In her book Bright-Sided, a skeptical history of the positive-psychology movement, Barbara Ehrenreich traces the American love of self-help back to the beliefs of the early Puritan settlers, whose precarious new lives reinforced the stern theology they brought with them from the old world. At the mercy of their inhospitable surroundings, the settlers sought to control what they could: their own minds. They kept a vigilant watch on their motivations and desires, and punished themselves and one another for transgressions of thought as much as for sins of behavior, believing that God could witness their inner battles as clearly as their outward actions. Before Freud’s influential stratification of the mind into the id, ego, and superego, it was common to believe that the mind could be divided against itself, a site of warring good and evil impulses.
But over time, the Puritans’ paranoid self-policing gave way to a more positive view of the self as something malleable and improvable. If a person could learn to guard her mind against sinful thoughts, why could she not also train it toward virtue and goodness? Couldn’t vigilance be a path toward self-improvement as well as a means of self-flagellation? In the twentieth century, as people began to move farther from their families and from the tight-knit communities that helped bolster religious faith, the social obligation to adhere to strict moral codes began to fade. Urban living and corporate labor demanded different skills and rewarded different behaviors, leading to a shift that is sometimes characterized in broad terms as a move from “character” to “personality.” The importance of a person’s internal, largely invisible, moral character lost ground to social skills, popularity, and adaptability. In response, a new kind of self-help emerged that claimed to teach readers how to make themselves more personable—to seem better rather than be better.14
Reverend Newell Dwight Hillis was fully immersed in the self-improvement theories of the new century, and did not believe that personal happiness on earth was incompatible with spiritual rewards. When they weren’t trying to drum up support for World War I, his books and pamphlets—with titles like The Quest of Happiness, Right Living as Fine Art, and A Man’s Value to Society—were intended to help his congregation embrace worldly success. In Great Books as Life Teachers, for instance, he held up works by George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson as sources of practical inspiration for living well. In other books he celebrated the example of historical figures, like nineteenth-century British prime minister William Gladstone, as offering up a template for ordinary people’s lives. His own journey from rural Iowa to boomtown Brooklyn, and his position of leadership and power, was an aspirational model for none other than Dale Carnegie, author of the enduring bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People, who as a young man devoured Reverend Hillis’s educational pamphlets.15 (The minister might, however, have raised an eyebrow at his acolyte’s most audacious act of “self-improvement”: changing the spelling of his given name from “Carnagey” to Carnegie, in order to imply a family connection to Andrew, the country’s leading industrialist.)
By the time Dale Carnegie (re)made his name, in the midst of the Depression, readers were willing to entertain pretty much any path to a better life. Popularity was the means and the message of How to Win Friends and Influence People, published the same year as Live Alone and Like It, which set out to help readers develop a “personality” suited to the corporate world: flexible, upbeat, friendly, shallow, and always with an eye out for opportunity. Optimism and self-belief were the twin pillars of 1930s self-help. In the wake of economic disaster and political uncertainty, the culture was receptive to gurus who preached that it was possible to transcend financial insecurity and unemployment simply by tackling one’s mental attitude. With the period trappings stripped away, these theories still resonate today, for instance, in the dazzling claims made for the power of “mindfulness” to focus the attention and generate clear visions of a better self. Dale Carnegie’s book, meanwhile, continues to sell some three hundred thousand copies a year.16
Marjorie Hillis’s instinctive faith in optimism was elevated to a spiritual dogma by the writer and preacher Norman Vincent Peale. Peale originally wanted to be a journalist, before he attended seminary and was ordained into the Methodist Episcopal Church, but his true calling was as a salesman. After his 1924 ordination he was assigned to the moribund Flatlands Church, Brooklyn, and immediately set about rebuilding his congregation with a successful direct-marketing campaign of “doorbell ringing and postcard mailing.” After a move to Syracuse where he deployed similar tactics, Peale landed a radio show, and shortly afterward arrived at Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, where he would be based for the rest of his career. According to Steven Starker, one of the few historians to look critically at modern self-help, Peale’s early books, called The Art of Living (1938) and You Can Win (1939), were too vague and theoretical to stand out from the flood of similar titles at the end of the Depression decade.17 Peale refocused his efforts on his radio show, and after World War II rose to the fame that would last through the 1950s and beyond, thanks to his 1952 bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking, which promised the world to people feeling scared and uncertain within it. To the horror of many of his religious peers, Peale reduced the complex and mysterious bond between man and God into a straightforward transactional relationship, reducing prayer to the first part of a three-part formula for happiness: prayerize, picturize, actualize. Telling his devotees that their unhappiness was self-manufactured, he encouraged them to deploy mantras and visualizations to achieve a life of joy, happiness, and material success, despite the looming fears of the Cold War. With appealing anecdotes, simple formulas, and practical-sounding to-do lists and techniques, Peale’s blending of the spiritual and self-help genres proved especially popular with middle-class women.
