One Simple Idea (26 page)

Two years after his book appeared, Liebman died suddenly of heart failure at age forty-one. Though young and boundlessly energetic, he had maintained a frantic—and frantically ambitious—schedule of talks, sermons, articles, and radio addresses. Having addressed the pressures of modern living, Liebman died of modernity’s most common disease: stress.

At the time of Liebman’s death, the Bible alone surpassed
Peace of Mind
as the top-selling spiritual book of the twentieth century. But
Peace of Mind
would soon be eclipsed by the work of one of the rabbi’s closest admirers: a man who saw the potential for reaching great masses of people through a mystical program couched in reassuringly familiar terms.

Four years after Liebman’s death, the driving idea behind all the self-help movements of the postwar era appeared in the title of Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952
The Power of Positive Thinking
. The book broke Liebman’s record, spending an unprecedented ninety-eight weeks at number one on the
Times
bestseller list. And it made positive thinking into an everyday, every-man-and-woman philosophy. The Protestant minister’s outlook was electrifying and freeing to people who had been raised on religion as a punitive institution. Peale’s core message, recalled his longtime friend and co-minister the Reverend Arthur Caliandro, was this: “Not only can you be forgiven, but you could achieve, you could accomplish.”

Raised in Ohio, Peale was placed in charge of Marble Collegiate Church on Manhattan’s East Side during the Great Depression. Though Marble Collegiate was one of the nation’s oldest pulpits—with roots extending to 1628 and its Fifth Avenue church building dating to 1854—the Dutch Reformed congregation was ailing and shrinking when Peale took over in 1932. The buoyant young minister quickly attracted new congregants. His appeal stemmed from his interest in the therapeutic power of prayer. At the Manhattan church, Peale struck up a partnership with a psychoanalyst, Smiley Blanton, who had studied with Sigmund Freud and been psychoanalyzed by the master himself. Peale and Blanton believed that religion and psychiatry could complement one another. Peale emphasized that the modern minister should be considered a professional, “a scientist of the spiritual life,” and a figure as capable, in his own way, of providing counsel as a doctor or analyst. Blanton compared the awakening of the unconscious to William James’s “conversion
experience.” The psychiatrist felt that the airing of repressed wishes and memories could, like a religious conversion, “transform the person’s life.”

In 1937, Peale and Blanton opened the Religio-Psychiatric Clinic in the church basement. Patients received care from either a minister or a therapist, or both. The church clinic was similar to the Emmanuel Movement, though it focused strictly on anxious minds and troubled hearts. By 1952, the Religio-Psychiatric Clinic and its support staff, which it drew from area hospitals, therapy offices, and clinics, saw some three thousand patients annually; ten years later the number swelled to an extraordinary twenty-five thousand.

While Peale and Blanton closely collaborated, Peale’s interests branched off in more mystical directions. The minister developed his own ideas about the force of “prayer power” to magnetically attract circumstances, and the mind’s ability to aim suggestions and influences at other people. Blanton, until his death in 1966, maintained his partnership with Peale, and their clinic continues today as the Blanton-Peale Institute and Counseling Center. Blanton, however, often kept his written work distinct and remained aloof from his friend’s metaphysical theories.

In 1952, fifteen years after opening the Religio-Psychiatric Clinic, Peale reached into every corner of America, and many other parts of the world, with his manifesto,
The Power of Positive Thinking
. It became the kind of book that could be found in households everywhere, including those where there were few other books. It was not Peale’s first book. In the late 1930s, he had written quieter, more modest-selling works that depicted religion less as a philosophy of practical solutions than as a refuge from the torrents of life. Peale’s tone began to change in 1948 with his first self-help bestseller,
A Guide to Confident Living
, which more fully enunciated his positive-thinking themes. Four years later
The Power of Positive Thinking
took Peale’s methods to their most practical edge and overshadowed everything that came before it.

Peale’s innovation was to craft a system that reprocessed mind-power
teachings through Scriptural language and lessons. In actuality, Peale’s techniques came straight from New Thought. They included visualizations, affirmations, inducements to action of the
leap-and-the-net-will-appear
variety, formulas for manifestation (“1. PRAYERIZE 2. PICTURIZE 3. ACTUALIZE”), and assertions of self-belief backed by religious faith. Peale’s approach
was
New Thought—but stripped of most magical terminology.

The minister used Biblical references and practical, everyday anecdotes that were reassuringly familiar in tone to the churchgoing public. (Though Peale did let slip a few telltale pieces of occult phraseology, as will be seen.)
The Power of Positive Thinking
was the most accessible expression of mind-power philosophy since Ralph Waldo Trine’s
In Tune with the Infinite
and James Allen’s
As a Man Thinketh
—but it surpassed even the combined influence of those two works through Peale’s story-telling abilities and his insight into human character, gleaned from years of experience at the Religio-Psychiatric Clinic.

Peale generally deflected questions about his intellectual or spiritual sources. He often said his insights came squarely from Scripture. In his 1984 memoir,
The True Joy of Positive Living
, Peale identified Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Roman philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius as his “lifelong teachers.” It was the kind of benign claim that Peale typically used to maintain his image as nothing more than an Ohio minister’s son with a penchant for age-old advice. But Peale’s life and career were run through with a complex web of mystical and political influences. Beneath his sunny exterior there existed a surprisingly complicated man.

In a little-known interview in 1987, six years before his death, Peale made a rare disclosure about where his ideas came from, and how he related to the spiritual and intellectual trends around him. Peale described the influence he found in California mystic Ernest Holmes. Indeed, the Peale-Holmes relationship reveals how the vision of early New Thought
gave rise to the broader American culture of motivational philosophy and therapeutic spirituality.

Peale and the Science of Mind founder Holmes had met just once, in Los Angeles in the summer of 1940. At the time, each went to hear the other deliver a talk. But Holmes’s work had already reached Peale when he was younger. “Ernest came into my life long before we actually met,” Peale said, “before I even decided to be a minister, when I was a vacillating, insecure, twenty-year-old.” These weren’t empty words. Peale did suffer from a lifelong sense of inferiority, especially after his reputation as a minister of practical wisdom made him a target of mockery among critics and intellectuals, who saw him as a simplistic purveyor of feel-good nostrums. Yet this feeling of inferiority was also his lifelong link to other people. Only someone who knew what it meant to feel inferior could relate to people in need.

Peale recalled that when he took his first job, as a reporter at the
Detroit Journal
in 1920, his editor detected the young man’s “paralyzing fear of inadequacy.” As the minister recounted, “He took me aside and handed me a book,
Creative Mind and Success
by Ernest Holmes.” It was Holmes’s second book, written in 1919. “Now I want you to read this,” the editor told him. “I know this fellow Holmes. I’ve learned a lot from him, and so can you.” What did Peale learn? “Love God, love others, you can if you think you can, the proper control and use of the human mind, drop your limited sense of self and gain true Self-Reliance.” Holmes’s slender volume of essays and affirmations opened Peale to new possibilities of what a religious message could be. Peale entered Boston University Seminary soon after finding it. “There is no question in my mind that Ernest Holmes’s teachings had helped me on my way,” he said.

Peale’s writing and sermons reflected mind-power influences beyond Holmes. Reverend Caliandro, who succeeded Peale at the pulpit of Marble Collegiate when the minister retired in 1984, recalled Peale’s deep attraction to Napoleon Hill (“he was really after that same form”), Dale Carnegie, Charles Fillmore, and Emmet Fox. Peale adopted the mind-power movement’s phraseology, including “Law of Attraction.”
He echoed New Thought concepts that had their earliest inception in Mesmerism, such as the notion that the mind emits a tangible, magnetic
prayer power
. “The human body’s magnetic power has actually been tested,” he wrote in
The Power of Positive Thinking
. “We have thousands of little sending stations, and when these are turned up by prayer it is possible for a tremendous power to flow through a person and to pass between human beings.”

