One Simple Idea (25 page)

In the years following his meeting with Carnegie, and after his study of the success methods of other industry titans, Hill embarked on a series of articles and books, which culminated in
Think and Grow Rich
in 1937. Hill’s books never attracted serious critical attention—other than to be dismissed or waved aside for vulgar shallowness. Indeed, New Thought and self-help literature became a category of book that went unread by its detractors. But Hill was often subtler, shrewder, and surer
in his understanding of human nature than many scoffers supposed. Yet his career also revealed the kind of yes-man corporatism that increasingly marked the motivational field in the twentieth century.

In his autobiographical writings, Hill showed a repugnant lack of moral feeling as a young man by helping local businessmen conceal the killing of a black bellhop in Richlands, Virginia. The episode occurred in 1902. The black hotel worker died after a drunken bank cashier—an employee of Hill’s boss at the time—dropped a loaded revolver, which went off, killing the bellman. The nineteen-year-old Hill sprang into action as the consummate fixer, coaxing local authorities to label the criminally negligent death as “accidental,” and getting the victim quickly buried. The town’s “big men” rewarded Hill by naming him the manager of an area coal mine—the youngest such manager in the nation, Hill proudly reckoned.

The episode reflected the troubling pattern of Hill’s life: He identified with power so strongly that he never questioned the decency, ethics, and general outlook of the man in the corner office. Nowhere in his accounts of high climbers is there any countervailing consideration of cunning, ruthlessness, or amorality—or, for that matter, of the kind of corrupt obsequiousness that Hill showed back in Richlands. Even in his elderly years, prior to his death in 1970, Hill remained oddly attached to his image as a “promising young man” set on charming industrial giants.

A similar outlook prevailed in the work of Dale Carnegie. Like Hill, Carnegie possessed an innate grasp of how to get men in power to open up to him: Just ask them how they overcame their early hardships. But this method of gaining access—in which the questioner always dotes and never challenges—also left Carnegie with the perspective that corporate chieftains are always ready with a
put-’er-there-pal
handshake and an abundance of helpful advice. The question of corruption or backbiting
never seemed to enter Carnegie’s mind. He believed that the men on top deserved to be there—and his level of introspection on the matter went no further.

Yet Carnegie, like Hill, proved a pioneering observer of human nature, and a genius of communication. He had a key message and he understood how to convey it to a vast range of people. It was this:
Agreeable people win
.

Growing up in Missouri, Dale Carnegie began his career as a salesman and traveling stage actor. In the years immediately preceding World War I, he realized that the rules of business had changed. America had entered an age in which communication skills were—for the first time ever—the foundation of success. As Carnegie saw it, the ability to speak clearly and convincingly, to tell stories and jokes, and to connect with one’s bosses, workmates, and customers was a vital tool. He further believed that the power of persuasion could be learned through study, drilling, and practice. In 1912 Carnegie convinced the manager at the New York YMCA where he was living to allow him to deliver a series of lessons in the art of public speaking. In an era in which image mattered, the young instructor altered the spelling of his surname from the less-elegant
Carnagey
to
Carnegie
.

Carnegie worked tirelessly to build his following as a speaking coach. In future years he was anointed with his own appearance in Ripley’s
Believe-It-Or-Not
, which reported that Carnegie had personally critiqued 150,000 speeches. In 1926, Carnegie outlined his formula in his first book,
Public Speaking: A Practical Course for Businessmen
. It remains probably the best volume ever produced on the topic. Carnegie devised a near-airtight template for how to deliver a good talk, including the proper use of stories and parables, the need for
over-preparation
, how to memorably deploy numbers, the use of good diction, and the right tonality of the voice.

