the bombastic style,” as Boorstin termed it, held sway in this important area of public discourse.22
Young Dale Carnagey entered college, however, precisely at a fluid moment when the oratorical tradition was losing its grip. In the early years of the new century, educational interest in revamping the traditional teaching and practice of rhetoric was growing significantly. Critics of Victorian formalism were beginning to replace old-fashioned “oratory” with a new model of “public speaking,” thus beginning a revolution that over the next few decades would establish a conversational tone, a relaxed atmosphere with an audience, and open, honest speech as keys to effective communication. Eventually Carnagey would become a prime mover in this process, but during his college years in the early 1900s he stepped into the arena just as the first stages in the transition were playing out. Many of the old rules of gesture, breathing, and inflection were still being drilled into students, but teachers of “expression” and rhetoric were also importing new elements that aimed to relax some of the old strictures and imperatives. At the forefront of this revisionist crusade stood the disciples of a European voice and acting teacher.23
The Delsarte System, named after François Delsarte, a French theorist of vocal music and operatic acting, emerged as a progressive method of speech training in the United States during the late nineteenth century. Originally, Delsarte had presented a complex, cosmic pseudo-philosophy stressing the intertwining of vocal sounds and movement in expressing the deepest human impulses of mind and soul. But under the aegis of American interpreters such as Steele MacKaye, this approach evolved into a system of physical training where gesture, pantomime, and emotion became conduits for human “expression.” By the 1880s and 1890s Delsartians had become an important influence in shaping acting, dance, and, most important for young Carnagey, oratory. The practice of MacKaye’s “harmonic gymnastics,” or physical exercises designed both to relax the body and to focus one’s mental powers on elocution, gesture, and effective expression, became a key pedagogical tactic. In some hands, the Delsartian method became a parody of late-Victorian gentility, with a highly artificial inventory of statue posing, tableaux, and mechanical poses. But for most Delsartians, this approach represented a shift away from Victorian restraint and formalism. The system offered several new principles with liberating potential: freeing the voice and body from restrictive habit and making them responsive to a deeper “mental cause”; training the voice and body to be responsive to the spontaneous expression of ideas; encouraging the free play of individualism; and utilizing the voice and body for a delivery that was “natural,” which meant a “conversational” tone achieved through studied technique.24
Thus the Delsarte System served as a bridge between the high formalism of nineteenth-century Victorianism and the socially grounded realism of twentieth-century modernity. As such, it reflected a broader transformation in American culture. Many fields of endeavor in this era of great change—education, the law, philosophy, historical study, political ideology—witnessed a similar shift away from formal categories, abstract principles, moral imperatives, and static, immutable systems of thought. A new sensibility stressed the need to confront social reality, test ideas for their efficacy in the real world, and accept the notion that truth happened to an idea rather than residing inherent in it. From “legal realism” to “progressive education” to philosophical “pragmatism” to “progressive history,” nearly every area of cultural endeavor took on this new instrumentalist coloration. The teaching of oratory fit the larger pattern. The Delsartians reflected an emerging antiformalist, post-Victorian sensibility that deemphasized technical displays and embraced a psychological approach tying together body and mind.25
At the State Normal School in 1904, as at many other educational institutions, the influence of Delsarte was palpable. Frederick Abbott, the school’s professor of Dramatic Expression and the Speech Arts, was leading the charge. A diminutive man with thick, wiry hair and a dynamic, inspiring presence, he had trained under F. Townsend Southwick, one of America’s leading Delsartians, at Southwick’s New York School of Expression in New York City. Abbott spent much of the 1890s touring the United States and Canada as a lyceum speaker, and then moved into pedagogy, filling a number of teaching positions in the following years. He arrived at the State Normal School in 1905, and quickly became a major influence on Carnagey’s development as a public speaker.26
Abbott assigned Southwick’s textbook, Elocution and Action, in his classes. In fact, Abbott had written an advertising blurb for his mentor’s text several years earlier, describing it as “in accordance with the ‘new elocution’ ” and reporting, “I have used it with splendid results with my pupils.” From Southwick’s text, Carnagey learned a dislike for overblown displays of passion, a Victorian staple, and an appreciation for “a solid foundation of conversational delivery. Emotion that is genuine will find its own outlet, if the channels of expression are free.” He learned that an overemphasis on technique would result in “loss of spontaneity, which is more valuable than grace or mechanical perfection.” He learned the importance of speaking slowly because if “we are careful to do this, we need not shout nor strain the voice, but we can use our every-day conversational tone and be perfectly at ease.” Finally, he learned to connect spoken words with inner emotions so as to “really feel what you would express and express only what you feel. This is the secret of natural delivery.”27
