Carnegie’s message was to inspire go-getting Americans to look on the bright side, and sell themselves better. In the depths of the Great Depression, it was this desperate need that Carnegie addressed in How to Win Friends and Influence People. The hunger for a better future remains a constant feature of the American sociopolitical landscape. Trump’s diehard supporters are an apt reminder that, for many Americans, the pursuit of happiness is unsatisfying, success painfully elusive, and failure shameful and/or infuriating. Whatever the outcome of Tuesday 8 November, there’s no doubt that the ecstatic selling of American greatness will remain part of the national psychodrama for years to come. Trump, indeed, continues actively to extol a later Carnegie fan (Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking) for his contribution to the American way of life. Selling and salesmanship pervade American life and literature: Sister Carrie (Theodore Dreiser), Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis), The Iceman Cometh (Eugene O’Neill), Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller), and Glengarry Glen Ross (David Mamet).Įxactly 80 years after How to Win Friends first appeared, it comes as no surprise to find a distorted, and sickeningly corrupt, version of Dale Carnegie’s homespun and inspirational self-help manual flourishing in the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, bestselling author of The Art of the Deal. T he selling of the American self, and its dream of a better future, began with the Declaration of Independence and founding father Benjamin Franklin, who once observed that “God helps them that help themselves”.

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