From “Friends for Now,” which appeared in the April 1982 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 174-year archive—is available online at harpers.org/archive.
When the Midwestern farm boy Dale Carnegie emerged as an expert on friendship, he’d had more experience with animals than with people. The introduction to his pioneering book How to Win Friends and Influence People, which has sold millions of copies since its publication in 1936, described Dale’s upbringing on the family farm in Missouri, where he devoted mornings to feeding Duroc-Jersey hogs and evenings to milking cows; his days, spent on the back of his horse, carried him to and from the State Teachers’ College, where he was no social success.
This background has left its imprint on his book. Human nature, Carnegie concluded, was animal-like. “When dealing with people . . . we are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride.” To such animals, friendship is utterly unnatural, entirely a product of will. Carnegie set out to train his intractable breed with this basic command: “Say to yourself over and over, ‘My popularity, my happiness, and my income depend to no small extent on my skill in dealing with people.’ ”
Friendship has been an elusive subject throughout history and a frequent theme in imaginative literature, but scarcely explored in nonfiction. Thoreau proclaimed friendship “the secret of the universe,” and noted, “I can remember only two or three essays on this subject in all literature.” For decades, Carnegie’s guide to making friends had the how-to market pretty much to itself. Lately, however, there has been a spate of books on the art, or science, of making friends. Dorothy Carnegie, Dale’s widow, has joined in, with a revised Eighties edition of her husband’s classic. It looks like friendship may be in vogue.
Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People promulgates three “Fundamental Techniques.” These are: “don’t criticize . . . or complain”; “give honest and sincere appreciation”; and “arouse in the other person an eager want.” The result, Carnegie claims, will be appreciation in return, plus real estate sales, marriage proposals, or satisfaction of whatever motive may lurk behind the chummy show. Merely smile, make frequent use of the other person’s name, and obey those three tips—which multiply in successive chapters into six ways of making people like you, nine ways of changing people, and (count ’em) twelve ways of winning people to your way of thinking—and you’re reborn a hail-fellow-well-met, guaranteed to get ahead.
Carnegie is convinced that sincerity is as easily willed as a ready smile and a memory for names. He’s wrong, of course, but in the original edition it doesn’t matter most of the time. After all, Carnegie’s brand of hearty, pseudosincere friendliness suited the life of the salesman that he had in mind, and is similarly useful in other lines of work. But the insincerity that often works in professional settings is rarely appropriate in personal, intimate relations: as an afterthought, the original edition extended its techniques to “Home Life,” but the hollow niceties prescribed for husbands and wives were creepy. That chapter has been dropped from the revised book (its portrait of wives as housebound clotheshorses and husbands as patronizing breadwinners won’t do these days). And if the advice Carnegie offers about how to “win” friendships is inadequate, his tips on how to keep such friends are hopeless. Since our needs and desires are notoriously fickle, friendships based on them are bound to be so, too, as Aristotle warned—good news for the how-to literary industry, since it means that books will continually be bought.
“My friends have come to me unsought,” Emerson marveled. Montaigne remarked on an “inexplicable and fatal power” at work in the best friendships. That power makes possible sincerity rather than insinuation; empathy rather than conviviality; sympathy rather than solicitude; conversation rather than communication; commitment rather than casual association.
