Self help messiah, p.6
Self-help Messiah, page 6
The second step was equally important. Successful salesmen needed to sell themselves as well as their products, Carnegie shrewdly observed. A major section of How to Win Friends was devoted to “Six Ways to Make People Like You,” and it included advice on “how to make people like you instantly.” The author offered tips for advancing in the sales game, such as soliciting a “yes response” immediately from a potential buyer because this would “set the psychological processes … moving in the affirmative direction” and make it more likely that he would buy your product. Carnegie even included a surefire letter for use in sales promotions. It began, “I wonder if you would mind helping me out of a little difficulty?” It went on to ask clients how successful the product had been and if there were additional services that could be supplied, and then closed with: “If you’ll do this, I’ll surely appreciate it and thank you for your kindness in giving me this information.” Carnegie added, in parentheses, “Note how, in the last paragraph, [the letter] whispers ‘I’ and shouts ‘you.’ ” These techniques aimed to make the other person feel important but also set the salesman to conveying a positive, compelling image of himself to a client.2
In a broad sense, Carnegie, with his usual acumen, had grasped a crucial historical truth: Early twentieth-century America was embracing a new kind of economy where consumer abundance was the order of the day and salesmen played a key role in lubricating the flow of goods. But he also understood that selling consumer goods had become linked to emotional self-fulfillment and the ideal of a compelling personality. As with many other themes in his famous book, Carnegie’s formulation was less the result of a systematic analysis of modern life and more a result of his own past experience. As his college career came to a close, the young man, weary of poverty and eager to partake of the prosperity beckoning all around, took the plunge into the world of salesmanship. This endeavor proved frustrating, but it provided ideas and techniques that became an integral part of his famous success message. As he would make clear in later years, selling yourself in a modern America of abundance held the key to achievement and advancement.
In the spring of 1908, Dale Carnagey was ready for a change. Having confronted an acute crisis of confidence in college over his religious background and feelings of social inferiority, he had embraced public speaking as a means to distinction and molded himself into a champion debater and orator. He expected to finish his course work, graduate, and become a schoolteacher with a long-term goal—set sometime in the hazy future—of becoming a Chautauqua speaker. But Carnagey still was haunted by the specter of poverty that had hung over his family since his boyhood. He had no money, few possessions, and his parents were struggling to hold on to their farm.
Thus when a classmate, in casual conversation, mentioned an opportunity for moneymaking, Carnagey was receptive. Frank Sells, a fellow member of the Irving Literary Society, related that he had spent part of the previous year selling courses for the International Correspondence School in Denver, Colorado. The company paid the princely sum of $2.00 a day for room and board, while the salesman pocketed the commissions from any sales he made. After noting that a beginning schoolteacher made only $60.00 a month, an amount matched by the Correspondence School’s expense account alone, Carnagey quickly calculated the advantage and moved decisively.3
Full of enthusiasm but naïve, he applied for the job in a rather unorthodox fashion. Not realizing that it was bad form to seek a position by mail, he dashed off a letter—along with a crude résumé—to the International Correspondence School in Denver and asked for a sales position. The company decided to hire this neophyte sight unseen. Only later did Carnagey learn that its managers had ignored his effrontery because they felt that someone who had won several public-speaking awards had the stuff to be a good salesman. Elated, he finished his spring semester courses, received his Regents Certificate, which made him a graduate of the “elementary course” and entitled him to teach, and prepared to leave home for the first time at age nineteen. On May 23, 1908, his family accompanied him to the Warrensburg depot, and as he boarded the train, his mother wept to see her youngest child depart on this new adventure. She seems to have sensed the finality of what her son later described as “leaving the family nest forever, to try out my wings in the world.”4
Carnagey’s journey to Denver almost parodied the old story of the backward country boy arriving in the big city. He brought with him every penny he had—around twenty dollars—in a small cloth bag that Amanda had made for him. It hung on a string around his neck under his shirt, in his words, “so none of the city slickers would rob me.” After riding the rails for a day and a half, he secured a cheap room at a boardinghouse in Denver and lay awake his first night “awestruck by the largest city I had ever seen and … too frightened to turn out my light.” About midnight, when a loud pounding on the door convinced him that he was about to be robbed and killed, he cried out, “What do you want??” The night watchmen yelled back, “Turn out that light!” The chagrined young man admitted, “I was probably the greenest country kid that had ever wandered into Denver in many a moon.”5
Carnagey faced the world with a determination to succeed. Photographs from this era show a young man of modest stature, neatly dressed in a dark suit, a shirt with a high, starched collar, and a bow tie. His medium-length hair was parted on the side and swept back, sometimes with a slight pompadour, a style that emphasized his sharp features, aquiline nose, and protruding ears. With his head cocked to the right and tilting slightly upward, he gazed out at the world earnestly, intensely, somewhat quizzically. Young Carnagey attempted to project an air of gravitas befitting a man of the world. At the same time, however, he betrayed a certain false bravado with this air of worldly confidence. A hint of insecurity peeked out from behind the serious façade of the boy orator with the gift of gab.
