School of Humans.
You know what they say, those who can't do teach, and those who can't even do.
That write self help books. That's right.
You don't have to worry about failing in your career. You can always become a life coach. I personally don't read self help books, but I do ask read it a lot of questions about my life. One of the most sold self help books of all time is Think and Grow Rich. It came out in nineteen thirty seven and has sold over a bazillion copies. The actual number we don't know, as it's likely to have been greatly exaggerated. And how many of those people who read that book
became rich, probably very few. The gist of the advice in the book is basically positive thinking.
If you can think it, you can have it.
That involves having a lot of desire for something, having faith in the process, positive self talk, imagining, intuition. If you use all of those things, you can get rich. So let's just take a moment to think and see if we become rich. Are you guys thinking? Do you guys have more money now? I don't think I do.
Oh well.
And even though most of its ideas are garbled, bullshit and relatively ineffective. Think and Grow Rich is considered one of the most influential books in the self help genre. And the guy who wrote this book was named Napoleon Hill. And if you can believe it, Napoleon was top tier American filth. He was a scammer, a cheater, temporarily part of a cult, you know, definitely someone I would like
to take advice from. So let's get out of this self help section and just look at Napoleon Hill's life and see what lessons he can teach us on how to live.
Cue the theme music.
This is American filth and I'm Gabby Watts. Every week I tell you a filthy story from American history. This week's episode self help con Man. So here's something you might be dealing with that might make you turn to self help. This is a question. Are you struggling with getting people to take you seriously? Well, looking at Napoleon Hill's life, you can follow this one simple step to
change that lie. That's right, Make stuff up about yourself to make you seem more serious, more elite, more deserving of sympathy, more interesting, more important, more worth someone's time. Why just be yourself. That's embarrassing and won't get you anywhere. So Napoleon Hill was born in eighteen eighty three in Virginia, and really he was born Oliver Napoleon Hill. He started going by Napoleon later in life. Napoleon described his family
as three generations of quote, ignorance, illiteracy, and poverty. And who can't empathize or sympathize with a woe as me tale. Someone who came from such a dire and tough background definitely deserves to be taken seriously.
And you see here is where Napoleon Hill did something very important.
He lied because the Hill family was not ignorant, illiterate, or that poor. The family was actually pretty well educated. Like his grandfather was a printer, and if I'm being honest, it'd be really hard to be.
A printer if you were illiterate.
Napoleon's dad was a dentist. Granted he was an illegal dentist. He didn't have a license, but he eventually got one at the age of forty after authorities were like, hey, we're gonna arrest.
You unless you become legit.
And who knows, maybe it's because of this dentistry deception that Napoleon Hill himself got into scamming later in his life.
Dads teach all the good lessons.
Napoleon's mom died when he was around nine years old, which that it's sad and can you know, cause some trauma.
But it seems that his stepmom was a very positive force.
In his life. She was like, hey, Napoleon, you need to get your act together. You need to go to school, you need to go to church. And she also bought him a typewriter. She was like, Napoleon, if you can write, the world is your oyster. So clearly Napoleon's family wasn't ignorant, illiterate, or really in poverty. They were actually kind of well off, supportive, and one of the best for him. But that's not an interesting story. That doesn't capture the American dream where
you start from the bottom and end up at the top. Napoleon, he was in the middle. That's not compelling. I'm not going to take that seriously. The only self help writer we're going to take seriously is one who has struggled and persevered. So anyway, if you want people to take you more seriously, just lie about who you are and where you come from. Another thing you can do to be taken seriously is to be in the right place at the right time and cover up a murder. Here's
what happened. Right after college. Napoleon got a job working as the assistant to a lawyer, and this lawyer owned some coal mines. One night, the manager of the coal mine got drunk and shot a black bell hop allegedly accidentally. Napoleon's boss was out of town, so Napoleon went to the scene of the crime and it is like, I'm going to take responsibility for this situation, and I'm going to cover up the murder so that nobody, including my boss,
will look bad. And then when his boss came back, Napoleon was like, hey, I covered up this murder for you. Nobody knows about it. It's totally chilling cool. And his boss was like, oh my god, that's such great work. I'm going to promote you. So Napoleon took that drunk guy's job and became the manager of a coal mine. At this point, he was only nineteen years old. But unfortunately for Napoleon, he had a huge head, huge ego, and being the manager of a coal mine was still
not good enough for him. And that leads us to another self help question, how can I make a lot of money without actually having a job.
