William H. Danforth

William Henry Danforth (September 10, 1870 – December 24, 1955) was an American businessman, the founder of the Ralston Purina Company, and the author of the durable self-development classic I Dare You! (1931).

Raised on a Missouri farm and educated at Washington University in St. Louis, he built a feed-and-cereal empire whose famous red-and-white checkerboard logo was a direct expression of his personal philosophy of life: he pictured existence as a “checkerboard,” with the strongest people developing all four “squares” of themselves in balance.

He was also a co-founder of the American Youth Foundation, devoting much of his later life and fortune to youth character-development camps and leadership programs. I Dare You! distilled his creed into a short, vigorous book addressed to the “four-square” reader.

Its central image is the Four-Square (or Four-Fold) Development — the deliberate, balanced strengthening of the Physical, Mental, Social, and Religious sides of a person — captured in the maxim “Stand Tall, Think Tall, Smile Tall, Live Tall.” The book’s animating device is the dare: Danforth challenges the reader to refuse a small, lopsided life and instead “be your own self at your very best.” The Christian Science Monitor later named it among the top self-help books of its era.

Danforth’s place in the Atlas is as a primary, pre-war source of the balanced-life and behavioral-activation strands of the success tradition: where much New Thought stresses belief and attraction, Danforth stresses daring action, disciplined all-round development, and sharing/service as the engines of a large life.