The path to success is linear, as conventional wisdom has it: You get a good education, make a thoughtful choice about a career, and diligently climb the ranks until you are rewarded with money, power, and personal fulfillment. In truth, life is often more like a slinky, full of twists and turns that challenge you to pull back, regroup, and reinvent yourself.
Self-Help Messiah: Dale Carnegie and Success in Modern America
By Steven Watts (Other Press)
In his engaging and well-researched biography of Dale Carnegie, Steven Watts tells the story of the self-help guru’s roundabout path to becoming one of the most influential voices of the 20th century. Self-Help Messiah: Dale Carnegie and Success in Modern America is both a historical narrative of the rise of the therapeutic culture in America and an inspirational text on the possibilities of reimagining your life at every turn.
Known as the godfather of the personal-success industry for his 1936 bestseller, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Carnegie’s biography has often been told as a Horatio Alger tale of rags to riches. Born on a farm in Missouri and raised in a poor, pious home, he was shamed as a young man for his ill-fitting clothes and big ears, until he discovered that his gift for oratory could help him gain popularity and a paycheck.
Yet it wasn’t that simple: Carnegie struggled, failed, and reinvented himself numerous times. Watts, a professor of history at the University of Missouri at Columbia, describes those efforts in richer detail than previous biographies, allowing the reader to identify with Carnegie’s very human struggle.
Watts shows that Carnegie was a product of 20th-century capitalism who understood the powerful link between selling consumer goods and selling a feeling of importance and happiness. At 19, after graduating from his teaching college, where he’d won awards for public speaking, he became a traveling salesman. After a rough start, he was successful at sales, but after a few years, gave up his lucrative job in the Midwest to follow a dream of acting in New York City. He wasn’t a hit in the theatrical world, so within a few years he was selling once more—this time, cars.
That career wasn’t the right fit, either. To pick up a bit of extra money, Carnegie applied to colleges to teach public speaking. New York and Columbia Universities weren’t interested in his services, but the YMCA offered him an opportunity to teach night classes to adults. There he combined his oratory and theatrical and sales skills to draw a following.
As World War I broke out, Carnegie was voraciously reading the work of New Thought psychologists and preachers like the Rev. Russell H. Conwell, Elbert Hubbard, James Allen, and Orison Swett Marden. Embracing their message of the power of positive thinking and personal presentation, he honed his classes to focus on the importance of sincerity, enthusiasm, and expression as a way to impress others and succeed in the corporate world. His advice—personal presentation matters as much as hard work, and everyone craves recognition—both reinforced the individualist impulse of the American dream and added a modern focus on image and personality, which were becoming pervasive in the age of advertising.
“Personality—with the exception of preparation—is probably the most important factor in public address,” Carnegie said. To sharpen it, and to escape the poverty of the Depression, required a changed mental attitude. Like many at the time, Carnegie saw the Depression as a test of the resilience of the American dream.
Scholars like Micki McGee (Self Help, Inc., 2005) and Donald Meyer (The Positive Thinkers, first published in 1980 and reissued this year) have explored Carnegie’s role in creating our self-help fallacy: that individual attitude can overcome social factors. Watts does not engage with any such Marxist critiques. Rather, he delivers a generally positive description of the wide reach of Carnegie’s practical advice. In addition, Watts offers a nuanced view of Carnegie’s role in the American shift from advice literature focused on morality and virtue to modern self-help, with its often more superficial bromides. For Carnegie, both virtue and personality were necessary for success. Indeed, when Carnegie spoke of his own life, he routinely mentioned the “blessing of faith and a sturdy character” instilled in him by his mother.
By the early 1920s, Carnegie’s YMCA classes had become popular enough to offer his own correspondence courses. But he received criticism for using composite characters in his advertisements and for exaggerating (or fabricating) stories of his childhood to attract audiences.
To present himself in the best possible light, Carnegie went so far as to “improve” his own name. Born Dale Carnagey, in 1925 he changed the spelling and pronunciation to match that of millionaire Andrew Carnegie. Watts attributes that decision to pre-emptive embrace of the success of the business giant, and also to a rejection of Carnegie’s childhood poverty and a devotion to positive thinking (to get the “nay” sound out of the middle of the name).
It wasn’t until the Simon & Schuster editor Leon Shimkin attended a 1934 lecture by Carnegie and approached him about writing a book that the possibilities for really disseminating the practical advice became a reality. How to Win Friends and Influence People was written as an action book: Based on core principles such as “be a good listener” and “encourage others to talk about themselves,” the advice was taken up by millions. Orders came from theological seminaries and bordellos alike.
A century after Carnegie began teaching the importance of making people feel appreciated, the centrality of self-confidence, and the individualistic attitude that you, too, can be a success if you approach people in the correct way, his courses are still being taught nationwide. Indeed, I assign How to Win Friends and Influence People to my students, and each semester students tell me about the speeding tickets avoided, essay extensions offered, and roommate relationships improved by his seemingly simple advice.
And yet we should see that Carnegie can also be an inspiration for those who aren’t on a linear path to reinventing themselves. For young adults, the underlying message of his life is comforting: You, too, can take chances, fail, and pick up skills along the way to eventually discover your purpose.
Watt’s historical narrative is also a caution to those who write Carnegie off, as academics often do, as obvious or superficial, and miss the social and psychological power of his work.
Christine B. Whelan is a visiting assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of Generation WTF (Templeton Press, 2011) and Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women (Simon & Schuster, 2006).
