Self help messiah, p.50
Self-help Messiah, page 50
29 DC, Public Speaking: The Standard Course, Book III, 136, and Book IV, 18–19.
30 H. Addington Bruce, “Masters of the Mind,” American Magazine (November 1910): 71–81. See also H. Addington Bruce, “The New Mind Cure Based on Science,” American Magazine (October 1910): 773–78, and several books by Bruce: The Riddle of Personality (New York, 1908), Scientific Mental Healing (Boston, 1911), Nerve Control and How to Gain It (New York, 1919), and Self-Development: A Handbook for the Ambitious (New York, 1921). For biographical information on Bruce, see Satter, Each Mind a Kingdom, 244.
31 DC, Public Speaking: The Standard Course, Book I, 26.
32 Ibid., Book III, 28–29, and Book IV, 19, 2, 69.
33 Ibid., Book III, 125–26, where DC described and quoted from Invictus, by William Ernest Henley.
34 Dale Carnagey, Draft Registration Card No. 59, 10th District, Draft Board 44 and Registrar’s Report 31-9-44-A, June 5, 1917, in World War I Selective Service Draft Registration Cards, 1917–1918 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives); “Yaphank Greets New Army Recruits,” The New York Times, September 20, 1917; and “Camp Upton,” Brookhaven History, available at http:www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/history/camp_upton1.asp.
35 DC, “Letters to My Daughter,” 19–20.
36 DC, Public Speaking: A Practical Course, 353, 355–56.
37 Charles Whann, Captain, 23rd Precinct, Metropolitan Canvass Committee to Adj. General M. McCaim, July 12, 1918; DC to Amanda Carnagey, December 3, 1918; and DC to Mrs. J. W. Carnagey, January 29, 1919: all DCA.
38 DC to Mrs. J. W. Carnagey, January 29, 1919; and DC to Mrs. J. W. Carnagey, May 11, 1919: both DCA.
39 DC, “How Businessmen Are Acquiring Self-Confidence and Convincing Speech,” Supplement to Syllabus B-15—Public Speaking, YMCA, October 15, 1919, DCA.
40 DC, “My Triumph Over Fears That Cost Me $10,000 a Year,” American Magazine (November 1918): 50–51, 137–39; and J. M. O’Neill, “The True Story of $10,000 Fears,” Quarterly Journal of Speech Education (March 1919): 128–37.
41 O’Neill, “The True Story of $10,000 Fears,” 132, 135–36.
42 Ibid., 136, 137.
43 DC, Public Speaking: The Standard Course, Book III, 117–34.
7. Rebellion and the Lost Generation
1 DC, How to Win Friends and Influence People (New York, 1937), 12, 111, 17.
2 Ibid., 16, 15, 26.
3 DC, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (New York, 1948), 134, 121–22, 123–24.
4 Margaret Case Harriman, “He Sells Hope,” The Saturday Evening Post (August 31, 1937): 33; and Lowell Thomas, Good Evening Everybody (New York, 1976), 109.
5 Lowell Thomas to Mr. H. W. Turner, March 8, 1917, reprinted in 1917 advertisement for Carnagey’s course in Baltimore, DCA.
6 Joel C. Hodgson, Lawrence of Arabia and American Culture: The Making of a Transatlantic Legend (Westport, CT, 1995), 11–26.
7 Ibid., 11, 28–30.
8 Harriman, “He Sells Hope,” 33; Thomas, Good Evening Everybody, 200; and DC, autobiographical note, untitled and undated, DCA.
9 DC to Amanda Carnagey, August 1919, DCA; Thomas, Good Evening Everybody, 200; and DC to Amanda Carnagey, July 31, 1919, DCA.
10 Thomas, Good Evening Everybody, 200–1; and DC, Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business (New York, 1953 [1926]), 194.
11 Thomas, Good Evening Everybody, 201–2; DC to Amanda Carnagey, August 18, 1919, DCA; DC, autobiographical fragment, DCA; Hodgson, Lawrence of Arabia and American Culture, 30–31; and Lloyd’s Weekly News and The Times quoted in With Allenby in Palestine publicity pamphlet, DCA. A complete description of the show can be found in Hodgson, Lawrence of Arabia and American Culture, 33–35.
12 With Allenby in Palestine publicity pamphlet; and DC to Amanda Carnagey, August 1919: both DCA. DC outlined the scope of his job several years later in a letter to Professor A. B. Williamson, February 2, 1925, DCA.
13 DC to Amanda Carnagey, August 1919; DC to Carnagey family, undated, fall 1919; DC to Amanda Carnagey, January 27, 1920; and DC to Amanda and James Carnagey, March 12, 1920: all DCA.
