Psychology of Leadership

Front matter

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Foreword

I have been asked, on many occasions, by many individuals, to write this book, and the appreciative response accorded its contents, when presented in the form of lectures in schools and conferences, encourages me to hope that these laws of leadership may attain a wider usefulness in this printed form.

The book is an attempt to present the assured results of scientific psychology briefly, clearly, dynamically, and inspirationally, for the assistance of maturer young people and those adults who are not too old or too wise to learn and to grow, and it is hoped that the personal note so frequently struck in these pages will serve to enhance the practical value of their intimate messages.

If somebody had done for me, twenty-five years ago, what I, in this book, have tried to do for others, I think I should have been deeply grateful, and that I should have been saved from many mistakes and failures.

Henry Epwarp TRALLE.

New York City, February 2, 1925.

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Contents

CHAPTER From WHENCE LEADERS

Il Instincts AnD INTELLIGENCE III Perrsonauiry Factors .

IV Svusconscious RESOURCES .

Chapter I From Whence Leaders

A leader is an earthly star. He is the one human being in a hundred who shines out through the insufficient luminosity of human mediocrity and lights up the dark places of social obsecurity.

Leaders are the illuminators of the world. Sometimes we call them geniuses, though the word ‘‘geniuses’’ usually is reserved for the lead- ‘ ers of the leaders, the brightest of the earthly stars.

I shall hang what I have to say about geniuses upon the five poetic pegs of some lines I wrote a few years ago.

From WHeENcE GENIUSES

From whence, tell me, do geniuses spring, The ones who cause the world to swing? They come from the crowds, and not from the clouds. 3

What magic touch aroused their souls, And urged them on to worthy goals? A mother’s wise love, inspired from above.

Who fanned the spark of genius there, And made it burn so bright and fair? A teacher with skill to stir and to thrill.

How chance they to be known to fame, And called throughout the world by name? They ’ve learned how to work, and never to shirk.

How do they reach the glorious heights? How do they win the world’s great fights? Achieved through their pluck, and not any luck.

I. GENIUS IS DEMOCRATIC

From whence, tell me, do geniuses spring,

The ones who cause the world to swing?

They come from the crowds, and not from the clouds.

The world’s leaders come from the crowds, and not from the clouds. They may come from almost any home, anywhere, any time, without giving notice to anybody. Without doubt, the leaders of the next generation are very close to us now, if only we had eyes with which to see them.

Passing through a park, in a Mid-Western city, I came upon a bronze statue of heroic proportions

—a tall, gaunt, rugged figure portrayed in a long Prince Albert coat and uncreased trousers, the big feet encased in rough boots, and one big hand folded over the other—and, as I looked into that virile, serious face that seemed to have written in it the history of all the ages, I stood with uncovered head, and asked, ‘‘From whence did you come, O Statesman Genius, savior of the Union and emancipator of a race?’’

And a voice long hushed seemed to answer, ‘‘I came from the crowds, and not from the clouds.”’

““You did indeed,’’ I said, ‘‘and I once saw, on a Southern hillside, the little log cabin out of which you came.’’

Genius seems to run in some families; but, sooner or later, it seems to run out again. Why does it run out, and how did it run in, in the first place? Nobody seems to be able to answer either of these questions.

It is said that fifty members of the Bach family, in five generations, were notable musicians. How did music get into that family in the first place, and why did it get out after a while?

We need, of course, to take account of our ancestors, though some wag has said that most of the old ‘‘family trees’’ seem to be producing ‘‘nuts’’ these days. However that may be, it is well established that heredity alone cannot adequately explain genius, if we mean organic heredity, that is, all that was in the original germ plasm, not even when we take account of atavism, by which is meant the sudden appearance in a descendant of some characteristic of a remote ancestor, as when a red head suddenly bobs up, after four or five generations of black heads.

There were, in the original germ plasm which later became a human being, certain physical characteristics, as height or shortness, black hair or red hair, brown eyes or blue eyes, and a nose that turned to the right or the left or up—or that just got started and did not turn any way particularly.

Were there also, in that plasmic beginning of the genius, this leader of whom we are thinking, certain individual mental characteristics that constituted a basis for genius—musical, literary, artistic, oratorical, mechanical? J suppose nobody knows absolutely. It has been generally so held. It seems to be clearly established that it is impossible to make a musician, for instance, out of any individual selected at random. At the same time, I think it likely also, though it is not now generally so held, that there was a sufficient plasmic basis‘for genius of some sort in every normal human being, and that he may become one of the leaders among men, provided he has a favorable social heredity—home, school, and community influences.

So far as organic heredity is concerned, it may be found, when we know more about it, that any differences in bases for genius may be due not to individual differences in mental characteristics but to differences in the strength of certain instincts and in the driving power of the essential life energy.

In any case, we need to give attention both to eugenics, seeing to it that human beings are well born, and to euthenics, seeing to it that they are well environed.

Surely it is more important that we have well-born babies than it is that we have well-born chickens, pups, kittens, calves, and pigs! Some years ago, a friend of mine paid twenty thousand dollars for two pigs, on account of their eugenics, and the investment proved to be a profitable one.

We need, as a people, to take eugenics seriously, and to invest more largely with a view to a betterborn generation of human beings. It is imperative, moreover, that we make larger investments in euthenics—in educational institutions, in laws that protect childhood and youth, in wholesome recreation, in non-commercialized amusements, in socialized churches, in religious education.

It is more than probable that almost any commonwealth of the United States has in it more geniuses in possibility than have been developed in all the world in all the centuries, if only the rest of us had the prophetic insight to see there what God sees, and to codperate with Him in faith and intelligence and courage.

It would be a mistake also for any of us adults to say: ‘‘All that may be true, but what about me? Both my organic heredity and my social heredity have been wrong, and it is too late for me to hope to become a leader among men.”’

Tn the first place, the chances are that the heredities may have been better than we realize, and besides history is full of refutations of such pessimistic assumptions. Many a man has refused to be bound by his ancestors or to be thwarted by his environment. He has bound his ancestors and conquered his surroundings, building his own world from within by the creative power of personality, and has taken his place among illustrious leaders—sometimes after his hair has begun to turn gray or even to turn out. He has become an earth-born star to light the ways of men up the rugged steeps of life.

Il. THE HOME’S CONTRIBUTION

What magic touch aroused their souls, And urged them on to worthy goals? A mother’s wise love inspired from above.

It is to the home that we must turn if we would uncover the deepest secrets of genius. In the early life of every great leader, there was the potent influence of a mother or a father, or both— or some one who took the place of one or both.

Right influences in the school and community may make leadership possible despite the lack of proper home training, and sometimes in the face of bad home training, but it is only the right kind of home that can make possible the highest type of leadership.

In some cases, the home influences are so powerful that these develop exceptional leadership with little or no help from the schools.

At six years of age, Thomas A. Edison was sent to school, and always was at the foot of the class. At the end of three months, he was sent home by his teacher, with a note saying: ‘‘Keep this boy at home. He is too stupid to stay in school.’’

The mother said to herself: ‘‘My boy is not stupid. It is simply that the teacher does not understand him. I will teach him myself, and I will show the world that my son has brains enough.’’

So, during the next eight years, with love, with patience, and with intelligence, this mother gave this boy practically all the schooling he ever had. She taught him to read rapidly, with pleasure, with understanding, and with appropriation of the essential values of what he read. She taught him to think for himself.

At eleven years of age, the boy had gathered together two hundred bottles, after persuading his mother to allow him to use some shelves and a bench for a ‘‘laboratory’’; and, in order to make sure that no one would meddle with his materials, he wrote two hundred ‘‘poison’’ labels, and pasted them upon the bottles.

After a while, when he became a newsboy on a railroad, young Edison spent his spare time between ‘‘runs’’ in a library; and, not knowing what he wanted to read, he would tackle a shelf of books, no matter on what subject, and read everything that was on that shelf, and then would begin on another shelf.

One of the most successful educators in America is Angelo Patri, born in Italy, author of the book, ‘‘A Schoolmaster in the Great City,’’ in which he says: ‘‘I remember sitting with the family and the neighbors’ families about the fireplace, while Father, night after night, told us stories of the Knights of the Crusades or recounted the glories of the heroes of proud Italy. How he could tell a story! His voice was strong, and soft, and soothing, and he had just sufficient power of exaggeration to increase the attractiveness of the tale. We could see the soldiers he told us about pass before us in all their struggles and sorrows and triumphs. Back and forth he marched them into Asia Minor, across Sicily, and into the castles of France, Germany, and England. We listened eagerly and came back each night ready to be thrilled and inspired again by the spirit of the good and the great. Then came the journey over the sea, and the family with the neighbors’ families were part of the life of New York. We were Little Italy.’’

It was not only that the spiritual values of the stories got into this boy’s life and made a man of him, but that unconsciously he was being trained

FROM WHENCE LEADERS Ld in the art of story-telling, the one best method of teaching, and thus was being saved from the formalism and didacticism that afflict so many teachers and schools.

The great military hero of the Southland, Robert EH. Lee, owed his military genius to his cultured mother rather than to his warrior father, the fighting ‘‘Light-horse Harry.’’

