In 1895, in the mountains of Wise County, Virginia, a stepmother made a trade with a twelve-year-old boy. The boy carried a pistol through the backwoods and had a reputation for trouble. The stepmother, Martha, a school principal’s widow, offered him a typewriter in exchange for the gun. She told him that if he learned the machine as well as he knew the weapon, he might grow rich and famous. The boy took the deal. He kept the aim.
Oliver Napoleon Hill (1883-1970) became the most influential success writer in American history. His 1937 book Think and Grow Rich has sold tens of millions of copies, seeded the modern self-help industry, and passed its vocabulary into the bloodstream of American business: the definite chief aim, the written goal, the mastermind group, the burning desire. He also spent much of his life one step ahead of creditors, prosecutors, ex-wives, and the postal inspectors of the United States. Any serious account of Hill has to hold both facts at once. He built the most durable formula for American aspiration, and he built it while running.
Hill was born on October 26, 1883, near Pound, Virginia, in the Appalachian southwest of the state. His father, James Hill, pulled teeth without a license and made moonshine when the season allowed. His mother, Sarah, died when the boy was nine. The family called him Nap. He would not drop the name Oliver until 1908, and the reason he dropped it belongs to the criminal record rather than the legend.
The stepmother’s typewriter worked fast. By thirteen Hill wrote for a small mountain weekly whose items sometimes reached the Virginia papers. His authorized biographers, Michael J. Ritt Jr. and Kirk Landers, writing with the cooperation of the Napoleon Hill Foundation, concede that when news ran short, young Hill invented it. The admission sits in the official record like a loaded gun in the first act. The boy who made up news when news was scarce became the man who made up a career when a career was scarce.
At seventeen Hill finished school, studied briefly at a business college in Tazewell, and in 1901 went to work for Rufus Ayres (1852-1926), a coal magnate and former attorney general of Virginia. Hill stood five feet six. He compensated with posture, double-breasted suits, pressed white shirts, and a handkerchief squared in the breast pocket. He dressed like the executive he intended to become, which is a detail worth holding, because Hill understood before he understood anything else that in America the costume often precedes the position.
The Ayres years produced the first of the stories Hill told about his own honesty, and the story reads differently depending on who tells it. In Hill’s version, a drunken bank cashier dropped a gun in a hotel one weekend and the discharge killed a Black bellboy. Hill rushed to the scene, interviewed the lone witness, found the bank unlocked with money scattered as if a storm had passed through, counted it all, and reported that not a cent was missing. He noted, in his unpublished autobiography, that he could have pocketed fifteen or twenty thousand dollars without detection. Ayres rewarded him with the management of a coal mine and 350 men. Hill was nineteen. When Richard Lingeman reviewed the authorized biography for the New York Times in 1995, he read the same episode and saw a cover-up: Hill vouched to the coroner that the death was accidental, paid for the bellboy’s burial, and got the mine as his reward. In the Hill literature this story proves his integrity. In the Hill record it may be the first documented instance of his central skill, which was managing what other people believed had happened.
The official biography goes quiet between 1903 and 1908, and the newspapers explain why. On June 17, 1903, the Tazewell Republican recorded the marriage of Oliver N. Hill to Edith Whitman. A daughter followed in 1905. The marriage produced testimony rather than memoir. Business associates later swore that Hill visited brothels across the South during those years. Edith’s 1908 divorce filing described a man of violent and ungovernable temper who threw their toddler and choked her, who took the baby to his mother in Virginia and threatened never to return her, and who once threatened on a public street to blow his wife’s brains out. In January 1908 Hill wrote Edith that he was leaving the country and that she could reach him only through his father.
He had reason to leave. Through 1907 and 1908 Hill ran the Acree-Hill Lumber Company out of Mobile, Alabama, buying ten to twenty thousand dollars of lumber on credit from suppliers in Georgia, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, then selling it for cash at prices that undercut every honest dealer in the state. He told his partner the cash came from new investors. The partner sold out. The suppliers compared notes. In September 1908 Hill vanished from his Mobile office, telling his stenographer he was off to visit some mills. The trade press called the hunt for him the Acree-Hill Sensation. Alabama issued warrants. The Postal Service opened a mail fraud investigation. An Indiana lumber company sued. By December, Oliver N. Hill had surfaced in Washington, D.C., as Napoleon.
Here the legend places its cornerstone, and here the legend fails. According to the story Hill told for the last five decades of his life, 1908 was the year Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) received him in his 64-room Manhattan mansion, kept him the weekend, and commissioned him to spend twenty years interviewing the most successful men in America, without pay, to distill the principles of achievement. Carnegie, in this telling, opened the doors to Thomas Edison (1847-1931), Henry Ford (1863-1947), and Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922). The mission became Hill’s credential, his brand, and eventually a full book of reconstructed dialogue, published in 1948 as Think Your Way to Wealth and later retitled How to Raise Your Own Salary, in which the steel king of Pittsburgh discourses on the seventeen principles of achievement in the cadence of a correspondence-course brochure. Hill did not begin telling the Carnegie story until after Carnegie died in 1919. Carnegie’s biographer David Nasaw, asked by the journalist Matt Novak whether the meeting occurred, said he “found no evidence of any sort that Carnegie and Hill ever met.” Even the authorized biographers admit the published Carnegie conversations were contrived. What the documents show for 1908 is a divorce, a check-alteration arrest that ended in acquittal, warrants in Alabama, and a man changing his name in a new city.
Washington gave the new Napoleon his first school. In 1909 he founded the Automobile College of Washington and advertised that six weeks of training could turn any man into an expert earning up to two hundred dollars a week. Every Sunday morning he sat at the Rammel Hotel in Alexandria and interviewed recruits. The interview forms probed the applicant’s finances more closely than his aptitude. The college’s business model, exposed by Motor World in April 1912 under the headline “Pointing the Easy Route to Getrichquickland,” was elegant: students paid tuition for the privilege of assembling cars for the Carter Motor Corporation, which received their labor free. The catalog promised graduates a sales agency and commissions, plus three dollars a head for every new student they recruited. The structure anticipated multi-level marketing by half a century.
The Washington years also gave him a third wife. In June 1910 Hill, then twenty-six, drove his car from the college garage to the home of Florence Elizabeth Hornor, a high school student from a wealthy Lumberport, West Virginia family who had received her diploma the previous Wednesday. Ten minutes later, as the Washington Herald reported, the car was on the road to Marlboro, and the couple returned that evening married. His students, who had helped him gas the car and strap on a spare tire that morning, knew nothing. Three men of the Automobile College married in semi-secrecy that same week, a coincidence the local papers noticed and never explained.
Florence bore three sons. The second, Napoleon Blair Hill, arrived on November 11, 1912, deaf and without ears. His father resolved to teach the boy to speak and even, as Hill saw it, to hear, and toward that end he forbade Blair from learning sign language, over years of fighting with family and teachers. Blair later appeared in Think and Grow Rich as the book’s proof that persistence conquers limitation. The chapter does not mention what the method cost the child.
The college folded in 1912, taking four thousand dollars of the Hornor family’s money with it. The family moved to Lumberport, Hill grew restless, and Chicago followed. There he worked briefly for the LaSalle Extension University, printed stationery reading “Napoleon Hill, Attorney at Law” despite never having attended law school or, as his own biographers concede, performed legal services for anyone, ran a candy company whose partners forced him out and, by his account, had him arrested on a false charge, and in 1915 founded the George Washington Institute, a school of success and self-confidence. Students at the institute wrote letters to newspapers, at Hill’s urging, promoting his run for a seat in Congress. One student who criticized him, a German-American, was reported by Hill to federal authorities for suspicious activities and, according to the authorized biography, spent the war under arrest.
The institute’s finances undid it. Hill capitalized the school at one hundred thousand dollars, kept 51 percent of the shares, and sold the rest to his students at ten dollars each. He also created a dummy lender, the First National Trust Association, which mailed students offers to finance their tuition at five percent interest, so that Hill could lend students money to pay Hill. In 1918 the Illinois attorney general’s office investigated. Assistant Attorney General Raymond Pruitt told the Chicago Daily Tribune that the institute’s assets, a few dozen desks and a mimeograph, might liberally be appraised at twelve hundred dollars. Warrants issued on June 4, 1918, under the state’s Blue Sky Law, the statute written against sellers of empty air. Hill promised to surrender, disappeared for four days, and posted two thousand dollars bond. The following month a trade magazine still carried his article on how to sell your services, bylined the Dean of the George Washington Institute.
Hill’s own account of 1917 and 1918 mentions none of this. In his telling, President Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) recruited him for the war effort at an attractive salary, which Hill, nearly broke, patriotically refused, and in November 1918 Hill sat in the White House as Wilson read the German armistice request, went white, and asked Hill’s advice on the reply. Hill suggested asking whether the request came from the German people or the German war lords, and the president exclaimed that this would force the Germans to shed their Kaiser. No evidence outside Hill’s writings supports any of it, and his own magazine, in September 1921, described his armistice day differently: he was in the street, penniless, drunk on joy like everyone else, and went home to his typewriter with the idea for a magazine. The later Wilson story required a fifteen-minute presidential absence, a handed-over state document, and a punchline. The contemporaneous story required only a typewriter. The gap between the two is the biography.
The magazine he founded, Hill’s Golden Rule, preached ethics and practiced promotion. In its February 1920 issue Hill called the Golden Rule “a weapon that no resistance on earth can withstand,” powerful in business because so few competitors applied it. The formulation deserves attention. Hill grasped that conspicuous virtue creates obligation, and that obligation can be collected. He gave out Golden Rule medals to generate press, claimed 150,000 subscriber votes for an award to a chiropractor (Woodrow Wilson placed second), and in 1923 sent a press agent to an Edison dealers’ convention announcing that a leading magazine writer wished to attend. Edison, cornered, posed for a photograph. Hill circulated it with a caption pairing “two of America’s famous men” and describing parallel rises from poverty. By one contemporary account, Edison returned the medal Hill pinned on him without comment. The photograph survives as the only image of Hill with any of the hundreds of great men he claimed to have studied.
The Federal Trade Commission charged Hill in October 1919 with running fraudulent advertising through his magazine on behalf of a Texas oil promoter named S.E.J. Cox, whose stock Hill puffed in an article about a couple who had made a million dollars for other people. In 1922 Hill and a prison chaplain founded the Intra-Wall Correspondence School, a charity to educate Ohio convicts. Hill toured churches raising money for it. In Shelby, Ohio, in August 1923, he moved a congregation so thoroughly that schoolchildren emptied their pockets, and the collection reached roughly a thousand dollars. In December the Mansfield News asked the warden of the Ohio penitentiary what the school had received. The warden answered: nothing. Hill blamed the chaplain and blamed Butler Storke, the paroled forger he had installed to run the charity, and Storke went back to prison. As for the letters and autographed photographs from Wilson, Taft, Bell, and the president-to-be of the Philippines, the correspondence that might have documented Hill’s claimed intimacy with the great, the authorized biography reports that all of it burned in a Chicago storage fire in the mid-1920s.
In 1926 Hill’s wandering intersected with an authentic American tragedy. Don Mellett (1891-1926), the crusading editor of the Canton Daily News, spent a year naming the police officers and vice lords of Canton, Ohio, in print, and on July 16, 1926, was shot dead outside his garage in a conspiracy of gangsters and police. Hill claimed Mellett as a friend and patron who had raised fifty thousand dollars to publish Hill’s eight-volume philosophy of success, and claimed that only car trouble kept Hill from dying beside him, and that an anonymous call the next morning sent him fleeing to West Virginia without packing. The record shows Hill lecturing in Orrville, Ohio, twenty-five miles from Canton, six weeks after the murder, praising the martyred editor from the platform and charging, plausibly, that the assassination was carried out under police protection. That October Hill appeared before an Indianapolis grand jury investigating the Ku Klux Klan‘s entanglement with Indiana politics; the Associated Press noted he had held a contract with two Klan figures, and his own biographers record that his Indianapolis lecture tour included an address to a Klan meeting. Then, around his forty-third birthday, he went into the West Virginia backwoods, broke and hiding from parties he never named, and stayed most of a year.
He emerged with the manuscript that became The Law of Success, and the scene of its sale is the purest Hill scene on record. In Philadelphia in 1928, dead broke, he borrowed money from his brother-in-law, took an enormous suite in a fashionable hotel, and waited for Andrew Pelton, a Connecticut publisher of New Thought books, flashing a roll of bills and tipping every bellboy and desk clerk in sight. The performance was the pitch. Pelton, who published belief for a living, bought it, and the eight-volume course appeared in 1928. By early 1929 royalties ran twenty-five hundred dollars a month. Hill bought a Rolls-Royce, and by his later count two, and a six-hundred-acre Catskills estate called Shagbark, financed with investors’ money and slated to become the world’s first university-sized Success School, with vacation homes for the successful to be built and sold on the grounds. The stock market crashed in October 1929. By mid-1930 Shagbark was foreclosed, Florence and the boys were back in Lumberport living on her family’s money, and Hill was in New York writing a book called The Magic Ladder to Success, which died at birth. In a letter to Florence from this period, preserved by his biographers, Hill described a plan to sell his books as contest textbooks in every high school in the country and wrote that if it worked he might be rich in a year, and if it failed he might go to jail. Few sentences in the archive describe his career more efficiently. In 1930 he also helped finance the first Mormon feature film, Corianton, through unlicensed stock sales that New York regulators halted; the film flopped everywhere but Utah, and what Hill extracted from the corporation is unknown.
He spent the early 1930s founding paper universities and dummy corporations in Washington, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and later claimed that in 1933 the Roosevelt administration recruited him, an anti-union arch-conservative, to write speeches, counsel labor peace, and coin the line about having nothing to fear but fear itself, all for a dollar a year. His biographers admit the documentary record of this service is scant. No evidence outside Hill’s writings supports it. Florence divorced him in 1935, flying to Florida because West Virginia would not grant one.
Then Knoxville, 1936. Hill, fifty-three, lecturing, told his audience from the platform that he was searching for his dream girl. A twenty-nine-year-old woman named Rosa Lee Beeland came to see him the next day. He met her at the elevator, walked her to his study, did not offer her a chair, and talked. She later wrote that they compared notes for five hours, that before she left they were engaged, and then they were married. The whole courtship ran about forty-eight hours.
What followed was the most productive collaboration of Hill’s life. Penniless, the newlyweds moved into the Hell’s Kitchen apartment of Blair Hill, the deaf son, the only son still speaking to his father, and Blair’s wife Vera. Napoleon heckled and hounded Vera until she fled to West Virginia; Blair lent his father three hundred dollars and followed her; the marriage did not survive. Alone in the borrowed apartment, Napoleon and Rosa Lee built the book. By most accounts, including the grudging authorized one, Rosa Lee did much of the building, typing, cutting, arranging, and rewriting the manuscript three times over until Hill’s bloviation ran in sentences a tired man could follow. Pelton resisted; the Depression seemed a poor market for prosperity gospel. He was wrong the way publishers dream of being wrong. Think and Grow Rich appeared in 1937 with the most efficient title in the history of American publishing, and a country eight years into humiliation bought it by the hundreds of thousands. The book told the beaten reader that poverty was a mental condition, that desire plus faith plus autosuggestion plus organized planning plus persistence plus a mastermind alliance would convert defeat into wealth, and that the man who stopped digging three feet from the gold had only himself to blame. It even had, as the era’s showmen liked to say, a little sex in it: a chapter on sex transmutation taught that erotic energy, rerouted from the bedroom to the office, could raise a man to genius.
Hill signed the royalties over to Rosa Lee in a prenuptial arrangement designed to keep the money from his creditors, his victims, his ex-wife, and his sons. The couple bought an estate in Mount Dora, Florida, with domestic staff, and spent faster than the checks came in. Blair asked for his three hundred dollars back and got silence; in a letter to his mother he called his father an unscrupulous, two-timing, double-crossing good-for-nothing. In 1939, with creditors circling, the Hills announced to the national press that they would adopt fifteen perfect children, aged five to nine, healthy, parentless, yet never institutionalized, and raise them scientifically; the Kansas City Star styled Hill a Florida philanthropist; tax records show two adopted dependents whose fates the authorized biography cannot trace. In the same years the Hills paid visits to Peace Haven, the Long Island Vanderbilt mansion where James B. Schafer (c. 1896-1955) ran the Royal Fraternity of the Master Metaphysicians, a New Thought cult that treated Think and Grow Rich as scripture and announced in 1939 that it would raise a baby girl, Jean, to immortality through vegetarianism and positive thought. Hill stood as the immortal baby’s godfather. When Schafer later faced grand larceny charges over a magazine investment, his sworn appeal named the man who had brought him the deal: Napoleon Hill. Schafer went to Sing Sing. Hill was never charged. The baby went back to her mother, mortal.
Rosa Lee ended the marriage in 1940 with a thoroughness her husband could respect. While he traveled, she sold everything, including the Rolls-Royce, took the royalties her prenup guaranteed, hired a private detective to confirm his infidelities, and married her divorce lawyer. Hill, cleaned out, appeared at Florence’s door asking for money and was refused. He drifted to Clinton, South Carolina, where a publisher and college president named William Jacobs took him in after the two bonded over hatred of General Sherman; Hill’s next book, Mental Dynamite (1941), flopped, lacking both a market and Rosa Lee’s editing. In 1943 he married Jacobs’s secretary, Annie Lou Norman, his fifth wife, who had a small estate of her own and who lasted, unlike the others, until his death. They moved to California, where Hill did radio on KFWB and lectures, and where he added Gandhi to his roster of admirers, claiming the Mahatma had put him under detective surveillance to verify he was the real thing before distributing his books across India.
The last act began with an expulsion. In January 1952 Hill sold the town of Paris, Missouri, a two-month success course, and along the way told the Moberly Kiwanis Club that the Korean War could be stopped overnight by an ultimatum to Stalin backed by atomic annihilation of every Russian concentration point, and reminded them that he had advised Roosevelt to have kidnappers brought in dead. Paris ran him out for fraud. That same year he met W. Clement Stone (1902-2002), the Chicago insurance magnate who had built a fortune on hard-sell tactics and positive mental attitude, and who revered Think and Grow Rich. Stone gave Hill what he had never had: capital, organization, and a partner too rich to need to steal. Napoleon Hill Associates produced courses, films, and the magazine Success Unlimited; the 1959 book Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude, coauthored with Stone, carried Hill’s formulas into the sales meetings, insurance agencies, and hotel ballrooms of postwar America. Norman Vincent Peale (1898-1993), whose The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) borrowed heavily from Hill and who credited Hill and Stone with helping him, carried the gospel into the churches, and, as pastor to the young Donald Trump, into places Hill could not have imagined. Hill and Stone parted in the early 1960s, and Hill franchised his Science of Success courses in a licensing structure resembling the multi-level schemes his automobile college had prefigured. The Napoleon Hill Foundation, chartered in 1963, took custody of the legend, and guards it still; when Novak asked its CEO in 2014 to see Hill’s unpublished autobiography, he was refused, then offered a day tour of Wise, Virginia, for a five-thousand-dollar donation.
Hill died on November 8, 1970, in Greenville, South Carolina. Outwitting the Devil, a manuscript from 1938 in which the Devil confesses that his chief instrument is drift, the unchosen life, stayed locked away until the Foundation published it in 2011, reportedly because his wife’s family found it too hot to print.
What should a serious reader make of him? The debunking case is closed and has been since Novak’s 2016 investigation assembled the court records, the trade-press exposés, and the newspaper trail, confirming what Alan Farnham‘s 1995 Fortune piece and Lingeman’s review had already signaled. The Carnegie commission is fiction. The presidential intimacies are fiction. The interviews with hundreds of great men rest on one ambushed photograph and a returned medal. The businesses were, with numbing regularity, schemes. The man who taught America the mastermind principle alienated nearly everyone who allied with him, including the deaf son who financed his masterpiece with a loan never repaid.
Yet the fraud finding, by itself, explains too little, because it cannot explain why the book still sells. Hill stands in a lineage. New Thought, the nineteenth-century movement descending through Phineas Quimby and Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), taught that thought shapes material reality. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) taught self-trust as a spiritual discipline. Hill’s contribution was to strip the metaphysics of its churchly aims and point it at the cash register, and to package the result in the idiom of the American salesman, the archetype he lived: mobile, verbally gifted, self-invented, dependent on performance, aware that success often turns on what a man can make others believe he can do. Some of what he packaged survives scrutiny once the cosmic claims fall away. People persist longer at aims they rehearse. Written goals concentrate attention. A man’s associates raise or lower what he attempts, which is the sound core inside the mastermind mysticism. Even the autosuggestion chapters describe, in occult language, the ordinary psychology of self-talk and habit. Hill’s prose enacts its own doctrine: he repeats the same commands until they feel inevitable, which is why the book reads less like an argument than an induction.
The costs of the doctrine are equally real. A creed that makes wealth a function of thought makes poverty a function of thought too, and hands every casualty of luck, class, illness, and swindle a verdict of mental surrender. The line from Hill runs forward through Peale to the prosperity gospel, through The Secret (2006), whose law of attraction restates Hill without credit, through the multi-level marketing industry his automobile college prefigured and his Foundation has honored, and through the seminar economy that sells the poor a mindset in place of a wage. The line also runs through the coaching circles, goal-setting disciplines, and entrepreneurial peer groups that have helped millions of people organize their ambition, and an honest accounting keeps both lines in view.
The deepest reading of Hill may be the reflexive one. His books describe a man who repairs a broken life by fixing a definite aim, commanding his subconscious, and surrounding himself with believers. That man was the author. Hill wrote his prescriptions from inside the disease: the debts, the flights, the abandoned families, the fire that consumed the evidence. The stepmother’s typewriter did what she promised. He became rich, at intervals, and famous, durably, and he did it with the machine, telling America a story about itself so useful that the country has never much wanted to check it. He remains the case study his own method requires and cannot survive: proof that a man can think, and grow rich, and that what he grows rich selling can be the thinking itself.
Notes
Primary investigative source: Matt Novak, “The Untold Story of Napoleon Hill, the Greatest Self-Help Scammer of All Time,” Paleofuture / Gizmodo, December 6, 2016; also available at Gizmodo. Nearly all the documented scandal material comes from Novak: the Edith Whitman marriage and divorce filing, the Acree-Hill lumber flight, the Automobile College and Motor World exposé, the Blue Sky warrants and Pruitt’s $1,200 appraisal, the Intra-Wall charity and Mansfield News warden quote, the Edison ambush, the Mellett and Klan material, the Schafer deposition naming Hill, Rosa Lee’s exit, the Paris, Missouri expulsion and atomic-ultimatum speech, and the Foundation CEO’s $5,000 tour offer. The Nasaw quote is his, sourced to a direct interview.
Corroborating secondary sources: Richard Lingeman, “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People,” The New York Times, August 13, 1995, a review of the authorized biography and source for the cover-up reading of the bank/bellboy episode; Alan Farnham, “Seamy Side of a Self-Help Swami,” Fortune, August 7, 1995; and David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (Penguin, 2006).
The authorized version: Michael J. Ritt Jr. and Kirk Landers, A Lifetime of Riches: The Biography of Napoleon Hill (1995). Concessions I drew from it, via Novak’s quotations: young Hill inventing news, the “attorney at law” letterhead, the contrived Carnegie book, Blair and sign language, the “might go to jail” letter, the storage fire, and the scant FDR record. The Napoleon Hill Foundation carries the legend version if you want the counterweight.
Extrapolations I made without a link, all self-evident from profession or situation: the reading of the 1908 name change as tied to the warrants, where the timing is documented and the motive is inference, flagged in the prose as such; the observation that the costume preceded the position; the characterization of Pelton as a publisher of belief; and the closing reflexive reading. The claim that the country “has never much wanted to check” the story is my judgment, defensible from the sales figures against the thirty years the debunking has been public.
The E. J. Kahn New Yorker piece on the Metaphysicians, “The Metaphysicians,” March 16, 1940. It’s a gift for the Collins interaction-ritual frame.
New Yorker: ‘A Place to Think’
A.J. Kahn writes in the March 9, 1940 issue:
HEN the Royal Fraternity of Master Metaphysicians bought William K. Vanderbilt’s 110-room house at Oakdale, Long Island, in 1938 and announced it would convert the place into a retreat for its members, a lot of people who had never heard of the organization before were surprised. Since then, the Metaphysicians, who not only have moved into the Vanderbilt house but also have been holding nightly meetings in a set of rooms in Steinway Hall variously designated as the Forum of Truth and the Center of Peace, have been full of surprises. Last November, in full view of the press, they adopted a five-month-old baby named Jean, whom they claimed they would make immortal. In January, their leader, James B. Schafer—who is known fraternally as The Messenger and to a few intimate disciples as Uncle Jimmy—announced for publication that six of his flock would become rich within a year, apparently by means of the same mysterious power that would provide Jean with immortality. The doctrine of Mr. Schafer, and hence of the Metaphysicians as a group, seems to the uninitiated to be an involved mixture of Christian Science, Rosicrucian-ism, and Father Divine. Mr. Schafer’s vocabulary is made up largely of abstract nouns, and his chief stipulations to his followers are that they shall study the truth, shall hold malice toward no man, and, above all, shall think. Because Mr. Schafer believes that it is wise for people to take into their bodies only “that which with the least amount of effort gives the most amount of energy,” he and his followers do not smoke, do not drink, do not eat meat, and do not touch either coffee or tea. When not eating vegetables, they are supposed to spend a good deal of their time simply in thought. Their headquarters are dotted with signs saying “think,” and their publications carry such admonitions as “When Thinkers think together things happen. Let’s think!” Mr. Schafer and his followers are convinced that if they think hard enough about something they want, they will sooner or later get it.
There are now some ten thousand people in and around New York who profess spiritual allegiance to Mr. Schafer; some of the more transcendental are entitled to call themselves Master Meta-physicians, and other, newer devotees are merely Fellows. Mr. Schafer, who is unmarried and about fifty years old, founded the Fraternity in New York around twenty-five years ago after an experimental period, which he doesn’t like to talk about, when he is said to have studied medicine, sold automobiles, taken up Christian Science, and dug ditches. Until the Fraternity set up shop in Steinway Hall four years ago, it was comparatively small and used to meet in members’ homes. In the last couple of years, Mr. Schafer has attracted many converts, both by giving a talk every Sunday morning, in the summer at Carnegie Hall and in the winter at Loew’s Ziegfeld Theatre, and by acquiring the Vanderbilt mansion. The house, which was built for $7,000,000 in 1900, has set the Metaphysicians back only about $350,000, including the cost of new and opulent furnishings. It used to be called Idlehour, and is now known as Peace Haven, the House of the New. Testament. The money required for the purchase of Peace Haven and for other Fraternity expenses comes, according to Mr. Schafer, exclusively from rank-and-file members’ “love gifts.” It is likely that a handful of especially rich and affectionate members have contributed the bulk of the backing.
Although I had Heard that only Fellows of the Fraternity may stay at the house overnight, I decided some weeks ago that it would be interesting to visit the place, never having met either a metaphysician or an immortal before. I called up Mr. Schafer, who is probably the only man in the New York telephone directory with an M.M. (Master Metaphysician) after his name, and asked if I might come. He said yes, so on a recent Friday evening I drove fifty miles to Oakdale to spend twenty-four hours with the Metaphysicians.
Peace Haven is a rambling, three-story, red-brick structure resembling a large country club, which, in many respects, is exactly what I found it to be. I arrived there shortly before ten o’clock, and at the reception desk, which had a sign on it saying “Enlightenment,” I asked for Miss Scherer, who, Mr. Schafer had told me, was the hostess and would take care of me. Miss Scherer appeared and said she had reserved a room for me. I could hear a voice issuing from a loudspeaker in the living room on the ground floor. That, Miss Scherer explained, was Mr. Schafer. Several evenings a week at Steinway Hall he gave a talk which was sent on to Oakdale by a direct telephone wire. I heard him say, “I’m part of you, you’re part of me, we’re all part of life.” I looked into the living room, which Miss Scherer told me was called Peace Hall, and saw a dozen people, among them two elderly ladies knitting, a younger lady wearing a pink evening jacket and what appeared to be a pair of black velvet pajamas, and a girl of about sixteen sitting on a couch with her feet tucked under her, chewing thoughtfully on a candy bar.
Miss Scherer instructed a boy to carry my bag and took me upstairs to my room, climbing a massive oak staircase onto which a number of leaded windows open. In one of them there is a stained-glass panel which Miss Scherer told me used to bear the Vanderbilt coat of arms but now bears the Metaphysicians’ emblem : a dove of peace holding an olive twig and leaf inside a circle signifying eternity. At the head of the stairs was a sign saying “think.” We walked down a long, dimly lit corridor whose walls were covered with velvet tapestries, and I noticed that each room had a name as well as a number. My room, for instance, was Integrity, and next door was Constancy, in which, I was told, the immortal baby was sleeping. Miss Scherer assured me that Jean was a quiet child and wouldn’t disturb me. Integrity was a large room with a ceiling at least twelve feet high; it was formerly Mrs. Vanderbilt’s bedroom.
Peace Haven as a Ritual Machine: Randall Collins Reads the Master Metaphysicians
On a Saturday night in the winter of 1940, in the former Vanderbilt mansion at Oakdale, Long Island, seventy people in evening clothes sat facing a handsome man in a dinner jacket. He said, “Peace, friends.” They answered, “Peace.” At nine o’clock he told them to close their eyes, imagine a great blue light above their heads, and think about love and the universal mind. They closed their eyes. The group had a word for what happened next. They called it blending.
Randall Collins (b. 1941) built his sociology on moments like this one. In Interaction Ritual Chains (2004), Collins took Emile Durkheim’s (1858-1917) account of religion, which located the sacred in the assembled group rather than in the heavens, and shrank it to the scale of the face-to-face encounter. Every successful ritual, in Collins’s model, requires four ingredients: bodies gathered in one place, a barrier marking insiders from outsiders, a shared focus of attention, and a common mood. When the ingredients combine, attention and emotion feed on each other, the participants’ rhythms entrain, and the gathering produces its outputs: solidarity, symbols charged with the group’s feeling, standards of right conduct, and, for each individual, a fund of confidence and enthusiasm Collins calls emotional energy. People carry that energy out of the encounter and spend it in the next one. Life, for Collins, is a chain of such situations, and people move through the chain like investors, seeking the gatherings that pay.
E. J. Kahn Jr. (1916-1994) drove out to Oakdale that winter and spent twenty-four hours inside the Royal Fraternity of Master Metaphysicians, and the report he filed for the New Yorker on March 16, 1940 reads, sixty-four years before Collins published his theory, like a field test of it. Kahn thought he was writing a comic piece about cranks who banned meat and planned to raise an immortal baby. He was writing a parts inventory of a ritual machine, and nearly every component Collins would later name is present, labeled, and running.
Start with assembly and barrier. Peace Haven sat fifty miles from Manhattan, far enough that arrival cost something. Entry to residence required election as a Fellow and a hundred dollars, which the Fraternity called a love deposit, a phrase that converts a fee into a bond. The house rules ran the boundary through daily conduct: no smoking within a hundred feet of the building, no tipping, no loud talk in the cloisters. The food rules ran it through the body. No meat, no alcohol, no coffee, no tea, and Postum at breakfast. Collins argues that the strongest barriers are not walls but practices, because a practice must be renewed at every meal, and every renewal re-marks the member. Miss Selin, ten years a vegetarian, explained the rule to Kahn in the group’s own idiom: the slaughtered animal feels a last surge of fear, the fear poisons the blood, and the eater takes the poison in. The doctrine polices the boundary and teaches the group’s psychology in one stroke, since it makes fear itself the contaminant. The great metaphysical taboos, the ones the immortal child would be raised to shun, were hate, fear, and worry: the emotions that kill a ritual.
Then focus. The mansion was saturated with attention cues. Signs reading “think” stood at the reception desk and the head of the stairs. The dove-and-circle emblem, installed in the stained glass where the Vanderbilt arms had been, repeated on the china, the silverware, the members’ pins, the shuffleboard floor, and the side of the immortal baby’s carriage. The bedrooms carried names in place of the usual numbers: Integrity, Constancy, Opportunity, Fulfillment, Decision. A corridor could read Tolerance, Virtue, Bath, Obedience, Completeness, Cedar, Maid, the sacred and the janitorial interleaved without embarrassment. Collins holds that symbols are batteries. They store the emotion generated in assembly and discharge it between assemblies, and they run down unless the group gathers again to recharge them. A member of the Fraternity could not cross a hallway, lift a fork, or go to bed without touching a charged object. The house was not decorated with the group’s beliefs. The house was the interval between meetings, solved.
The meetings themselves came in grades, and the grades map onto Collins’s central claim that co-presence is the active ingredient. At the top stood Schafer in person: Sunday orations at Carnegie Hall or the Ziegfeld, nightly sessions at Steinway Hall in rooms named the Forum of Truth and the Center of Peace, and the Saturday ceremony at Oakdale, for which the members dressed as for a wedding. Below that ran the piped-in ritual. Several nights a week Schafer’s Steinway Hall talk traveled to Oakdale by direct telephone wire and issued from a loudspeaker mounted where the organ pipes had been, above the white marble fireplace. Kahn walked in on one of these transmissions and recorded the scene: a dozen people scattered through the great hall, two old ladies knitting, a teenager chewing a candy bar, the disembodied voice saying that he was part of them and they were part of him. Collins predicts exactly this decay. Remove the body of the speaker and you remove the feedback loop; attention slackens into half-attention; the ritual becomes background sound. The knitting needles are the measurement. The Fraternity seems to have understood the deficiency in its own way, because everything else in the building, the emblems, the signs, the named doors, worked to hold the charge that the loudspeaker could not deliver.
Schafer himself is a Collins type: the energy star. Collins argues that emotional energy stratifies. Those who occupy the center of successful rituals absorb the group’s attention and come away confident, warm, magnetic, and initiative-taking, which positions them at the center of the next ritual, and the advantage compounds. Watch Schafer enter the dining hall halfway through lunch. A flutter runs through the room. He moves table to table, clapping backs, shaking hands, calling members by their first names, a middle-aged man in a double-breasted blue suit whom Kahn compares to a successful salesman. The comparison is more literal than Kahn knew, since Schafer had in fact sold automobiles in the vague years he declined to discuss, but the deeper point is the direction of the energy. The flock did not merely receive Schafer’s attention. They generated his charisma and then explained it metaphysically. Mr. Herkelroth testified that he once watched Schafer sag in his chair at Steinway Hall as though the mind had departed the body, and the group discussed, casually, over lunch, whether a man could be in two places at once. Collins would say the members felt the difference between Schafer charged and Schafer drained, a difference any performer knows, and converted the feeling into doctrine. Charisma is the name the audience gives to its own entrainment.
The immortal baby completes the Durkheimian set, because a group this organized requires a sacred object at its center, and in November 1939 the Fraternity adopted one in front of the press. Jean was five months old, blue-eyed, the daughter of a poor and non-metaphysical couple. She slept in a room called Constancy. Her carriage bore the emblem. She was carried to as many meetings as possible so that the Fraternity spirit might soak in, and at the Saturday ceremony she squirmed and cried at the back of the hall while the truth students paid her no attention at all. The inattention is the tell. A participant must do something; a sacred object need only exist and be possessed. Schafer kept her photograph by his bed in a heart-shaped silver frame, filmed her development for an archive meant to outlast Manhattan, and posed her, before Kahn’s eyes, in the arms of her nurse, holding a book she could not read. Her immortality was the group’s solidarity, projected onto a body and scheduled to outlive every member. Durkheim said the totem is the clan, worshipped in emblem form. Jean was the congregation, aged five months.
The book she was made to hold matters to this analysis, and not only because the Metaphysicians treated it, in Miss Stollman’s account to Kahn, as a Gospel. Think and Grow Rich contains, in its Master Mind principle, a folk version of Collins’s theory. Napoleon Hill taught that when two or more minds coordinate in harmony toward a definite aim, a third force arises, greater than the sum, and he wrapped the claim in the physics of vibration. Strip the vibration and what remains is entrainment: gathered bodies, shared focus, common mood, and a surplus of confidence that participants can feel and cannot locate, so they assign it to the cosmos. Hill sold the experience as a technique for getting rich. Schafer built a residential institution for having the experience nightly. The cult did not misread the book. The cult read the book correctly and constructed the machine it describes, then ran the machine for its own sake, with wealth retained as the advertised output. Collins gives the exchange rate both men were trading on: emotional energy is the thing itself, and money is one of the stories a group can tell about where the energy will lead.
The wealth story required winners, and here the Fraternity displayed the stratification Collins says every ritual order produces. In January 1940 Schafer announced that six truth students would become prosperous within the year, and the six were named: a beautician, a perfumer, a dress designer, an authoress, an airplane-parts manufacturer, and an unemployed actor named Kingsley, two months in the movement, who told Kahn his selection had come as a pleasant surprise. The announcement functioned as a prize ceremony without the inconvenience of results. It concentrated the group’s attention on six members, flooded them with exactly the confident energy the doctrine promised, and advertised to the rest that the center was reachable. Kingsley, dressing for the Saturday dance in the dormitory he shared with Kahn, already carried himself like a man with prospects, and his sole documented achievement in show business was as part of a crowd noise in the Orson Welles Martian broadcast, a credit that suits the analysis better than any invention could: a career spent generating collective effervescence for scale, anonymous inside the roar.
Against all this stands Kahn, and Collins needs him too, because the theory predicts not only who catches fire but who stays cold. Kahn arrived without a love deposit, without evening clothes, and with a rival chain of rituals on his person: the New Yorker observer’s stance, the raised eyebrow held in trust for a readership fifty miles away. He roomed in Integrity, under the house blessing, beside the monkey knickknacks, and none of it charged. He counted the vegetables at lunch and stayed hungry. By late afternoon the hunger won, and he drove to a tavern for a hamburger and a tall glass of beer, and called it as physical a little meal as he could remember. The sentence is the whole sociology of the outsider. The Fraternity’s ascetic table was a solidarity engine for members, each renounced steak a small payment into the common fund, and for the unentrained visitor the same table was a deficit that his body settled at a roadhouse. Irony, Collins might add, is how a man keeps his own energy inside a ritual not his own. Kahn’s jokes are a membrane. They kept the New Yorker reader’s chain unbroken while he sat with his eyes open in a hall full of people blending.
The piece ends on the right scene, though Kahn plays it for a smile. As he stood in the vestibule saying his goodbyes, a small, shy woman asked whether his car had room for one more, since the other cars were full and the next train was distant. He offered the ride. She answered in triumph that she had known he would, because she had been thinking hard about getting a lift since four that afternoon. This is the retail end of the ritual economy. The great assemblies charge the symbols; the symbols then get spent in small transactions, where they buy interpretations. A polite man with an empty seat could not have refused her, and courtesy would explain the ride in any house in America. Inside Peace Haven, the ride confirmed the cosmology, and she carried the confirmation back up the oak staircase, past the sign that said think, another coin of emotional energy minted from an ordinary kindness. Collins’s chains are made of exactly such links. The Fraternity dissolved within a few years, Schafer went to prison, and Jean went home to her mortal parents, but on that Friday evening in 1940 the machine was running at capacity, and it ran on nothing but assembled bodies, a guarded door, a blue light held in seventy imaginations at once, and the human refusal to let a good feeling go unexplained.
The Man Who Sold the Hero System: Napoleon Hill and the Denial of Death
The boy stood at a grave in the mountains of Wise County, Virginia, in 1892, nine years old, watching them bury his mother. The record preserves nothing of the scene beyond the fact of it, but the fact is enough, because a boy of nine in those hills knew what a grave was. His people were Primitive Baptists and subsistence farmers. Death was not hidden from mountain children. It came through the cabin, it was washed and dressed by the family, and it was preached over by elders who taught that God had settled every soul’s account before the foundation of the world, and that no exertion of the creature could alter the ledger.
Within a year or two the boy carried a pistol. At twelve he traded it to his stepmother for a typewriter. Ernest Becker (1924-1974) would have paused a long time over that trade. In The Denial of Death (1973), Becker argued that the mainspring of human activity is the terror of death, and that culture exists to manage the terror: every society is a symbolic action system, a hero system, that lets its members earn a feeling of cosmic significance, of mattering permanently in a universe that will erase them. The gun is the oldest tool for that feeling. A man with a gun cannot be ignored. The typewriter is the subtler tool. A man with a typewriter can write himself into a story that keeps going after the funeral. Martha Hill did not know she was exchanging one immortality apparatus for another, but the boy seems to have grasped it at once, and he never afterward confused the two. Napoleon Hill went armed with narrative for the next seventy years.
Becker’s frame asks two questions of any life. What terror organizes it, and what vehicle does the man build to outrun the terror? For Hill the terror had two faces, and they were not the same terror. The first was the common one, the mother in the ground, the mountain funerals, death as every child of Wise County met it. The second was particular, and it was worse to him. It was the terror of remaining Oliver.
Oliver was the name on the marriage record in Tazewell in 1903 and on the warrants in Alabama in 1908. Oliver was a short man from Pound, Virginia, a coal clerk, a failing lumber jobber, a husband whose wife swore in a divorce filing that he had choked her. In 1908, with the creditors comparing notes and the postal inspectors opening files, Oliver disappeared, and a man named Napoleon surfaced in Washington. Run the subtraction that this essay series runs on every subject. Take away the Carnegie commission, which never happened. Take away the twenty years of interviews with the great, which rest on one ambushed photograph. Take away the White House afternoons with Wilson and Roosevelt, which exist only in Hill’s prose. Take away, in short, every witness Hill ever claimed for his own significance, and what remains is Oliver at the grave, unwatched, unelected, and mortal. Hill performed that subtraction on himself once, in 1908, and spent the rest of his life making sure no one could ever perform it again. The fabrications were not ornaments on the career. The fabrications were load-bearing. They held off the second death, the one Becker says frightens men more than the first: the death of the self as a figure of significance, the discovery that you were nobody all along.
Becker gives a name to the elder Hill chose. In the transference, a man handles his terror by binding himself to a figure of power, a father large enough to guarantee the cosmos. Most men find the figure in a living leader, a general, a boss, a rebbe, a party. Hill did something more economical. He selected Andrew Carnegie, the richest man of the age, and he made the selection stick by waiting until Carnegie was dead. A living transference object can refuse you. A dead one signs whatever you put in front of him. From 1919 on, Hill possessed a father who had singled him out of all the young men in America, laid hands on him in a Manhattan mansion, and commissioned his life’s work, and this father could never deny the laying on of hands, because he was in the ground at Sleepy Hollow. Hill did not merely lie about Carnegie. He solved the transference problem the way he solved every problem, by manufacture.
What he manufactured for himself he then discovered he could sell, and this is where Hill stops being a case for Becker and becomes a collaborator. Becker wrote that modern man’s crisis is the collapse of the shared hero systems. The peasant knew how to be a hero: work the land, raise the sons, keep the fast, die shriven. The mountain Baptist knew: endure, hope for election, distrust the striving flesh. But the America of 1900 to 1940 was pulling millions of men out of those inherited systems, off the farms and out of the parishes, into cities and sales territories where the old scripts conferred nothing. Consider one of them, because Hill considered him for thirty years. An Akron rubber worker, laid off in 1931, sits in a furnished room. The shop floor that made him a man is shut. The church of his boyhood is four hundred miles behind him and did not survive the move. The union is broken. Every apparatus by which he once earned the feeling of mattering has failed at the same time, and what he confronts in the furnished room is not only poverty. It is insignificance without appeal, which is to say, it is death brought forward into the middle of life. In 1937 that man could walk to a drugstore and buy, for two dollars and fifty cents, a replacement hero system in one volume, portable, undenominational, requiring no congregation, no land, no ancestry, and no election by God. Desire would be his calling. The definite chief aim would be his covenant. The mastermind would be his church. Riches would be his salvation, and the book told him on every page that the kingdom was within him, available to thought. Hill’s genius was not psychological insight. His genius was retail. He took the thing Becker says every culture must provide and every modern man was losing, and he packaged it for individual sale.
The package was built of sacred words, and sacred words do not travel. Each one takes its meaning from the hero system that consecrates it, and moved to another system the same word turns alien or obscene. Walk Hill’s four load-bearing words through other lives and watch them change.
Take desire, the first chapter and the first commandment. In Hill, desire is holy fire. The man who wants wealth with a white heat has already begun to be saved; wanting, sustained and definite, is the engine of everything. Carry the word up the hollow to the Primitive Baptist elder who preached over Hill’s mother. In that system desire for riches is the flesh talking, the old Adam, and the man who burns with it is not beginning his salvation but advertising his distance from it, since grace is unearned, election is settled, and the creature’s wanting moves God not at all. The elder’s heroism is endurance inside the decree. Carry the word instead to a Carthusian in his cell above Grenoble, who has organized an entire life around the extinction of exactly what Hill commands him to kindle; his hero system scores desire as the enemy, and each day it goes unfed is a day of victory. Now carry it to a Lagos prosperity pastor with forty thousand seats to fill, and the word comes home almost intact, desire as seed faith, wanting as worship, because his system descends from Hill’s through channels a genealogist can trace. And carry it to a mother in Seoul during the November exam, and desire is real and burning but it is not permitted to be hers; it has been transferred whole to the son, and her heroism is the emptying of her own wants into his examination number. Same word. Four cosmologies. Hill’s use of it makes sense only inside the system he built, where the self is the project and wanting is prayer.
Take persistence, the chapter Hill hung on the parable of the miner who quit three feet from the gold. In Hill’s system persistence is the virtue that redeems all defeats, because the vein is always there and the universe pays the man who keeps digging. Sit the word down at a poker table in Gardena at three in the morning, next to a man four racks down and still calling, and persistence is the disease itself; every gambler ruined in California was three feet from the gold, and his hero system, the one the cardroom sells him, consecrates the exact fallacy Hill consecrated, that the next foot of digging is owed. March the word past a Foreign Legion sergeant and it changes uniform: persistence is holding the position, and it counts even when the position falls, because the system scores the enduring and not the outcome; a man can persist perfectly and die, and the dying subtracts nothing. Hand the word to a Sicilian widow keeping four children alive on a hillside of stones, and persistence is not a virtue and not a strategy. It is the absence of any exit. Nobody promised her gold in the third foot. Her system calls it bearing, and awards it quietly, at the funeral, in the size of the crowd. Hill’s persistence requires his metaphysics, a universe that keeps accounts and pays. Remove the paymaster and the word means four different things in four different mouths.
Take riches, the promised land itself. In Hill riches are visible grace, the outward proof that the inward thought was right, and the book’s title welds thinking to getting as cause to effect. Set the word inside a Lakota giveaway, where the man of standing is the one who empties his hands, who distributes horses and blankets until he owns almost nothing, and Hill’s proof runs backward: accumulation held too long is the mark of a small man, and the hero is known by what leaves him. Set it in Mayfair, in the mouth of a fourth-generation heir, and riches are only respectable when they appear to have arrived without desire, which is why the heir’s system reads the whole Hill enterprise, the burning wants, the written goals, the strain, as a single unforgivable vulgarity, and why Edison’s circle recoiled when a promoter cornered the old man for a photograph. The heir would rather be poorer and unstriving. Set it in a Donetsk coal brigade in 1935, where the record-breaking hewer is draped in banners and his tonnage printed in the papers, and the glory that Hill routes through the bank account routes instead through the quota, with personal riches a suspect residue that could put a man on a list. Each system produces heroes; each defines the treasure that certifies them; and Hill’s certificate is legal tender only inside the church he printed it in.
Take fear, the enemy Hill spent his last serious book interrogating. In Hill’s system fear is the Devil’s instrument, the poverty consciousness, the thing to be cast out so completely that his associates at Peace Haven were teaching an infant to regard death as a hygiene problem. Put the word on an Icelandic cod boat in February and fear is the instrument of survival, the accurate reading of the sea, and the skipper who casts it out drowns his crew; that system’s heroes are the ones who feared correctly for forty years and brought the boat home. Put it in the mouth of a Gerrer Hasid on the afternoon of Yom Kippur and fear is not even negative; the fear of Heaven is a cultivated attainment, the beginning of wisdom, rehearsed every autumn with the shroud-white kittel and the liturgy of who shall live and who shall die, because that system holds that only the man who has stood inside his death can live rightly. Becker stood closer to the Hasid than to Hill. He argued that the terror is true, that mortality is the real situation, and that the honest life begins in looking at it. Hill built the opposite instrument, a system for never looking, and sold blindness as vision.
How much did the salesman see? The evidence says: more than he could afford to. In 1938, a year after the great success, Hill wrote a manuscript in which he interviews the Devil, and the Devil, under a compulsion of candor no living witness ever enjoyed in Hill’s prose, confesses how he runs the world. He does it through drift, the unchosen life, the man who slides through his days on habit and fear without a definite aim. The Devil claims the schools, the churches, and, in passages the family found too hot to print, most of the human race. The book stayed locked away for seventy-three years. Read with Becker open beside it, Outwitting the Devil is the most self-aware document Hill produced, and its self-awareness is of the sealed kind. Hill could see with total clarity that ordinary men live in what Becker called the vital lie, the character armor of routine and small diversion that keeps the terror out of view. He diagnosed the armor in everyone. What he could not see, or could not say, is that his own system was armor of a costlier grade, that the definite chief aim is also a way of never sitting still with the fact of the grave, that a man can drift at high speed toward a goal. He interviewed the Devil for the same reason he had interviewed Carnegie: the living could not be trusted to say the lines. Both interviews were conducted with himself, and only one of them told the truth, and that is the one he buried. Grant him this much on the self-awareness ledger: he knew the product was manufactured, he knew the biography was a stage set, and the letter survives in which he told Florence that the next scheme would make him rich in a year or put him in jail. A man who can write that sentence to his wife is not deceived about what he is. He was deceived, to the end, about what it cost.
The cost was itemized in other people. The deaf son, forbidden the language of his hands so that the father’s system could claim a miracle of persistence, financed the father’s masterpiece with a loan from a Hell’s Kitchen apartment and was repaid with silence and a chapter. The wives were absorbed and shed as the project required, and the ablest of them, who built the book’s sentences, had to loot the estate to collect her wages. The readers paid on a longer schedule. A hero system that makes wealth the proof of right thought makes poverty the proof of wrong thought, and for ninety years it has handed a verdict of mental surrender to every casualty of luck, sickness, and swindle, including the casualties of swindles Hill himself ran. Becker wrote in Escape from Evil (1975) that the evil in history flows from immortality projects, from men purchasing the feeling of deathlessness and passing the invoice to others. Hill’s project was bloodless by the standards of the century, and the invoice was real, and other names are on it.
And yet the project worked, which is the coordinate hardest to write down. Becker allowed mankind only the symbolic victory, the work that outlasts the body, and by that sole permitted measure Hill won. The boy from the grave in Wise County lies in the ground like his mother, and the book has outsold almost everything published in his lifetime, and a foundation stands guard over the legend with lawyers and locked archives, an apparatus of curated immortality that most emperors would envy. Three facts, then, fix the position of Napoleon Hill, and they should be read together or not at all. The terror that drove him was less the grave than the ledger, the fear of being audited back into Oliver. The vehicle he built was a hero system for one, which he then duplicated and sold to a nation of men falling out of their inherited systems, so that his private armor became a public industry. And the fare was collected from other people, from a boy’s hands, from three wives, from ten million strivers taught to read their bad luck as bad thinking, while the man himself rode to the one destination his creed could deliver. He desired immortality with a burning definiteness, he persisted past every exposure, and he got it, three feet down, in the only vein that was ever there: the story, still selling, with his name on the cover and Oliver nowhere in it.
