The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  While the inner-directed acquisitive consumer could pursue the ever receding frontiers of material acquisition, these frontiers have lost much of their lure for the other-directed person. As we saw in Chapter III, the latter begins as a very young child to know his way around among available consumer goods. He travels widely, to camp or with his family. He knows that the rich man’s car is only marginally, if at all, different from his own—a matter at best of a few additional horsepower. He knows anyway that next year’s model will be better than this year’s. Even if he has not been there, he knows what the night clubs are like; and he has seen television. Whereas the deprived inner-directed person often lusted for possessions as a goal whose glamour a wealthy adulthood could not dim, the other-directed person can scarcely conceive of a consumer good that can maintain for any length of time undisputed dominance over his imagination. Except perhaps sex.

  For the consumption of love, despite all the efforts of the mass media, does remain hidden from public view. If someone else has a new Cadillac, the other-directed person knows what that is, and that he can duplicate the experience, more or less. But if someone else has a new lover, he cannot know what that means. Cadillacs have been democratized. So has sexual glamour, to a degree: without the mass production of good-looking, well-groomed youth, the American pattern of sexual competition could not exist. But there is a difference between Cadillacs and sexual partners in the degree of mystery. And with the loss or submergence of moral shame and inhibitions, but not completely of a certain unconscious innocence, the other-directed person has no defenses against his own envy. He is not ambitious to break the quantitative records of the acquisitive consumers of sex like Don Juan, but he does not want to miss, day in day out, the qualities of experience he tells himself the others are having.

  In a way this development is paradoxical. For while cookbooks have become more glamorous with the era of other-direction, sex books have become less so. The older marriage manuals, such as that of Van der Velde (still popular, however), breathe an ecstatic tone; they are travelogues of the joy of love. The newer ones, including some high school sex manuals, are matter of fact, toneless, and hygienic—Boston Cooking School style. Nevertheless, much as young people may appear to take sex in stride along with their vitamins, it remains an era of competition and a locus of the search, never completely suppressed, for meaning and emotional response in life. The other-directed person looks to sex not for display but for a test of his or her ability to attract, his or her place in the “rating-dating” scale—and beyond that, in order to experience life and love.

  One reason for the change is that women are no longer objects for the acquisitive consumer but are peer-groupers themselves. The relatively unemancipated wife and socially inferior mistresses of the inner-directed man could not seriously challenge the quality of his sexual performance. Today, millions of women, freed by technology from many household tasks, given by technology many “aids to romance,” have become pioneers, with men, on the frontier of sex. As they become knowing consumers, the anxiety of men lest they fail to satisfy the women also grows—but at the same time this is another test that attracts men who, in their character, want to be judged by others. The very ability of women to respond in a way that only courtesans were supposed to in an earlier age means, moreover, that qualitative differences of sex experience—the impenetrable mystery—can be sought for night after night, and not only in periodic visits to a mistress or brothel. Whereas the pattern of an earlier era was often to make fun of sex, whether on the level of the music hall or of Balzac’s Droll Stories, sex today carries too much psychic freight to be really funny for the other-directed person. By a disguised asceticism it becomes at the same time too anxious a business and too sacred an illusion.

  This anxious competitiveness in the realm of sex has very little in common with older patterns of social climbing. To be sure, women still use sex as a means to status in spheres controlled by men. But they can do this chiefly in industries that are still competitive in the pre-monopolistic patterns. Thus until recently the theater and the movies were controlled by novi hommes who remind us of those early nineteenth-century British mill owners who, before the Factory Acts, relied on their mills as a harem.3 And Warner, Havighurst, and Loeb in Who Shall Be Educated?4 describe how women schoolteachers may still cabin-date their way up the relatively unbureaucratized hierarchies of local school systems. These, however, are exceptional cases; the search for experience on the frontier of sex is, in the other-directed era, generally without ulterior motives.

  II. Changes in the Mode of Consumption of Popular Culture

  ENTERTAINMENT AS ADJUSTMENT TO THE GROUP

  In Chapter IV we saw how the inner-directed youth was made ready to leave home and go far both by directly didactic literature and by novels and biographies that gave him a sense of possible roles on the frontiers of production. In contrast to this, the other-directed person has recourse to a large literature that is intended to orient him in the noneconomic side of life. This orientation is needed because, with the virtually complete disappearance of tradition-direction, no possibility remains of learning the art of life in the primary group—a possibility that persisted even in the mobile families of the era dependent on inner-direction. The child must look early to his mass-media tutors for instruction in the techniques of getting directions for one’s life as well as for specific tricks of the trade.

  We can trace an edifying sequence that runs from the success biography of the Samuel Smiles or the Horatio Alger sort to the contemporary books and periodicals that deal with peace of mind. The earlier books are directly concerned with social and economic advance, dealt with as achievable by the virtues of thrift, hard work, and so on. Then we find in the first years of this century the development in America of the now almost forgotten “New Thought” movement. As described by A. Whitney Gris-wold, the movement’s motto was: “Think Your Way to Wealth.”5 That is, wealth was to be achieved no longer by activity in the real world but by self-manipulation, a kind of economic CouÉism. But wealth itself as a goal was unquestioned.

  From then on, inspirational literature becomes less and less exclusively concerned with social and economic mobility. Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, written in 1937, recommends self-manipulative exercises for the sake not only of business success but of such vaguer, non-work goals as popularity. Perhaps it is not only the change from depression to full employment that led Carnegie to write How to Stop Worrying and Start Living in 1948, in which self-manipulation is no longer oriented toward some social achievement but is used in a solipsistic way to adjust one to one’s fate and social state. The same tendencies can be found in a large group of periodicals, with an interlocking directorate of authors and with titles such as Journal of Living, Your Personality, Your Life, which testified to the alteration of paths to upward mobility and to the increase of anxiety as a spur to seeking expert help. The New York Times Book Review of April 24, 1949, advertises Calm Yourself and How to Be Happy While Single; the latter deals according to the advertisement with such problems as “how to handle the men in your life (heavy dates, office companions, friends, drunks) … making conversation … liquor, boredom—just about every problem you’ll encounter on your own.” Certainly, there are many positive sides to a development that substitutes for the older, external, and often pointless goals such as wealth and power, the newer, internal goals of happiness and peace of mind, though of course, one must always ask whether, in changing oneself, one is simply adapting to the world as it is without protest or criticism.

  Here, however, I am not evaluating these trends but am interested in showing how popular culture is exploited for group-adjustment purposes not only in the form of manifestly didactic literature and services but also in fictional guise. There is nothing new in the observation that people who would rather not admit their need for help, or who prefer to spice it with fun, look to the movies and other popular media as the sources of enlighten
ment. In the studies of the movies made under the Payne Fund twenty years ago, much evidence was gathered concerning use of the movies by young people who wanted to learn how to look, dress, and make love.6 The combination of learning and excitement was clear in these cases, especially among children of lower-class origin suddenly brought face to face with sex and splendor. Today, however, as audiences have become more sophisticated, the mixture of messages has become more subtle.

  From an examination of a group of women’s magazines, Ladies’ Home Journal, American, Good Housekeeping, and Mademoiselle, for October, 1948, I concluded that a good many stories and features and, of course, far less subtly, many ads, dealt largely with modes of manipulating the self in order to manipulate others, primarily for the attainment of intangible assets such as affection. Two stories will illustrate: “The Rebellion of Willy Kepper” by Willard Temple in Ladies’ Home Journal and “Let’s Go Out Tonight” by Lorna Slocombe in the American magazine.

  Handling the office. “The Rebellion of Willy Kepper” is unusual in that it deals with a work situation rather than one of domestic and leisure life. It is the story of a paint salesman, Willy, a shy young man who has worked himself up through the factory. There is a pretty file clerk whom Willy wants to know better but does not know how to approach. At this point the stockholder’s son enters the business, gets the promotion Willy hoped for, and makes time with the file clerk. Willy, previously so mild, loses his temper and becomes gruff and rasping with people in the office and shop. This is his “rebellion.” This change of mood is of course noticed at once.

  Willy, however, has built up an enormous capital of good will by his previous good temper, so that plant people, instead of turning on him, try to find out what the trouble is; it cannot be Willy’s fault. They discover that the stockholder’s son is to blame, and they set out to hex him—he trips into paint, gets orders mixed up, and rapidly learns how dependent he is on others’ liking him if he is to do his job. Willy, in fact, saves him from his worst jam with a customer, and after a few knocks of this sort the son decides to start at the bottom in the factory, in order to earn his own capital of good will. Thus the road to Willy’s promotion is reopened. At the end Willy asks the stockholder’s son what techniques he used with the file clerk. He tells Willy to compliment her on her eyes; he does so and succeeds in making a date.

  There are some fairly obvious things to be said about this story. In the first place, though it is set in the sphere of production, it deals with the sales end of a factory which is a net of interpersonal relations that will deliver paint to the customer only against a bill of lading marked “good will.” The work situation is seen in terms of its human element and its noneconomic incentives. There are no problems about paint, but only about people. In the second place, the stockholder’s son was able to date the girl not because of his wealth and position but because of his line, his skill in the leisure arts of language. Language is presented as a free consumers’ good; one, moreover, of which the consumer is also a producer; there is no patent or monopoly on lines. Finally, we have a picture of the “antagonistic cooperators” of the same sex—Willy and the son—whose rivalry for job and girl is so muted that they can exchange advice on how to win both; in a way, they are more interested in each other’s approval than in victory. In the end Willy has regained his lost good temper and his rival has given up his early arrogance.

  Handling the home. “Let’s Go Out Tonight” pictures the consumption frontier of a young, college-bred suburban matron. Her husband is a good provider and faithful; her two children are healthy; she has everything—except enough attention from her tired businessman spouse. The latter comes home, reads a paper, goes to bed, and his wife complains to her friend in their morning telephone chat that they never go places and do things any more. She looks back nostalgically on her college days when he was courting her and when life seemed glamorous. Suddenly she decides to go back to her college to see just what the magic was in those days.