Well, as Napoleon Hill's life will show us.
You should probably just get a job. Because he started a lot of schemes, a lot of scams that failed. But Napoleon Hill, he thought he was destined for great things in his life, so he wasn't just going to be a low life employee. He wanted to own a business, be rich, be renowned. So what he did was moved to Mobile, Alabama in nineteen oh seven, because we all know that Alabama is the best place to make money.
Everyone's always like, if you want to be famous, if you want to be rich, if you want to be notable, you got to move down to Mobile, Alabama. What he was doing down there is he developed a scheme. He was buying lumber on credit and then he would sell it to other people at a reduced rate and then just not pay back his credit. The people buying the lumber from him were like, Wow, this is a great deal. Meanwhile, the people he had bought the lumber from were like, hey,
you need to pay us back. But unfortunately for Napoleon Hill, his scheme did not work out. Eventually a bunch of people were after him. He was bankrupt. He was also facing mail fraud charges. He had to pay back his creditors, but instead of doing that, he fled.
But you guys know what they say.
If you can do mail fraud and mobile Alabama, you can do it anywhere. It's unclear how he evaded authorities and his creditors, but by nineteen oh eight he was living in Washington, d c. And this is officially when he changed his name to Napoleon Hill instead of Oliver. Sure, he might say it was an esthetic change, you know, he was trying to be a new person, but it was probably a way to deceive the law so they wouldn't find him and throw him in prison.
When he got to DC, he picked.
Up his typewriter and started writing articles about successful people.
But unfortunately he wasn't making enough money.
So he was like, I guess I got to do another scheme because having a normal job is out of the question.
This time, he started a scam in.
The field of education, which he would do time and time again throughout his life. What he did is he started this education program where people were learning how to repair cars. But really what was happening is he was just using these people to assemble and repair cars and not pay them because look, they're learning, it's education. It was like an unpaid internship, and Napoleon got all of the profits from their labor. But unfortunately this scheme did
not last long, so he pivoted. He was like, instead of doing that where I get people to assemble cars, what I'm going to do is I'm going to promise students that I'm going to teach them how.
To sell cars.
But really what happened is that he set it up kind of like a multi level marketing scheme where he got people to sign up and then got those people to get other people to sign up, but they didn't ever actually learn anything, and Napoleon again got all of their money.
Through these schemes.
Again, people were accusing him of fraud, and so he was like, no, what I'm going to do now, I'm going to move to Chicago. When he got to Chicago, he did try to do a legal business. He and a couple partners opened a candy store, but very quickly after starting that business, his partners were like, Hey, get the fuck out of this business. You're so annoying and you don't know how to do anything. I imagine Napoleon
was also trying to scam them in some way. Yeah, that's conjecture, but I feel like it's kind of evidence based based on his past behavior. Isn't this someone you really want to take advice from? Good thing he got into self help because if he didn't get into self help, he kind of has the qualifications of being the president of the United States, get it, because Trump's also a con artist. Just kidding, guys, this is a bipartisan podcast.
We have no opinions on it.
So after the candy shot failed, he went back to his education model. Throughout these years of scheming and planning, something he is good at is marketing himself. He's good at convincing people he's legit when he's not. And so he was like, who else does that?
Oh?
People in advertising. So he started an institute of advertising where he was like, I'm going to teach people how to be confident and sell stuff, Like, yeah, I could see.
How you could make money off of that.
People love a nice little lecture about how to believe in themselves. But of course Napoleon had a scheme behind this.
As well.
