One Simple Idea (21 page)

Once in Los Angeles, Larson covered his tracks. He took one of the last books published in 1910 by his Progress Company,
Your Forces and How to Use Them
—he had taken the title from Prentice Mulford’s signature work—and reissued it, switching the copyright year from 1910 to 1912 and changing the name of the copyright holder from the Progress Company to himself. He probably did this to shield the book from his Chicago creditors.
^*2
Larson repeated the practice with several other works.
In 1912, he reverted the name of his magazine back to its original title,
Eternal Progress
, and resumed publication. Larson hadn’t lost his taste for social relevancy, as the renewed publication was heralded by an essay contest that offered a hundred-dollar prize for the best article on “The Cure of Poverty.”

Larson’s career exemplified the conflicting ideals that could mark the early New Thought movement.

Seen from one perspective, Larson meant what he wrote about the power of the mind to impact events, which he articulated in more than forty books until his death in 1962. Critics sometimes failed to appreciate the depths of passion and sincerity that were necessary for any writer to energetically produce that kind of output—much of it, in Larson’s case, delightfully readable. When Larson’s message reached people who had been raised in religiously repressive settings, or amid the peer pressure of small towns, it could arrive as a vivifying gospel of self-will.

Yet Larson also displayed a quality seen in Fenwicke Holmes (who cited Larson as a key influence) and in other mind-power acolytes who made ethical compromises on the path to self-improvement. And this was Larson’s unnerving ability to avert his gaze so completely from the pale side of life, as in his debt-ridden Chicago past, that his sunny metaphysics served to conceal a lack of personal accountability. This moral ambiguity intermittently colored positive thinking for decades ahead.

A popular New Thought voice of the 1920s and ’30s sought to resolve the moral conundrums of self-affirming metaphysics. He concealed his identity behind the initials R.H.J., which stood for Roy Herbert Jarrett. By profession Jarrett was a salesman of typewriters and office printing machines. But this salesman accomplished what few ministers or practical philosophers ever did: He worked out an ethical philosophy of personal success and higher living, and couched it in everyday, immensely persuasive language. At age fifty-two Jarrett brought his message to the
world with a self-published, pocket-sized pamphlet called simply:
It Works
.

Published in 1926, Jarrett’s twenty-eight-page pamphlet has never gone out of print. It has sold over 1.5 million copies and remains popular—for good reason.
It Works
is one of the most beguiling and infectious books ever written on mental manifestation. Anyone who wants to taste (or test) such ideas can finish Jarrett’s pamphlet during a lunch break. And many people did so. Americans who had never before given much thought to metaphysical ideas wound up buying and often giving away large numbers of
It Works
, sending grateful testimonials to the address that Jarrett printed inside.

As the legend goes at the front of the booklet, Jarrett had sent his short manuscript to a friend for critique. Jarrett identified the friend only by the initials “J.F.S.” The helper returned it with the notation: “IT WORKS,” which Jarrett decided to use as his title. The legend is true. The friend was Jewell F. Stevens, owner of an eponymous Chicago advertising agency, which specialized in religious items and books. In 1931, the advertising executive Stevens hired Jarrett to join his agency as a merchandising consultant and account manager. For Jarrett, the new position was deliverance from a tough, working-class background, and years of toil in the Willy Loman–domain of sales work. Jarrett became the example of his own success philosophy.

Roy Herbert Jarrett was born in 1874 to a Scottish immigrant household in Quincy, Illinois. His father worked as an iceman and a night watchman. Roy’s mother died when he was eight. By his midtwenties, Roy was married and living in Rochester, New York, working as a sales manager for the Smith Premier Typewriter Company. His first marriage failed, and by 1905 he returned to the Midwest to marry a new wife and live closer to his aged father. In Chicago, Jarrett found work as a salesman for the American Multigraph Sales Company. It was the pivotal move of his life.

American Multigraph manufactured typewriters and workplace printing machinery. In a sense, the printing company was the Apple
Computer of its day. The company’s flagship product, the Multigraph, was an innovative, compact printing press. It took up no more space than an office desk and could be operated without specialized knowledge. The Multigraph was the first generation of easy-to-use printing devices, allowing offices to produce their own flyers, mailers, and newsletters. Its manufacturer possessed a sense of mission. American Multigraph had a reputation in the printing trade for its gung-ho culture and pep-rally sales conventions.

“For years,” wrote the industry journal
Office Appliances
in September 1922, “a feature of every convention has been an address on ‘The Romance of the Multigraph’ by Advertising Manager Tim Thrift.” On the surface, Thrift told salesmen, the Multigraph could print labels, newsletters, and pamphlets—but one must peer into “the soul of what to some appears as a machine.” The Multigraph, he said, was “not a thing of metal, wood and paint; a mere machine sold to some man who can be convinced he should buy it. Ah, no! The Multigraph is a thing of service to the world …”

Cynics could laugh, but for Jarrett the company’s motivational tone, combined with the magical-seeming efficiency of modern printing, helped launch him on the idea of
It Works
.

Jarrett’s belief in inspirational business messages dovetailed with his interest in autosuggestion and mental conditioning. Such ideas reached Jarrett through the work of a French pharmacist and self-taught psychologist named Emile Coué, who had visited Chicago. Jarrett’s vision grew from a cross-pollination of American business motivation and the ideals of the French mind-power theorist.

Born in Brittany in 1857, Emile Coué developed an early interest in hypnotism, which he pursued through a mail-order course from Rochester, New York. Coué more rigorously studied hypnotic methods in the late 1880s with physician Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault. The French therapist Liébault was one of the founders of the so-called Nancy School of hypnotism, which promoted hypnotism’s therapeutic uses. While working as a pharmacist at Troyes in northwestern France in the early 1900s,
Coué made a startling discovery: Patients responded better to medications when he spoke in praise of the formula. Coué came to believe that the imagination aided not only in recovery but also in a person’s general sense of well-being. From this insight, Coué developed a method of “conscious autosuggestion.” It was a form of waking hypnosis that involved repeating confidence-building mantras while in a relaxed or semiconscious state.