In a Southern library, I found a Lee biography in which it is recorded that, for several years, during the boyhood of Robert, while his father was in the West Indies, seeking to regain his shattered health, this boy was with his mother, in her loneliness, for several hours each day, during which time she told him the stories of the achievements of the great men of history, and of the exploits of the military heroes of the world, including those of his own father.

Thus Robert’s mind was turned toward things military; his ambition was stirred; he was developed into one of the greatest military geniuses of alltimes. It was during those significant years with his mother that there were also developed in him, to a remarkable degree, those Christian attitudes and ideals from which he never swerved.

Many other examples might be cited. When any one of us begins to look back to find the oceasion of the best in his life, he is conscious of the ‘‘magic touch’’ of some one who lived and loved when he was a child.

If this be true, every parent should be an earnest, persevering student of child psychology, the accumulated common sense of the ages with reference to child nature and child training, the composite wisdom of many parents and teachers. Every father ought to know at least as much about the inside of his boy’s head as he knows about the inside of a Ford or a Packard. Every mother ought to know at least as much about child nature as she knows about flower nature or chicken nature.

It ought to be exceedingly encouraging to some of us who have not realized our dreams of leadership to consider that we may make it possible for sons and daughters to reach the promised lands which we ourselves have never been able to enter.

Ill. THE POWER OF THE TEACHER

Who fanned the spark of genius there, And made it burn so bright and fair? A teacher with skill to stir and to thrill.

We shall never be able properly to estimate and to appreciate the importance of the teacher in the development of leadership. The leaders are prone to assume that their leadership is due to their inherent abilities and their own efforts alone; and they do not seem to realize that their native endowments would have remained latent and inoperative, for the most part, had it not been for the teachers who ‘‘fanned the spark.”’

So quiet and non-spectacular are the learning processes, so hidden from the possessor are the springs of thought and action in the depths of consciousness, and so unobtrusive are the dynamic urges of the teaching act that the teacher never looms large in the thinking of the taught.

A reputable teacher of dramatics, after many years of success in developing actors and dramatic readers, committed suicide, in New York City, a few years ago, because his students would attribute their successes to their own brilliance and would neglect to give him his due share of credit.

In the experience of any thoughtful leader, who is given at all to intelligent self-analysis, his teachers appear larger, the farther he gets away from them.

My teacher of English in college was an enthusiastic young man, about twenty-four years of age; and he seemed to take a special interest in me, and once arranged an extra class for my benefit. He helped me to appreciate the beauties and possibilities of our language and literature, and fired me with an ambition to speak and to write clear, vigorous English.

My debt to this teacher of English, I now see, is incalculable; but at the time I took him for granted, and had no adequate appreciation of what he was doing for me.

Twenty-five years later—a few months ago— I was lecturing in the town in which this teacher is now an honored professor of English in a reputable college, and I said: ‘‘There sits in this audience, this evening, a man who, more than a quarter of a century ago, was one of my teachers in college. He taught me to love my native tongue, and to appreciate its literature. I owe to him an inestimable debt of gratitude; but never during these years, until now, I am ashamed to say, have I ever told him so. I might have found his address, and I might have written to him occasionally some words of appreciation; but I did not do it, and this tardy acknowledgment and apology comes too late to be appreciated by him. It can only embarrass him, I know, but at least I have somewhat purged my own soul; and, it may be, have helped all of us into a more adequate appreciation of our teachers.’’

There was another young professor, who got me interested in history and economics, and who taught me the uses of a library, and how to read an average of two worth-while books a week for the remainder of a lifetime—and to do this during the rest and recreational periods of a busy existence. And to this teacher I have only recently said, ‘‘Thank you.’’

There was a third teacher who taught me how to think for myself, and to let my thinking begin where the thinking of others leaves off. There are no words in our richest of languages that are strong enough to express even the smallest part of the appreciation I now have for this teacher; and it is too late even to attempt it, for his prophetic voice is no longer heard among men, and Uncle Sam’s carriers do not reach the pleasant place of his present abode.

Then there was the teacher who led me out from the musty places of metaphysical psychology, in the department of philosophy, into the broad, bright spaces of genetic, experimental, social, religious, and practical psychology. The monument I have erected to him in my heart can never be high enough to do him justice.

I must mention one other teacher, the teacher who guided my feet in the pious paths in which they had been placed by my parents, and who led me to dedicate my life to character building, putting the service motive at the front in my thinking so successfully that the spiritual entities and not mere things have been preéminent in all my experience through all the years.