His real breakout, however, occurred in 1936 with the landmark
How to Win Friends and Influence People
. Two years earlier, an executive at Simon & Schuster, Leon Shimkin, had enrolled in a fourteen-week course of Carnegie’s lectures on public speaking and human relations. The
Brooklyn-born Shimkin was a dedicated self-improver. He had talked his way into publishing on the vow that he could do everything from bookkeeping to answering phones to stenography. He took Carnegie’s classes out of genuine personal interest—and was immediately sold on the success coach’s potential as an author. Not every literary tastemaker agreed. Social critics such as H. L. Mencken heaped scorn on self-help, and most of the lettered classes wanted no part of it. But Shimkin saw the potential in figures like Carnegie.

For his part, Carnegie was cool to the prospect of Simon & Schuster as his publisher. The still-new press had previously rejected two of Carnegie’s manuscripts. Carnegie resented it and was hesitant to pursue a project with them. Plus, he doubted that his lectures on how to cultivate a pleasing personality would even translate into a good book. Shimkin persisted. He arranged to have Carnegie’s talks transcribed, and urged the speaking coach to massage the transcripts into proper chapters. Carnegie’s work-in-progress arrived with the quiet title “The Art of Getting Along with People.” It evolved into “How to Make Friends and Influence People”—but, still, it wasn’t quite right. Under Shimkin’s guidance “Make Friends” became the more fetching “Win Friends”—and one of history’s best-known titles was born.

How to Win Friends and Influence People
became the bible of self-advancement, and it remains so. Carnegie, like no other writer, understood the foibles of human nature: He noted how we love being flattered, hearing the sound of our own name, and talking about ourselves; conversely, we hate being told we are wrong or hearing the words “I disagree.” The
New York Times
detected “a subtle cynicism” in the Carnegie approach. But few could deny that Carnegie understood how to get things done within organizations, including the kinds of large companies in which Americans were increasingly employed. He innately grasped how to ease the frictions of personality that stymied careers and projects. And Carnegie told the blunt truth about human affairs: We tend to self-idealize; so if you want to win someone’s cooperation, avoid offending his sense of vanity.

Carnegie didn’t write in the typical New Thought vein. He rarely
made spiritual references. Yet he very definitely saw the mind as a tool that wielded power over people and circumstances, including physical health. In his 1944 book,
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
, Carnegie wrote: “You are probably saying to yourself right now: ‘This man Carnegie is proselytizing for Christian Science.’ No. You are wrong. I am not a Christian Scientist. But the longer I live, the more convinced I am by the tremendous power of thought. As a result of many years spent in teaching adults, I know men and women can banish worry, fear, and various kinds of illnesses, and can transform their lives by changing their thoughts. I know! I know!! I know!!!”

Not all therapeutic writers were as exclamatory as Dale Carnegie. A more somber metaphysical literature briefly won public acclaim. The top-selling and most influential spiritual writer in America immediately following World War II was an erudite Boston rabbi named Joshua Loth Liebman. Liebman’s surprise bestseller,
Peace of Mind
, appeared in 1946, shortly after the war ended. The book spent a remarkable fifty-eight weeks at number one on the
New York Times
bestseller list, a record for its time.
Peace of Mind
sought to diagnose the angst and fears of a postwar world in which physical survival was no longer at risk, but boredom, ennui, and depression seemed everywhere on the rise.

Liebman was no success guru. Early in his book he devised a prayer for the self-aware modern man: “God, Lord of the universe, heap worldly gifts at the feet of foolish men. But on my head pour only the sweet waters of serenity. Give me the gift of the Untroubled Mind.” Yet Liebman also wrote in the vein of mind-power theology. His writing echoed the tone of Jewish Science, the early-twentieth-century metaphysical movement that formed a Jewish alternative to Christian Science. (Liebman’s
Peace of Mind
was preceded by a 1927 work of the same title by a leading Jewish Science rabbi, Morris Lichtenstein.) In particular, Liebman’s prayer for modern people seemed inspired by the work of S. Felix
Mendelsohn, a Reform rabbi from Chicago who was active in Jewish Science. Foreshadowing Liebman’s work, Mendelsohn deftly blended explicit modern psychological language with the positive-thinking ideal in his 1938 “Daily Prayer for the Modern Jew”:

Liebman took this psychological tone further. He wanted man to awaken to unseen neuroses, and to achieve a credible self-love, while acknowledging dark emotions as an inevitable part of life. In his 1946 book, the rabbi intrepidly updated William James’s “religion of healthy-mindedness” with this variant: “All men today need the healthy-mindedness of Judaism, the natural piety with which the Jew declares, ‘One world at a time is enough.’ ” Liebman was not addressing himself exclusively to Jews; he was redefining Jewish ethics and psychoanalytic traditions as universal guideposts to healing.