Peale also used phrases such as “in tune with the infinite” (from Ralph Waldo Trine) and “music of the spheres” (a Hermetic-Pythagorean theory of harmonious proportions among the orbits of planets); and he urged people to observe and listen to nature, syncing one’s personality with the tempo of the natural world, which he considered the tempo of God-in-man. “All of the universe is in vibration,” Peale wrote in
The Power of Positive Thinking
. “… The reaction between human beings is also in vibration. When you send out a prayer for a person, you employ the force inherent in a spiritual universe.” This wasn’t exactly the language of a conservative Dutch Reformed minister.

That observation about vibrations seemed to enter Peale’s writing through the work of Florence Scovel Shinn, an artist and mystic whose books Peale praised later in his life. She was among the most alluring and unusual New Thought figures of the early twentieth century. Florence was born in 1871 in Camden, New Jersey, and in 1898 married American realist painter Everett Shinn. They were part of the Ashcan School of American artists, a cohort known for depicting street scenes, urban life, and the immigrant experience. Florence Shinn worked as an artist and illustrator of children’s literature in New York City before writing her 1925 New Thought classic,
The Game of Life and How to Play It
. Unable to interest New York presses, she published the book herself. Shinn quickly became a popular New Thought teacher and lecturer, bringing a unique warmth and amiability to mystic-occult ideas. Her writing often described universal “vibrations”—an idea that entered her books, before entering Peale’s, through the occult work
The Kybalion
, which Shinn avowedly admired.

Yet it would be an error to assume, as some fundamentalist critics have charged, that Peale was some kind of occultist in vestments. He was not. In many regards Peale was, in fact, the midwestern Methodist he presented himself as. He labored to find a Scriptural antecedent to the ideas he wrote about. In the truest sense, Peale was a great synthesizer. He once recalled his father telling him—quite rightly:

For all of Peale’s spiritual adventurousness, the minister was most at home among business elites and corporate climbers. Reverend Caliandro remembered an elderly Peale’s attraction to Donald Trump upon first seeing the real-estate magnate on television. Peale was always “very impressed with successful people” and self-promoters, Caliandro recalled. “That was a weakness.”

Peale acknowledged his tendency to kowtow to the powerful. He once obligingly invited success author Dale Carnegie to deliver a talk at the Religio-Psychiatric Clinic—a move that disturbed Smiley Blanton, who couldn’t see what Carnegie’s self-salesmanship had to do with the clinic’s therapeutic work. Peale admitted that he often evinced an “all-things-to-all-men attitude,” and he reluctantly withdrew the invitation.

Peale gamely courted corporations, penning a
Reader’s Digest
article in 1950, “Let the Church Speak Up for Capitalism.” U.S. Steel soon became a major supporter of Peale’s motivational digest,
Guideposts
, which had struggled at its inception in 1945. In the early 1950s, the steel giant purchased monthly subscriptions for all of its 125,000 employees. The following decade, some 762 American businesses were ordering company-wide subscriptions to
Guideposts
.
^*1

Beyond his business contacts, Peale maintained a network of conservative political friendships. Beginning in World War II, he began a lifelong relationship with Richard Nixon, who attended Peale’s Marble Collegiate Church while he was temporarily stationed in the city during the war. Nixon continued to attend Marble Collegiate after moving to Manhattan in the early 1960s, following his unsuccessful run for governor of California. Shortly after Nixon took the White House in 1968, Peale performed the marriage ceremony of Nixon’s daughter Julie to former president Dwight Eisenhower’s grandson David, at his New York pulpit with the two presidential families looking on. (Dwight Eisenhower was hospitalized at the time and watched on closed circuit TV.) Peale remained close with Nixon and became the president’s spiritual counselor during Watergate.

In recognition of Peale’s influence as an ambassador of encouragement, Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984. Reagan hailed Peale for devising “a philosophy of happiness.” Peale’s White House ceremony, and publication of his memoirs that same year, marked the culmination of decades that he had spent burnishing his image as the minister to whom all aspiring Americans could relate. “A crustless sandwich nowadays is more controversial than Norman Vincent Peale,”
People
magazine wrote in 1982.