One Simple Idea

by Mitch Horowitz

  Help me, O God, realize my potentialities for noble and creative endeavor.… Grant that I gain a thorough insight into my personality and that I see myself as I really am. Help me not to waste my energies but to labor diligently with cheerful heart and mind. Let happiness pervade my every thought and deed and enable me to enjoy good health and to dispel fear and anger from my consciousness. May I realize the eternal character of my soul which partakes of Thine ever-existing presence.

  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:

  For those who have lost loved ones during the tragic war, all of the rest of life will be but a half loaf of bread—yet a half loaf eaten in courage and accepted in truth is infinitely better than a moldy whole loaf, green with the decay of self-pity and selfish sorrow which really dishonors the memory of those who lived for our up building and happiness.

  Spirited Communication

  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.

  Two years after his book appeared, Liebman died suddenly of heart failure at age forty-one. Though young and boundlessly energetic, he had maintained a frantic—and frantically ambitious—schedule of talks, sermons, articles, and radio addresses. Having addressed the pressures of modern living, Liebman died of modernity’s most common disease: stress.

  At the time of Liebman’s death, the Bible alone surpassed Peace of Mind as the top-selling spiritual book of the twentieth century. But Peace of Mind would soon be eclipsed by the work of one of the rabbi’s closest admirers: a man who saw the potential for reaching great masses of people through a mystical program couched in reassuringly familiar terms.

  Apostle of Happiness

  Four years after Liebman’s death, the driving idea behind all the self-help movements of the postwar era appeared in the title of Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 The Power of Positive Thinking. The book broke Liebman’s record, spending an unprecedented ninety-eight weeks at number one on the Times bestseller list. And it made positive thinking into an everyday, every-man-and-woman philosophy. The Protestant minister’s outlook was electrifying and freeing to people who had been raised on religion as a punitive institution. Peale’s core message, recalled his longtime friend and co-minister the Reverend Arthur Caliandro, was this: “Not only can you be forgiven, but you could achieve, you could accomplish.”

  Raised in Ohio, Peale was placed in charge of Marble Collegiate Church on Manhattan’s East Side during the Great Depression. Though Marble Collegiate was one of the nation’s oldest pulpits—with roots extending to 1628 and its Fifth Avenue church building dating to 1854—the Dutch Reformed congregation was ailing and shrinking when Peale took over in 1932. The buoyant young minister quickly attracted new congregants. His appeal stemmed from his interest in the therapeutic power of prayer. At the Manhattan church, Peale struck up a partnership with a psychoanalyst, Smiley Blanton, who had studied with Sigmund Freud and been psychoanalyzed by the master himself. Peale and Blanton believed that religion and psychiatry could complement one another. Peale emphasized that the modern minister should be considered a professional, “a scientist of the spiritual life,” and a figure as capable, in his own way, of providing counsel as a doctor or analyst. Blanton compared the awakening of the unconscious to William James’s “conversion experience.” The psychiatrist felt that the airing of repressed wishes and memories could, like a religious conversion, “transform the person’s life.”

  In 1937, Peale and Blanton opened the Religio-Psychiatric Clinic in the church basement. Patients received care from either a minister or a therapist, or both. The church clinic was similar to the Emmanuel Movement, though it focused strictly on anxious minds and troubled hearts. By 1952, the Religio-Psychiatric Clinic and its support staff, which it drew from area hospitals, therapy offices, and clinics, saw some three thousand patients annually; ten years later the number swelled to an extraordinary twenty-five thousand.

 
; While Peale and Blanton closely collaborated, Peale’s interests branched off in more mystical directions. The minister developed his own ideas about the force of “prayer power” to magnetically attract circumstances, and the mind’s ability to aim suggestions and influences at other people. Blanton, until his death in 1966, maintained his partnership with Peale, and their clinic continues today as the Blanton-Peale Institute and Counseling Center. Blanton, however, often kept his written work distinct and remained aloof from his friend’s metaphysical theories.

