How To Win Friends - For Half A Century

Nation's Business
December, 1986
by Sharon Nelton

In January, 1937, humorist James Thurber reviewed Dale Carnegie's how To Win Friends and Influence People for the Saturday Review of Literature and found the book wanting.

"Mr Carnegie," Thurber complained, "loudly protests that one can be sincere and at the same time versed in the tricks of influencing people. Unfortunately, the disengenuities in his set of rules and in his case histories stand out like ghosts at a banquet."

But never mind. Though Carnegie died in 1955 and Thurber joined him in the great beyond six years later, The Book lives on. First published in October, 1936, by Simon & Schuster with a printing of 5,000 copies and a hardcover price of $1.98 (now $16.95), How To Win Friends, aimed at helping readers achieve success through self-confidence, made publishing history.

Soon 5,000 copies were being sold a day, revealing the tremendous hunger in America for self-help books and setting sales records for nonfiction. Now celebrating its 50th anniversary, The Book has been translated into more than 30 languages, and more than 15 million hardcover copies have been sold.

Leon Shimkin, then a junior executive and later board chairman at Simon & Schuster, was responsible for acquiring The Book for his company. Shimkin first heard Carnegie in Larchmont, N.Y., when Carnegie gave an introduction to his famous course in public speaking and human relations. Shimkin was impressed enough to take the course.

Then he was impressed enough to suggest that Carnegie do a book based on his lectures. Carnegie wasn't interested. But he finally agreed to let his secretary gather notes, and between the secretary, Shimkin and Carnegie, a book came into being two years later.

"It became more successful than his course ever was," says Shimkin, now 79 and retired.
The son of a Maryville, Mo., farmer, Carnegie was born Nov. 24, 1888. His mother reared Dale as a strict Methodist and, given to making speeches on sin, liquor and the salvation of souls, she was his first oratorical role model. Perhaps the earliest hint of his destiny came one morning in 1900 when the skinny farm boy stood up in Sunday school and gave a talk entitled, "The Saloon, Offspring of Hell."

As a student at the State Teachers College (now Central Missouri state University) at Warrensburg, Mo., he couldn't afford to board in town, and he had to ride to and from school on horseback.

"This had its compensations, however," observed a droll Current Biography 1941, "because Carnegie could try out his recitations on the horse."

After college, he tried brief stints at selling and acting, and in 1912 he found himself in New York without a job. He decided to teach public speaking and approached the YMCA on 125th Street.

"The Y had so little faith in my public speaking course that it refused to risk $2 a night--a teacher's salary in those days," said Carnegie. He offered to work on a profit-sharing basis: From the first money that came in, the Y could pay for printed matter and postage for the course. If there was any profit, it could be divided.

Within a few months, Carnegie was teaching classes in YMCAs in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Willington and making $30 to $40 a night in commissions.

People came, he said, because "they wanted to solve their problems. They wanted to be able to stand up on their feet and say a few words at a business meeting without fainting from fright. Salesmen wanted to be able to call on a tough customer without having to walk around the block three times to get up courage. They wanted to develop poise and self-confidence. They wanted to get ahead in business. They wanted to have more money for their families."

His first marriage ended in divorce, but a dozen years later he met stenographer Dorothy Price Vanderpool, who had taken a Carnegie course in her native Tulsa. Smitten, he asked her to come to New york as his secretary. According to William Longgood, author of a book about Carnegie, Dale and Dorothy were married in November, 1944, after a tempestuous courtship during which she quit her job and was packing to go home "only to have him turn on the how-to-win-friends charm and influence her into staying."

Though his upbringing was strict and his message tinged with a religious fervor, Dale Carnegie was not without a sense of fund. He enjoyed collecting examples of humor drubbing him, including a book called How To Lose Friends and Alienate People. The New Yorker once reported that he had turned up as a supernumerary in a performance of the ballet "Scheherazade" at the City Center with his friend Homer Croy (to whom The Book is dedicated).
They were paid a reported $1 apiece. One of the professional dancers was asked if she felt influenced by Carnegie. "If Nijinsky was a super," she responded, "he wouldn't influence me.

Carnegie began licensing the Dale Carnegie course in 1944 and in 1945 set up a private stock company with himself as president and dorothy as vice president. Dorothy Carnegie, who was born the year her husband began working for the Y, has carried on his work for the last three decades and is now chairman of the parent company, Dale Carnegie & Associates, Inc., in Garden City, N.Y. President is another Carnegie devotee, J. Oliver Crom, whose wife, Rosemary, is Dorothy Carnegie's daughter by a previous marriage. The Croms' three children also work in the 300-employee company, two as managers and one as a course instructor.

The courses--prices range from $300 to $900--have grown from the original instruction in public speaking to such topics as sales, customer relations and professional development. Crom expects them to reach about 140,000 students this year through more than 100 licensed offices.

Although students have included virtually everyone from housewives to engineers, the names of some of the graduates add a special luster: Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca; Labor Secretary William E. Brock; Mary Kay Ashe, chairman of Mary Kay Cosmetics; and chicken magnate Frank Perdue.

Even two squads of Dallas Cowboys Cheerladers have been through Carnegie training. The courses teach the cheerleaders communication skills they need for public appearances and help them cope with instant celebrity, explains Debbie Bond, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders' assistant director and a Carnegie graduate herself.

Why has the How To Win Friends message enjoyed such longevity?

"Because it has been very effective; it works," answers Bond, who says the biggest impact on her has been in giving her self-motivation. "I tel people about Dale Carnegie all the time because it changed my life."

Oliver Crom believes the Book's success is based on the fact that his father-in-law turned to principles that have stood the test of time. "The ideas I stand for are not mine," Carnegie once said. "I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don't like their rules, whose would you use?" In an article in American heritage not long ago, business writer Peter Baida was discussing another acclaimed book, In Search of Excellence. "It is an interesting book that deserves to be widely read," he said. "But at bottom it has little to add to the lessons that Dale Carnegie taught to a whole generation of Americans half a century ago."