14 DC to Amanda and James Carnagey, December 1920; DC to Amanda Carnagey, August 1919; and DC to Amanda and James Carnagey, March 12, 1920: all DCA.
15 Hodgson, Lawrence of Arabia and American Culture, 41; DC, autobiographical fragment, DCA; and DC to Amanda and James Carnagey, May 14, 1920, DCA.
16 DC to Amanda and James Carnagey, May 26, 1920, DCA; and Harriman, “He Sells Hope,” 33.
17 Thomas, Good Evening Everybody, 219.
18 DC to Amanda and James Carnagey, December 1920, DCA.
19 Ibid.; DC to Professor A. B. Williamson, February 2, 1925; and The Ross Smith Flight: From England to Australia publicity pamphlet: all DCA.
20 “Dale Carnagey Married,” Belton Herald, August 4, 1921; and Marriages Registered in July, August, and September 1921, England and Wales, Marriage Index: 1916–2005, available at Ancestry.com.
21 Lolita B. Carnagey, passport application in Rome, May 10, 1922, U.S. Passport Applications, 1795–1925, available at Ancestry.com; National Archives and Records Administration; Charles C. Harris, 1900 United States Federal Census, available at Ancestry.com; and 1910 United States Federal Census, available at Ancestry.com.
22 “Dale Carnagey Married”; Charles C. Harris, 1920 United States Federal Census, available at (database, Ancestry.com); Lolita Carnagey, passport application; and Dorothy Carnegie, videotaped interview, 1996, DCA, who related facts about her husband’s first marriage based on conversations with him.
23 Various postcards, photographs, and letters from DC to his parents during the 1920s, DCA.
24 “Interesting News Received from Mr. Dale Carnagey,” Belton Herald, February 10, 1922; Lolita Carnagey, passport application; and DC, “Dale Carnagey, Spending Summer in Europe, Writes of Life There,” Maryville Tribune, October 22, 1922.
25 DC, “Daniel Eversole Is More Impressive Than Cuno,” Maryville Democrat-Forum, September 25, 1923; DC, Public Speaking: A Practical Course for Business Men (New York: Association Press, 1926), 174–75; and undated postcard, DCA.
26 Series of undated postcards, DCA; DC, “Dale Carnagey Says Nodaway County Girls Would Charm Heart of Iron Man,” Maryville Democrat-Forum, November 13, 1924; and DC, “Letters to My Daughter” (January 1952–1955), 20–21, DCA.
27 DC, “Dale Carnagey Says Nodaway County Girls Would Charm.”
28 “Life in Bedison Is More Thrilling Than in Paris,” newspaper clipping dated by hand “Oct. 18, 1924,” no citation, DCA; DC, “Dale Carnagey Says Nodaway County Girls Would Charm”; and DC letter to himself, undated but probably written in late 1920s, DCA.
29 DC, “Dale Carnagey, Spending Summer in Europe”; DC to Amanda and James Carnagey, December 1920, DCA; Thomas H. Nelson to Mr. Percy Peixotto in Paris, undated, DCA; “Would You Like to Speak in Public? Learn to Think When on Your Feet,” New York Herald (European edition: Paris), November 25, 1924; and DC to Prof. A. B. Williamson, February 2, 1925, DCA.
30 Carnagey Shepherd Breeding and Training Farm undated pamphlet, DCA; and James Carnagey, “Closing Out Sale” announcement, undated but refers to his “nearing” seventy-fourth birthday in January 1926, obviously written by DC, DCA. The DCA also has about one dozen photos of German shepherds with Lolita’s handwriting on the back.
31 Charles Kemp and Edward Claflin, Dale Carnegie: The Man Who Influenced Millions (New York, 1989), 128; DC, “Damned Fool Things I Have Done” file, December 31, 1927, and undated entry, DCA.
32 DC, “Damned Fool Things I Have Done” file, December 9, 1927; DC, “Dale Carnagey, Spending Summer in Europe”; and undated postcard, DCA.
33 Harriman, “He Sells Hope,” 33–34; and DC, Lincoln the Unknown (New York, 1959 [1932]), 51, 55–56, 71–72.
34 DC, Lincoln the Unknown, 55–56, 77, 84, 86.
35 Lolita Carnegie to DC, March 16, 1932, DCA. DC applied for a passport on January 5, 1928, and spent some time later that year traveling in Germany, Switzerland, Norway, and France with Lolita. Records indicate that on October 5, he left Cherbourg, France, for New York City alone.
36 “Dale Carnagey Entering Rank of Writing Celebrities,” Maryville Democrat-Forum, December 6, 1914.
37 DC, How to Win Friends, 62; and DC, How to Stop Worrying, 77.
38 “Dale Carnagey Entering Rank of Writing Celebrities”; DC, “Daniel Eversole Is More Impressive Than Cuno”; and DC, “Dale Carnagey Says Nodaway County Girls Would Charm.”
