Dale Carnegie (1888–1955) was a Missouri-born teacher, sprung from a struggling farm family. After a brief, unsuccessful acting career, he began to offer public-speaking classes in a New York YMCA in 1912. In 1936, his book How to Win Friends and Influence People, based on two and a half decades of teaching classes in speech and assertiveness, succeeded spectacularly and went on to sell 15 million copies. It was essentially a book of advice to salesmen and executives who wanted to manipulate their customers and employees. Its commonsense advice included the injunctions to gaze intently on your interlocutor, to use a dazzling smile, to remember his name, and praise him lavishly. Above all, said Carnegie, make the people you meet feel important and they in turn will respect and admire you. He added that the feeling must come from within—if it was insincere, it was worthless. The author had changed the spelling of his name (originally Carnagey) to match the name of industrialist-millionaire Andrew Carnegie, whom he idolized. He littered the text of his book with the older Carnegie's sayings, jostling them against quotations by John D. Rockefeller, Jesus, Lao-tzu, and Confucius.
Carnegie's success is attributable partly to the fact that his book appeared in the depths of the Great Depression and offered solace and hope to a generation of discouraged businessmen. It also contributed to the growing literature of industrial psychology and welfare capitalism, which emphasized the importance of good human relations in a smoothly operating commercial system. Ironically, it had little to say about making friends (hostile reviewers treated it as a manual on the cynical perfection of insincerity) but did describe methods for avoiding confrontation and strife. Carnegie himself disarmed critics by insisting, "I've never claimed to have a new idea. … I deal with the obvious."
Bibliography
Kemp, Giles, and Edward Claflin. Dale Carnegie: The Man Who Influenced Millions. New York: St. Martin's, 1989.
Meyer, Donald. The Positive Thinkers: Religion as Pop Psychology from Mary Baker Eddy to Oral Roberts. New York: Pantheon, 1980.