What he did at the institute is that he valued it at one hundred thousand dollars and then got the students to buy stocks. But the thing is the school was actually only valued at twelve hundred dollars, and then he just kept all of that money. It's honestly insane how many schemes he had. It's just like bruh, Like can't you just write or pull down a job or something.
It's really insane because over the next few years he did even more fraudulent advertising and committed mail fraud and just did all sorts of terrible things.
Like he started a charity where he said, oh.
If you donate to it, we'll give that money to veterans, but really he just took all that money and put it in oil stocks. Then he had another charity where he said, oh, if you give me money, I'm going to send educational supplies to people in prison. But can you believe it, he was just pocketing that money for himself. And even as he did all these scams and all
these schemes, he never had that much money. And I know, I keep saying the thing of like, oh, he's a just good job, which sounds very boomer of me, but still like these scams weren't working out for him. He'd get the money, then he'd lose it, or he'd have to pay legal fees, and he had to travel a lot. But I guess he thought one day, through one of these schemes, he'd make.
It big, so it'd all be worth it.
As napoy and Hill was running amuck doing all of these scams and schemes, he was still manufacturing an identity to make himself look more notable throughout these couple decades after he went to college to before he became a successful self help writer.
Said that he met all.
Sorts of rich and talented people, who in turn thought he was also a rich and talented person. Unfortunately for him, there is absolutely no proof that he met any of these people, according to Napoleon Hill, though he says, oh, well, all the records of me meeting these people unfortunately got burned up in this fire.
Ugh, that's so annoying. Sorry, I can't prove it, but I did meet these people.
The only evidence that he met a famous person was there's a photograph of him and Thomas Edison. Edison looks annoyed Napoleon Hill is standing next to him, awkwardly close, just staring at him. And apparently this photo was taken after Napoleon had given Thomas Edison an award, an award that Napoleon had created through his magazine, and that was used as an excuse for him to meet people, being like, oh, hello, famous person, here's an award I'm giving you. According to
some newspaper reports, Thomas Edison declined the award. Another person that Napoleon Hill claimed to meet was none other than President Woodrow Wilson, and they met during World War One. Napoleon claimed that Woodrow Wilson had reached out to him to get his perspective and his advice on the war, and also to go sign the armistice with Germany. Yes, apparently Napoleon Hill is so notable that Woodrow Wilson was like, I need you to finish this war.
Isn't that believable? Later on, Napoleon.
Hill also claimed that he had met FDR and he said it was actually himself who had come up with the iconic phrase the only thing we have to fear a spear itself. Unfortunately for Napoleon, though the White House has explicitly said that there are no records at all of Napoleon Hill ever meeting FDR, Woodrow Wilson or any president.
At this point, I think we can learn a lesson from Napoleon Hill, which is, if you're trying to make up fun tidbits about your life, maybe don't go so far as to say that you're the advisor to the president. You know, if you want to stay believable, maybe just have some like lower tier people that you know, because at this point he does kind of sound like a lunatic. But it wasn't his fictitious meeting with Woodrow Wilson or
FDR that was central to Napoleon Hill's life. No, it was in nineteen oh eight, right after he had fled Alabama. That's when he claimed he met Andrew Carnegie, who at
the time was the richest man in the world. And it was this alleged conversation with Andrew Carnegie that would lead to his self help rise to fame because, according to Napoleon Hill, Andrew Carnegie gave him a lot of advice on how to think and how to get rich, and then also introduce Napoleon to all these other successful people who he interviewed so he could write his book, Think and Grow Rich. But again, there is no evidence
that this conversation with Andrew Carnegie ever happened. You know, Napoleon would say it's because all of the documents got burnt up in that fire, and Carnegie would say it's because he has no idea who the hell that guy is. But before we get to his breakthrough, here's another question you might consult to self help book for how can I have a successful marriage? Well, let's look at Napoleon
Hill's life once again to answer this question. And if we do that, it looks like the answer is you can't. It is literally impossible to have a successful marriage. Most official Napoleon Hill biographers basically the Napole Hill simps. They say that he was married three times, but actually it was probably more like five.
