INTRODUCTION

BY TOM BUTLER-BOWDON

How To Win Friends and Influence People is a significant book on many levels.

Although it had many antecedents in the success literature of the Victorian and early modern era, it was the first self-help or motivational blockbuster of the twentieth century. Its rate of sales shocked author and publisher, and today the book has sold over 30 million copies in English, and many more in the world's main languages.

It is also a cultural phenomenon. A 2013 Library of Congress survey, based on responses from over 9,000 people, included How To Win Friends and Influence People as one of the 100 "Books That Shaped America," alongside Moby Dick, Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Great Gatsby, the Federalist Papers, Up From Slavery, and Silent Spring.

As the cornerstone of the Dale Carnegie Course, How to Win Friends is one of the great peer-supported approaches to personal transformation, arguably in the same league as Toastmasters International, Weightwatchers, and Alcoholics Anonymous.

This Introduction provides a short biography of Carnegie, including how his book came to be written. I will highlight its key themes. Finally, I consider his ethics and personality, including why he changed the spelling of his name, and the wider cultural impact of his work.

EARLY YEARS: FARM BOY, STUDENT, SALESMAN, ACTOR

Dale Harbison Carnegey was born on November 24, 1888, to James and Amanda, in the hamlet of Harmony Church, ten miles from Maryville, Missouri. He had an older brother, Clifton. His mother steeped him in popular literature and made him memorize tracts from the Bible and orate them in church.

Dale's childhood was a constant round of hard farm work: milking cows, chopping wood, and raising pigs in freezing winters. It gave him a lifelong hatred of manual labour. "I was ashamed of our poverty," he later said.

Assailed by floods and pests, the Carnegeys were forced to sell their smallholding. They started again with a rented farm, but times remained tough. James Carnegey turned for solace to populist leaders like William Jennings Bryan and tended to morosity, while Amanda was sunny, optimistic, and pious. His parents left him nothing except "the blessing of faith and sturdy character," an older Carnegie liked to say. They lived just long enough (Amanda died in 1939 and James in 1941) to see their son's success.

In 1904, the family moved to farmland near Warrensburg, Missouri, so that the boys could get a proper education. They attended Warrensburg Normal School and then the Missouri Teacher's College (now University of Central Missouri). The family could not afford to pay for Dale to live on site, so he had to ride a horse to school from their farm nearby.

Humiliated and poorer than his peers, college nevertheless opened his horizons. He gained self-esteem via public speaking, including memorized declamations and debating. He found he could gain friends by his words, and began winning speaking and debating competitions and training other students. As a harbinger of his later writing style, Carnegey adopted an informal, chatty style, very different from traditional oratory.

After graduating from college in 1908, he saw his ticket out of poverty as being a travelling Chautauqua speaker. But the only path open to him was sales. He moved to Nebraska to sell correspondence school courses. He was a failure at it and, to boot, homesick. Things got slightly better with a sales position in Omaha with Armour and Company, the huge meatpacking company. He worked the rural districts of South Dakota selling canned meat, lard, and soap, and his work ethic put him into the top tier of Armour salesman. As a result, Carnegey was able to send a good chunk of his earnings home to help his parents pay the mortgage.

As a salesman, Carnegey learned to tell an amusing story. He found that smiles and positivity had a real effect on people, even if much of the time he felt like he was acting. He discovered the power of remembering people's names and letting them talk about themselves.

But Carnegey was too ambitious and intellectually curious to sell meat forever. In 1911, aged 22, he applied and was accepted into the prestigious American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. Over the decades, this institution, with its innovative techniques, trained Anne Bancroft, Grace Kelly, Spencer Tracy, and later Kirk Douglas and Robert Redford.

Yet Carnegey lasted only six months at the Academy before joining a travelling stage production of Polly of the Circus, a popular moralistic romance of the time. He played the part of Dr Hartley, plus many extra parts, and travelled around the East and Midwest. When the run ended, however, no other acting parts opened up. He was forced to return to sales.

Back in New York, Carnegey went into business with an acquaintance selling trucks, and then joined an auto sales company including Packard cars. His heart was not in cars any more than it was in meat, but socially he enjoyed life in the city. He dated Jewish, Irish, French, and Canadian girls, and wrote home to a slightly worried Amanda to tell her about it all. But the reality of a job he hated and a dirty rented room made him feel his life was going nowhere.

Carnegey left Packard in late 1913. Now 25, he was desperate to move out of sales and have a speaking career. He gave a few one-off talks (on cowboys for the New York Board of Education, and on self-expression and oratory to the Masons) and took writing courses at Columbia University. As Columbia and New York University had turned down his ideas to teach evening extension courses, he now aimed a little lower. The director of New York's smallest Y.M.C.A., in Harlem, gave him a chance to give a course on public speaking. The course did well, and Brooklyn Y.M.C.A. asked him to run a course, followed by Y.M.C.A.s in Newark, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Teaching mostly young white-collar males who wanted to get ahead in business, he was earning a princely $500 a month.

Carnegey also began having some success with writing, getting commissions for "how they made it" success stories for magazines. These potted biographies of well-known people would remain an important sideline for most of his life. He also wrote articles on war and Antarctic exploration, and how to make money from writing for the screen or stage.

CARNEGIE'S INFLUENCES: CHRISTIAN SCIENCE TO PSYCHOLOGY

In 1915, Carnegey co-authored his first book, The Art of Public Speaking, with editor and writer Joseph Berg Esenwein. It was published (ironically) by one of the home correspondence schools that he had been a salesman for only a couple of years prior.

The Carnegey Course in Public Speaking, meanwhile, had become a mini industry. By 1920, it had been codified into a course-"Public Speaking: The Standard Course of the Y.M.C.A. Schools"-that Carnegey could train others to give. What made the course different was its infusion with the motivational, psychological, and even metaphysical ideas of the day.

Carnegey's influences included the popular speaker Rev. Russell H. Conwell and his famous "Acres of Diamonds" speech (which promised readers they would find their fortune in their own back yard); Elbert Hubbard and his "Message to Garcia" story from the Spanish-American war, about a soldier who gets the job done without excuses; James Allen, the English metaphysical thinker and author of As A Man Thinketh; Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science and author of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures; and Orison Swett Marden, the founder of Success magazine and author of Pushing To The Front, or Success Under Difficulties.

Biographer James Watts (Self-Help Messiah) believes that Marden, the most famous motivational speaker and writer of his day, was Carnegey's secret mentor. Marden encouraged Carnegey to read as widely as possible across history, fiction, science, and philosophy. Indeed, How To Win Friends and Influence People references many great figures from history, philosophy, and religion-from Cicero to Confucius to Shakespeare to Napoleon. That said, Carnegey's childhood friend Homer Croy, whom the book is dedicated to, remembers Carnegie always trying first to find the condensed versions of books to save time and cut to the core ideas.

Carnegey was inspired by the American New Thought writers whose preoccupation was the metaphysics of abundance and "mind power," but he knew that to appeal to the broadest audience he had to invoke the emerging science of psychology. He quotes liberally from William James, Sigmund Freud, and Alfred Adler, and from contemporary writers such as Harry Overstreet. Overstreet wrote one of the first popular psychology books, Influencing Human Behavior (1925), and it is mentioned several times in How To Win Friends. Carnegie's principle, "Arouse in the other person an eager want" was taken directly from Overstreet, as was his list of "basic human needs" that need to be satisfied.

INTERWAR YEARS: IMPRESARIO, HUSBAND, NOVELIST

Carnegey's prosperous new life ended with Woodrow Wilson's decision in 1917 to enter the United States into World War One. He was drafted and sent...