Taken to its logical extreme, positive thinking could be presented as a quasi-magical shortcut to wealth and power. Napoleon Hill, author of 1937’s Think and Grow Rich, expounded a particularly shaky philosophy that depended heavily on the repetition of affirming mantras and other mind-control techniques such as visualization and autosuggestion. The author claimed to have analyzed over a hundred American millionaires, who were quite happy to expound on how their personal fortitude and self-belief (rather than privilege or luck) had made them successful. Think and Grow Rich mystified their road to success in a way that both intrigued and frustrated its readers, promising a “secret” that it never really explained, beyond urging them to cultivate a “burning desire” for success. More than fifteen million people bought it anyway—almost as many as have bought into its twenty-first-century heir, Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, since 2006. Byrne’s secret is as vague as Hill’s: she claims that a “law of attraction” governs the universe and shapes our lives, and that by banishing negative thinking and visualizing our desires, we can “attract” whatever we want.18
Byrne and her 1930s predecessors were indebted to the teachings of New Thought, a multifaceted spiritual movement that traced its origins back to a nineteenth-century Maine clock maker with the gloriously hucksterish name of Phineas P. Quimby. Quimby was fascinated by the power of the mind and how it might be controlled by hypnosis and harnessed to heal the body—Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, was his patient and student. New Thought, as its name suggests, was a broad and adaptable movement, able to incorporate ideas derived from Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists, as well as various European and Asian mystical traditions, all of which, in their different ways, rejected the dominant lessons of scientific empiricism. The theoretical basis of many success manuals, that mind control was possible and achievable through visualization, autosuggestion, and the repetition of mantras and slogans, was derived from New Thought, and given authority by examples from life that supposedly demonstrated the success of the book’s methods. Historian Stephen L. Recken observes that “words such as power, mastery, and control dominated the literature of the movement,” helping to explain its powerful appeal to readers whose
lives lacked those very things.19 Nothing in mainstream 1930s self-help suggested that there might be a way to improve your own situation by working with other people—on the contrary, the route to success usually depended on leaving those other poor suckers in the dust.
Although the business of selling success in the 1930s—like the business of selling anything—was dominated by men, several women found a receptive audience for their particular brand of life advice, paving the way for Marjorie Hillis, but usually putting forth a less independent-minded, and much less entertaining philosophy. The most successful of these was Margery Wilson, who built a career selling women on the power of “charm.” Born Sara Barker Strayer in Tennessee, Wilson got her start in the movie business, where she learned early on the power of smoke and mirrors. After stints as a touring entertainer, she wound up at director D. W. Griffith’s Reliance-Majestic Studios aged just fourteen, and landed a job on camera, according to Photoplay magazine, by strapping padding to her undeveloped body, “until she presented a rotund and mature appearance.”20 The doe-eyed, ringleted Wilson racked up an impressive number of screen credits, most prominently as “Brown Eyes” in Griffith’s 1916 picture Intolerance.21 By the early 1920s, Wilson was not only an actress but also a screenwriter, producer, and director. In its freewheeling early phase, before roles and hierarchies became strictly defined, the movie business—like many fledgling industries—had plenty of space for talented women who knew how to seize an opportunity.22 When the talkie era dawned in the late 1920s, Wilson saw a chance to reinvent herself as a speech coach for those actors and actresses caught unprepared, with thick accents and squeaky pitches, for the advent of sound.
