The Organization Man

by William H Whyte

  Why any of this sorry crew should be considered at all is difficult to understand. One contending couple, Katie and Bill, consists of a juvenile and an equally juvenile wife who is interested chiefly in staying home and being dowdy. Another contender, Sid, is an ambitious fool who has forgotten how to be a husband to his wife; at length he and his wife revisit one of those quaint Italian restaurants with a comic-dialect proprietor (Tomaso, by name), and the emotional hang-over of this experience helps the wife reform him out of his ambition.

  This leaves only one man fit for the job. He is Jerry Talbot, a hard-working husband with a sexy, ambitious wife. In terms of the values of the world depicted in the film, she’s the only worth-while person in the bunch. Unlike the others, busily sabotaging their husbands, she’s actually trying to do something for her husband, albeit a little too pushily. She has the same zest for manipulation as the top man, and her ambition will provide her husband just the same economic motivation companies are so keen on. By the curious morality of popular fiction, however, she is too materialistic. Openly, she savors the idea of high life in New York. The movie does too—that’s what its “production values” are all about—but, like the biblical movies, it must in the end smite that which it has exploited. She has to go. Some ten minutes before the dinner at which the boss has promised to award the prize, the husband viciously tells her to get packing. He won’t even let her eat supper with the others. He gets the job. The boss explains that by ditching a person inimical to the team the man has shown his true mettle. To quote from the shooting script:

  GIFFORD: Talbot, I think you have that …

  “X plus” … that makes a big man big.

  (pause)

  But there was something that made me doubt that you could ever function successfully as a general manager—a handicap—and frankly it caused me to decide against you.

  I was convinced you were not aware of this handicap and I wanted to call it to your attention. I found an opportunity that gave me a chance to do so. I can only guess at the details, but this much I know: that suddenly you did become aware of it and had the courage to get rid of it—and just as suddenly I’d found my new general manager! Congratulations!

  Jerry looks up at Gifford, dazed, and it is a moment before he can grasp the hand that is offered him. Liz turns quickly to Sid and when she sees the unutterable relief in his eyes her own are suddenly filled with tears. Sid reaches for her hand.

  And now his arms are around Liz and she presses against him with a warmth he hasn’t felt in years. And next to them Katie and Bill are hugging each other ecstatically.

  Hardly a morality tale. Nor are most such stories, singly. Taken together, however, they constitute a sort of ever continuing serial, and innocent of thought as any one story may be, cumulatively they have a message. And for all the fluff, what a dismal one it is! Accept.

  To compare it with the theme George Orwell tackled in 1984 might seem to be freighting popular fiction with more portent than it deserves; Orwell was writing of totalitarianism, specifically Communism, and because he makes the leaders of society so villainous, the terrible world he sketched would seem far remote, a hell to our heaven. Yet in the final paragraph there is a scene which is hauntingly similar to the endings of our current fiction. As the erstwhile rebel Winston sits idly at a café, he gazes up at a picture of Big Brother. He begins to babble incoherently. Tears of gratitude well up in his eyes. At last, as the officers of the Caine had learned to love Queeg, he had won the victory over himself. He had learned to love Big Brother.

  * I am indebted to Reinhard Bendix’s analysis of the New Thought movement. In his excellent study, Work and Authority in Industry (N.Y. 1956), Bendix points out the dilemma the Protestant Ethic had forced upon the middle class. In the older version there was a sharp division between the haves and have-nots, with very little comfortable middle ground in between. Only a few could be successful; the rest would have to accept their station as an indication of lack of necessary personal qualities. As N. C. Fowler wrote in 1902 in The Boy, How to Help Him Succeed: “Many a man is entirely incapable of assuming responsibility…. He lacks the courage of willingness to assume responsibility and the ability of handling others. He was born for a salaried man, and a salaried man he had better remain.” This, as Bendix points out, was much too harsh a doctrine and the New Thought movement, which denied such exclusive-ness to success, furnished a badly needed modification.

  * High Noon seems to be susceptible to some much more involved interpretations. In “The Olympian Cowboy” (The American Scholar, Summer 1955, Vol. 24, No. 3) a Swedish critic named Harry Schein manages to interpret it as a piece of American propaganda. He writes: “I see High Noon as having an urgent political message. The little community seems to be crippled with fear before the approaching villains; seems to be timid, neutral, and halfhearted, like the United Nations before the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea; moral courage is apparent only in the very American sheriff…. High Noon, artistically, is the most convincing and, likewise, certainly the most honest explanation of American foreign policy.”

  * Sales Management, January 15, 1952, describes how U.S. Machine Corporation saw the problem: “All too often, so often in fact that it becomes almost a common situation, a sort of ‘love triangle’ develops in the lives of salesmen. The three sides of the triangle are salesman, wife, company. The wife sees the company robbing her of her husband’s time and companionship, becoming a rival, she feels, for his affection. At first she is slightly resentful. In time she may become openly jealous. This, unless brought under control, can end up in irreparable damage to the salesman’s worth to his employer.”

  PART VII

  The New Suburbia: Organization Man at Home

  CHAPTER 21 The Transients

  I now turn to organization man at home—and, I hope, some clues as to where he is going. In these next chapters I am going to examine him in the communities that have become his dormitories—the great package suburbs that have sprung up outside our cities since the war. They are fascinating institutions in their own right, and here and there I will detour into aspects of them that are tangential to my main theme. What I wish to concentrate on, however, is the way in which they reflect the values of the organization man —and of the next generation to come.

  They are communities made in his image. There are other kinds of people there too, and for many a resident the curving superblocks of suburbia are the end of a long road from the city wards to middle-class respectability. But it is the young organization man who is dominant. More than others, it is he who organizes the committees, runs the schools, selects the ministers, fights the developers, makes the speeches, and sets the styles.

  Organization people live in many other kinds of places, of course, and some of them are in jobs that don’t require them to move away from home at all. But in the new suburbia they are concentrated, and in so pure a state that here they may provide the best indication of the organization life of tomorrow. In suburbia, they can express themselves more clearly than in The Organization itself. They are not subordinates or juniors; they are the elders of the new suburbia, and there they are relatively free of the pressures of older traditions and older people that affect them elsewhere. In such propinquity, they bring out in each other—and at times caricature—tendencies that are latent in organization life, and one sees in bold relief what might be almost invisible in more conventional environments. To an older eye, perhaps, what is to be seen through the picture windows is abnormal, but what may be abnormal today is very likely to be normal tomorrow.

  What suburbia best illuminates, I believe, is the nature of organization man’s “rootlessness”—and the need to revise our customary assumptions about rootlessness. In speaking of the transients in our society it is interesting how instinctively we describe them by what they don’t fit—of the homes they’ll never go back to again, of the worlds they never made. Related to the usual niches of society, they are anomalies; moving as they
are, they cut across the convenient abstractions that have ordered our thoughts, and thus we find it easy to see them as symptoms of malaise, psychological casualties of that world they never made.

  Before looking at the transients’ suburbia, then, we must first look at the changes in mobility and class structure that brought them there. In suburbia, as we will see in the next chapter, organization man is trying, quite consciously, to develop a new kind of roots to replace what he left behind, and to understand the nature of his quest we need to know what it is he did leave behind, why he left it behind, and how he looks back upon it.

  On the matter of how much upward mobility there really is in this country, thinking has fluctuated a great deal—more, perhaps, than the mobility itself. Forty years ago the notion that the U.S. had a fairly fluid society would not have been particularly controversial; observers did point out that the Alger story was more an article of faith than a reality, but for the most part they felt our social structure was dynamic—almost frighteningly so. During the thirties and forties, however, a highly influential series of community studies began convincing people that this was no longer true. Quite the contrary, it now appeared that the American system was finally shaking down into a fixed order of things in which achievement was more and more closed to the lower classes.

  Anthropologist Lloyd Warner and others held that the basic pattern was revealed by the rigidities of the traditional community —the venerable, tree-shaded town in which the Hill, local business ties, and interlocking family relationships firmly fix the individual’s position, and from which he can move upward (from the Elks, say, to the Rotary) only by sanction of the next upper group. Short-circuiting of this route, furthermore, was now believed to be more difficult than ever. The old route up through the shop was closing; the worker was unionized, the manager professionalized, and as these lines firmed, the boy from shantytown was going to have less chance than ever of crossing over the tracks. As I noted in the chapter on belongingness, this diagnosis was not without a note of advocacy; students of this school believed there should be some mobility, but they felt that for the most part the individual should not cherish illusions that he was going to go up but instead adjust to the realities of a fairly static environment.

  These studies did a service in drawing attention to class and status factors Americans like to pretend don’t exist. In focusing on the things that stand still, however, the studies slighted the importance of the things that don’t, and in almost all of them there was one rather important omission. What about the man who doesn’t fit in because he’s not there to fit in? What about the man who leaves home?

  The man who leaves home is not the exception in american society but the key to it. Almost by definition, the organization man is a man who left home and, as it was said of the man who went from the Midwest to Harvard, kept on going. There have always been people who left home, and the number of them is not decreasing but increasing—and so greatly that those who stay put in the home town are often as affected by the emigration as those who leave.

  When a man moves from one place to another he is not necessarily moving socially. If we look at the figures for geographic mobility, however, we find that there is a rough connection between the two kinds of movement. Consider the relationship between the physical movement and age, education, and occupation. Men in the twenty-five-to-thirty-four age group are only 7.5 per cent of the total population, but they account for 12.4 per cent of the migration. The second characteristic is education: the more of it, the more mobility. If a man goes to college now, the chances are almost even that he won’t end up in his home state. Recent census figures and Time’s study, They Went to College, indicate that the educational level is higher among migrants than nonmigrants, and the higher the educational level, the more intensive the migration. Only 27.3 per cent of high-school grads aged twenty-five to thirty-four, for example, were interstate migrants, versus 45.5 per cent of those who had had at least one year of college. Of those who worked their way through in a college outside their home state, 69 per cent don’t come back. And for all college men, incidentally, the higher the grades, the more likely they are to move. Next, income. As the correlation with education would suggest, the more the mobility, the more one is likely to be in the higher income brackets. Census figures do not break down migration by income groups, but the experience of direct-mail people indicates that address changes are most frequent in the $5,000 and over bracket. There are also indications that address changes are becoming more frequent in this group. In 1953, 14.8 per cent of Fortune’s subscribers changed addresses during the year. In 1954, 16.6 per cent, and in 1955, 17.4 per cent.