The first time he.
Got married was when he was fifteen. He married another teenager who had accused him of fathering her child. But after they got married, she was like, oh, actually, I'm just kidding. That didn't happen. This is someone else's kid, So the marriage was a nult. The next marriage was to this woman named Edith Whitman. They got married in nineteen oh three. In this relationship, Napoleon was super abusive and a huge pile of garbage.
They had a daughter together, and oh boy, was he a bad dad.
On several occasions, he threw his toddler daughter to the floor and hit Edith, even choking her. There was also a time when he took their daughter away from Edith and said she couldn't have her back. Edith eventually was able to get her daughter back and filed for divorce. This happened when Napoleon was in Alabama doing his lumber schemes, and while he was down there, he started visiting houses
of ill repute aka cornicating with prostitutes. In nineteen oh a, when Edith filed her divorce, Napoleon never showed up in court, effectively abandoning his wife and his daughter, probably for the best, and starting his new life in DC as Napoleon the writer who was single, but don't worry. With his lies and deceit, he was quickly able to find another wife.
He married this lady named Florence Elizabeth Horner in nineteen ten, and by lady, I mean they met when she was still in high school and they got married in a rush literally three months after they met. Over the course of their marriage, they had three sons. One of the kids was born deaf. Napoleon believed he could fix this, and so he never allowed his son to learn sign language and was like, Hey, even though he's deaf, we're going to be able to teach him how to hear
and how to speak. Yes, you can just will someone to start hearing, because that's the power of positive thinking. Unfortunately, his son remained deaf. His wife, Florence, came from a well off family, and early in their marriage her family actually invested in several of his schemes, but over time they realized how much of a con man he was and how he was just losing and wasting all of their money. For most of their marriage, Florence and Napoleon
lived separately. Napoleon was always off doing his scams, and she would say with her family in West Virginia. He would only visit her and his kids when he wanted money, which her family was more and more hesitant to give him because they were sick of his shit. But in nineteen twenty eight, it seemed that everything was going to turn around because Napoleon Hill finally found the publisher. We'll
be right back after these soothing advertisements. So Napoleon Hill, while he'd been doing his schemes and his scams and all that jazz he was writing, he had magazines. He wrote those profiles about inspirational successful people. During this time he had also written an eight volume work called The.
Law of Success.
In it, he described fifteen principles of success. A definite chief aim, self confidence, habit of saving, initiative, and leadership. Imagination. Of those things, he most definitely had imagination. But it was a long road to publishing, first of all, because these books that he wrote are actually quite bad. They're pretty messy, they don't make that much sense. But Napoleon said he did have an interested publisher. His name was Donald Mellett, and he was a newspaper publisher in Ohio.
Mellett was known for going after game and also police corruption, and according to Napoleon, he was very interested in publishing self help books. However, right before the contract was supposed to be signed, right before Napoleon was supposed to get his cash to publish the books, Mellet was murdered, perhaps by some gang members or even by some police officers, Napoleon was convinced that he was next. Obviously he was friends with Mellet, so the gangs are going to come
after him because he's so important. The gangs don't want those self help volumes coming out, so Napoleon went into hiding because he was for sure a target. Well, Napoleon very quickly came out of hiding, and he was bereft because he didn't have a publisher.
He had burned most.
Of the bridges in his life and so he was reduced to cold calling. But he did find this one publisher who was really into self help, who was going to self help Napoleon, and by that I mean publish his freakin' books. The publisher was Andrew Pelton. He loved a self help which was really having a moment in the nineteen twenties, and so Napoleon cold called him, was like, hey, I have this series of books that I wrote about self confidence and how to be successful.
I think you might like them.
