Promise Land by Jessica Lamb-Shapiro

Author:Jessica Lamb-Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

My father’s concept of success derives from the “how you play the game” school. He values process over product; any enterprise in which he has fun carries some intrinsic value. For those who are more result oriented, there is no shortage of self-help books on success. One of the most popular schemes for prosperity is called the law of attraction. This law, backed by no widely accepted evidence, posits that you can attract things you want simply by thinking about them.

Although the law of attraction could theoretically be applied to anything, it most frequently appears in self-help books about making money. In Practical Methods for Self-Development (1904), Elizabeth Towne claimed that money was as free as air. She wrote, “The only thing that keeps us from taking plenty of money or air is fear. . . . The trouble with us is that we are afraid to expand. . . . Take deep, full breaths of air, and your mind and purse expand in sympathy with your lungs. . . . Money is really as free as air.”

The rich “do not get rich because they possess talents and abilities that other men have not, but because they happened to do things in a Certain Way,” wrote Wallace D. Wattles, author of the best-selling tome The Science of Getting Rich. A thin man, with a long, wan face, Wallace D. Wattles was an admirer of Horace Fletcher, the author of Menticulture, a self-help book on the virtues of prolonged mastication, and Edward H. Dewey, Fletcher’s mentor and creator of the “No-Breakfast Diet.” In 1908, Wattles ran for office as a member of the Socialist party. Wattles died in 1911, just one year after the publication of The Science of Getting Rich. The book was not only an instant best seller, it is still published and revered today. This fact is even more impressive when one reads the book and realizes how far from the line demarcating sanity Wattles has wandered.

Wattles claims the science of getting rich is as “exacting and logical” as algebra and arithmetic. However, he instructs you to do things only “in a Certain Way.” It’s a long time before he explains to you what this Certain Way is, and then only by defining it with a bunch of other amorphous terms like having “Faith” and believing in the idea that you are an “Advancing Man.”1

The following passage is emblematic of his blunt but effective style:

Talented people get rich, and blockheads get rich; intellectually brilliant people get rich, and very stupid people get rich; physically strong people get rich, and weak and sickly people get rich . . . any man or woman who has sense enough to read and understand these words can certainly get rich.

Wattles’s use of repetition is almost unparalleled in a genre largely based on repetition. Repetition is a favorite rhetorical tool in self-help. Repetition is how we learn. It’s an old adage in advertising that you need to see something seven times before it takes residence in your brain.

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