39 Malcolm Cowley, Exiles Return: A Literary Odyssey (New York, 1975 [1934]), 9. For insightful analyses of the Lost Generation of writers, see also Craig Monk, Writing the Lost Generation: Expatriate Autobiography and American Modernism (Iowa City, 2008), and an older treatment by Alfred Kazin, “Into the Thirties: All the Lost Generations,” in his On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (New York, 1942).
40 See Carl Van Doren, Contemporary American Novelists, 1900–1920 (New York, 1922), 146; and Kazin, “The New Realism: Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis,” in On Native Grounds.
41 “All That I Have” unpublished manuscript, DCA.
42 Ibid., 3, 4, 31–32.
43 Ibid., 101–2.
44 Ibid., 183–84.
45 Ibid., 20–21, 100.
46 Ibid., 10–12.
47 Ibid., 38, 88.
48 DC, “Former Nodaway Countian, Now Writer, Declares He Still Knows His ABC’s,” Maryville Democrat-Forum, October 1925; “Armistice Novel” sketch, DCA; DC’s clippings on writing, DCA.
49 DC, How to Stop Worrying, 77–78.
50 Ibid.; and DC, “Letters to My Daughter,” 21.
51 DC to Amanda and James Carnagey, May 14, 1920, DCA; DC to Amanda and James Carnagey, May 26, 1920, DCA; and DC, “Dale Carnagey Says Nodaway Girls Would Charm.”
8. Business and Self-Regulation
1 DC, How to Win Friends and Influence People (New York, 1937), 2–3, 12.
2 Ibid., 54, 68–69, 42–43, 34, 126, 160, 179, 98, 160, 190.
3 DC, “Dale Carnagey Says Nodaway County Girls Would Charm Heart of Iron Man,” Maryville Democrat-Forum, November 13, 1924; DC, “Former Nodaway Countian, Now Writer, Declares He Still Knows His ABC’s,” Maryville Democrat-Forum, October 1925; and DC, Public Speaking: A Practical Course for Business Men (New York: Association Press, 1926).
4 Margaret Case Harriman, “He Sells Hope,” The Saturday Evening Post (August 31, 1937): 36; and Adolph E. Meyer, “How Dale Carnegie Made Friends, Etc.,” The American Mercury (July 1943): 44.
5 Harriman, “He Sells Hope,” 36.
6 DC to Prof. A. B. Williamson, February 2, 1925; William F. Hirsch, the executive secretary of United YMCA Schools, to DC, December 2, 1920; and DC to Hirsch, January 8, 1921: all DCA.
7 DC, “Dale Carnagey, Spending Summer in Europe, Writes of Life There,” Maryville Tribune, October 10, 1922.
8 DC, Public Speaking: A Practical Course, 201, 37, 38–40, 153–54, 175.
9 Ibid., 7–9.
10 Coolidge quoted in William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon (New York, 1938), 253, and in James Prothro, The Dollar Decade (New York, 1954), 224.
11 Ford quoted in Steven Watts, The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (New York, 2005), 120–22. For a trenchant summary of 1920s prosperity, see Paul Boyer et al., The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People (Lexington, MA, 1996), 772–73.
12 William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1988), xiii–xiv. Among a voluminous literature on the new consumerism, see also Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1984), and Daniel Horowitz, The Morality of Spending: Attitudes Toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875–1950 (Baltimore, 1985). On domestic science, see Bettina Berch, “Scientific Management in the Home: The Empress’s New Clothes,” Journal of American Culture (Fall 1980): 440–45, and Glenna Matthews, “The Housewife and the Home Economist,” in her Just a Housewife: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (New York, 1987), 145–71.
13 Ellis Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order (New York, 1979), v, 80, 99; Kim McQuaid, “Corporate Liberalism in the American Business Community, 1920–1940,” Business History Review (Autumn 1978): 342–68; and Leach, Land of Desire.
14 DC, Public Speaking: The Standard Course of the United Y.M.C.A. Schools (New York, 1920), Book III, 16, 19, and Book IV, 69–71, 72; and Public Speaking and Self-Confidence, 1917 advertising pamphlet, DCA.
15 DC to Prof. A. B. Williamson, February 2, 1925, DCA.
16 DC, Public Speaking: A Practical Course, 3–5, 12.
17 Ibid., 31, 228.
18 Ibid., 31, 172–73.
19 Ibid., 47, 82, 332, 395–96.
20 Ibid., 134, 166, 192.
21 Ibid., 401–2.
22 Ibid., 48–49.
23 Ibid., 247, 37.
24 Susman, Culture as History, 274, 280.
25 Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870–1920 (Chicago, 1990), 201–2. See also, in a vast literature on the “organizational synthesis,” Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, 1977); Richard R. John, “Elaborations, Revisions, Dissents: Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.’s The Visible Hand After Twenty Years,” Business History Review (Summer 1997): 151–200; and Louis Galambos, “Technology, Political Economy, and Professionalization: Central Themes of the Organizational Synthesis,” Business History Review (Winter 1983): 471–93.
26 DC, “How Businessmen Are Acquiring Self-Confidence and Convincing Speech,” Supplement to Syllabus B-15—Public Speaking, YMCA, October 15, 1919, DCA; and DC, Public Speaking: The Standard Course, Book IV, 66–67, 85–87.
27 DC, Public Speaking: A Practical Course, 143–44.
28 Ibid., 203.
29 Ibid., 225, 226.
30 Ibid., 228, 229, 230, 238, 239, 242.
31 Ibid., 423–24.
32 Ibid., 298–99, 425, 391.
33 Richard Weiss, The American Myth of Success: From Horatio Alger to Norman Vincent Peale (Urbana, IL, 1988), 196; and DC, Public Speaking: A Practical Course, 389.
34 DC, Public Speaking: A Practical Course, 240, 175, 389.
35 Ibid., 386, 474–75.
36 Ibid., 387–88.
37 Coolidge quoted in Frank Presbrey, The History and Development of Advertising (New York, 1929), 620, 622, 625.
38 DC, Public Speaking: A Practical Course, 470, 387.
39 Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows (New York, 2000 [1925]), 5, 18, 50, 66, 33–35, 13–18, 19–25, 42. For an exceptionally insightful analysis of Barton and the new culture of personality, see T. J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880–1930,” in Richard Wrightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New York, 1983), 3–38, especially 29–38.
40 DC, Public Speaking: A Practical Course, 429–30.
41 See, among many others, two books that suggest this interpretive paradigm: John G. Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man (Chicago, 1965), and Judy Hilkey, Character Is Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997).
42 Entries quoted here and in the following paragraphs are all from “Damned Fool Things I Have Done” file, DCA.
43 DC, Public Speaking: A Practical Course, 33, 65, 140, 68, 135, 231.
44 What Can a Course in Public Speaking Do for Me?, 1930 publicity pamphlet, DCA.
45 “The Engineers Club of Philadelphia: Here Is How New York and Philadelphia Engineers Have Profited by Dale Carnegie’s Course,” 1930 advertisement, DCA.
46 DC, “Why a Banker Should Study Public Speaking,” Bulletin of the American Institute of Banking (January 1927): 23–30.
47 See the following “How They Got That Way” installments in American Magazine: (September 1929): 88, 174; (October 1929): 78, 192; (December 1929): 73; (January 1930): 144; (April 1930): 208; (May 1930): 204; (July 1930): 82, 94, 124; and (January 1931): 80. For a brief sketch of Albert T. Reid, see the Kansas Historical Society website, available at Kansapedia: kshs.org/kansapedia/albert-t-reid/12182.
48 “How They Got That Way,” American Magazine (November 1929): 80.
9. “Do the Thing You Fear to Do”
1 For statistics on the impact of the Great Depression, see Robert L. Heilbroner, The Economic Transformation of America (New York, 1977), 179, 185.
2 Rosemary Crom, ed., Dale Carnegie—As Others Saw Him (Garden City, NY: D. Carnegie, 1987), 10, 12; DC to Homer Croy, September 15, 1931, Homer Croy Papers, State Historical Society of Missouri; and Homer Croy’s sad story in DC, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (New York, 1948), 266–68.
3 See Abbie Connell’s reminiscences in Crom, Dale Carnegie, 25; and DC to Amanda and James Carnagey, December 31, 1930, DCA.
4 See Warren I. Susman’s essays in his Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1984), in particular “Culture and Commitment,” 196–98, and “The Culture of the Thirties,” 154, 164.
5 For a concise treatment of FDR’s first inaugural address, see David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York, 1999), 133–34.
6 DC, “Grab Your Bootstraps,” Collier’s (March 5, 1938): 14–15.
7 Ibid., 14, 15, 37.
8 See DC’s reminiscences on China in Crom, Dale Carnegie as Others Saw Him, 25; and DC, “Grab Your Bootstraps,” 14, where he reiterated his views on that country and America’s Great Depression.
9 DC, The Dale Carnegie Course in Effective Speaking and Influencing Men in Business, 1934, 12.
10 DC to Lowell Thomas, May 21, 1934, Lowell Thomas Papers, Marist College Archives and Special Collections; “How to Increase Your Income and Develop Leadership,” full-page newspaper advertisement for the Carnegie course, 1932–1935, DCA; and DC, Topics for Talks and Schedule of Sessions: Dale Carnegie Course, 1934, 27.
