Quiet (5 page)

One of the most powerful lenses through which to view the transformation from Character to Personality is the self-help tradition in which Dale Carnegie played such a prominent role. Self-help books have always loomed large in the American psyche. Many of the earliest conduct guides were religious parables, like
The Pilgrim's Progress
, published in 1678, which warned readers to behave with restraint if they wanted to make it into heaven. The advice manuals of the nineteenth century were less religious but still preached the value of a noble character. They featured case studies of historical heroes like Abraham Lincoln, revered not only as a gifted communicator but also as
a modest man who did not, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “offend by superiority.” They also celebrated regular people who lived highly moral lives.
A popular 1899 manual called
Character: The Grandest Thing in the World
featured a timid shop girl who gave away her meager earnings to a freezing beggar, then rushed off before anyone could see what she'd done. Her virtue, the reader understood, derived not only from her generosity but also from her wish to remain anonymous.

But by 1920, popular self-help guides had changed their focus from inner virtue to outer charm—“to know
what
to say and
how
to say it,” as one manual put it. “To create a personality is power,” advised another.
“Try in every way to have a ready command of the manners which make people think ‘he's a mighty likeable fellow,' ” said a third. “That is the beginning of a
reputation for personality.”
Success
magazine and
The Saturday Evening Post
introduced departments instructing readers on the art of conversation. The same author, Orison Swett Marden, who wrote
Character: The Grandest Thing in the World
in 1899, produced another popular title in 1921. It was called
Masterful Personality
.

Many of these guides were written for businessmen, but women were also urged to work on
a mysterious quality called “fascination.” Coming of age in the 1920s was such a competitive business compared to what their grandmothers had experienced, warned one beauty guide, that they had to be visibly charismatic: “
People who pass us on the street can't know that we're clever and charming unless we look it.”

Such advice—ostensibly meant to improve people's lives—must have made even reasonably confident people uneasy. Susman counted the words that appeared most frequently in the personality-driven advice manuals of the early twentieth century and compared them to the character guides of the nineteenth century. The earlier guides emphasized attributes that anyone could work on improving, described by words like

But the new guides celebrated qualities that were—no matter how easy Dale Carnegie made it sound—trickier to acquire. Either you embodied these qualities or you didn't:

It was no coincidence that in the 1920s and the 1930s,
Americans became obsessed with movie stars. Who better than a matinee idol to model personal magnetism?

Americans also received advice on self-presentation—whether they liked it or not—from the advertising industry. While early print ads were straightforward product announcements (“
EATON'S HIGHLAND LINEN: THE FRESHEST AND CLEANEST WRITING PAPER
”), the new personality-driven ads cast consumers as performers with stage fright from which only the advertiser's product might rescue them. These ads focused obsessively on the hostile glare of the public spotlight. “
ALL AROUND YOU PEOPLE ARE JUDGING YOU SILENTLY
,” warned a 1922 ad for Woodbury's soap. “
CRITICAL EYES ARE SIZING YOU UP RIGHT NOW
,” advised the Williams Shaving Cream company.

Madison Avenue spoke directly to the anxieties of male salesmen and middle managers. In one ad for Dr. West's toothbrushes, a prosperous-looking fellow sat behind a desk, his arm cocked confidently behind his hip, asking whether you've “
EVER TRIED SELLING
YOURSELF
TO YOU? A FAVORABLE FIRST IMPRESSION IS THE GREATEST SINGLE FACTOR IN BUSINESS OR SOCIAL SUCCESS
.” The Williams Shaving Cream ad featured a slick-haired, mustachioed man urging readers to “
LET YOUR FACE REFLECT CONFIDENCE, NOT WORRY! IT'S THE ‘LOOK' OF YOU BY WHICH YOU ARE JUDGED MOST OFTEN
.”

Other ads reminded women that their success in the dating game
depended not only on looks but also on personality. In 1921 a Woodbury's soap ad showed a crestfallen young woman, home alone after a disappointing evening out. She had “
longed to be successful, gay, triumphant,” the text sympathized. But without the help of the right soap, the woman was a social failure.

Ten years later, Lux laundry detergent ran a print ad featuring a plaintive letter written to Dorothy Dix, the Dear Abby of her day. “Dear Miss Dix,” read the letter, “
How can I make myself more popular? I am fairly pretty and not a dumbbell, but I am so timid and self-conscious with people. I'm always sure they're not going to like me.… —Joan G.”

Miss Dix's answer came back clear and firm. If only Joan would use Lux detergent on her lingerie, curtains, and sofa cushions, she would soon gain a “deep, sure, inner conviction of being charming.”

This portrayal of courtship as a high-stakes performance reflected the bold new mores of the Culture of Personality. Under the restrictive (in some cases repressive) social codes of the Culture of Character,
both genders displayed some reserve when it came to the mating dance. Women who were too loud or made inappropriate eye contact with strangers were considered brazen. Upper-class women had more license to speak than did their lower-class counterparts, and indeed were judged partly on their talent for witty repartee, but even they were advised to display blushes and downcast eyes. They were warned by conduct manuals that “the coldest reserve” was “more admirable in a woman a man wishe[d] to make his wife than the least approach to undue familiarity.” Men could adopt a quiet demeanor that implied self-possession and a power that didn't need to flaunt itself. Though shyness per se was unacceptable, reserve was a mark of good breeding.

