Abstract
Light heavyweight boxing champion Louis “Battling Siki” Fall from Senegal, Africa, was once one of the four or five most recognizable black men in the world. Therefore, it was not surprising when Battling Siki’s likeness was used in Gordon J. A. Hargrave’s popular 1920s sales training manual, Secrets of Selling. However, Hargrave used Louis Fall’s picture not to lionize the boxing legend but rather to train would-be salesmen on the differences between the emotional and the logical buyer. In this essay, the folk science of physiognomy—the notion that a person’s outer appearance, especially the face, could provide insight into his or her true character or personality—is explored and discussed in the context of how it shaped the training given to salesmen in the early twentieth century.
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Kopp, D.M. (2018). Physiognomy: Training’s Woeful Countenance. In: Famous and (Infamous) Workplace and Community Training. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59753-3_3
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