The affair moved with the speed of a herd of buffalo
thundering across the plains. Spectators stood for an
hour and a half to watch the performance.
The speakers were a cross section of life: several sales
representatives, a chain store executive, a baker, the
president of a trade association, two bankers, an insurance
agent, an accountant, a dentist, an architect, a druggist
who had come from Indianapolis to New York to
take the course, a lawyer who had come from Havana in
order to prepare himself to give one important three-minute
speech.
The first speaker bore the Gaelic name Patrick J.
O’Haire. Born in Ireland, he attended school for only
four years, drifted to America, worked as a mechanic,
then as a chauffeur.
Now, however, he was forty, he had a growing family
and needed more money, so he tried selling trucks. Suffering
from an inferiority complex that, as he put it, was
eating his heart out, he had to walk up and down in front
of an office half a dozen times before he could summon
up enough courage to open the door. He was so discouraged
as a salesman that he was thinking of going back to
working with his hands in a machine shop, when one
day he received a letter inviting him to an organization
meeting of the Dale Carnegie Course in Effective
Speaking.
He didn’t want to attend. He feared he would have to
associate with a lot of college graduates, that he would
be out of place.
His despairing wife insisted that he go, saying, “It
may do you some good, Pat. God knows you need it.”
He went down to the place where the meeting was to be
held and stood on the sidewalk for five minutes before
he could generate enough self-confidence to enter the
room.
The first few times he tried to speak in front of the
others, he was dizzy with fear. But as the weeks drifted
by, he lost all fear of audiences and soon found that he
loved to talk – the bigger the crowd, the better. And he
also lost his fear of individuals and of his superiors. He
presented his ideas to them, and soon he had been advanced
into the sales department. He had become a valued
and much liked member of his company. This night,
in the Hotel Pennsylvania, Patrick O’Haire stood in front
of twenty-five hundred people and told a gay, rollicking
story of his achievements. Wave after wave of laughter
swept over the audience. Few professional speakers
could have equaled his performance.
The next speaker, Godfrey Meyer, was a gray-headed
banker, the father of eleven children. The first time he
had attempted to speak in class, he was literally struck
dumb. His mind refused to function. His story is a vivid
illustration of how leadership gravitates to the person
who can talk.
He worked on Wall Street, and for twenty-five years
he had been living in Clifton, New Jersey. During that
time, he had taken no active part in community affairs
and knew perhaps five hundred people.
Shortly after he had enrolled in the Carnegie course,
he received his tax bill and was infuriated by what he
considered unjust charges. Ordinarily, he would have
sat at home and fumed, or he would have taken it out in
grousing to his neighbors. But instead, he put on his hat
that night, walked into the town meeting, and blew off
steam in public.
As a result of that talk of indignation, the citizens of
Clifton, New Jersey, urged him to run for the town council.
So for weeks he went from one meeting to another,
denouncing waste and municipal extravagance.
There were ninety-six candidates in the field. When
the ballots were counted, lo, Godfrey Meyer’s name led
all the rest. Almost overnight, he had become a public
figure among the forty thousand people in his community.
As a result of his talks, he made eighty times more
friends in six weeks than he had been able to previously
in twenty-five years.
And his salary as councilman meant that he got a return
of 1,000 percent a year on his investment in the
Carnegie course.
The third speaker, the head of a large national association
of food manufacturers, told how he had been unable
to stand up and express his ideas at meetings of a
board of directors.
As a result of learning to think on his feet, two astonishing
things happened. He was soon made president of
his association, and in that capacity, he was obliged to
address meetings all over the United States. Excerpts
from his talks were put on the Associated Press wires
and printed in newspapers and trade magazines
throughout the country.
In two years, after learning to speak more effectively,
he received more free publicity for his company and its
products than he had been able to get previously with a
quarter of a million dollars spent in direct advertising.
This speaker admitted that he had formerly hesitated to
telephone some of the more important business executives
in Manhattan and invite them to lunch with him.
But as a result of the prestige he had acquired by his
talks, these same people telephoned him and invited
him to lunch and apologized to him for encroaching on
his time.
