Appendix B

Brief history and apparent origin of American self-help

These books have common threads. The latest, Covey's 7 Habits (1989), was based on study of 200 years of self-help texts in America. In the 20th century we have Peale's Positive Thinking (1952), preceded by Hill's Think and Grow Rich (1937) and Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends (1937). Ten years earlier is James Allen's As A Man Thinketh (1923). Another decade prior were Charles F. Haanel's Master Key System (1912) and Wallace D. Wattles' Science of Getting Rich (1910).

Possible influences on these works can be attributed to the environmental influences of their times. Peale's influence might have been the Cold War mentality of the late 40's and early 50's. Hill, while starting his research twenty years earlier, published during the depression for the stated purpose of getting enabling people to start making money again. As well, this was the publishing time of Dale Carnegie. Allen published after World War I, while Haanel and Wattles published prior, during America's affluence period. While the later works all might be touted as responses to war and recovery, this theory doesn't hold for the earliest works, whose authors had never seen a whole world at war.

A more interesting line of approach is the common principles which have surfaced in the different books. Many of these authors are known to be included under the umbrella of “New Thought.” According to a pamphlet authored through the Calgary New Thought Center, Peale is also included as being heavily influenced by New Thought authors. Hill gives credit to Haanel, who himself references Judge (Thomas) Troward, one who lectured and wrote widely on the subject of “Mental Science” from 1902 to his death in 1916. The Calgary pamphlet credits Troward with being one of the two “taproots” of the New Thought movement. Other sources, such as the Santa Rosa Church of Religious Science, traces the history back through Troward to Emerson and Transcendentalism to Kant and then originally to Plato who first coined the term “transcendent.”

The other taproot was Phineas P. Quimby, who cured and trained many healers, who in turn were able to train others, forming organizations and churches as they spread. Of interest to this study is that the current form of spiritual treatment for one, the New Thought Church of Religious Science's, that of giving thanks after prayer, which is done in the past tense, that of having already received the object/request prayed for.

New Thought is itself inclusive of a wide-ranging span of thoughts and ideas, ranging from mystic to biblical to scientific and everything in between. It currently has perhaps the greatest collection of modern thinkers and philosophers willing to tackle the subject of the God directly.

It's not surprising particularly that New Thought ideas would then influence self-help so widely. What is surprising is that this one philosophic school would sprout continuing best sellers and/or be the source for underlying principles of self-improvement.

The conclusion of this study, regardless of the sources of the material, is that there is a simple system of self-improvement/self-help based on principles which are native to nature and can be proven scientifically to be effective where applied exactly.