Culture of Character vs. Culture of Personality

Orison Swett Marden, who wrote Character: The Grandest Thing in the World in 1899, produced another popular title in 1921. It was called Masterful Personality.

Many of these guides were written for businessmen, but women were also urged to work on a mysterious quality called “fascination.” 

Coming of age in the 1920s was such a competitive business compared to what their grandmothers had experienced, warned one beauty guide, that they had to be visibly charismatic:

 “People who pass us on the street can’t know that we’re clever and charming unless we look it.”

Such advice—ostensibly meant to improve people’s lives—must have made even reasonably confident people uneasy.

Susman counted the words that appeared most frequently in the personality-driven advice manuals of the early twentieth century and compared them to the character guides of the nineteenth century.

The earlier guides emphasized attributes that anyone couldwork on improving.

But the new guides celebrated qualities that were—no matter how easy Dale Carnegie made it sound—trickier to acquire.

Either you embodied these qualities or you didn’t.

It was no coincidence that in the 1920s and the 1930s, Americans became obsessed with movie stars. Who better than a matinee idol to model personal magnetism?

From: 

"Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking" by Susan Cain.