Norman Vincent Peale: Positively 90

When Norman Vincent Peale introduced the world to “The Power of Positive Thinking” 36 years ago, his idea that faith in oneself could produce miracles was routinely written off as Pollyanna poppycock. As Peale recalls, fellow clergymen accused him of selling out theology and writing “a crass dissertation on how to make a buck” while the psychological community dismissed his work as too simplistic.

Today, at age 90, Peale has not only outlived most of his critics, he has outloved them, his friends claim.

Clearly, the world has loved him back. Peale’s notions have become so accepted by society that a secular version of them is currently being taught in numerous grade schools. What’s more, his seminal book, “The Power of Positive Thinking,” has now sold more than 15 million copies in 42 languages and is ranked as the all-time best-selling work of nonfiction by a single author, beat only by the multi-authored Bible.

Absorbed Into the Mainstream

In fact, Peale’s deceptively simple notion that you are whatever you think you are has been so absorbed into the mainstream that many positive thinkers have moved beyond it to embrace meditation, the possibility of past lives and the healing properties of crystals.

But Peale, whose work is credited by some as laying the foundation for the New Age and human potential movements, admits that he hasn’t any idea what the New Age is.

“I don’t know much about that New Age business,” he said, sitting in his office at the Foundation for Christian Living in Pawling, N.Y., 60 miles north of Manhattan. “I have received critical letters that I belong to the New Age. I’ve got to look into it and see what it is. But anything that develops legitimate, positive thinking principles, I’m for it.”

Despite such letters, Peale has noticed that criticism of his work has markedly eased up in recent years. “That worries me,” he mused, the twinkle in his eyes reading more like 19 than 90. “I used to get criticized a lot more and I don’t get criticized as much now. It makes me feel like I’m slipping.”

Psychologist/minister J. Harold Ellens, who has written on Peale for the Baker Encyclopedia of Psychology, remembers that Peale’s work was initially scorned by ministers and therapists alike.

“These people misunderstood him,” said Ellens, founder/editor of the Journal of Psychology and Christianity. “It is a very significant fact that Dr. Peale was three-quarters of a century ahead of the times with his emphasis on the relationship between psychology and religious experience. He saw psychology and Christian experience as very compatible . . . he had the courage to stand pat on this position in spite of the opposition of the entire Christian church for nearly half a century. His genius was that he . . . translated psycho-theology into the language of the people.”

And Ellens suspects the world is just now catching up with the man called “the minister to millions.”

If Peale hasn’t had time to check out the New Age variations on positivism, it’s not because he’s been taking it easy.

Last year Peale’s 35th book, “The Power of Ethical Management” (co-authored with Kenneth Blanchard), made the best-seller lists and he has yet another book scheduled for publication this fall.

In addition, Peale and his wife, Ruth, traveled about 98,000 miles in 1987, as he delivered more than 300 speeches all over the world, said his associate Eric Fellman. Peale also supervised 400 employees at his foundation, which publishes Guideposts magazine, with 4.6 million paid subscribers. And he found time to take his family on a safari in West Africa, though he vows never to do it again.

Meanwhile, what many say may be Peale’s greatest legacy, his “Power of Positive Students” program, was introduced in 400 West Virginia grade schools this year and is planned for use in 30 other states.

But recently, at Manhattan’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, Peale took some time just to celebrate. His longtime friends Donald and Ivana Trump, Phyllis George and John Y. Brown and Armand Hammer threw him a black-tie 90th birthday bash that doubled as a fund-raiser for his foundation.

Peale may have a hearing aid in each ear, thinning white hair and a few age spots dotting his lightly wrinkled pink skin. But as he gingerly worked a room packed with well-wishers, his joy, enthusiasm and physical vigor were obvious.

His posture remains erect. He still moves at a good clip. And he speaks with a loud, raspy, excited voice. He even enjoyed posing for paparazzi with friends such as Mariette Hartley, Art Linkletter and former Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole.

Peale Stole the Show

Though singer Glen Campbell performed at the celebration and stars from government, business and the arts offered sincere testimonials, it was Peale himself who stole the show (though he accused his wife, Ruth, of doing the same).

Amazingly, he did it with a few nuggets of negative thinking that cracked up the entire audience. Peale claims he hates being stuck on pedestals so he did his best to jump off any that were erected that night. Of industrialist Armand Hammer, who co-chaired the party but could not be present, he said, “He’s 10 days older than I am. I looked at him the other day and he walks like an old man! And I’m sure he said I’m not so hot myself.”

Then, after predicting Donald Trump would become “the greatest builder of our time--he’s a very ingenious man,” Peale added, “Ivana Trump is pretty much the brains of the family.”

Of course, Peale also trashed himself, recalling the trouble he used to get into as a preacher’s son in southern Ohio.

“You know something, I’ve been sitting here tonight thinking . . . about the Carter brothers,” he told the sellout crowd in the Waldorf ballroom.

The brothers, Peale said, were twin bachelors who ran a grocery store in Bellefontaine, Ohio, a town of about 10,000 residents.

“They were what we used to call . . . sourpusses,” he continued, saying that the brothers complained to his father about the scandalous speed (30 m.p.h.) he drove the family car, about his smoking corn-silk cigarettes and about his tipping over outhouses on Halloween.

“What I’ve been thinking about tonight is I haven’t the slightest idea where the Carter brothers are,” Peale said. “Whether they’re up here or down there, I hope they’ve heard what goes on here tonight.”

