Charles Haanel the Businessman: His St. Louis Career

Before he was an author, Charles Haanel was a St. Louis businessman. He was in his mid-forties when he began issuing The Master Key System around 1912, and by then he had spent many years in commerce, first as an employee and then as a promoter and president of companies. That career explains a good deal about the course: its steady talk of attainment, its examples drawn from finance, and the way it was sold.

This page sets out what the record supports. The main source is a short profile printed in his lifetime, and the record beyond it is thin. Where we could not confirm something, we say so.

The main source

Almost everything known about Haanel's business life before 1912 comes from one place: a biographical sketch in Walter B. Stevens's St. Louis, the Fourth City, 1764 to 1909, Volume 3, published in 1909. We read it in a public domain scan. It is about a page long, and it is the only detailed account written while Haanel was active in business.

It should be read with care. City histories of that era often carried flattering profiles of local businessmen, and this one is no exception. It calls Haanel "in every sense of the word a self-made man" and closes with a paragraph of praise for his "laudable ambition." The names, dates and titles in it are useful. The praise is part of the genre.

Office boy to company promoter

According to Stevens, Haanel was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on May 22, 1866, and moved to St. Louis with his parents in early childhood. He began work as an office boy for the National Enameling and Stamping Company, a large St. Louis maker of enameled ware, and stayed with that firm for fifteen years.

He then left to promote ventures of his own. The first one Stevens describes was in southern Mexico. In his words, the region around Tehuantepec "was reputed as being especially adapted to the growth of sugar and coffee," and Haanel "succeeded in convincing a number of capitalists of the feasibility of taking up land in that section of the country and working a plantation." A company was formed in 1898 to raise sugar and coffee, with Haanel as president. Stevens says the plantation "was successful from the beginning," but gives no figures.

The Continental Commercial Company

Haanel next organized the Continental Commercial Company, which, Stevens writes, was consolidated with the plantation company "and also absorbed six additional companies." The year is smudged in the scan we read. Other researchers date the company to 1905. In 1909 it was operating under that name with Haanel as president, and Stevens says it was capitalized at two and a half million dollars and was "one of the largest of its kind in the world." That last phrase is the profile's claim, and we found nothing to test it against.

Vineyards and a mine

Stevens lists two more presidencies.

• The Sacramento Valley Improvement Company. Haanel was "one of the organizers" and its president from the start. Stevens says it owned "the largest Tokay vineyards in the world," another claim we could not check. Later genealogical research reports that this venture did not succeed and that the company was eventually dissolved.
• The Mexico Gold and Silver Mining Company. Haanel was its president. Stevens describes it only as "a company of some importance in developing the rich mineral resources of the southern republic." He does not name a mine, a district or any output.

We looked for records naming a specific mine or district for this company, including Sombrerete in Zacatecas, and found none. Until a primary source turns up, the Mexico Gold and Silver Mining Company is the only mining company we can place him in.

Stevens also records some of his civic life: he was a Republican, a member of Keystone Lodge, a thirty-second degree Mason, a Shriner and a member of the Missouri Athletic Club. He married Esther M. Smith in 1885 and, after her death, Margaret Nicholson of St. Louis in July 1908.

The course as a business

When Haanel turned to writing, he ran it like a business. The Catalog of Copyright Entries, published by the Library of Congress, shows him registering material under his own name in St. Louis in 1912, 1916, 1917 and 1919, in several forms: short pamphlets, mimeographed and typewritten lessons, a sales booklet and a printed book. The course itself was sold by mail, one part a week, and promoted in New Thought magazines. His 1919 book states that "The Master Key" was registered as a trademark in the United States Patent Office.

The selling was energetic. A 128 page booklet printed for him by the Inland Printery in St. Louis in 1919 promises to unlock "the secret chambers of success" and reprints letters from students. One, signed with Napoleon Hill's name, credits the course for Hill's success, and another says the course "is more valuable than a college education." These letters appear in Haanel's own sales material, and none has been independently confirmed. Later sales figures for the course are unverified as well.

How the career shows in the course

A businessman's outlook runs all through the text. The course measures progress by results and treats ideas as tools. Among its examples:

• Part Six says an understanding of mental law "cannot fail to be of inestimable value in the transaction of business," and that "Great financiers are learning to withdraw from the multitude."
• Part Sixteen points to Andrew Carnegie, Harriman and Sir Thomas Lipton as men who started poor.
• Part Twenty-Three argues that Morgan, Rockefeller and Carnegie grew rich "because they made money for other people."
• The 1919 booklet cites the railroad builder James J. Hill and his large estate as proof of the method.

Haanel also had firm views on how business should be done. Part Twenty-Three calls service "The first law of success" and says it "is built on integrity and justice." Part Twelve warns that "Supposed independence which required many years of toil and effort suddenly disappears." Whether he had his own ventures in mind, the text does not say.

These passages are the core of what the course says about money and success, and they read differently once you know their author had raised capital, run plantations and, by later accounts, seen at least one company fail.

What the record does not show

• No accounts. We found no balance sheets, annual reports or court records for his companies, so we cannot say how much money they made or lost.
• No independent view. Beyond the 1909 profile, we found no contemporary press coverage of his business career.
• Unclear endings. Apart from the reported failure of the Sacramento company, we do not know when or how his other companies wound up.

Why it matters to readers

Knowing that Haanel was a company promoter does not prove or disprove his ideas. It does help explain them. His promises about concentration, the subconscious mind and the law of attraction are framed as practical tools for people who want to get ahead, because that was the world he knew. It also explains his habit of presenting belief as settled law, the confident tone of a salesman, which applies equally to his claims about health and healing.

The same practical streak runs through Haanel's other books. Mental Chemistry (1922) has chapters titled "Industry" and "Economics" and comments on the post-war economy. Because all of this writing is now in the public domain, readers can check the text for themselves, work through all 24 parts of the course, and compare it with later success books such as Think and Grow Rich.