Coué argued that many people in life suffer from a poor self-image. Our
willpower
, or drive to achieve, he said, is constantly overcome by our
imagination
, by which he meant a person’s unconscious self-perceptions. “When the will and the imagination are opposed to each other,” he wrote, “it is always the
imagination
which
wins
…” By way of example, he asked people to think of walking across a wooden plank laid on the floor—obviously an easy task. But if the same plank is elevated high off the ground, the task becomes fraught with fear even though the physical demand is the same. This, Coué asserted, is what we are constantly doing on a mental level when we
imagine
ourselves as worthless or weak.

Coué’s method of
autosuggestion
was a model of simplicity. He told patients to repeat the confidence-building mantra:
Day by Day, In Every Way, I’m Getting Better and Better
. It was to be recited twenty times each morning and evening, just loud enough to hear, while lying in bed upon awakening and before going to sleep, with eyes closed and the mind focused on what you desire. He advised using a string with twenty knots to count off the repetitions, as if counting rosary beads.

In the early 1920s, news of Coué’s method reached America. The “Miracle Man of France” briefly grew into an international sensation. American newspapers featured
Ripley’s-Believe-It-Or-Not
-styled drawings of Coué, looking like a goateed magician and gently displaying his knotted string at eye level like a hypnotic device. In early 1923, Coué made a three-week lecture tour of America. One of his final stops in February was in Jarrett’s hometown, where the Frenchman delivered a talk at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall.

In a raucous scene, a crowd of more than two thousand demanded that the therapist help a paralytic man who had been seated onstage. Coué defiantly told the audience that his autosuggestive treatments could work only on illnesses that originated in the mind. “I have not the magic hand,” he insisted. Nonetheless, Coué approached the man and told him to concentrate on his legs and to repeat, “It is passing, it is passing.” The seated man struggled up and haltingly walked. The crowd exploded. Coué rejected any notion that his “cure” was miraculous and insisted that the man’s disease must have been psychosomatic.

To some American listeners, Coué’s message of self-affirmation held special relevance for oppressed people. The pages of Marcus Garvey’s newspaper,
Negro World
, echoed Coué’s day-by-day mantra in an editorial headline: “Every Day in Every Way We See Drawing Nearer and Nearer the Coming of the Dawn for Black Men.” The paper editorialized that Marcus Garvey’s teachings provided the same “uplifting psychic influence” as Coué’s.

Coué took a special liking to Americans. He found American attitudes a refreshing departure from what he knew back home. “The French mind,” he wrote, “prefers first to discuss and argue on the fundamentals of a principle before inquiring into its practical adaptability to every-day life. The American mind, on the contrary, immediately sees the possibilities of it, and seeks … to carry the idea further even than the author of it may have conceived.”

The therapist could have been describing the salesman-seeker Roy Jarrett. “A short while ago,” Jarrett wrote in 1926, the year of Coué’s death, “Dr. Emile Coué came to this country and showed thousands of people how to help themselves. Thousands of others spoofed at the idea, refused his assistance and are today where they were before his visit.” But Jarrett saw the potential.

Taking his cue from the ease of Coué’s approach, Jarrett devised “Three Positive Rules to Accomplishment” in
It Works
. In summary, they went:

Just as Coué had observed about American audiences, Jarrett boldly expanded on the uses of autosuggestion. In the steps of the American metaphysical tradition, Jarrett believed that subconscious-mind training did more than recondition the mind: it activated a divine inner power that served to out-picture a person’s mental images into the surrounding world. “I call this power ‘Emmanuel’ (God in us),” Jarrett wrote.

With its ease of methods, the self-published pamphlet quickly found an audience and ran through multiple printings. Many readers swore by it, and wrote in for additional copies to give away to friends (something Jarrett encouraged with a bulk-order form). But Jarrett felt incomplete. It wasn’t that he chafed at using mind-power for material ends. Indeed, he urged readers to use the book for money, possessions, or just about anything they wanted. But he believed that many had missed the book’s deeper point. “Merely giving you the simple rules to accomplishment, with brief instructions as to their use,” he wrote several years later, “while beneficial, is not satisfying.”

Jarrett’s deeper purpose in
It Works
was only hinted at by a mysterious symbol he placed on its cover. Below the title
It Works
appeared a simple drawing of a cross, with its bottom bent at a right angle. The square-and-cross appeared on every copy of the little red book until 1992, when a later publisher removed it. That symbol, wrote Jarrett’s friend Stevens, “was really the undisclosed reason for the book.”

What was this beguiling square-and-cross, which some readers ignored, some wondered at, and a publisher later cut? Five years after producing
It Works
, Roy Jarrett made a little known and final foray into
publishing. In 1931, he produced a thoughtful and ambitious work,
The Meaning of the Mark
. The longer volume served as an inner key to
It Works
—it explained his strange symbol and dealt directly with the moral quandaries of success-based spirituality.

Jarrett explained that the cross-and-square was his personal symbol of spiritual awakening. Its meaning, he hoped, would be intuitively felt by readers. The square represented earthly values, particularly the need to treat others with the respect one seeks for oneself, which Jarrett saw as the hidden key to achievement. But there was another part to the matter. Personal attainment could find its lasting and proper purpose only when conjoined to the cross, the presence of God. Together, individual striving and receptivity to the Divine would bring man into the fullness of life. Jarrett wrote: