Simon and schuster

Polly of the Circus. 
 
He would never be a Booth or a Barrymore. He had the good sense to recognize that, So back he went 
to sales work, selling automobiles and trucks for the Packard Motor Car Company. 
He knew nothing about machinery and cared nothing about it. Dreadfully unhappy, he had to scourge 
himself to his task each day. He longed to have time to study, to write the books he had dreamed about writing 
back in college. So he resigned. He was going to spend his days writing stories and novels and support himself 
by teaching in a night school. 
Teaching what? As he looked back and evaluated his college work, he saw that his training in public 
speaking had done more to give him confidence, courage, poise and the ability to meet and deal with people in 
business than had all the rest of his college courses put together, so he urged the Y.M.C.A. schools in New York 
to give him a chance to conduct courses in public speaking for people in business. 
What? Make orators out of business people? Absurd. The Y.M.C.A. people knew. They had tried such 
courses—and they had always failed. When they refused to pay him a salary of two dollars a night, he agreed to 
teach on a commission basis and take a percentage of the net profits—if there were any profits to take. And 
inside of three years they were paying him thirty dollars a night on that basis—instead of two. 
The course grew. Other ‘Ys’ heard of it, then other cities. Dale Carnegie soon became a glorified 
circuit rider covering New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and later London and Paris. All the textbooks were too 
academic and impractical for the business people who flocked to his courses. Because of this he wrote his own 
book entitled 
Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business
. It became the official text of all the Y.M.C.A.s 
as well as of the American Bankers’ Association and the National Credit Men’s Association. 
Dale Carnegie claimed that all people can talk when they get mad. He said that if you hit the most 
ignorant man in town on the jaw and knock him down, he would get on his feet and talk with an eloquence, heat 
and emphasis that would have rivaled that world famous orator William Jennings Bryan at the height of his 
career. He claimed that almost any person can speak acceptably in public if he or she has self-confidence and an 
idea that is boiling and stewing within. 
The way to develop self-confidence, he said, is to do the thing you fear to do and get a record of 
successful experiences behind you. So he forced each class member to talk at every session of the course. The 
audience is sympathetic. They are all in the same boat; and, by constant practice, they develop a courage, 
confidence and enthusiasm that carry over into their private speaking. 
Dale Carnegie would tell you that he made a living all these years, not by teaching public speaking - 
that was incidental. His main job was to help people conquer their fears and develop courage. 
He started out at first to conduct merely a course in public speaking, but the students who came were 
businessmen and women. Many of them hadn’t seen the inside of a classroom in thirty years. Most of them were 
paying their tuition on the installment plan. They wanted results and they wanted them quick—results that they 
could use the next day in business interviews and in speaking before groups. 
So he was forced to be swift and practical. Consequently, he developed a system of training that is 
unique—a striking combination of public speaking, salesmanship, human relations and applied psychology. 
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A slave to no hard-and-fast rules, he developed a course that is as real as the measles and twice as 
much fun. 
When the classes terminated, the graduates formed clubs of their own and continued to meet fortnightly 
for years afterward. One group of nineteen in Philadelphia met twice a month during the winter season for 
seventeen years. Class members frequently travel fifty or a hundred miles to attend classes. One student used to 
commute each week from Chicago to New York. Professor William James of Harvard used to say that the 
average person develops only 10 percent of his latent mental ability. Dale Carnegie, by helping businessmen and 
women to develop their latent possibilities, created one of the most significant movements in adult education 
– Lowell 
Thomas 
1936