  In 1952, fifteen years after opening the Religio-Psychiatric Clinic, Peale reached into every corner of America, and many other parts of the world, with his manifesto, The Power of Positive Thinking. It became the kind of book that could be found in households everywhere, including those where there were few other books. It was not Peale’s first book. In the late 1930s, he had written quieter, more modest-selling works that depicted religion less as a philosophy of practical solutions than as a refuge from the torrents of life. Peale’s tone began to change in 1948 with his first self-help bestseller, A Guide to Confident Living, which more fully enunciated his positive-thinking themes. Four years later The Power of Positive Thinking took Peale’s methods to their most practical edge and overshadowed everything that came before it.

  Peale’s innovation was to craft a system that reprocessed mind-power teachings through Scriptural language and lessons. In actuality, Peale’s techniques came straight from New Thought. They included visualizations, affirmations, inducements to action of the leap-and-the-net-will-appear variety, formulas for manifestation (“1. PRAYERIZE 2. PICTURIZE 3. ACTUALIZE”), and assertions of self-belief backed by religious faith. Peale’s approach was New Thought—but stripped of most magical terminology.

  The minister used Biblical references and practical, everyday anecdotes that were reassuringly familiar in tone to the churchgoing public. (Though Peale did let slip a few telltale pieces of occult phraseology, as will be seen.) The Power of Positive Thinking was the most accessible expression of mind-power philosophy since Ralph Waldo Trine’s In Tune with the Infinite and James Allen’s As a Man Thinketh—but it surpassed even the combined influence of those two works through Peale’s story-telling abilities and his insight into human character, gleaned from years of experience at the Religio-Psychiatric Clinic.

  Peale generally deflected questions about his intellectual or spiritual sources. He often said his insights came squarely from Scripture. In his 1984 memoir, The True Joy of Positive Living, Peale identified Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Roman philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius as his “lifelong teachers.” It was the kind of benign claim that Peale typically used to maintain his image as nothing more than an Ohio minister’s son with a penchant for age-old advice. But Peale’s life and career were run through with a complex web of mystical and political influences. Beneath his sunny exterior there existed a surprisingly complicated man.

  “You Can If You Think You Can”

  In a little-known interview in 1987, six years before his death, Peale made a rare disclosure about where his ideas came from, and how he related to the spiritual and intellectual trends around him. Peale described the influence he found in California mystic Ernest Holmes. Indeed, the Peale-Holmes relationship reveals how the vision of early New Thought gave rise to the broader American culture of motivational philosophy and therapeutic spirituality.

  Peale and the Science of Mind founder Holmes had met just once, in Los Angeles in the summer of 1940. At the time, each went to hear the other deliver a talk. But Holmes’s work had already reached Peale when he was younger. “Ernest came into my life long before we actually met,” Peale said, “before I even decided to be a minister, when I was a vacillating, insecure, twenty-year-old.” These weren’t empty words. Peale did suffer from a lifelong sense of inferiority, especially after his reputation as a minister of practical wisdom made him a target of mockery among critics and intellectuals, who saw him as a simplistic purveyor of feel-good nostrums. Yet this feeling of inferiority was also his lifelong link to other people. Only someone who knew what it meant to feel inferior could relate to people in need.

  Peale recalled that when he took his first job, as a reporter at the Detroit Journal in 1920, his editor detected the young man’s “paralyzing fear of inadequacy.” As the minister recounted, “He took me aside and handed me a book, Creative Mind and Success by Ernest Holmes.” It was Holmes’s second book, written in 1919. “Now I want you to read this,” the editor told him. “I know this fellow Holmes. I’ve learned a lot from him, and so can you.” What did Peale learn? “Love God, love others, you can if you think you can, the proper control and use of the human mind, drop your limited sense of self and gain true Self-Reliance.” Holmes’s slender volume of essays and affirmations opened Peale to new possibilities of what a religious message could be. Peale entered Boston University Seminary soon after finding it. “There is no question in my mind that Ernest Holmes’s teachings had helped me on my way,” he said.