In many ways, Carnagey’s alliance with the International Correspondence School was a perfect match. His driving ambition to escape a family background of poverty and move up in the world reflected perfectly the company’s mission. The ICS had been founded in 1891 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Aimed at working-class individuals who sought to move upward into more prestigious jobs, it offered a variety of courses in practical subjects such as accounting, mechanical drawing, barbering, embalming, pharmacy, real estate sales, bookkeeping, stenography, surveying, plumbing, building contracting, electrical lighting management, gas engineering, and dozens of others. To make the offerings even more attractive to a clientele of modest economic means, one could enroll in a course on the installment plan and pay the fee over a period of months. As a 1905 ICS advertisement asked dramatically, “On Which Side of the Desk Are You? The man before the desk works with his hands and is paid for his labor. The man behind the desk works with his head and is paid for his knowledge …”6
Students would receive in the mail a series of Instruction and Question Papers from ICS, which offered exactly the information they needed. Each unit was accompanied by a test that the student would complete and return to the company, where scores of graders sitting five abreast at desks checked the work. Higher-ranking instructors and principals then evaluated it again. A student progressed upward at his or her own pace through ever-more sophisticated layers of information until completing the course. By the early 1900s, every year about a hundred thousand new students were enrolling in more than three hundred ICS courses emanating from thirty-one branch schools established around the country in cities such as Denver. Eager for practical education and upward economic mobility, throngs of largely white, native-born industrial workers and laborers—as well as a few clerks and low-level office workers—flocked to the ICS, seeing it as an opportunity for self-improvement.7
In 1910 Carnagey left college to work a large territory in the Great Plains as a traveling salesman.