The ability to speak is a shortcut to distinction. It puts
a person in the limelight, raises one head and shoulders
above the crowd. And the person who can speak acceptably
is usually given credit for an ability out of all proportion
to what he or she really possesses.
A movement for adult education has been sweeping
over the nation; and the most spectacular force in that
movement was Dale Carnegie, a man who listened to
and critiqued more talks by adults than has any other
man in captivity. According to a cartoon by “Believe-It-or-
Not” Ripley, he had criticized 150,000 speeches. If
that grand total doesn’t impress you, remember that it
meant one talk for almost every day that has passed since
Columbus discovered America. Or, to put it in other
words, if all the people who had spoken before him had
used only three minutes and had appeared before him
in succession, it would have taken ten months, listening
day and night, to hear them all.
Dale Carnegie’s own career, filled with sharp contrasts,
was a striking example of what a person can accomplish
when obsessed with an original idea and afire
with enthusiasm.
Born on a Missouri farm ten miles from a railway, he
never saw a streetcar until he was twelve years old; yet
by the time he was forty-six, he was familiar with the far-flung
corners of the earth, everywhere from Hong Kong
to Hammerfest; and, at one time, he approached closer
to the North Pole than Admiral Byrd’s headquarters at
Little America was to the South Pole.
This Missouri lad who had once picked strawberries
and cut cockleburs for five cents an hour became the
highly paid trainer of the executives of large corporations
in the art of self-expression.
This erstwhile cowboy who had once punched cattle
and branded calves and ridden fences out in western
South Dakota later went to London to put on shows
under the patronage of the royal family.
This chap who was a total failure the first half-dozen
times he tried to speak in public later became my personal
manager. Much of my success has been due to
training under Dale Carnegie.
Young Carnegie had to struggle for an education, for
hard luck was always battering away at the old farm in
northwest Missouri with a flying tackle and a body slam.
Year after year, the “102” River rose and drowned the
corn and swept away the hay. Season after season, the
fat hogs sickened and died from cholera, the bottom fell
out of the market for cattle and mules, and the bank
threatened to foreclose the mortgage.
Sick with discouragement, the family sold out and
bought another farm near the State Teachers’ College at
Warrensburg, Missouri. Board and room could be had in
town for a dollar a day, but young Carnegie couldn’t
afford it. So he stayed on the farm and commuted on
horseback three miles to college each day. At home, he
milked the cows, cut the wood, fed the hogs, and studied
his Latin verbs by the light of a coal-oil lamp until his
eyes blurred and he began to nod.
Even when he got to bed at midnight, he set the alarm
for three o’clock. His father bred pedigreed Duroc-Jersey
hogs – and there was danger, during the bitter
cold nights, that the young pigs would freeze to death;
so they were put in a basket, covered with a gunny sack,
and set behind the kitchen stove. True to their nature,
the pigs demanded a hot meal at 3 A.M. So when the
alarm went off, Dale Carnegie crawled out of the blankets,
took the basket of pigs out to their mother, waited
for them to nurse, and then brought them back to the
warmth of the kitchen stove.
There were six hundred students in State Teachers’
College, and Dale Carnegie was one of the isolated half-dozen
who couldn’t afford to board in town. He was
ashamed of the poverty that made it necessary for him to
ride back to the farm and milk the cows every night. He
was ashamed of his coat, which was too tight, and his
trousers, which were too short. Rapidly developing an
inferiority complex, he looked about for some shortcut
to distinction. He soon saw that there were certain
groups in college that enjoyed influence and prestige – the
football and baseball players and the chaps who won
the debating and public-speaking contests.
Realizing that he had no flair for athletics, he decided
to win one of the speaking contests. He spent months
preparing his talks. He practiced as he sat in the saddle
galloping to college and back; he practiced his speeches
as he milked the cows; and then he mounted a bale of
hay in the barn and with great gusto and gestures harangued
the frightened pigeons about the issues of the
day.
But in spite of all his earnestness and preparation, he
met with defeat after defeat. He was eighteen at the time
– sensitive and proud. He became so discouraged, so
depressed, that he even thought of suicide. And then
suddenly he began to win, not one contest, but every
speaking contest in college.
Other students pleaded with him to train them; and
they won also.