Carnagey became a convert to Abbott and Southwick’s “new elocution.” He retained the studied physical posture of traditional formalism but aimed for a more natural, conversational delivery while spicing up his presentations with elements of emotion, particularly enthusiasm. He saw himself as part of a revolution in public speaking that rejected the “verbal fireworks” of the nineteenth century and sought “to let go, to be spontaneous, to break through my shell of reserve, to talk and act like a human being.” Carnagey also drew upon his mother’s influence. During his childhood, she had nudged him toward a more natural style in delivering his “pieces” at religious gatherings. While other boys had adopted florid physical movements while speaking, Amanda “scorned these silly tricks. Poetry had to be spoken with the proper singing quality, and a speech made with the meaning clear and eloquent. And without the extravagant gestures.”28
By the time he had completed his college studies and entered the wider world, Carnagey’s rejection of formalism in rhetoric and elocution was complete. By 1912, he had become a fledgling speech instructor and even the faintest vestiges of traditional, stilted oratory drew his ire. He urged his mother, for example, to abandon her plans to send a young female ward for speech lessons. “Those elocution teachers that you have out in those small towns are worse than nothing,” he warned. “Don’t let anyone spoil her by teaching her a lot of rot.” In another missive, he stressed that misguided elocution lessons were worse than none and contended that “a bad teacher, like a bad doctor, may do you harm.”29
Eventually Carnagey’s embrace of modern public speaking, with its practical bent and emphasis on individuality and communication, caused him to rethink his entire view of college education. Looking back at his college experience, he wrote many years later, he could recall only one sentence that stuck in his mind. His history professor had told him, “Carnagey, you are going to forget practically everything you learn here; and you ought to forget it, anyway, because very little of it is important. The really significant thing is what kind of man you are making of yourself while learning these things.” This became the lynchpin for Carnagey’s utilitarian view that academic learning—he described it as a “medieval” system that filled students’ heads with useless facts—should give way to an emphasis on personal development in college studies. Public speaking had filled this role for him, providing confidence and skills in dealing with people that were “of more practical value to me in business—and in life—than everything else I had studied in college put all together.”30
In such fashion Carnagey’s college experience framed a critical transition in his life. Socially, it brought into focus a desperate yearning to escape his family’s heritage of rural poverty and presented the possibility of future success. Intellectually, it convinced him that the narrowly religious worldview of his parents was ill suited to the dynamic modern world of the early twentieth century. Culturally, it nudged him away from the moral strictures and genteel formalism of nineteenth-century Victorian culture. Overall, college provided a quantum leap in self-respect to this impoverished farm boy and prompted a dawning sense that a new world was opening up and that he could be a part of it. Bolstered by his achievements in public speaking and eager to strike out on his own, Carnagey sensed that success was his for the taking. Confident in his abilities and impatient with his past, he was ready for even bigger changes.
An opportunity presented itself in 1908 when a fellow student told Carnagey about a moneymaking opportunity that seemed tailor-made for his verbal skills. He leaped at the chance and fled from the family cocoon. Determined to get ahead, he moved hundreds of miles away physically and even further emotionally.
Selling Products, Selling Yourself
In How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie often delved into the world of sales. “Thousands of salesmen are pounding the pavements today, tired, discouraged, and underpaid,” he claimed. “Why? Because they are always thinking only of what they want” and don’t understand the people to whom they are trying to sell. But the guidelines in his book could remedy this situation. “Countless numbers of salesmen have sharply increased their sales by the use of these principles. Many have opened up new accounts—accounts they had formerly solicited in vain,” he exclaimed. “Men are frequently astonished at the new results they achieve. It all seems like magic.” The first step was to understand that in modern America, discovering people’s desires was crucial. Everyone had their own problems and “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.” But the skilled salesman also knew that people’s desires could be encouraged and inflated. As Carnegie proclaimed, in one of his favorite maxims, “arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him.”1
