Self help messiah, p.7
Self-help Messiah, page 7
In this explosive growth of a consumer economy, two endeavors proved particularly dynamic. First, advertising began to take shape in its modern form. Whereas advertising in the 1800s had focused on the practical virtues of a given product—its strength, quality, durability, usefulness—by 1900 the promotion of goods had dropped utilitarianism for emotional symbolism. Modern advertising increasingly trumpeted the idea that commercial products could bring personal enhancement, private satisfaction, and emotional happiness. It took shape as a species of commercial therapy promising an array of self-fulfillment: fantasies of play and fun, romantic encounters, displays of increased social status, emblems of progress and sophistication. Advertisements for dresses and sport jackets, deodorant and shampoo, cigarettes and golf clubs, vacuum cleaners and refrigerators, automobiles and pool tables shifted their calculus of appeal from meeting practical needs to fulfilling personal desires. They promised a better life.17
Second, salesmanship emerged as a key activity for conveying consumer goods from manufacturers through retailers to the hordes of ordinary middle-class and working-class citizens eager to enjoy the fruits of abundance. In the 1800s, individual salesmen had traveled the countryside as peddlers, “hawkers,” and “drummers” bringing a limited cache of goods to small groups of buyers at village stores or rural farmsteads. But beginning around 1900, large manufacturing companies began to organize dozens or even hundreds of salesmen and create elaborate systems where routes were planned, retail customers were targeted, and a paper trail of sales slips and reports tracked their every move. “The birth of modern salesmanship occurred in the decades around the turn of the century,” Walter A. Friedman, the leading historian of the subject, has observed. “The country, as envisioned by the pioneers of modern selling, now comprised sales ‘territories.’ Citizens were not steelworkers, bankers, or housewives but ‘prospects.’ ” Psychologists, economists, and newly emerging marketing experts studied and refined the bureaucratic rationalization of selling. This activity gave rise to trade journals—Salesmanship in 1903, Salesman in 1909, and Salesmanship: Devoted to Success in Selling in 1915—that discussed new issues and trends in the field. The professionalization of salesmanship was intrinsic to the broader expansion of a corporate, consumer economy. As Friedman concluded, “The ‘visible hand’ of management … could not have succeeded in many industries without the ‘visible handshake’ of a team of salesmen out on the road.”18
Dale Carnagey headed out on his determined quest to sell Armour products as part of this great sales revolution in the early 1900s. He found life on the road to be full of challenges. Working his territory in South Dakota, he quickly discovered that weather in the northern Great Plains could impede and exhaust even the hardiest traveling salesman. The winter months saw an onslaught of bitter, unrelenting cold. His letters home from December to February were filled with regular notices of hardship: “I am snowbound here today and probably will be tomorrow, too”; “I went wolf hunting last Saturday and had to wade in snow over a knee deep.” In January 1909, he was stranded in a hotel in Pierre, South Dakota, for several days by a howling blizzard. Having read all the available books and magazines and growing stir crazy, he finally decided to walk to the train station in the ferocious gale and plot his escape. The clerk warned him not to go, pointing out the temperature was seventeen degrees below zero, “that I couldn’t see my hands in front of me and that I might get off the sidewalk and lose my way, start going in circles, and end up freezing to death.” Carnagey ventured outside anyway and suffered the consequences: He froze the tiny blood vessels in his ears. “To this day, I will walk down the street with my hands cupping my ears on days when other people don’t even feel slightly uncomfortable,” he related more than forty years later.19
At the opposite extreme, large portions of the summer could be blazing hot and dry. “We have been having some fearful hot weather here—105 degrees in the shade,” he wrote to his mother in August 1909. “[Let anyone] come to Dakota for a year and then just plain old Missouri will look good.” But Carnagey did not allow weather to slow him down. “I was ambitious,” he noted. “Some of the other salesmen in that territory didn’t bother to go out on sizzling summer days when the temperature soared to over a hundred, or in the bitter winter cold when it dropped below zero. Extremes of weather never kept me indoors if there was a possibility of making a sale or catching a train to the next town.”20