  Records of long-distance movers show the same concentration of organization people. The greatest single group of their clients—between 40 and 50 per cent—is composed of corporation people being transferred from one post to another (with the corporation directly paying the bill). If to this group are added government, Army and Navy people, and corporation people leaving one company for another, roughly three quarters of all moves are accounted for by members of large organizations.

  These people confound the usual concepts of class. Some can be described as upper class, some middle class, but it is the horizontal grouping in which they come together that is more significant. It does not declass them; however muffled, the differences in family background between organization people will never be erased. But they will be superseded. When organization people speak of the boat they are all in together, it is the horizontal grouping they are describing. They assimilate one another, and the fact that they all left home can be more important in bonding them than the kind of home they left is in separating them.

  The export movement that brings them together has become thoroughly basic to our society. It is no longer a case of the special boy who had to get out of town to cross the tracks to find an outlet for his energies; now as many as three quarters of the town’s young college men may be in the same position. Where are they to go after college? Back home? Lawyers and doctors can, and the majority do; they are in the happy position of being able to go home, to keep professionally alert, and to make a good bit of money at the same time. But for the others, opportunity seems to be elsewhere—not just for the delivery boy who became an Air Force lieutenant, but for the young man on the Hill who’s gone off to join Du Pont.

  It is understandable that American literature has been so long fascinated with the small town revisited, or lost.* Those who have gone away think often of what they left behind and they are curiously ambiguous in their feeling of estrangement. In the case of the organization transients, they feel they sacrificed much and they often wonder if the gain has been worth it. Most of them came from reasonably prosperous homes, and when they look back they remember the support of the kinfolk and friends about, the reassuring solidity of grandfather’s mansard-roof house, and the feeling that they were part of the group that counted. The family name, as they so often say in retrospect, meant something. No longer: local prestige, they well know, is not for export, and what is one town’s upper-upper would be another’s middle class.

  In leaving this behind, however, the transients also draw solace. They have entered the heavyweight competition, and if they do not enter the arena exactly barehanded, they feel down deep that they have proved themselves just a little bit better than those who didn’t. One of the great tacit bonds the transients share is a feeling, justifiable or not, that by moving they acquire an intellectual breadth that will forever widen the gap between them and their home towns.

  “Dave and I have often thought about going back to East Wells,” a successful young executive’s wife explains. “It’s a beautiful old New England town and we both had such happy times there. But all the people who had anything on the ball seem to have left. There are a few who took over their fathers’ business, but the rest—I hate to sound so snobbish, but, dammit, I do feel superior to them.” And they can never really go back. Once the cord is broken, a return
carries overtones of failure. “I’m fed up with New York,” says one executive, “but if I went back to Taylorston I know damned well they’d think my tail was between my legs.”

  Even if the chance of transfer sends them back they will be strangers. They might still be able to pick up the local prestige they may have inherited, but if they do, it will be at the risk of weakening their new, and now more important, organization ties. One junior executive explained it to me this way: “Because of this last transfer I’m back here, almost by accident, where I was born. It ought to be a setup; frankly, my family is as old guard around here as they come. Well, it’s a lot of crap, sure, but I must say I get a good bit of pleasure knowing I can join the City Club and my boss can’t. But it’s damned privately I think about it. If I am going to go ahead in this organization, the people I’ve got to get along with are the office crowd, and don’t think I wouldn’t get the business if they started reading about me in the social columns.” Says another, “It’s odd. Here I’ve got a social position a lot of people would give a fortune to get, but the minute I joined the corporation I had to turn my back on it. We’re sort of declassed, and as far as Amy and I are concerned, it is as if we weren’t born here at all.”

  But perhaps the most important reason the transients can’t go home is that they won’t find it there if they do. It is not just the physical changes—the new sub-developments on the old golf course, the shopping-center strip just outside town, the new factory. As the young transients have left town, their opposite numbers from other towns have come in, and in many American communities there has been wholesale displacement from positions of power of the names that once “meant” something. Even in towns relatively untouched by urbanization the exodus of youth has left a vacuum the community itself cannot replenish. The venerable Newburyport of “Yankee City” fame is an example. With a population of about 15,000 at this moment, Newburyport has not shared at all the population growth that has affected almost every “normal” American community; physically, it is the Newburyport of the 1800s with the addition of relatively few modern buildings.