Andrew Pelton had no idea who he was, but agreed to me with him in Philadelphia. Now, Napoleon, who at the time was extremely broke estranged from his family, he was like, I need to look like I'm rich and successful so that I can get this guy to publish these books about being successful. So what he did is he approached one of Florence's brothers and was like, can you give me some money? And he was like, okay, fine,
go away now. And so Napoleon got a swanky hotel room in Philadelphia and kept acting like he was the richest guy ever. He was overtipping everybody. He would just pull out a roll of cash, being like, look, I mean, I'm the richest, most successful guy in the world. That's why I wrote these books about success. But he tricked Pelton. Pelton's all of that and was like, damn, this guy knows what he's talking about. I better publish his eight volume work, The Law of Success. And weirdly enough, the
book was a whopping success. Napoleon had finally done it. He was making something that made money and wasn't completely a scam. I mean, the advice was a scam because he didn't know what he was talking about, obviously, but the royalty started coming in. He was making twenty five hundred dollars a month. At this point, he and Florence and his three sons rekindled their family Napoleon bought a big house and property in the Catskills.
He bought a rolls Royce. He was living large so.
Charge that it was more than he was making off of the books. But unfortunately, not only was Napoleon Hill spending too much money, it was nineteen twenty nine and the stock market crashed and Napoleon Hill was completely broke again and so again he had to plead with his wife to give him some money from her family. They lost the house she and her family had to pay
for all of their expenses. In the early thirties, he published another book that was a commercial failure, so he had to go back to scheming and scamming, but nothing paid off, so in nineteen thirty five he and Florence got divorced because he was a freaking loser who had scammed her family and had abandoned his wife and his kids, only appearing when he needed money. But two years later
Napoleon Hill wrote his Open Think and Grow Rich. The reason this book was more successful than The Laws of Success is because he.
Didn't really write it.
He had a lot of the ideas behind it, but it was actually his new wife, a twenty nine year old named Rosalie Beelnd, who can be credited for a lot of the book's success. They met soon after his divorce from Florence. She was twenty nine years old, he was fifty three. She went to one of his lectures and afterwards talked to him for five hours, and then within forty eight hours of them knowing each other, they
got engaged. But Napoleon and Rosalie they didn't have any money, So what ended up happening is they moved in with one of Napoleon's sons who was living in a small apartment in New York City. The apartment was cramped and his son's wife hated him and Rosalie. The son's wife moved out and eventually divorced the Sun. The Sun also fled the apartment and left his dad three hundred dollars
because he had no other money. But Rosalie and Napoleon were undeterred by being pieces of shit, so they started on a book. Rosa typed up and significantly edited the book to make sense, because that was one of the main issues with Napoleon's writing.
It wasn't good or coherent.
They approached Pelton with the book and he was like, ah, it's the Great Depression.
People aren't really like buying books right now.
Also, the self help movement kind of feels at its end. But Napoleon pressed him and he did it, and oh boy, think and grow rich started flying off the shelves. One reason is, you know, yes, this was during the depression. People didn't have that much money to spend, but they were obviously also eager to figure out how to make money, and voila a solution. They could just think and grow rich. Now, at this point, Napoleon and Rosalie became super rich.
They made a lot of money.
And again, while they made money, Napoleon was good at spending more than he ever made. They bought a mansion in Florida, bought all the newest luxuries, but they never did for pay Napoleon's son back the three hundred dollars.
What a great guy.
Because they were spending so much money though it was running out, and a couple of years they were like, oh no, we need even more money now to maintain our lavish lifestyle in this mansion in Florida. So they decided to do this weird media stunt to get more attention.
They were interviewed by a newspaper, and they told the paper that they were going to adopt fifteen children and raise them away from the corruption of the world and make them perfect beings by showing them the right way to think, so they could get rich and be great, to basically be angels on earth. They're like, yeah, if we raise them in isolation, they're going to be awesome. I'm going to show them how to think and be powerful.
And yes, this sounds absolutely bonkers. And they never did end up adopting any children, but some friends of the Hills, who were the leaders of a religious cult, actually did do something like this. They wanted to raise a baby who had such extraordinary power of thinking that the baby would become immortal.
Yep, an immortal.
Baby just through positive thinking. Well I'm going to talk about that next week.
Okay.