Carnagey also learned that transportation could be problematic as he struggled to reach the far-flung towns in this vast region. There was only one regular passenger train, and it traveled at night. But “butchers and grocers were not open at night, so that night train was no good to me,” he explained. “So I had to ride in the caboose of a [daytime] freight train, and while the train was taking on freight or unloading freight or switching cars, I had to run uptown to the butcher shops to sell them fresh beef and pork, and to the grocery stores to sell canned meats, cheese, and lard.” He had only a rough idea of how much freight needed to be loaded or unloaded, and thus how long the train would be stopped. So upon dashing back to the station he often found himself swinging onto the platform of the caboose as it was pulling out of the station and rapidly picking up speed. “The wonder is that I wasn’t thrown under the cars and ground into mincemeat,” he observed later.21
Carnagey soon realized that the life of a traveling salesman in the West was often solitary and irregular, beset by loneliness, long workdays, crude lodgings, and erratic meals. In one frontier town, he was forced to share a room with another man as the proprietor stretched a bedsheet over a wire that he strung across the center of it. “There was no privacy. Every time I moved, the man on the other side of the sheet could see the big shadows I made against the sheet,” he described. He also suffered from catarrh, a chronic inflammation of the mucous membranes in the head, which was finally alleviated by the removal of his tonsils. But Carnagey was determined to persevere over all such obstacles. “I was so eager to make good that long hours, uncomfortable beds, and missing meals meant nothing to me,” he wrote. “I didn’t mind … It was infinitely easier than the backbreaking work of cutting weeds and brush on the farm.” Only occasionally did he succumb to loneliness, as he did in July 1910. “As I sit here waiting for my train I will write to what I have at last come to realize is the best friend that I have ever had or ever will have—my mother,” he confessed.22
As Carnagey gradually built a regular sales route among the retail stores throughout the badlands, he was able to establish a base of operation in Pierre, South Dakota. He traveled to towns such as Redfield, Philip, Huron, Wall, and Wolsey, but then returned to Pierre for most weekends, where he was able to enjoy a number of social activities with a circle of new friends. Most of them centered on the First Baptist Church. Skeptical of traditional Protestant doctrine after his college studies, he attended church less for spiritual edification and more as a way to fend off his mother’s inquiries about the state of his soul. “I will try to take the plan of asking ‘what would Jesus have me do’ in my work,” he reassured her wearily in a letter home. “It makes one want to try to do better to read your letters.” “Don’t read my Bible as much as I ought to,” he confessed at another point, before adding, “I attend Sunday School all the time and wouldn’t think of missing it.” In letters home, he described enthusiastically the numerous gatherings and outings hosted by “the young ladies’ and young gentlemen’s Sunday School class.” At one such gathering at a young woman’s home, he reported how he “put on my white shirt and white vest and dressed up better than I had for six months.” Clearly, Carnagey’s church attendance was a matter of social companionship rather than doctrinal devotion.23
Within a few weeks of beginning his stint with Armour and Company, Carnagey had established connections with merchants, applied his determined work ethic, and settled into a comfortable network of friends. His sales career began to thrive. Letters home were filled with descriptions of hard work and feeling “mighty tired” at the conclusion of his workdays. But they were also filled with proud accounts of sales success. In the summer of 1909, he told Amanda, “I stood 6th out of the 112 route salesmen in pure lard last month.” In early February 1910 he reported that he stood tenth overall among the Armour sales force in terms of volume and profit, and then third overall a few weeks after that. By the summer of 1910, he informed his family, “I have had extra fine luck this week selling goods and I believe that the records will give me first place.”24
While some of his success could be attributed to hard work and a good product, it also stemmed from learning tricks of the salesman’s trade. As he traveled about meeting with store owners and shopkeepers, Carnagey grasped the need to establish personal relationships and then maintain them in order to sell goods. Success demanded a pleasant personality, ease in meeting and conversing with people, using stories and anecdotes to hold attention, and conveying an infectious zeal for one’s product. Aided by his experience with public speaking and his natural enthusiasm, Carnagey became a deft practitioner of these skills. He sensed that the art of selling lay in meeting human desire, a topic that many psychologists (and advertisers) were beginning to explore in the early 1900s. As one observer would note years later, Carnagey’s How to Win Friends and Influence People “draws in part on lessons the author learned working as a salesman for Armour.” Smiling, becoming interested in other people, avoiding arguments, remembering people’s names, encouraging others to talk about themselves, being a good listener, using encouragement and praise, dramatizing your ideas, and making the other person feel important—all of these techniques were honed in the dusty towns and bustling general stores of the South Dakota of the early 1900s.25
Carnagey’s success as a salesman brought a new sense of financial security and sophistication. On this front, he had much ground to make up. As his Armour sales flourished, he began to bring home handsome paychecks, but never having had any money before he remained woefully ignorant of the rudiments of personal finance. In August 1909, he confronted an embarrassing problem in a letter to his parents:
Here is a question I am ashamed to ask anyone else, so I will ask you. I have put my last three salary checks in the National Bank of Commerce at Pierre and I have also put $10 of my expense account in there … Here is my question. When I put my money in there how do I know I can ever get it out? They gave me a receipt for it and if they should say they owed me nothing I could do nothing. I don’t just have to rely on their word, do I? Be sure to answer this.
The inexperienced young man, at age twenty-one, did not know how banks worked.26
Within a few months, however, Carnagey was facing the world armed with a growing arsenal of financial and business knowledge. He opened bank accounts in South Dakota and Missouri and deposited hundreds of dollars into them, while also learning to navigate the system of sales slips and letters of credit involved with Armour and Company. By early 1910 he was sending his parents checks for $370.00 to pay on their farm and reminding them about another $200.00 he had asked to be deposited in his Citizens Bank account. Even more revealingly, he asked his father to “sign a note for this $570.00 promising to pay on demand without interest and also a note promising to pay that $420.00 on the settlement of the estate or something to that effect.” He explained his rationale: “It can’t hurt anything to do business on business-like principles. I’ve learned that since I went to working for a wholesale house.” Here appeared a new Dale Carnagey—a man of the world with a grasp of business and an air of sophistication, a man who was confidently throwing off the old family albatross of poverty.27
For all his success as salesman and the welcome flow of money into his pockets, Carnagey grew increasingly restless with selling meat. His heart was not entirely in it. In many ways, he remained a frustrated performer who yearned to do something more expressive, a skilled public speaker who longed for the approval of the crowd. In letters home, he talked frequently of “going back to school as soon as possible” after working to “earn a few dollars.” He regularly attended Chautauqua meetings, where he “heard some very fine things,” or lectures such as the one by a Baptist minister in Pierre who had traveled around the world and who “spoke last night on the Hawaiian Islands. It was simply fine.” Whenever possible, he made public presentations himself. In February 1910 he sent his parents a copy of the program from a meeting at the Pierre Baptist Church where he recited a poem of his own composition entitled “The Sunday School Boy.” At the conclusion, he reported proudly, “the Superintendent of the Sunday School and the President of the Class both came to me at once and they wanted to get a copy of the poem and have it printed … Others said it was the best thing on the program.” He added playfully, “Didn’t know I was a poet, did you?” Later in the year, he appeared at a church benefit show, where he again presented one of his own poems along with a scene from Shakespeare’s As You Like It.28
In fact, as Carnagey admitted later, during his entire stint as a salesman “I was still interested in public speaking and dramatics.” When a freight train on which he was traveling had a longer layover than expected, he used to practice aloud, in his words, “some of the Shakespearean declamations I had spouted in college.” One time, this penchant for public speaking sparked a comical incident that almost landed him in deep trouble. He was in Redfield, South Dakota, when his freight train was delayed unexpectedly. So he killed the time by wandering into the train yard and “rehearsing a scene from Macbeth: ‘Is this a dagger that I see before me? The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible to feeling as to sight? Or art thou but a dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from a heat-oppressed brain?’ ” As the young man went through the scene, he spoke loudly and forcefully, paced about, and punctuated his words with broad, dramatic gestures. All at once a police car pulled up and four officers jumped out, demanding to know what he was doing and why he was frightening women. Carnagey replied that he didn’t know what they were talking about. It turned out that Redfield contained an insane asylum, and a pair of women living in a house adjoining the train depot had reported that an escaped patient was yelling and throwing himself around. When the young man explained his actions, the police did not believe him. They demanded identification and, in Carnagey’s words, “they were positive I was off my rocker.” Only when he showed them his Armour order book and letter of credit did they relent. As he concluded, “I was released after being warned to watch my step. As I walked back across the tracks to my train, I was conscious of the puzzled and still suspicious eyes of the police on my back.”29
By the fall of 1910, his sales skills had produced striking success. In his assessment, his two years with Armour and Company brought “tremendous self-confidence because I took a territory that had been standing in 25th place among the 29 rural routes leading out of South Omaha, and brought that territory into first place.” Rufus Harris, the company’s sales manager, was so impressed that he recommended Carnagey be given a management position at the sales office in Omaha. But the young man declined. His restlessness with the meat-selling business had grown acute, and by the late fall of 1910 he had concocted an ambitious plan. He had saved enough money to return to his first love—public speaking—so he decided to resign his position and go to Boston, where, in his words, he would “attend one of the schools of expression and learn to interpret poetry so that I might go out on the Chautauqua circuit and make my living interpreting poems and stories I had written myself.”30
At this point Carnagey had a fortuitous encounter. While traveling from Blunt to Pierre in the caboose of a freight train, he found himself sitting alongside Reverend Russell, a lecturer from the Episcopal Church who was traveling to give a presentation. As they talked, Carnagey shared his plan for heading to Boston in a few weeks to enroll in a school of expression. But Russell suggested another course of action. According to Carnagey, the older man argued that “I would get much better training if I attended the American Academy of Theatrical Arts in New York City, the most famous dramatic training school in the United States. He said I would get everything there that I could get in Boston plus training for the stage. I decided to go to New York.” It was a momentous decision that, in Carnagey’s words, “changed the course of my life.”31
The young man’s parents were stunned when he informed them of his plans, especially his mother. Not only was he abandoning a lucrative position but he was entering into the morally dubious field of stage acting. Amanda bluntly told her youngest son that “a stage career was sinful” and prayed that God would guide him to the correct decision. But Carnagey maneuvered subtly to gain her approval. “I will say that I do pray over the proposition and want you to. I do not want to go unless it is for my good. I am sure I am willing to do whatever God shows me in his will. It is far nobler work than selling meat,” he wrote to Amanda. He suggested that stage training could lead to more acceptable endeavors and “I may benefit from it in Lyceum business work.” After several weeks of debate, however, the young man played the trump card: his own happiness. “I hate to go into a profession against your will but when choosing a wife or profession one does well to please themselves,” he wrote Amanda. “So I am going to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in January.” His mother finally resigned herself to her son’s decision after praying to God that “His will, not hers, be done.”32
So after resigning his sales position with Armour and Company in November 1910, Carnagey returned home to spend the Christmas holiday with his mother and father. He stayed through the New Year to join his parents in celebrating their twenty-ninth wedding anniversary, and then he boarded a train for New York City during the first week of January. Amanda, although accepting her son’s decision, had a sense of the finality of this move and was distraught. “Mother kissed me goodbye with tears rolling down her cheeks,” he related. “She sobbed and sobbed, ‘Oh Dale, I may never see you again.’ ” But the young man was committed. He had saved a considerable amount of money—enough to pay the tuition of four hundred dollars at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, with enough left over to live cheaply for a year—and was confident that a bright future awaited him. So for the next few days, he traveled by rail from Kansas City to New York, sitting in a day coach because he was unable to “afford the luxury of a Pullman berth.”33