After her marriage, Wilson began to write scripts for a radio show on “charm,” and in 1928 published the first version of The Woman You Want to Be: Margery Wilson’s Complete Book of Charm, which was revised and reprinted in 1933, 1935, 1938, and 1942. In the book, Wilson stressed that the program was a response to a need on the part of her readers, not rooted in her own experiences, as Marjorie’s books would be. “The three courses in this book grew from the questions, the problems, and the needs of actual women,” she wrote. “This is a living book, not a compilation of static ideas. It is a pulse of the modern woman’s progress in personal achievement.”23 “Charm” was a feminine version of what Dale Carnegie called “personality,” the basis of his formula for corporate success. But charm, Wilson claimed, was more reliable. Noting that “fashions in personalities change as surely as do hair-arrangements,” she declared that charm, by contrast, was “classical and enduring.”24 Charm could work equally well for a woman whether she was trying to land a husband and run a pleasing home, or whether she was looking to make her mark in a career outside the home. Success, as both Carnegie and Wilson imagined it, sprang from the impression one made on others—clearly something the Hollywood veteran could well understand.
Wilson’s “charm” was an elastic quality, encompassing a large and often contradictory set of behaviors and beliefs. Although it now carries the ring of the superficial and untrustworthy, and is often associated with men, for Wilson it was exclusively female, and had enormous potential to change a woman’s life. She even elevated it to a nationalistic virtue. At the beginning of The Woman You Want to Be, Wilson makes the case that “the hope of any nation lies in the personal qualities of its individual members,” and in the 1942 update she added that now, “as our way of life is challenged” by war, it was more important than ever to help readers achieve “personal strength and healthy minds.” The notion that charm was a rock-solid base under the mistiness of changing fashions is an odd idea, made stranger by its elasticity. Charm is self-confidence, Wilson tells us, but it’s also unself-consciousness. It can be faked until it becomes real, although how you tell the difference is never explained. Charm lies in being your best self, but only if that self is also attractive to others and free of cynicism. A list of methods to make other people like you includes a vicious formula for positive thinking (“pour a strong mental germicide on any lurking self-pity”) alongside submissiveness to implicitly male judgment (“keep your voice soft, lilting and uncomplaining”).25 Whatever its potential, cultivating charm was at heart a project where the power lay in the hands of other people.
Unlike Marjorie Hillis, Margery Wilson did not base her lessons on her own experiences or those of her friends, and she spoke only briefly and in general terms about the importance of tangible details like work, money, and life at home. The few specific people she cited to illustrate her theories tended to be famous—one report of Eleanor Roosevelt’s “charming” behavior at a White House tea serves both to support the principle and burnish the author’s reputation. Meanwhile, who could argue with a flourish of authority like, “Eliza-beth Arden once told me her theory of breath”?26 Wilson relied heavily on bold, vague declarations and where the sentence alone didn’t do it, italics or all caps drove home the point: “You must have a goal.” “PRETEND POISE, THEN GET IT.”27
In common with many contemporary self-help books, Wilson combined her bracing rules with practical exercises and lists for study, and provided space in the back of the book to write out one’s own personal program. These tasks spanned the practical and the emotional, including writing out an hour-by-hour daily routine, with time for grooming, answering mail, “a little daily informative reading,” and exercise. A version of the popular modern practice of keeping a “gratitude journal” appears in the instruction to make a list of “100 people and things you like,” with a view to cultivating a more positive outlook on life. A reader of Live Alone and Like It inadvertently demonstrated how popular these kinds of techniques were, when she wrote to Marjorie Hillis to thank her for not including them: “I am so glad that you didn’t give us any breathing excercizes [sic] or ridiculous diets,” she wrote. “As it is now the book reads just like a fairy tale of possibilities within the reach of anyone.”28
