The cult of personality

How confidence turned into arrogance.

It’s no accident that the television series ‘Mad Men’ was conceived and ran successfully for eight years in America, winning five Golden Globes. This is the land that coined lines like:

Strangers’ eye, keen and critical.

Can you meet them proudly—confidently—without fear?

Print ad for soap circa 1922.

The show is a dramatized version of one of New York’s most prestigious ad agencies at the beginning of the 1960s. It focuses on one of the firm’s most mysterious but extremely talented ad executives—Don Draper.

More than 50 years earlier, a skinny, nonathletic, and insecure high school student from Harmony Church—a small town about a hundred miles from Kansas City in Missouri—impressed by the value of public speaking, moved to New York.

His first class at a YMCA night school on 125th street is $2 per session. The Y’s director refuses to pay that kind of money, thinking the topic won’t generate much interest.

Carnegie’s trigger was a visiting Chautauqua speaker based in New York. The speaker was part of an adult education movement quite popular throughout rural America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His supremely relatable rags-to-riches tale captured the then young boy’s imagination.

Post college coincided with the years corporate America was booming—ford, J.C. Penney, Woolworth, and Sears Roebuck were household names.

Still fairly poor, but young and ambitious Carnegie joined the ranks of salesmen— social operators. They were people “with a ready smile, a masterful handshake, and the ability to get along with colleagues while simultaneously outshining them.”