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| Name: | Dale Carnegie | |||
| Birth: | November 24 1888 | |||
| Death: | November 01 1955 | |||
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Dale Carnegie was an American writer and the developer of famous courses in self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking and interpersonal skills. Born into poverty on a farm in Missouri, he was the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, first published in 1936, a thundering bestseller that remains popular today. Along with several other self-motivational books, he also wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln, entitled Lincoln the Unknown.
Carnegie was an early proponent of what is now called responsibility assumption, although this only appears minutely in his written work. One of the core ideas in his books is that it is possible to change other people's behavior by changing one's reaction to them.
Carnegie developed and taught world famous courses in self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking, and interpersonal skills. He introduced courses to the adult student, revolutionizing the adult education movement of the early 1900's.
Born Dale Breckenridge Carnegey, second son of James William Carnegey and Amanda Elizabeth Harbison in Maryville, Missouri, on November 24, 1888, his parents ran a small farm that barely provided sustenance and Carnegie was a full-time laborer on it from a very young age. He picked strawberries, cut cockleburs, punched cattle, branded calves, and rode fences as he struggled for a decent education. After several seasons of flooding that drowned the crops and brought the cholera that killed the hogs that were the farm’s primary product, the Carnegey family, facing foreclosure, sold out and bought another farm near the State Teacher's College at Warrensburg, Missouri.
Desperate for an education, Carnegie enrolled in the Teacher's College although he could not afford the room and board. Consequently, he remained on his parent’s farm as a full-time laborer and traveled approximately three miles to the college every day on horseback. Early mornings and late evenings were spent milking cows, cutting wood, feeding the hogs, and studying his Latin verbs by coal-oil lamp. At 3 a.m., every morning, Carnegie would rise to feed the farm’s pedigree baby pigs, kept by the stove to keep from freezing in the cold Missouri winters.
Due to his living situation, Carnegie became rather isolated from his peers. He was ashamed of his poverty that necessitated living on the farm (though not of his family’s need for his labor) and he rapidly formed an inferiority complex because of his tattered clothing, his lack of social life, and his lack of position within the town and school.
In an effort to alleviate this situation, he studied his fellow students, noticing those people who enjoyed the most prestige and influence within the school. These people tended to be the football players, baseball players, debating team captains, and public speaking contest winners. Realizing he did not have any discernable athletic ability, he decided to enter and win public speaking contests. It took him months to prepare his speeches. He practiced while he did his chores, and even in the saddle during his three mile commutes. As hard as he studied, he still lost these contests, bruising his ego and he settled into depression. Suddenly, however, he started winning one contest after another. Other student began to beg for training from him, and would win contests because of that training.
After graduating from college, Carnegie sold correspondence courses to ranchers in Nebraska and Wyoming. After figuring out that he was a miserable salesman, Carnegie, in lieu of fare, fed and watered two carloads of wild horses on board the train to Omaha to search for a new position. He found another job at Armour and Company, selling soap, lard, and bacon.
Carnegie’s territory was up in the Badlands and considered extremely unproductive. He covered this territory by freight train, stagecoach, and horseback, sleeping in pioneer hotels or in boxcars. He studied books on salesmanship, rode bucking broncos, played poker with the Indians, and learned how to collect money. Within two years he was considered the most productive salesman in Omaha, making his territory a national leader for the company.
That year, 1911, Amour and company offered to promote him—a position he turned down in order to relocate to New York in order to pursue his dream of becoming a lecturer with the then popular adult education courses in Chautauqua, New York. Instead of procuring that position, he enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He toured the country, playing the role of Dr. Hartley in Polly of the Circus. During this tour, Carnegie realized that he would never be an exceptional actor so he went back to work as a salesman—selling automobiles and trucks for the Packard Motor Car Company.
He knew nothing of machinery, cared less than nothing about cars, and hated his job. What Carnegie truly wanted to do with his life was to write books. He resigned from Packard and told himself he would devote himself to writing stories and novels. Returning to New York, without even a rumor of a job and almost penniless, Carnegie rented a room at the local YMCA on 125 Street. Writing without any successes, and calling forth his experience in tutoring his fellow students in debate and public speaking, Carnegie persuaded the YMCA hostel manager to let him teach a class on public speaking for people in business.
The Y.M.C.A. knew that such courses always failed—they had tried them before. When they refused to pay him a salary of two dollars a night, Carnegie agreed to teach on a commission basis and take a percentage of the net profits. That was in 1912. By 1915, Carnegie was taking in $30 a night.
Carnegie improvised his first session. As he ran out of material to teach, he suggested to his students to talk about "something that made them angry." Developing his own approach to human discourse, he quickly became a successful teacher, capitalizing on his practical approach to people, claiming that all people could talk when they got mad. Carnegie claimed that almost any person could speak acceptably in public if he or she had self-confidence and an idea that is boiling and stewing within.
The course grew. Other Y.M.C.A.’s heard of it, then other cities. Carnegie soon began teaching in a territory that covered New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and later London and Paris. Because the textbooks of the day were too academic and impractical for business people, in 1913, Carnegie published his first book, Public Speaking and Influencing Men In Business. Initially, Carnegie concentrated on public speaking, but because the students, who were businessmen and women, wanted immediate results, Carnegie was forced to swiftly and practically develop a system of training that was considered unique at the time. He combined public speaking with salesmanship, human relations, and applied psychology. As there were never any hard and fast rules in his development of a course, Carnegie developed some of the best public affairs courses in the world.
By 1914, Carnegie was earning $500 per week. In 1916, he was able to rent New York’s main venue, The Carnegie Hall, and his lectures were sold out. It was in 1919, that Dale Carnegey legally changed his name to Carnegie, a successful marketing move, for Andrew Carnegie, who died in that year, was a well-known rags-to-riches American businessman and revered philanthropist. Much of Andrew Carnegie’s life and philosophy inspired Dale Carnegie in his actions and his writings.
Using his own experiences of losing a fortune in the Stock Market Crash of 1929, Carnegie learned to accept the worst that could happen, and then would proceed to improve on the worse, using these events as inspiration in his books. He would write about his experiences, helping people worldwide learn about his brand of social discourse.
His works became best sellers. How to Win Friends and Influence People, had 17 printings in its first year. Dale Carnegie had become the first American Guru, developing courses on self-improvement, salesmanship, and corporate training programs. Carnegie also designed programs for improvement in public speaking skills and interpersonal skills.
After his first marriage ended in divorce in 1931, Carnegie did not marry again until November of 1944, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Dorothy Price Vanderpool, also a divorcee, had two daughters: Rosemary, from her first marriage, and then Donna Dale from her marriage to Carnegie.
Dale Carnegie died at age 66, of Hodgkin’s lymphoma complicated with uremia on November 1. 1955, in Forest Hills, New York. He was laid to rest in the Belton cemetery, Cass County, Missouri, USA.