Displaying his trademark enthusiasm, Carnagey rushed into his sales territory in western Nebraska eager to sell this program for success, and to launch his own upward mobility in the process. Establishing a base in the small town of Alliance, he scoured the surrounding area looking for clients. But as the young man quickly discovered, it was not a locale rich with possibilities for selling home-education courses. In his words, “It was a dry, parched, burned-out country where wild horses roamed. Much of it was so bad that even the homesteaders who lived there had to struggle daily to eke out just a bare living on the dry, sandy land.” But he was not easily discouraged. He scurried in and out of retail stores trying to sell clerks and checkers a course in retail sales management. He spied men in the countryside painting a barn and tried to sell them a course in commercial sign painting. He dropped by machine shops and tried to sell the mechanics a course in engineering. “I worked desperately hard,” he described. “I was pathetically eager to succeed.” Despite such dogged efforts, however, he sold hardly any courses. Discouragement set in. “I was a flop,” Carnagey confessed. “The farmers I called on thought more about the drought than education, and would no more buy my course than they would jump off a ten-story building—if they could find a ten-story building.”8
After several months, Carnagey gradually surrendered to despair. Dragging back to his hotel room every evening with an empty sales book, he grew disheartened, then depressed as his sales career seemed to be collapsing before it even got off the ground. “Try as I would,” he reported, “it was mostly failure and discouragement and this was my first job! I longed to give it up and go back to the farm and to the emotional security of my mother and father, but I was ashamed to do that.” The situation became so bleak that after one particularly unrewarding day, he returned to his lodging and threw himself onto the bed and sobbed over his fading fortunes. His prospects for the future, which had seemed so bright only a short time before, now seemed to mock his pretensions.9
And as if this travail was not enough, Carnagey became involved in another imbroglio. Near the conclusion of his college career at the State Normal School, a professor of biology, Benjamin L. Seawell, somehow had convinced the youth to become involved in a gold-mining venture with promises of great profit from a meager investment. So Carnagey, along with his parents—all of whom had great trust in the judgment and integrity of this professional academic—somehow scraped together $100 to contribute to this venture. But the mine did not pan out and the young man’s letters home were filled with frantic inquiries about their vanished funds: “What have you heard regarding the gold mine? It seems to me we ought to be getting some results … Push the news from the gold mine on as fast as you get it.” James Carnagey finally succeeded in chasing down Seawell, who had moved from Warrensburg and taken a position at another small college in Missouri. In a return letter, the professor insisted that this business failure was not his fault. The gold-mining enterprise was legitimate, he insisted, and the only reason he could deduce for its failure to produce was “that some stealthy and criminal native, with no other motive than to get a job on the dredge, must have salted our prospective samples.” Indignantly he announced “my own clear conscience in the case.” Dale Carnagey was not mollified, scribbling angrily across the front of Seawell’s letter, “I want no more worthless stock. I want some hard cash out of him.” The episode offered a warning about how dangerous the pursuit of profit could be. Carnagey admonished himself, “I am constantly astonished at how people who have a little hard-earned money will listen to the slick talk of some smooth crook and then take and spend the savings of a lifetime without getting the advice of their bankers.” It was a hard-won lesson about human trust and the vagaries of the marketplace.10
Then Carnagey found a sudden solution to his problems. While traveling his territory, he met a veteran salesman in the hotel in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, and struck up a conversation. Soon the despondent youth began pouring out the story of his failure to sell correspondence courses and lamenting his future prospects. After hearing his tale, the older man “gave me some advice that proved to be another turning point in my life,” in Carnagey’s words. The salesman, who worked for the National Biscuit Company, did not mince words. “You haven’t got a real job, boy,” he said. “It is awfully difficult to sell educational courses to these farmers, grocery clerks, potato growers, and cattle ranchers in the sandhills of Nebraska. You ought to be selling some necessity like meat or canned foods. Why don’t you get yourself a regular job? I think a lad with your energy and enthusiasm could succeed if he sold something everybody wanted.” This frank assessment prodded Carnagey to action, while the words of encouragement soothed his lacerated confidence. He decided to sell something more tangible and began to plan a foray to Omaha to find a more dependable, lucrative job in its booming meatpacking industry.11
