Americanon by Jess McHugh

Author:Jess McHugh [McHugh, Jess]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

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The book that would influence over 30 million people was almost never written. In 1934, Leon Shimkin, a rising star at Simon & Schuster, happened to be invited to a course for young executives given by Dale Carnegie.27 By that point, Carnegie was making a comfortable living through his courses on public speaking, drawing crowds of businessmen each week. After just briefly watching Carnegie work his personal brand of magic—teaching people positivity and confidence—Shimkin was hooked. He approached Carnegie that very night with an offer to write a book.28 As soon as Shimkin mentioned his employer’s name, Carnegie flat-out declined. The publishing house had already rejected two prior manuscripts he had submitted, and anyway he was “too busy,”29 Carnegie told him. Shimkin, seeing the potential after just one course, persisted. He pursued Carnegie aggressively and even convinced him that a stenographer could write up some of his letters and submit them as a rough draft. After seeing his own work compiled in such a way, Carnegie was just as mesmerized by his own power and agreed to write the book.

Carnegie’s book and the context of the Great Depression are like two sides of the same coin—impossible to separate from each other. The book seems to represent the advice he wished someone had given him30 when he, like millions of Americans, saw much of his hard-earned money evaporate. With the stock market crash in 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, not only did people lose their savings; they lost their pride and sense of control. That is exactly what Carnegie gave them back, for the low price of $1.96. The 1920s, with its flappers, booming economy, and growing cities, was an age of optimism, brought to a sharp end by the 1929 stock market crash. Soon, Americans would be less interested in Emily Post’s rules for giving a debutante ball and more desperately in need of tips on how to survive food shortages and mass layoffs. In October 1929, the New York Stock Exchange tumbled, causing losses that totaled hundreds of billions of dollars in today’s currency. It wasn’t just rich investors who lost their money. An increasing number of working-class people had been trying their hand at playing the stocks. As Time magazine wrote at the time of the crash, “For so many months so many people had saved money and borrowed money and borrowed on their borrowings to possess themselves of the little pieces of paper by virtue of which they became partners in U. S. Industry. Now they were trying to get rid of them even more frantically than they had tried to get them.”31 Carnegie himself had not been immune to the effects of Black Thursday, and like so many other Americans, he had lost much of his savings in the crash. He would later write in a letter, “When I think of my record in the stock market, it seems a joke for me to be giving anybody financial advice on anything.”32

In 1935, as

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