  Peale’s writing and sermons reflected mind-power influences beyond Holmes. Reverend Caliandro, who succeeded Peale at the pulpit of Marble Collegiate when the minister retired in 1984, recalled Peale’s deep attraction to Napoleon Hill (“he was really after that same form”), Dale Carnegie, Charles Fillmore, and Emmet Fox. Peale adopted the mind-power movement’s phraseology, including “Law of Attraction.” He echoed New Thought concepts that had their earliest inception in Mesmerism, such as the notion that the mind emits a tangible, magnetic prayer power. “The human body’s magnetic power has actually been tested,” he wrote in The Power of Positive Thinking. “We have thousands of little sending stations, and when these are turned up by prayer it is possible for a tremendous power to flow through a person and to pass between human beings.”

  Peale also used phrases such as “in tune with the infinite” (from Ralph Waldo Trine) and “music of the spheres” (a Hermetic-Pythagorean theory of harmonious proportions among the orbits of planets); and he urged people to observe and listen to nature, syncing one’s personality with the tempo of the natural world, which he considered the tempo of God-in-man. “All of the universe is in vibration,” Peale wrote in The Power of Positive Thinking. “… The reaction between human beings is also in vibration. When you send out a prayer for a person, you employ the force inherent in a spiritual universe.” This wasn’t exactly the language of a conservative Dutch Reformed minister.

  That observation about vibrations seemed to enter Peale’s writing through the work of Florence Scovel Shinn, an artist and mystic whose books Peale praised later in his life. She was among the most alluring and unusual New Thought figures of the early twentieth century. Florence was born in 1871 in Camden, New Jersey, and in 1898 married American realist painter Everett Shinn. They were part of the Ashcan School of American artists, a cohort known for depicting street scenes, urban life, and the immigrant experience. Florence Shinn worked as an artist and illustrator of children’s literature in New York City before writing her 1925 New Thought classic, The Game of Life and How to Play It. Unable to interest New York presses, she published the book herself. Shinn quickly became a popular New Thought teacher and lecturer, bringing a unique warmth and amiability to mystic-occult ideas. Her writing often described universal “vibrations”—an idea that entered her books, before entering Peale’s, through the occult work The Kybalion, which Shinn avowedly admired.

  Yet it would be an error to assume, as some fundamentalist critics have charged, that Peale was some kind of occultist in vestments. He was not. In many regards Peale was, in fact, the midwestern Methodist he presented himself as. He labored to find a Scriptural antecedent to the ideas he wrote about. In the truest sense, Peale was a great synthesizer. He once recalled his father telling him—quite rightly:

  Norman, I have read and studied all your books and sermons and it is clearly evident that you have gradually evolved a new religious system of thought and teaching. And it’s O.K., too, very O.K., because
its center and circumference and essence is Jesus Christ. There is no doubt about its solid Biblical orientation. Yes, you have evolved a new Christian emphasis out of a composite of Science of Mind, metaphysics, Christian Science, medical and psychological practice, Baptist evangelism, Methodist witnessing and solid Dutch Reformed Calvinism.

  Ministry of Success

  For all of Peale’s spiritual adventurousness, the minister was most at home among business elites and corporate climbers. Reverend Caliandro remembered an elderly Peale’s attraction to Donald Trump upon first seeing the real-estate magnate on television. Peale was always “very impressed with successful people” and self-promoters, Caliandro recalled. “That was a weakness.”

  Peale acknowledged his tendency to kowtow to the powerful. He once obligingly invited success author Dale Carnegie to deliver a talk at the Religio-Psychiatric Clinic—a move that disturbed Smiley Blanton, who couldn’t see what Carnegie’s self-salesmanship had to do with the clinic’s therapeutic work. Peale admitted that he often evinced an “all-things-to-all-men attitude,” and he reluctantly withdrew the invitation.

  Peale gamely courted corporations, penning a Reader’s Digest article in 1950, “Let the Church Speak Up for Capitalism.” U.S. Steel soon became a major supporter of Peale’s motivational digest, Guideposts, which had struggled at its inception in 1945. In the early 1950s, the steel giant purchased monthly subscriptions for all of its 125,000 employees. The following decade, some 762 American businesses were ordering company-wide subscriptions to Guideposts.*1