While Carnagey’s tenure with the International Correspondence School appeared to be a short-lived disaster, it provided some important, enduring lessons. He imbibed, for instance, the ICS’s definition of its mission as one to provide “practical men with a technical education, and technical men with a practical education.” This utilitarian philosophy aimed not at instilling abstract ideas or developing the student’s mind in some broad sense but, in the company’s slogan, to help students “put the knowledge obtained into practical use.” In addition, Carnagey internalized the ICS’s sunny promotion of individual social advancement, which was reflected in an Algeresque pamphlet that it sent to everyone who answered one of its ads or signed up for one of its courses. Entitled 1,001 Success Stories, it was filled with personal testimonials from students who had taken the correspondence courses and subsequently risen within the white-collar world of American enterprise. Carnagey may even have seen a journal that began to appear from the ICS’s Encouragement Department just as he was leaving the company. It was entitled Ambition: A Journal of Inspiration to Self-Help. Burrowing deep into his worldview, the ICS sensibility of utilitarian success and inspiration helped create the foundation for his public-speaking courses, and then his success program presented in the mammoth best seller, How to Win Friends and Influence People.12
Keen to procure a more reliable, profitable sales position, Carnagey sought employment with one of the trio of big meatpacking companies located in Omaha: Armour, Swift, or Cudahy. He went to a local stockyard in western Nebraska and found a livestock dealer who was shipping two carloads of wild horses to Omaha and needed someone to feed and water them on the trip. The payment was free train transportation. Carnagey took the job, performed the task, and found himself in Omaha a few days later. Realizing that he did not really know how to apply for a job, he dropped into a local hardware company for an interview to gain some experience. After this dry run, he approached Swift and then Cudahy, both of whom rejected his application to be a salesman. At the offices of Armour and Company, however, he encountered Rufus E. Harris, the sales manager, who proved more sympathetic. When Harris heard about the applicant’s success as a public speaker in college, he offered him a position because, in Carnagey’s words, “he thought a kid who could speak better than anyone in college might become a good salesman.”13
Founded in 1867 in Chicago by Philip D. Armour and several of his brothers, Armour and Company had expanded throughout the late 1800s to become a giant in the meatpacking industry. It specialized in a variety of fresh and canned meats, and was in the forefront in the development of refrigerator cars to transport carcasses and in using meat by-products to produce other items such as glue, lard, buttons, soap, and fertilizer. In the 1880s, Armour and Company created a number of branch houses around the country as distribution centers to assist with sales, storage, and delivery. In 1897, it built a large meatpacking plant in Omaha to take advantage of the stockyards already established there to collect livestock from the Great Plains. By the time Carnagey joined the company in the fall of 1908, Armour’s Omaha facility was booming as one of the largest meatpacking operations in the country.14
Given a salary of $17.30 per week plus expenses, and assigned to a sales territory in the badlands of the Dakotas, a rejuvenated Carnagey set out once more to sell. Armour products were precisely the kind that his salesman mentor had advised—beef, pork, lard, and soap, staples that generated a steady demand among store owners and merchants. If the youthful salesman was enthusiastic about his new position, his parents were incredulous. When James, who was lucky to clear thirty dollars a month from his farm, learned the amount of his son’s weekly salary, he was so astonished that he told Amanda the company could not possibly keep up that rate of pay. But they were gratified when their son proved able to live off of his expense account and send most of his salary home to help them pay their mortgage. For Carnagey, however, the prod to success was more personal than benevolent. He was fiercely determined to recover from his disastrous first foray into sales with ICS. “I was so desperately eager to make good on this job that I would let nothing stop me,” he recounted.15
In fact, as Carnagey ventured out as a representative of Armour and Company, he was swept up in a booming expansion of American business. The period from 1890 to 1920 saw a significant shift in the economy away from a production-centered system of small entrepreneurs and toward a consumer-oriented system of large, bureaucratic corporations. As the early twentieth century unfolded, economic endeavors increasingly revolved around large companies that created and disseminated a swelling cornucopia of consumer goods: ready-made clothing, canned food, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, electric sewing machines, cameras, record players, toys and games, and a host of others. As this vast array of items poured out of the nation’s factories, there were department stores, chain stores, and mail-order houses that sprang up as commercial conduits to funnel them to consumers. This new economy of mass consumption was best reflected, perhaps, by the automobile, particularly Henry Ford’s Model T, introduced in 1908, but many other companies followed the same path: Singer Manufacturing, Eastman Kodak, National Cash Register, Coca-Cola, Wrigley, American Tobacco, H. J. Heinz, Kellogg, and Armour. Such corporations extended their economic reach into the nation’s hinterlands, spreading a vast banquet of products before eager middle-class consumers.16