Could any amount of money ever pay for the service that teacher did me in keeping me from worshiping the money gods? No, not ina trillion of eons.

Of course, not all of my teachers were good teachers. I had my share of poor ones, but I cannot hold any grudge against them, because I cannot remember any of them. I remember only my good teachers, and shall remember them with everlasting gratitude.

The real need for all of us, after we grow up, is to realize that school commencement never was intended to be the end of education, but rather the beginning of a better education, and to continue to be students all our lives, always learning from the world’s best teachers through a persistent and discriminating use of books and journals, through membership in educative organizations, and through personal contact with teachers in night schools, in summer schools, and in extension classes. We never should consider that we are educated, but always only in the process of being educated.

IV. WORK AS A FACTOR

How chance they to be known to fame, And called throughout the world by name? They ’ve learned how to work and never to shirk.

Some one said to Thomas A. Edison one day, ‘*T told a friend the other day that I consider you the greatest genius in the world.’’

‘‘Genius!’’ said Mr. Hdison. ‘‘Do you know what genius is? Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.’’

Another asked Mr. Edison, ‘‘How do you go about inventing anything?’’

He said, ‘‘I first find out all that everybody knows about the subject, collecting and reading everything concerning it, with the help of my assistants; and then I go at it, keeping my mind upon it and experimenting for from twelve to twenty hours a day, and I stick to it until I get what I want.”’

When questioned further, he said, ‘‘Before succeeding with my electric light, I tested six thousand vegetable growths for an ideal substance for use as a filament inside the glass tube. Every nook of the world was searched, and I finally got it.”’

Mr. Edison once said to a young man, ‘‘ Never look at the clock except to be sure that you get to work early enough in the morning.”’

One of the great universities tried for three years in succession to get Mr. Edison to come to the school in order to have a degree conferred upon him, and every time he would say: ‘‘Sorry I cannot come. Too busy. Keep it for later.’’ When a university in England wanted to confer a degree upon him, he said: ‘‘What! Cross the ocean for that? ‘Too busy, too busy.’’

Mr. Edison is quoted as having said, recently: “‘T do not approve of the present-day college graduate. My main objection against the college graduate is that he objects to work, especially when it is dirty work. He does not want a job with much work to it. He expects to be appointed foreman at the end of his sixth week. Most of the men working for me have never gone to college.’’

This statement raised a storm of protest on the part of the friends of the colleges, and most of us feel that it is not quite fair, for the fact is that the majority of those who are afraid of work never saw a college; but at the same time we must concur in Mr. Edison’s insistent emphasis on work as essential to success in every vocation. ‘‘Everything that is worth while,’’ as he puts it, ‘‘is hard to get. If the answer to any life problem is easy, it is wrong.’’

However large we may make plasmic genius, we must award the prize to plodding genius.

The theory and the practice of all the ages unite in saying to us that the highest innate genius must remain forever in the obscurity of the unknown unless it is discovered and brought to light and developed by hard, persistent work.

V. MORALE AN ESSENTIAL

How do they reach the glorious heights? How do they win the world’s great fights? Achieved through their pluck, and not any luck.

Every successful leader believes in himself and in his work.. He faces his task with hopeful unafraidness. He has courage, pluck, morale.

It is said, when our soldiers landed in France, to participate in the World War, a French woman of prominence, said: ‘‘I do not wish to see these soldiers. They are too few, and they are not trained; they cannot really help.’? But, because of her husband’s official position, she was present at the grand review; and afterward she said, ‘‘T had not been watching the American soldiers marching by for ten minutes until I knew I had been mistaken in my thinking about them, for I saw that their coming meant victory. It was in their faces and in their stride. They had come over to win the war. They fully expected to do it. They were on their way to Berlin.”’

Where did our soldiers get that morale that turned the tide of battle and helped the Allies to win? Certainly not in six months of intensive training alone. They had acquired it in twenty years of training in the American homes and schools, where they were taught to face courageously the facts of life and to fight cheerfully their daily battles with confidence in ultimate victory. ‘‘The mental attitude,’’ says Edgar James Swift, ‘‘ends by altering the effects themselves. If a man expects a plan to succeed, the chances are that he will carry it through; and if one anticipates failure he is quite certain to be gratified.’’

An important part of the work of the successful football coach consists in developing morale in his team. After the great victories of Princeton over Harvard and Yale, a few years ago, attention was ealled to Coach Bill Roberts’s mottoes that were hanging on the walls of his team’s club-room. One of them was: ‘‘The team which won’t be beaten can’t be beaten.”’

1. It will be my purpose, under the head of Discussion, at the close of each chapter, to provide material and suggestion for interesting and profitable class discussion or private consideration.