Wilson’s 1940 sequel, Make Up Your Mind, displayed the uncompromising and even violent individualism of some late-1930s self-help, nurtured in a world of encroaching fascism. In this book, decision making begins as a thrill, like “swimming off the Maine coast the first time,” but quickly expands to promise far more: “If a man uses his individual power of thought he is almost a god.” Other people, it assumes, are mere sheep, who lack the inner fortitude to train their own minds, or get pointlessly distracted by external events—in 1940, a fairly reasonable excuse, but not to Wilson, who shrugs, “Conditions have always been upset. There have always been wars.”29 Even the tiniest lapse was evidence of a lack of commitment to one’s personal goals. A woman who appears in public with dirty fingernails, for instance, has made a deliberate choice, not a forgivable lapse: “She chose to stay in bed an extra five minutes instead of getting up to clean them.” As distractions from the project of self-mastery, neither the threat of global war nor five minutes’ laziness was acceptable. Did you want to watch somebody else make himself into a god, while you worried and slept?
Unlike Wilson, Hill, and others, Marjorie Hillis did not believe that self-improvement was a zero-sum game that depended on defeating weaker rivals. Although she believed that attitude was important, she did not pretend that a person could rise above her circumstances and responsibilities by sheer force of will. From her own experience, she knew that independence was a matter of balance, and that even the most determined Live-Aloner had to take the interests of her family and community into account—this was simply a woman’s reality. She also did not suggest that she held any secret formula for overcoming the economic disaster of the Depression, and she was explicit that her books were not written for those in really dire straits. But she did believe that it was possible to stretch a modest income to accommodate an independent life—as long as you had a plan, a budget, and a clear sense of what you did and didn’t want. “The basis of successful living alone is determination to make it successful,” she wrote by way of introduction to her book. “Whether you belong to the con
servative school that calls it will-power, or the modern school that calls it guts, the necessity is there.”
Marjorie’s lively, nuanced, and realistic approach to self-improvement, met an unexpected challenge in late 1936, when a similar-sounding book, Wake Up and Live!, began to chase Live Alone and Like It up the bestseller lists. The book, by Chicago-born journalist Dorothea Brande, was adapted loosely into a musical and a movie the following year and went on to sell more than a million copies. The similarity between the titles of the books, and the gender of the authors, meant they were often mistaken for each other. The confusion was compounded when a racy anonymous satire, Wake Up Alone and Like It, appeared at the end of the year—a sign, at least, that the two books had captured the cultural zeitgeist.
But Dorothea Brande’s book had much more in common with Margery Wilson’s bracing bromides than with Marjorie Hillis’s gospel of good living. It was a manifesto aimed at men and women alike, advancing a Nietzschean theory, in which individuals are governed by a “Will to Power” and a competing “Will to Fail.” Brande advocates a ruthlessly individualistic form of success, and relentlessly categorizes the various forms of “failure” that the reader must identify and cast out of his or her life—including the seemingly innocuous “embroiderers and knitters,” “aimless conversationalists,” and “takers of eternal post-graduate courses.” The simple yet elusive formula that made Wake Up and Live! a bestseller—“Act as if it were impossible to fail”—held great attraction for those who felt powerless. It is not entirely coincidental that in the same year Wake Up and Live! was published, its author married the socialite, publisher, and fascist sympathizer Seward Collins, joining him as an editor on his right-wing American Review. Brande and Collins met after the end of his affair with Dorothy Parker, back when he was still a liberal. Collins was born into money and used it to shortcut Dale Car-negie, buying friends and influencing people through the acquisition of the respected literary magazine The Bookman. (He also used his fortune for less literary purposes, including to amass a vast collection of rare erotica that was his pride and obsession.)30
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