But with the advent of the Culture of Personality, the value of formality began to crumble, for women and men alike. Instead of paying ceremonial calls on women and making serious declarations of intention, men were now expected to launch verbally sophisticated courtships in which they threw women “a line” of elaborate flirtatiousness. Men who were too quiet around women risked being thought gay; as a popular 1926 sex guide observed, “homosexuals are invariably timid, shy, retiring.” Women, too, were expected to walk a fine line between propriety
and boldness. If they responded too shyly to romantic overtures, they were sometimes called “frigid.”

The field of psychology also began to grapple with the pressure to project confidence.
In the 1920s an influential psychologist named Gordon Allport created a diagnostic test of “Ascendance-Submission” to measure social dominance. “Our current civilization,” observed Allport, who was himself shy and reserved, “seems to place a premium upon the aggressive person, the ‘go-getter.' ” In 1921, Carl Jung noted the newly precarious status of introversion.
Jung himself saw introverts as “educators and promoters of culture” who showed the value of “the interior life which is so painfully wanting in our civilization.” But he acknowledged that their “reserve and apparently groundless embarrassment naturally arouse all the current prejudices against this type.”

But nowhere was the need to appear self-assured more apparent than in a new concept in psychology called the inferiority complex.
The IC, as it became known in the popular press, was developed in the 1920s by a Viennese psychologist named Alfred Adler to describe feelings of inadequacy and their consequences. “Do you feel insecure?” inquired the cover of Adler's best-selling book,
Understanding Human Nature
. “Are you fainthearted? Are you submissive?” Adler explained that all infants and small children feel inferior, living as they do in a world of adults and older siblings. In the normal process of growing up they learn to direct these feelings into pursuing their goals. But if things go awry as they mature, they might be saddled with the dreaded IC—a grave liability in an increasingly competitive society.

The idea of wrapping their social anxieties in the neat package of a psychological complex appealed to many Americans. The Inferiority Complex became an all-purpose explanation for problems in many areas of life, ranging from love to parenting to career. In 1924,
Collier's
ran a story about a woman who was afraid to marry the man she loved for fear that he had an IC and would never amount to anything. Another popular magazine ran an article called “Your Child and That Fashionable Complex,” explaining to moms what could cause an IC in kids and how to prevent or cure one.
Everyone
had an IC, it seemed; to some it was, paradoxically enough, a mark of distinction. Lincoln, Napoleon, Teddy Roosevelt, Edison, and Shakespeare—all had suffered from ICs, according
to a 1939
Collier's
article. “So,” concluded the magazine, “if you have a big, husky, in-growing inferiority complex you're about as lucky as you could hope to be, provided you have the backbone along with it.”

Despite the hopeful tone of this piece, child guidance experts of the 1920s set about helping children to develop winning personalities. Until then, these professionals had worried mainly about sexually precocious girls and delinquent boys, but now psychologists, social workers, and doctors focused on the everyday child with the “maladjusted personality”—particularly shy children. Shyness could lead to dire outcomes, they warned, from alcoholism to suicide, while an outgoing personality would bring social and financial success. The experts advised parents to socialize their children well and schools to change their emphasis from book-learning to “assisting and guiding the developing personality.” Educators took up this mantle enthusiastically. By 1950 the slogan of the Mid-Century White House Conference on Children and Youth was “A healthy personality for every child.”

Well-meaning parents of the midcentury agreed that quiet was unacceptable and gregariousness ideal for both girls and boys.
Some discouraged their children from solitary and serious hobbies, like classical music, that could make them unpopular. They sent their kids to school at increasingly young ages, where the main assignment was learning to socialize.
Introverted children were often singled out as problem cases (a situation familiar to anyone with an introverted child today).

William Whyte's
The Organization Man
, a 1956 best-seller, describes how parents and teachers conspired to overhaul the personalities of quiet children. “Johnny wasn't doing so well at school,” Whyte recalls a mother telling him. “The teacher explained to me that he was doing fine on his lessons but that his social adjustment was not as good as it might be. He would pick just one or two friends to play with, and sometimes he was happy to remain by himself.” Parents welcomed such interventions, said Whyte. “Save for a few odd parents, most are grateful that the schools work so hard to offset tendencies to introversion and other suburban abnormalities.”

Parents caught up in this value system were not unkind, or even obtuse; they were only preparing their kids for the “real world.” When these children grew older and applied to college and later for their first
jobs, they faced the same standards of gregariousness. University admissions officers looked not for the most exceptional candidates, but for the most extroverted.
Harvard's provost Paul Buck declared in the late 1940s that Harvard should reject the “sensitive, neurotic” type and the “intellectually over-stimulated” in favor of boys of the “healthy extrovert kind.” In 1950, Yale's president, Alfred Whitney Griswold, declared that the ideal Yalie was not a “beetle-browed, highly specialized intellectual, but a well-rounded man.” Another dean told Whyte that “in screening applications from secondary schools he felt it was only common sense to take into account not only what the college wanted, but what, four years later, corporations' recruiters would want. ‘They like a pretty gregarious, active type,' he said. ‘So we find that the best man is the one who's had an 80 or 85 average in school and plenty of extracurricular activity.
We see little use for the “brilliant” introvert.' ”

This college dean grasped very well that the model employee of the midcentury—even one whose job rarely involved dealing with the public, like a research scientist in a corporate lab—was not a deep thinker but a hearty extrovert with a salesman's personality. “Customarily, whenever the word brilliant is used,” explains Whyte, “it either precedes the word ‘but' (e.g., ‘We are all for brilliance, but …') or is coupled with such words as erratic, eccentric, introvert, screwball, etc.” “These fellows will be having contact with other people in the organization,” said one 1950s executive about the hapless scientists in his employ, “and it helps if they make a good impression.”