2. Prof. Albert Edward Wiggam, in his brilliant book, ‘‘The New Decalogue of Science,’’ greatly over-emphasizes, I think, the importance of organic heredity, as compared with social heredity, apparently not realizing that, in so doing, he is cutting the very tap-root of, educational effort. He says, for instance, that there are fifty million people in this country who have not sufficient brains to get through our certified high schools. Might he not more truthfully say that we educators and legislators have not brains enough to make adequate educational provision for them and to see that they do get through our high schools? In order to stress the importance of eugenics, he need not have belittled social heredity. In doing so he ignores established biological and psychological facts, and omits the testimony of certain reputable biologists whose experiments with the lower forms of life tend to show the power of environment upon life in its very beginnings. He defines eugenics as ‘‘a method ordained of God and seated in natural law for securing better parents for our children, in order that they may be born more richly endowed, mentally, morally and physically, for the human struggle.’? This definition is quite adequate, and all of us ought to agree that eugenics is a highly desirable method of race improvement. At the same time we ought to see that the very making of eugenics effective in practice is dependent chiefly on education, a fact which Professor Wiggam tacitly acknowledges in the very act of writing his book; for books are an important part of the method of education.

3. The physicians, Drs. Walsh and Foote, in their book, ‘‘Safeguarding Children’s Nerves,’’ say, in the chapter entitled ‘‘The Bogy of Heredity’’: ‘‘There is a tendency in present-day science to do away with even more of the bogy of heredity than ever had been the case before. We heard so much of the Jukes family and the Killikats and others, and how much heredity means in making people criminals and ne’er-dowells that we have been inclined to think that men are the representatives at best of their inheritance, the victims of heredity as it were. It was very much like the old-fashioned doctrine of predestination. But now we have come to realize that opportunity, and the individual himself, and his will power, may enable him within limits to break and change the results of heredity and start afresh to the great advantage of himself as well as of those with whom he is brought into contact. The family of Jonathan Edwards is often cited as an example of the opposite influence to that exerted in the Jukes and Killikat instances, but some one looked beyond Jonathan Edwards himself, and found that in the immediate preceding generations the family was not very exemplary or indeed of the kind that might with any assurance have been expected to have very reputable descendants.’’

4. Prof. C. M. Child, in the department of zoology in the University of Chicago, after conducting laboratory experiments with lower forms of animal life and plants for twenty years, concludes that environment shares equally with heredity from the very beginning of the life ‘‘in the development of the individual from the egg.’’ He says, ‘‘Heredity constitutes the sum total of the possibilities and environment determines which of them shall be realized in a particular individual.’’ See Prof. Child’s book, ‘‘Physiological Foundations of Behavior.’’

5. For a comprehensive statement of the views of the hereditarians, see the first chapter in ‘‘The Psychology of Childhood,’’ by Norsworthy and Whitley, and for a presentation of the other side of the question, see ‘‘Social Heredity and Social Evolution,’’ by Conn.

6. In his ‘‘Psychology of Christian Life and Behavior,’’ W. 8S. Bruce, D.D., says, ‘‘ Religious genius is just a deep sense of the Divine Presence at the moral center of a man’s nature.’’

7. For a helpful discussion of work and play, see Cabot’s ‘‘What Men Live By”’ and Patrick’s ‘‘The Psychology of Social Reconstruction.’’

8. George Albert Coe, in his ‘‘Law and Freedom in the School,’’ says: ‘‘If parental affection were wise, it would give the parent no rest until he learned what science has to say as to the nutrition and physical care of the child; as to how habits are formed, and what habits need to be formed or avoided in childhood; how to instruct children of different ages concerning sex; how to cooperate with the day school and the church school in their work of teaching; how to develop self-guidance in the child, and how at last to emancipate him from parental control. If parental affection were wise! What we see in most families is action, often genuinely planned action, based upon the fallacy that what I feel strongly must be so, especially if I act from affection. The result? Ask any teacher who knows sia mately the life of children!’’

9. Some of the more readable and helpful books for parents are the following: ‘‘Mothers’ Problems,’’ Clark; ‘‘The Healthy Child from Two to Seven,’’ McCarthy; ‘‘Fireside Child Study,’’ Du- Bois; ‘‘Child Nature and Child Nurture,’’ St. John; ‘‘The Dawn of Character,’’ Mumford; ‘““The Parent and the Child,’’ Cope; ‘‘The Psychology of Childhood,’’ Norsworthy and Whitley; ‘‘Safeguarding Children’s Nerves,’’? Walsh and Foote; ‘‘Sex Education,’? Wile; ‘‘Growth and