Back to Napoleon and Rosalie. So while their finances were dwindling, Rosalie decided to write a book of her own. She called it How to Attract Men and Money. Napoleon wasn't ashamed of this. He was like, Yeah, that's awesome that she's writing that, and he actually contributed a bit to the book.
He was like, I scheme she schemes.
We all scheme, and that's fine. But for Napoleon, he's about to be out schemed. Perhaps he met his match in Rosa Lee, because before they had gotten married, they signed a prenup that said all the royalties from the book would go to Rosa Lee. At the time, Napoleon was like, yeah, that makes sense, because my ex wife and kids they want my money. And also all these people who have tried to sue me for my scams they want my money. So if Rosa Lee has the money,
it's not my money, so they can't take it. And that will be fine because we're married, we're happy. But after Rosalie published her book, she got a divorce from Napoleon.
She suspected that.
He had been fraternizing with women of ill repute, which she was probably correct, and so what she did is she fled their Florida home and sold off all of his stuff and the divorce. With that prenup, she took all of his money, and then what she did is she married her divorce lawyer. Honestly, it's pretty hard to feel bad for Napoleon, but it really does seem that Napoleon and Rosalie were the perfect match, both deceitful pieces
as shit. So by nineteen forty Napoleon was broke and alone again, and after thinking grow rich his big smash, he never wrote another hit. He wrote one book that he claimed Mahatma Gandhi really liked, and he was like, obviously, now I'm going to go to India and do a tour. I'm so important over there. Gandhi loves me. He never did that, nor did Gandhi ever say that. But he got married again in nineteen forty three to a woman named Annie Lou Norman.
His fifth wife.
She was actually his landlady, and I suppose he seduced her by being like, wow, I tore around, I give lectures, I write in a magazine.
I'm so notable. Look at these books that I've written.
And after they got married, for reasons unknown really, they moved to California, and there Napoleon started scamming again.
In California, though his.
Schemes weren't working, so he went out to this small town in Missouri being like, I'm gonna teach you guys how to be successful again, another education scam, and they were all like, you're full of shit, Go away. They saw him as a fraud pretty quickly, and that seemed to be happening.
At this point.
Napoleon was losing his touch. He wasn't able to trick people as easily. His last big scheme was he teamed up with this guy who worked in insurance to create a magazine called Success Unlimited.
Not only was it a magazine, it.
Also sold courses and tools for success. And they said it was a charity because Napoleon would be lecturing the poor, but really it was just a business and if you can believe it, this one also didn't work. The insurance guy went on to make millions of dollars doing other stuff, but Napoleon was left in the dust with hardly any money, and his health was failing rapidly. He died in nineteen seventy.
He himself was pretty poor, but while he'd been alive, he'd started the Napoleon Hill Foundation, which held the rights to his books and what little royalties he had left. And when he died, his wife, Annie Lou sued for control of the rights to his books, and she was able to scrape away as much money as she could
from the Napoleon Hill Foundation. It's funny because When you look at most of the stuff about Napoleon Hill online, a lot of it's from the Napoleon Hill Foundation, who have published biographies about him, talking about how amazing he was, how shrewd he was, how he was a great businessman. But if you look just slightly below the surface, as we have in this episode, you'll see that he really
didn't seem to have any skills. He did a lot of schemes and really none of them were successful for very long, and he seemed like an all around not nice person. But a lot of people today do cite Napoleon Hill as an influence, including this guy named Norman Vincent Peel who was a pastor he loved Napoleon Hill, and guests who grew up in his church, Donald Trump. In every episode of American Filth, we learn a lesson.
I think the lesson we learn here is we can all be successful self help book writers, even if we have nothing to share. Just make it up, Just think and write a self help book. Cue the credits. American Field is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcast. This episode was written and produced and hosted by me Gabby Wats. Our theme song is by Jesse Niswanger. Our executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, and Brandon Barr.
You can follow along with a show on Instagram at American Filth Pod, and also be sure to leave us a review some stars, some online criticisms or comments. Share the pod far and Why.
I'll talk to you guys next time.
Bye, School of Humans.