Liebman saw psychological awareness as a necessary adjunct to the sin-and-repentance model of traditional religion. Indeed, postwar Americans of all backgrounds seemed to find succor in Liebman’s assurance that depression, addiction, infidelity, jealousy, and other modern maladies were not causes for guilt or shame, but were disorders of the psyche and the soul that could be treated through an improved sense of self-worth and a willingness to evaluate one’s personal desires in light of classical ethics.

Liebman didn’t run from contemporary issues. Both as a clergyman
and in his personal life he dealt forthrightly with the scars of the Holocaust. It was a topic that virtually none of the positive-thinking teachers even touched. After the war, Liebman’s family had adopted a Polish-Jewish orphan—an adolescent girl who had survived Auschwitz. The therapist-rabbi saw in the war an enduring tragedy that demanded acknowledgment. In January 1948, he told
Ladies’ Home Journal
: “Mine has been a rabbinate of trouble—of depression. Hitler’s rise, world crisis, global war, the attempted extermination of my people.” Yet Liebman believed that such circumstances required a constructive response among survivors and mourners, who were also obligated to pursue meaningful, productive lives. To them and others, Liebman wrote:

Liebman keenly understood how to bring moral seriousness to a discussion of people’s personal needs. He possessed a gift for language and phraseology that could universalize his psycho-spiritual message. The bestselling rabbi’s instincts for literary popularity, however, were not always razor-sharp—at least not on the first try.

When Liebman initially submitted his manuscript in 1945 to Simon & Schuster (ever since Dale Carnegie the publisher had developed a reputation for self-help) it arrived with the languid title “Morale for Moderns.” That didn’t sound to anyone like a bestseller. After coming under the tutelage of editor Henry Morton Robinson, himself an author and a former editor of
Reader’s Digest
, Liebman’s ethical tract reemerged with the friendlier title “Peace of Mind”—an aim to which everyone
could aspire. And here was another gift of the early self-help writers and their editors: The ability to render a title in terms that were clear, plain, and self-evidently desirable. Students of publishing, politics, and advertising could benefit from noting the phraseology of these men and women: every book and article announced its aim clearly, often employing phrases such as “how to” or “the power of,” and promising a definite benefit, whether in money, mental relaxation, or relationships. For Liebman, such language provided the framework to explore tender psychological issues while courting the broadest reach of people.

Some Christian leaders, such as Billy Graham and Monsignor Fulton Sheen, were overtly disdainful of Liebman’s psychological augmentation of Scripture. Sheen was particularly bellicose, satirizing Liebman’s approach to prayer in terms that purposely picked at the rabbi’s modernist voice: “ ‘I thank Thee, O Lord, that my Freudian adviser has told me that there is no such thing as guilt, that sin is a myth, and that Thou, O Father, art only a projection of my Father complex.… Oh, I thank Thee that I am not like the rest of men, those nasty people, such as the Christian there in the back of the temple who thinks that he is a sinner …’ ”

Others, including Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, not yet famous as the ambassador of the positive, were deeply excited by Liebman’s message. Peale enthusiastically recommended the rabbi’s book. In 1946, the
Federal Council of Churches Bulletin
hailed Liebman for writing “in the best manner of the Jewish prophets” and urged churches not to repeat the mistakes of the past by opposing the insights of the “psychological clinic.” It was a moment of remarkable openness on the American religious scene.