One Simple Idea

by Mitch Horowitz

  Fenwicke managed to escape the legal cloud. He became a formidable force in spreading the positive-thinking gospel, including to Japan, where it spawned a popular counterpart to the Science of Mind movement: Seicho-No-Ie, or Home of Infinite Life, Truth, and Abundance. He also made a decisive impact on the influential mythologist Joseph Campbell, who attended Fenwicke’s lectures in New York in the late 1920s. Fenwicke gave the young seeker an exercise to discover what he really wanted out of life: “One should jot down notes for a period of four or five weeks on the things that interest one. It will be found that all the interests tend in a certain direction.” Campbell used this technique to reach his decision to become a scholar of myth. Fenwicke’s advice seemed to echo in Campbell’s famous maxim: “Follow your bliss.”

  Ernest Holmes narrowly eluded the vortex of his brother’s legal problems. Investigators Washburn and De Long maintained that while Ernest was living in Venice Beach around 1917 he “was already engaged in a small way in the lucrative business of selling questionable stocks.” They offered no evidence for the assertion and Ernest’s name appeared in none of the news coverage that dogged Fenwicke. In fact, the younger brother had stopped working with Fenwicke in 1925—the reasons were never publicly discussed. They reunited in 1958, two years before Ernest’s death, to collaborate on an epic poem, The Voice Celestial.

  Ernest lived long enough to see his Science of Mind churches spread across the nation, encompassing more than 100,000 congregants. But his final years also saw his movement riven by a factional split. In a dispute over whether the churches would be self-governed, a cluster of ministries broke away in 1957 to form their own organization. The rift was bridged in 2011 when the two Holmes-based ministries, the United Church of Religious Science and the smaller Religous Science International, formally reunited.

  Holmes’s chief legacy was less as a congregational organizer than as a public voice. A formidable figure in the spiritual culture of Southern California, he attracted acolytes from Cary Grant to Peggy Lee to Cecil B. DeMille. His key text, The Science of Mind, became a favorite of Elvis Presley’s and is found today in the library of George Lucas. As will be seen, Holmes made a major impact on Rev. Norman Vincent Peale. More recently, his books were named as an influence by major-league pitcher Barry Zito and by Martin Luther King Jr.’s eldest daughter, Yolanda, who called Science of Mind her core religious commitment shortly before her death in 2007.

  While Ernest Holmes was never as well known as some of those who drank from his ideas, he was the closest New Thought had to an ambassador of the positive.

  CHRISTIAN D. LARSON:

  SOARING LANGUAGE, ETHICAL PITFALLS

  While displaying a serene demeanor and a relentlessly upbeat tone, Christian D. Larson pursued a dual existence as both a visionary writer who shaped the language of self-help, and a businessman who pushed ethical boundaries in his publishing empire.

  Born to Norwegian immigrant parents in the near-wilderness of northern Iowa in 1874, Larson had planned on a career as a Lutheran minister. But after a year at a Lutheran seminary in Minneapolis in 1894, he grew interested in Unitarianism, Transcendentalism, and the new mind-power philosophies. In 1898 Larson moved to Cincinnati, where he began writing and publishing New Thought tracts—and soon became a prolific and dynamic author.

  Some of his earliest works featured phrases that became widely known, though rarely credited back to Larson. They include “live the simple life,” “make yourself over,” “live in the present only,” and “attitude of gratitude”—the last made famous by Oprah Winfrey. Larson also coined the term “be all that you can be” generations before it became the advertising slogan of the U.S. Army. His work “Promise Yourself”—a verse meditation on the power of determined cheerfulness—gained worldwide notice in 1922 when it was adopted as the credo of Optimist International, a philanthropic club similar to the Jaycees or Rotarians. The verse work became known ever after as “The Optimist Creed.”

  For a time, Larson was also enormously successful at publishing his own widely read books and magazines at his Chicago-based Progress Company. His magazine, Eternal Progress, which he launched in 1901, grew by the end of the decade into a beautifully produced, socially progressive journal that combined the ideals of mind-power metaphysics with articles and photographs highlighting the growth of the nation.

  Alongside articles heralding New Thought’s emergence as “a universal religion,” Eternal Progress abounded with reportage and illustrated spreads on great dams, railroads, skyscrapers, and other engineering marvels that were bringing optimism about the future in the early twentieth century. In a typical issue, Eternal Progress chronicled the rebuilding of San Francisco after the 1906 fire and earthquake, and the beauty and growing economy of the Pacific Northwest, with its logging and fishing enterprises. Larson also ran articles calling for universal suffrage and the establishment of programs to educate and reform prisoners.

  Even more than Elizabeth Towne’s Nautilus, and probably unlike any other magazine in American history, Eternal Progress captured all the hallmarks of the Progressive Era: bounding commerce, scientific advances, working-class struggles, social reforms, and the appeal of the new mental therapeutics. This zeitgeist of unlimited potential was captured in Larson’s March 1909 issue in the poem “Eternal Progress” by Townsend Allen:

  From the first primeval atom,

  Upward, upward is the trend;

  Greater out of lesser growing.

  Ever to the perfect end.

  Upward, onward, each to-morrow

  Should be better than the past;

  God’s work in His creation;

  All who will may win at last.

  To broaden the magazine’s appeal beyond the metaphysical, Larson shortened its name to Progress in June of that year.

  For all of Larson’s ideals, the visionary writer had a checkered business history. On July 25, 1911, the U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois declared Larson’s Progress Company in “involuntary bankruptcy” following complaints from creditors who were owed $300,000. The court ordered a receiver to take control of the company’s plants and holdings, and suspended publication of Larson’s 250,000-circulation magazine. By August Larson had left town for Los Angeles. He later told an interviewer that his Chicago printing plant had burned down and, rather than rebuild, he decided to follow the country’s momentum and move west. At the time of the Progress Company’s receivership in 1911, however, creditors estimated that the company continued to hold plant and printing assets of about $100,000—a surprisingly robust sum for a business that Larson said was lost in a fire. Closer to the truth may be that Larson, facing a mountainous debt and with creditors at his heels, decided to act on his principle to “make yourself over” and left his liabilities behind to “reinvent” himself in Southern California.

  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.

  ROY HERBERT JARRETT:

  SALESMAN AS SEEKER

  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 he
adline: “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:

  1. Carefully write a list of what you really want in life—once you are satisfied with it, read it three times daily: morning, noon, and night.

  2. Think about what you want as often as possible.

  3. Keep your practice and desires strictly to yourself. (This was intended to prevent other people’s negative reactions from sullying your inner resolve.)

  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.