One Simple Idea

by Mitch Horowitz

  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:

  Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an evil eye, neither desire thou his dainty meats:

  For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he: Eat and drink, saith he to thee; but his heart is not with thee.

  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:

  Here is a youth hard pressed by poverty and labor; confined long hours in an unhealthy workshop; unschooled, and lacking all the arts of refinement. But he dreams of better things: he thinks of intelligence, of refinement, of grace and beauty. He conceives of, mentally builds up, an ideal condition of life; vision of a wider liberty and a larger scope takes possession of him; unrest urges him to action, and he utilizes all his spare time and means, small though they are, to the development of his latent powers and resources. Very soon so altered has his mind become that the workshop can no longer hold him.

  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.

  “If the Workers of America Chose to …”

  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, conservat
ive 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:

  If the workers of America chose to do so, they could follow the example of their brothers in Belgium and other countries, and establish great department stores and co-operative industries; they could elect men of their own class to office, and pass laws favoring the development of such co-operative industries; and in a few years they could take peaceable possession of the industrial field.

  The working class may become the master class whenever they will begin to do things in a Certain Way…

  To Wattles, the “Certain Way” meant using the mind as an occult force for attraction, the aspect of the book that interested creators of The Secret. And this highlights an important difference between Wattles and other early-twentieth-century writers on the character traits of success, such as Russell H. Conwell and Orison Swett Marden. Those writers endorsed the cultivation of willpower, optimism, and a can-do mind-set. They had no other social aims, and no belief in man’s occult prowess. Wattles, on the other hand, popularized the notion, also seen in Prentice Mulford, that the mind possesses an actual ethereal power—a “thinking stuff” that could literally attract circumstances or manifest desires. This became a core belief of the positive-thinking culture and distinguished it from the earlier character-building literature.

  In 1911, Wattles produced his final book, The Science of Being Great, also published by Towne. It remains the sole piece of American inspirational literature to celebrate the example of Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs. A hero to followers, Debs was sentenced in 1918 to ten years in federal prison for opposing the military draft during World War I. From his cell he won nearly one million votes for the presidency in 1920 (and probably more if voter suppression were factored in). Writing in 1911, Wattles counseled readers:

  Think about the good side of men; the lovely, attractive part, and exert your will in refusing to think of anything else in connection with them. I know of no one who has attained to so much on this one point as Eugene V. Debs, twice the Socialist candidate for president of the United States. Mr. Debs reverences humanity. No appeal for help is ever made to him in vain. No one receives from him an unkind or censorious word. You cannot come into his presence without being made sensible of his deep and kindly personal interest in you. Every person, be he millionaire, grimy workingman, or toil worn woman, receives the radiant warmth of a brotherly affection that is sincere and true. No ragged child speaks to him on the street without receiving instant and tender recognition. Debs loves men. This has made him the leading figure in a great movement, the beloved hero of a million hearts, and will give him a deathless name.

  In his speeches, Debs, too, encouraged a kind of working-class self-reliance, of both action and thought. “I would not lead you into the Promised Land if I could,” he told audiences, “because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition.”

  In early 1911 Wattles was preparing for another run for Congress on Debs’s ticket. Wattles’s daughter, Florence, a budding socialist orator and organizer, was assembling a ground operation for his next campaign in 1912. She insisted that his loss in the mayoral election had been due to fraud. The twenty-three-year-old Florence told a socialist convention in Kokomo, Indiana:

  They voted not only the dead men in the cemeteries, but vacant lots as well. We were robbed of the election, but in 1912 we will carry the election. Mark that. And we’ll get the offices, too. We mean to do it through a thorough and completely effective organization.

  But h
er father, who extolled the healing properties of the mind, was frail and often in shaky health. Wattles died of tuberculosis that year at age fifty during a trip to Tennessee. The Fort Wayne Sentinel remembered him not for his mystical works but as “one of the best known socialists in Indiana.”

  Liberating Powers

  In retrospect, the careers of Helen Wilmans, Elizabeth Towne, Wallace D. Wattles, and others can seem chimerical in their ideal of wedding social radicalism with the metaphysical powers of the mind. Yet their hopes reflected a brief moment in which avant-garde thinkers believed that human beings could develop and hone superior skills, and that life harbored unseen connections and channels of progress.

  Indeed, Victorian-era men and women were enthralled with the theory of evolution, which, in the minds of figures like Wattles, seemed to promise that humanity was capable of orderly advancement in all areas of existence. Wattles and his contemporaries saw man as a psycho-spiritual being whose inner powers were as unrecognized as x-rays had once been in the farming towns where he was raised. Progress seemed to promise man’s ability to continually improve his circumstances through the harnessing of natural and social laws, and Wattles believed that if such laws—including mental laws—could be properly understood, it followed that man’s outer life could mirror the refinement of his inner state.

  In this way, the possibilities of New Thought also touched the hopes of early-twentieth-century advocates for racial liberation. This was especially true of the black-nationalist pioneer Marcus Garvey, a man rarely perceived as having metaphysical affinities. Garvey, along with his admiration for James Allen, punctuated his speeches and newspaper articles with telltale New Thought aphorisms, such as “Enthusiasm Is One of the Big Keys to Success”; “Let us Give off Success and It Will Come”; and “always think yourself a perfect being.” And he reminded his audiences of the need for “a universal business consciousness.”