Then Peale got a little inspirational, while he continued to remind the crowd of his imperfections. He told of the days when he was a “shy, bashful and reticent” student at Ohio Wesleyan University, suffering from a serious inferiority complex.

Ben Arneson, an economics professor, asked him to stay after class one day. “When I call on you to talk you mumble and shift from one foot to another and you get red in the face. What’s wrong with you?” Peale remembered Arneson saying.

The professor, who told Peale that he, too, had once suffered from an inferiority complex, advised him to “ask the Lord to help you and believe he is helping you.”

So Peale began to pray: “Dear Lord, you can take a man and make him sober, you can take a thief and make him an honest man. Can’t you take a mixed-up guy like I am and make him normal?”

Felt Strangely Peaceful

Peale expected a flamboyant miracle but instead “felt strangely peaceful.” Shortly thereafter, other professors turned him on to the works of such classic positive thinkers as William James, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Marcus Aurelius. Roman emperor/philosopher Aurelius, said Peale, taught that “we become as our thoughts are usually and habitually.” And Peale told the audience he still has his copy of “The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius” and rereads it two or three times a year.

Peale, who worked briefly as a newspaperman before becoming a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church, informed the crowd that he intended to be back for his 100th birthday celebration and perhaps others. And prior to his speech, Ruth Stafford Peale, his wife of 57 years, also invited the crowd to her husband’s 100th birthday party.

Then she said with a knowing wink, “I’ve talked altogether too long. But if he gets started, I never have a chance.”

The day after the gala, Peale and his wife were in Pawling for more birthday celebrations and to cut the ribbon on a new multimillion-dollar addition to the Foundation for Christian Living.

After the ceremonies, the world’s most famous positive thinker relaxed in his office and discussed his periodic displays of negative thinking. He was pondering, in particular, the crack he made about Armand Hammer the night before. Peale said he had asked his friend Art Linkletter what he thought Hammer might think, and then concluded, “He (Hammer) has been my friend a long time. I think he’ll forgive me.”

It wasn’t the first time Peale had regretted a negative public statement. He said he still ranks the position he took on John F. Kennedy’s presidency as “the dumbest thing I ever did.” (In 1960, Peale joined a group of Protestant clergymen who suggested that Kennedy’s Catholicism could jeopardize the separation of church and state.)

“There’s a sequel to that story,” Peale offered. “I later became very friendly with Bobby Kennedy and I told him one time that that was the dumbest thing I’d ever done. He said to me, ‘I could fill a book with the dumb things I have done.’ ”

And Peale’s smartest accomplishment?

“The smartest thing I ever did, after finding the Lord, was finding this lady,” Peale said, gesturing to his wife, Ruth. “That was a gift of God.

“She’s a natural-born positive thinker. I had to fight my way to positive thinking. She’s also a natural-born businesswoman. She thinks up most of these things (done by Peale and his assorted enterprises). She’s also the best cook in the state of New York. She doesn’t cook gourmet food. I can’t abide gourmet cooking. They don’t cook the vegetables right.”

While that slight bit of negativism didn’t bother Ruth Peale, other statements from her husband sometimes do and she has never hidden it.

“I have to exert a great deal of patience when Norman thinks negatively. Oh, I know, he preaches about it. And writes about it. I practice it,” she reportedly told a group of clergymen and their wives in 1984.

Realistic or Negative?

Sitting next to her husband’s desk in Pawling this day, she elaborated: “I sometimes think he doesn’t realize that certain statements he makes might be termed negative. He calls them realistic. I call them negative.”

But Peale has, in fact, mellowed on many of his formerly negative views.

He was once quoted in the New York Times, for instance, as saying that newspapers contain too much unpleasant news, which resulted in readers’ developing “a negatively skewed view or perception of America.”

Now, however, he could not remember making the statement and declared, “I repudiate that. I think for the most part, the media’s made up of bright, honest-intentioned people and the tendency to editorialize in columns is less than what it used to be. . . . News is a departure from the norm. If the day comes when the headlines read, ‘Found: A Good Man,’ we’d be in trouble.”

Indeed, Peale said he has learned to put all forms of negativity to positive use, having had considerable practice in the days when he himself received so much criticism. “The thing to do is to consider the criticism and ask yourself if it’s valid. And if it’s valid, ask yourself if you’re willing to learn from it,” he advised. Invalid attacks, he added, should simply be dumped in the wastebasket.

As for the attacks on the high-living habits of some other well-known ministers lately, Peale also offered a hopeful note: “It saddens me. But let’s take a positive view. Ninety-nine and four-tenths percent of ministers are Godly, self-sacrificing people.”

Receive No Salaries

(According to a Foundation for Christian Living executive who asked not to be named, Peale and his wife receive no salaries from the foundation and even insist on buying their own car. “He’s rigid about not being ostentatious,” the executive said.)

Though Peale has no use for flamboyance and high living, he is all for having fun and continues to preach a gospel of joyfulness wherever he goes.

Asked what is the most fun thing he does, he responded instantly, saying it’s “speaking to a crowd of really motivated, positive-thinking young people, especially salesmen. I just revel in that. Outside of that, it’s swimming or hiking over these hills.”

How does he find time to exercise, to write best-selling books, to oversee new projects and to lecture relentlessly?

Peale had yet another slightly negative remark to explain how he gets everything done.

“I feel,” he said, “that I am doing the Lord’s work in my own bumbling, stumbling way.”