After graduating from college, he started selling
correspondence courses to the ranchers among the sand
hills of western Nebraska and eastern Wyoming. In spite
of all his boundless energy and enthusiasm, he couldn’t
make the grade. He became so discouraged that he went
to his hotel room in Alliance, Nebraska, in the middle of
the day, threw himself across the bed, and wept in despair.
He longed to go back to college, he longed to
retreat from the harsh battle of life; but he couldn’t. So
he resolved to go to Omaha and get another job. He
didn’t have the money for a railroad ticket, so he traveled
on a freight train, feeding and watering two carloads of
wild horses in return for his passage, After landing in
south Omaha, he got a job selling bacon and soap and
lard for Armour and Company. His territory was up
among the Badlands and the cow and Indian country of
western South Dakota. He covered his territory by
freight train and stage coach and horseback and slept in
pioneer hotels where the only partition between the
rooms was a sheet of muslin. He studied books on salesmanship,
rode bucking bronchos, played poker with the
Indians, and learned how to collect money. And when,
for example, an inland storekeeper couldn’t pay cash for
the bacon and hams he had ordered, Dale Carnegie
would take a dozen pairs of shoes off his shelf, sell the
shoes to the railroad men, and forward the receipts to
Armour and Company.
He would often ride a freight train a hundred miles a
day. When the train stopped to unload freight, he would
dash uptown, see three or four merchants, get his orders;
and when the whistle blew, he would dash down the
street again lickety-split and swing onto the train while
it was moving.
Within two years, he had taken an unproductive territory
that had stood in the twenty-fifth place and had
boosted it to first place among all the twenty-nine car
routes leading out of south Omaha. Armour and Company
offered to promote him, saying: “You have
achieved what seemed impossible.” But he refused the
promotion and resigned, went to New York, studied at
the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and toured the
country, playing the role of Dr. Hartley in Polly of the
Circus.
He would never be a Booth or a Barrymore. He had
the good sense to recognize that, So back he went to
sales work, selling automobiles and trucks for the Packard
Motor Car Company.
He knew nothing about machinery and cared nothing
about it. Dreadfully unhappy, he had to scourge himself
to his task each day. He longed to have time to study, to
write the books he had dreamed about writing back in
college. So he resigned. He was going to spend his days
writing stories and novels and support himself by teaching
in a night school.
Teaching what? As he looked back and evaluated his
college work, he saw that his training in public speaking
had done more to give him confidence, courage, poise
and the ability to meet and deal with people in business
than had all the rest of his college courses put together,
So he urged the Y.M.C.A. schools in New York to give
him a chance to conduct courses in public speaking for
people in business.
What? Make orators out of business people? Absurd.
The Y.M.C.A. people knew. They had tried such courses
-and they had always failed. When they refused to pay
him a salary of two dollars a night, he agreed to teach on
a commission basis and take a percentage of the net profits
-if there were any profits to take. And inside of three
years they were paying him thirty dollars a night on that
basis – instead of two.
The course grew. Other “Ys” heard of it, then other
cities. Dale Carnegie soon became a glorified circuit
rider covering New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and
later London and Paris. All the textbooks were too academic
and impractical for the business people who
flocked to his courses. Because of this he wrote his own
book entitled Public Speaking and Influencing Men in
Business. It became the official text of all the Y.M.C.A.s
as well as of the American Bankers’ Association and the
National Credit Men’s Association.
Dale Carnegie claimed that all people can talk when
they get mad. He said that if you hit the most ignorant
man in town on the jaw and knock him down, he would
get on his feet and talk with an eloquence, heat and
emphasis that would have rivaled that world famous orator
William Jennings Bryan at the height of his career.
He claimed that almost any person can speak acceptably
in public if he or she has self-confidence and an idea
that is boiling and stewing within.
The way to develop self-confidence, he said, is to do
the thing you fear to do and get a record of successful
experiences behind you. So he forced each class member
to talk at every session of the course. The audience
is sympathetic. They are all in the same boat; and, by
constant practice, they develop a courage, confidence
and enthusiasm that carry over into their private speaking.
Dale Carnegie would tell you that he made a living all
these years, not by teaching public speaking – that was
incidental. His main job was to help people conquer
their fears and develop courage.