  When she gets to her old room she realizes that only in retrospect was her college dating effortless. Actually, she recalls, she slaved to arrange parties for her future husband, to manipulate him into kissing her and finally into proposing. She concludes that she just has been loafing on her job as a housewife, and returns full of tolerant understanding for her husband and enthusiasm for new and improved manipulation. By buying a new dress, arranging with a sitter to have the children taken care of, and similar measures, she inveigles her husband into a theater date and is able to report success to her friend on the telephone.

  In the era of inner-direction, stories of a similarly orientational cast often encouraged the reader to aspire to distant horizons, to play for big stakes; many such stories today strike us as escapist and sentimental. In contrast, the type of “realism” in modern magazine fiction is neither uplifting nor escapist. There is an all too sensible refusal, in a story like “Let’s Go Out Tonight,” to admit that there can be decisively better marriages than this one, with its continuous petty deception. The reader of these stories will by no means always find his ideals and ways of life approved—it is a mistake to suppose that such magazines as Ladies’ Home Journal are edited by a formula of giving “the public what it wants”—but he is seldom stimulated to make great demands on life and on himself. In both of the stories I have used here as illustration, the assumption is made that a solution of conflict is available that involves neither risk nor hardship but only the commodities—interpersonal effort and tolerance—that the other-directed person is already prepared to furnish.

  “Conspiracy” theories of popular culture are quite old, summed up as they are in the concept of “bread and circuses.” In “The Breadline and the Movies” Thorstein Veblen presented a more sophisticated concept, namely, that the modern American masses paid the ruling class for the privilege of the very entertainments that helped to keep them under laughing gas. Such views assume the culture to be more of a piece than it is. Group adjustment and orientational influence in contemporary popular culture do not serve the interest of any particular class. In fact, pressures for other-directed conformity appear strongest in the better educated strata. The form these pressures take may be illustrated by a few examples.

  Heavy harmony. The head of a progressive boarding school in the East recently addressed the parents of its children as follows:

  The music department at X School wishes to provide for every child as rich a musical experience as possible.

  We believe that music is a necessary part of life and its influence is felt in every phase of living. Singing and playing together can bring understanding and good-will and it seems to me that this world needs more of this kind of harmony.

  At X, we try to provide some kind of music participation for every child and wish to encourage more musical activity, especially that of playing with a group in an orchestra.

  This letter does not betray much interest in music as such. It sees music primarily as a way of bringing people together locally and internationally too. Music as a way of escape into one’s individual creative life—a private refuge—would strike many such school authorities today as selfish.

  A similar theme appears in more refined form in Helen Howe’s novel of Harvard academic life, We Happy Few.7 The heroine Dorothea is viewed by Miss Howe as a selfish woman who, during the war, escapes from her social duties by having a love affair and by playing Bach and Mozart to herself on the piano. She is taken in the novel through a series of group-adjustment experiences that deflate what Miss Howe regards as her intellectual snobbery. Becoming a nurse’s aid, she meets other nurse’s aids socially; they are fine and dull. Traveling to Coeur d’Alene to be near her son in training, she “sees” America: in the stench of the ladies’ room, the sadness of platform partings, the good-heartedness of midwesterners. The townsfolk of Coeur d’Alene are another group-adjusting experience; they, too, are fine and dull. At the end Dorothea returns to Cambridge a sadder and wiser woman: her pride is g
one, and she has learned humbly to admire the great open spaces and the open sentiments usually associated with them in song and story.

  As a symbol of the learning process, Miss Howe writes that Dorothea, while a nurse’s aid staggering through agonizing days at the hospital, learns in her few off hours to enjoy Schumann as well as her beloved Bach and Mozart: “Her aesthetic as well as her human taste was stretching, too—cruder, possibly, but warmer and more inclusive.”

  This quotation hardly needs comment. Instead of permitting the heroine to escape either up or down from the exasperating human contacts of a nurse’s workday, Dorothea must move sideways. She must acquire warmer, group-adjusted musical tastes—she would be forgiven even more, doubtless, if she learned to like Ethelbert Nevin.8

  Yet granting Dorothea should learn this interpersonal art as a benefit to her work as a nurse’s aid—perhaps the sick are a special case and do need warmth of this sort—it is striking that she must bring the identical attitude into her leisure time: no change of roles is permitted. Leisure and work must, like Dorothea herself, be stretched (assuming, falsely, that Schumann’s sentimentality is “warmer”) until they completely overlap. The theme of both is group adjustment.

  What I have said is not to be understood as a polemic for coldness as against warmth or as a criticism of the genuine elements in the other-directed person’s concern for warmth, in himself and in others. Certainly it is an advance from the compulsory emotional constriction, the frightening coldness, of many inner-directed Americans to open up sociability to a wider and more outgoing responsiveness.