One Simple Idea (14 page)

Shortly after discovering
The Light of Asia
, Allen experienced a turning point in his outer life, as well. Around 1889 he found new employment in London as a private secretary and stationer—markedly friendlier vocations to the bookish man than factory work. In London he met his wife and intellectual partner, Lily.

By the mid-1890s Allen had deepened his inquiry into spiritual philosophies, immersing himself in the works of John Milton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and early translations of the Bhagavad Gita, Tao Te Ching, and the sayings of Buddha. He marveled over the commonalities in the world’s religions. “The man who says, ‘My religion is true, and my neighbor’s is false,’ has not yet discovered the truth in his own religion,” he wrote, “for when a man has done that, he will see the Truth in all religions.”

Allen also grew interested in the ideas of America’s New Thought
culture through the work of Ralph Waldo Trine, Orison Swett Marden, and, later, Christian D. Larson. His reading of New Thought literature sharpened his spiritual outlook—in particular his idea that our thoughts are causative and determine our destiny.

By 1898, Allen found an outlet for his intellectual interests. He began writing for the
Herald of the Golden Age
. In addition to metaphysical topics, the journal was an early voice for vegetarianism and humane treatment of animals, ideas that Allen had discovered in Buddhism. In 1901, he published his first book of practical philosophy,
From Poverty to Power
. The work extolled the creative agencies of the mind, placing equal emphasis on Christian ethics and New Thought metaphysics. The following year, Allen launched his own mystical magazine, the
Light of Reason
, and soon came another book,
All These Things Added
.

It was a period of tremendous productivity, capped in 1903 by Allen’s third and most influential work—the short, immensely powerful meditation,
As a Man Thinketh
. The title came from Proverbs 23:7:
As he thinketh in his heart, so is he
. In Allen’s eyes, that brief statement laid out his core philosophy—that a man’s thought, if not the cause of his circumstances, is the cause of
himself
, and shapes the tenor of his life.

As the book’s popularity rose, the phrase “as a man thinketh” became the informal motto of the New Thought movement, adopted and repeated by motivational writers throughout the century. Indeed, twentieth-century New-Thoughters frequently borrowed, cross-referenced, and repurposed one another’s language—sometimes to the point where an original reference, or its meaning, got lost. This was the case with Allen’s portentous title phrase. Read in context in Proverbs 23:6–7, the precept “as a man thinketh” is not a principle of cause-and-effect thinking, but rather a caution against covetousness and hypocrisy:

This kind of misunderstanding was common in New Thought. The early positive thinkers were passionate to describe their ideas as the fulfillment of ancient doctrines. Hence, they tended to retrofit the positivity gospel to Scripture and other antique sources, sometimes ignoring the context of favored passages.

Regardless, Allen’s book was otherwise marked by memorable, aphoristic lessons, which have withstood the passage of time.
As a Man Thinketh
defined achievement in deeply personal terms: “You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as your dominant aspiration.” Toward the end of
As a Man Thinketh
, Allen wrote in a manner that amounted to autobiography:

As a personal rule, Allen used his life experiences as the backbone of his teaching. “He never wrote
theories
,” Lily noted in 1913, “or for the sake of writing; but he wrote when he had a message, and it became a message
only when he had lived it out in his own life
, and knew that it was good.”

The impact of
As a Man Thinketh
was not fully felt during Allen’s lifetime, but the book brought him enough of an audience (and sufficient pay) so that he was able to quit secretarial work and commit himself to writing and editing full-time. On its publication, Allen, Lily, and their daughter Nora moved to the southern English coastal town of Ilfracombe,
where he spent the remainder of his life. He wrote books at a remarkable pace, often more than one a year, producing nineteen works. Allen’s days assumed a meticulous routine of meditating, writing, walking in nature, and gardening. His work habits never flagged. “Thoroughness is genius,” he wrote in 1904.

For all of his creative output, Allen struggled with fragile health. Lily wrote of her husband faltering from an illness in late 1911. On January 24, 1912, Allen died at home in Ilfracombe at age forty-seven, probably of tuberculosis. In an obituary of January 27, the
Ilfracombe Chronicle
noted: “Mr. Allen’s books … are perhaps better known abroad, especially in America, than in England.”

Indeed, the twentieth century’s leading American writers of motivational thought—from Napoleon Hill to Norman Vincent Peale—read and noted the influence of
As a Man Thinketh
. Dale Carnegie said the book had “a lasting and profound effect on my life.” The cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bob Smith, called it a favorite. The black-nationalist pioneer Marcus Garvey embraced the book’s do-for-self ethic and adapted the slogan “As Man Thinks So Is He” on the cover of his newspaper,
Black-man
. In years ahead, the book’s influence showed up in myriad places: An adolescent Michael Jackson told a friend that it was his “favorite book in the world”; NFL Hall-of-Famer Curtis Martin credited
As a Man Thinketh
with helping him overcome pain and injury; businessman and Oprah Winfrey partner Stedman Graham said Allen’s work helped him attain “real freedom.”

Yet the full impact of
As a Man Thinketh
can best be seen in the successive generations of everyday readers who embraced its aphoristic lessons in directing one’s thoughts to higher aims, and to understanding success as the outer manifestation of inner development. “Men do not attract that which they
want
,” Allen told readers, “but that which they
are
.” In that sense, Allen attracted a vast following of people who mirrored the ordinary circumstances from which he arose—and whose hopes for a better, nobler existence were reflected back to them in the example of his life.

No figures in the mind-power culture were more explicit in uniting progressive and mystical impulses than an early-twentieth-century Indiana socialist named Wallace D. Wattles and his publisher, a suffragist activist named Elizabeth Towne.

Wattles’s books were moderately popular during his lifetime, particularly his 1910
The Science of Getting Rich
—an intriguing program to use the mind as a wealth tool. But his books fell into obscurity following his death in 1911, a period when the market was flush with New Thought titles, which came and went quickly. If you mentioned his name in most self-help circles at the start of the current century, you’d receive blank stares. But his work gained new dramatic new currency in 2006 when it reemerged as one of the central sources behind the blockbuster movie and book
The Secret
.

The following year,
The Science of Getting Rich
, almost a century after its initial publication, reached number one on the
BusinessWeek
bestseller list. To the entrepreneurial readers who rediscovered Wattles, however, the motivational hero’s roots as a Christian socialist and radical social reformer were entirely unknown.

Wattles began his career in the 1890s as a Methodist minister in La Porte, Indiana. A student of the reformist minister George D. Herron, Wattles was a passionate exponent of the Social Gospel, a radical theology that emphasized Christ’s teachings on social justice, particularly the equitable treatment of workers, immigrants, and the poor, and the imperative to redress vast imbalances in wealth. The Social Gospel attracted hundreds of thousands of sympathizers during Wattles’s lifetime. In 1900, however, conservative members of his Methodist parish forced him from his pulpit after he opposed accepting collection-basket offerings from businessmen who used sweatshop labor. Wattles soon joined the more-liberal Quakers and began writing for a popular progressive and New Thought monthly journal called
Nautilus
.

Nautilus
was the brainchild of Massachusetts suffragist and mind-power
acolyte Elizabeth Towne. Beginning in 1898, its pages gave voice to a novel amalgam of worker’s rights and mental science. Towne had once been Mrs. Joseph Struble, a Portland, Oregon, housewife and mother of two, who found herself in financial ruin after she and her husband separated in the late 1890s. Towne had quit school at age 14 to marry, but she was ardently self-educated and had taken classes from students of Emma Curtis Hopkins. Towne believed in the power of ideas—and in the fall of 1898 she hit upon a life-changing one.

Towne borrowed thirty dollars from her father and in the space of three weeks published her first issue of
Nautilus
. In a nation eagerly interested in New Thought culture, the journal quickly became a clearinghouse for ads from mental-healers, Christian Science practitioners, and those hawking a bevy of tonics, pills, and medical devices. In the late nineteenth century, ads for patent medicines were a cash cow for many magazines, not for New Thought journals alone. While some of the ads that populated the pages of
Nautilus
and other New Thought magazines were absurd or harmful, proffering narcotics or miracle cures, others offered more practical fare, such as botanical syrups or yogurt pills for digestion.

Within two years, Elizabeth obtained a formal divorce from her estranged husband. She asked for no alimony, having achieved a measure of financial independence through
Nautilus
. Legally freed from a marriage that had been marked by anger and fracture, Elizabeth, along with her teenage son and daughter, wound her way across the nation in spring 1900 to Holyoke, Massachusetts. Her journey east was intended to bring her closer to a New Thought book dealer, William Towne, with whom she had been corresponding. The couple quickly married—“the hour [we] first met,” Elizabeth recalled. Together they prospered publishing
Nautilus
. Elizabeth was publisher and editor, and William was a columnist and treasurer, while her son, Chester, acted as managing editor.

The magazine and its book-publishing arm grew rapidly. In
Nautilus
’s first ten years of existence, its circulation shot from 3,400 to 35,000
(with reports in later years reaching 90,000).
Nautilus
remained in publication until 1953; it was one of the longest-running spiritual magazines in American history.

In addition to its writings on the uses of thought to “grow success,”
Nautilus
abounded with tips on physical culture and exercise, including stretching, fresh air, deep breathing, and vegetarianism. Towne had no patience for those who drooped through life. She replied to an advice-seeker who signed his letter
A Weakling
: “The trouble with you and with all the other weaklings is that you sit still and let the thought-power evaporate through your skulls—and run off your tongues—instead of directing it down through the nerves and muscles of your bodies where it is needed and will do some good.”

Along with mind-body therapeutics, Towne wrote on behalf of social reforms, calling for a universal five-dollar weekly wage for every man, woman, and child. Elizabeth and William were active in electoral politics, attending two conventions in 1912 where the Progressive Party was formed and Theodore Roosevelt was nominated to run for president. Towne became a force in local politics when she won a seat as Holyoke’s first female alderman in 1926. Two years later she mounted an unsuccessful independent bid for mayor.

Towne discovered in Wallace D. Wattles a New Thought writer who, like her, advocated for working people. In 1908 and 1909, Wattles had made back-to-back runs for Congress and mayor of Elwood, Indiana—each time on the ticket of the Socialist Party of America. During his mayoral campaign, Wattles pledged his support to thirteen hundred striking tin workers in Elwood, while simultaneously completing his mind-power classic
The Science of Getting Rich
. It appeared in 1910 under the imprint of the Elizabeth Towne Publishing Company.

Embraced a century later by business go-getters,
The Science of Getting Rich
, on close reading, reveals the unmistakable mark of socialist language. Wattles did not endorse “getting rich” as a go-it-alone project. Rather, the reformer believed that workers could, through collective action and the prospering powers of the mind, create a new world of
bounty, leisure, and equity—the same kind of gentle utopia foreseen in Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel,
Looking Backward
. As Wattles saw it: