One Simple Idea

by Mitch Horowitz

  The mind-power movement was invisible within the intellectual culture. In a sense, this absence reflected the movement’s second historical failure. The first had occurred earlier in the twentieth century when progressive figures such as Helen Wilmans, Wallace D. Wattles, and Elizabeth Towne found themselves unable to sustainably wed mind-power culture to movements for social reform.

  Even as New Thought’s intellectual and social aims floundered, however, its popularity soared. Or, rather, the popularity of its methods did. The term New Thought was only occasionally heard. Positive-thinking ideas, stripped of mystical language, congregational labels, and any historical moorings, began flowing into mainstream culture—and not just the religious culture: sales conferences, board rooms, dinnertime conversations, therapy offices, and even political campaigns began buzzing with the metaphysics of optimism.

  This development arrived after World War II, when a newer and less overtly mystical generation of positive-thinking teachers made their impact felt. These newcomers had taken careful measure of New Thought’s successes and failings. They meticulously distanced themselves from the occult language and miraculous claims that could turn away mainstream people. This fresh breed of thought-crusaders finally, and permanently, transformed positive thinking into the philosophy of American life.

  * * *

  *1 The Jewish Science movement remains active. The Society of Jewish Science maintains a congregation on Manhattan’s East Side. That congregation’s longtime religious leader, Tehilla Lichtenstein (1893–1973), was the first female head of an American Jewish congregation. She took over the pulpit from her husband, Rabbi Morris Lichtenstein, after his death in 1938. Like Emma Curtis Hopkins’s seminary and other New Thought–inspired groups, Jewish Science evinced a notable pattern of early female leadership.

  *2 This book contained Larson’s “Optimist Creed.” His switch in the copyright dates, from 1910 to 1912, created the lasting misimpression that the world-famous meditation appeared two years later than it actually did.

  *3 For many years, Unity’s residential housing was segregated. Unity’s black ministerial students and guests were denied residency until 1956, when Johnnie Colemon, an African-American female ministerial student from Chicago, embarked on a successful petition drive to open campus housing. Colemon became founding minister of one of the nation’s largest New Thought congregations, the Christ Universal Temple, in Chicago.

  *4 Neville may have hinted as much, especially in light of his love for Hebrew symbolism. He affectionately called Abdullah “Ab” for short—a variant of the Hebrew abba for “father.” Neville may have fashioned a mythical “father mentor” from various teachers.

  chapter six

  the american creed

  Nothing is impossible.

  —Ronald Reagan

  In the 1920s two revolutionary self-help authors arrived on the American scene. The two men had never collaborated but they possessed a shared instinct. By stripping New Thought of its magical language, they reconfigured mind-power principles into a secular methodology for personal achievement. Each went on to write landmark books whose titles and bylines became synonymous with success: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

  Hill was more clearly a product of the mind-power culture. His first book, in 1928, was an eight-volume opus called The Law of Success, a title borrowed from Prentice Mulford. Like Mulford, Hill believed that the mind possessed clairvoyant energies and forces. In particular Hill emphasized the existence of a “Master Mind,” an over-mind of shared human consciousness, which reveals itself to us in moments of intuition, in hunches, or in prophetic dreams. Tapping into the Master Mind became the centerpiece of his work.

  Hill jettisoned any vestige of the mind-power movement’s earlier social consciousness. “I gave a beggar a dime,” he wrote, “with the suggestion that he invest it in a copy of Elbert Hubbard’s Message to Garcia.” Hill was referring to Hubbard’s famous 1899 essay about an American soldier who displayed remarkable drive in carrying a message behind enemy lines to a Cuban rebel leader during the Spanish-American War. Message to Garcia was Hubbard’s paean to self-will and personal accountability. Hubbard’s social outlook, however, wasn’t quite what Hill’s tribute implied.

  When not praising the rugged virtues admired by Hill, Hubbard had produced articles on the horrendous working conditions in southern cotton mills, helping instigate some of the nation’s first child labor laws. Hubbard and his wife Alice, a suffragist and New-Thoughter, were killed on a peace mission to Europe in 1915 to protest World War I to the German Kaiser. A German U-boat torpedoed their passenger liner, the Lusitania, off the Irish coast. They died with nearly twelve hundred other civilians. “Big business has been to blame in this thing,” Hubbard had written of the war before his journey, “… let it not escape this truth—that no longer shall individuals be allowed to thrive by selling murder machines to the mob.”

  Hill overlooked that side of Hubbard’s work. Instead, he geared his appeal to the modern striver who wanted to get ahead. This focus probably grew from the influence of the man Hill came to idolize, and whose ideas undergirded his own: the industrialist Andrew Carnegie.

  The Gospel of Wealth

  Napoleon Hill became interested in the science of success in 1908 while working as a reporter for Bob Taylor’s Magazine, an inspirational journal founded by the ex-governor of Hill’s home state of Virginia. The publisher, Bob Taylor, took a particular interest in up-by-the-bootstraps life stories of business leaders. Through Taylor’s connections, Hill was able to score the ultimate “get”: an interview with the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie.

  Hill described his first encounters with Carnegie—“the richest man that the richest nation on earth ever produced”—in terms that brought to mind Moses receiving the tablets on Mount Sinai. Whatever impression Hill left on Carnegie, the industrialist made no mention of the younger man in his writings. Nonetheless, Carnegie’s memoirs do paint the image of himself as a man who enjoyed discussing the metaphysics of success.

  In his 1920 autobiography, which appeared the year after his death, Carnegie recalled that as an adolescent he “became deeply interested in the mysterious doctrines of Swedenborg.” A Spiritualist aunt encouraged the young Carnegie to develop his psychical talents, or “ability to expound ‘spiritual sense.’ ”

  Carnegie’s earliest writings probed whether there are natural laws of success, a theme that reemerged in Hill’s work. In 1889, Carnegie published his essay “Wealth”—which might have gained little note if not for its republication by England’s Pall Mall Gazette under the more provocative title by which it became famous: “The Gospel of Wealth.” Taking a leaf from the neo-Darwinian views of philosopher Herbert Spencer, Carnegie described a “law of competition” that he believed brought a rough, necessary order to the world:

  While the law may be sometimes hard to the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial but essential for the future progress of the race.

  Where Wallace D. Wattles had extolled creativity above competition, Carnegie welcomed “laws of accumulation” as necessary means of separating life’s winners from losers. But Carnegie’s essay had an interesting wrinkle. He counseled giving away one’s money in acts of philanthropy as the legitimate culmination of worldly success. And if the rich didn’t find a way to disperse their fortunes through philanthropy, Carnegie called for a nearly 100 percent estate tax to settle the matter for them.

  At their 1908 meeting, Hill eagerly questioned Carnegie about his success-building methods. The steel manufacturer urged the reporter to speak with other captains of commerce to determine whether a definable s
et of steps led to their accomplishments. Carnegie offered to open doors for Hill. Hill spent the next twenty years studying and interviewing businessmen, diplomats, generals, inventors, and other high achievers in an effort to map out their shared principles. He finally distilled seventeen traits or habits that these outliers seemed to have in common. They included concentrating your energies on one definite major aim; doing more work than you are paid for; cultivating intuition, or a sixth sense; showing persistence; reprogramming your thoughts through autosuggestion; practicing tolerance of opinion; gaining specialized knowledge; and convening around you a collaborative Master Mind group, whose members could blend their mental energies and ideas.

  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.

  “I Know! I Know!! I Know!!!”

  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!!!”

  The Untroubled Mind

  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 fol
lowing 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”: