The Organization Man

  It is a communal way of life, and the residents are well aware of it. They are of many minds how to describe it. Sometimes they lean to analogies like the frontier, or the early colonial settlements. Other times they are a little more wry; “sorority house with kids,” a projection of dormitory life into adulthood, or, slightly better, a lay version of Army post life. But no matter how sharp the coinages —“a womb with a view,” “a Russia, only with money”—it is a way of life they find suited to their wants, their needs, and their times. They are not unwitting pawns; educated to be more aware of social trends than their forebears, they discuss their situations with considerable sophistication; at times, the way they casually toss out words like “permissive” and “kid-centered,” it almost seems as if everyone was his own resident sociologist.

  In part, these communities are a product of the great expansion of the middle class, for the new suburbs have become a mecca for thousands of young people moving up and out of city wards. It is not these people, however, who are dominant. In his wanderings, the organization man has found in the new suburbs an ideal way station. He is the one who is most quick to move out, but as soon as he does another replaces him, and then another. It is he who sets the tone, and if he is as uncertain as any in keeping up with the Joneses, it is because he is the Joneses.

  Park Forest, the community I studied most intensively, has its unique features, but its most salient characteristic is that it is virtually a controlled sample of organization people. As elsewhere, there are other kinds of people too, and for many a newcomer from the city such communities are an education in middle-class values. What might be called the modal man, however, is a twenty-five-to-thirty-five-year-old white-collar organization man with a wife, a salary between $6,000 and $7,000, one child, and another on the way.

  If one wishes to study the next generation of organization men, a pretty good form chart is the record of how the younger ones handle their problems when they are away from their elders. Because they are jammed into such propinquity with one another in their new suburbia, everything they do carries a certain degree of exaggeration: the schools are a little more modern than elsewhere, the politics a little more intense, and most certainly the social life is a lot more social. Abnormal? Or the portent of a new normality? The values of Park Forest, one gets the feeling, are harbingers of the way it’s going to be.*

  This kind of suburbia is a natural phenomenon, they bear a resemblance to such Utopian ventures as the Oneida community or the Fourier settlements, but where earlier utopias were an expression of revolt and idealism, the new suburbs are a response to social and economic realities. Park Forest, for example, was set up, quite simply, to make money, lots and lots of it. Looking at the real-estate situation right after the war, a group of Chicago businessmen saw that there was a huge population of young veterans, but little available housing suitable for young people with (1) children, (2) expectations of transfer, (3) a taste for good living, (4) not too much money. Why not, the group figured, build an entire new community from scratch for these people? The group, incorporated as American Community Builders, bought up 2,400 acres in the cornland thirty miles south of Chicago and brought in a remarkable man, former Federal Public Housing Commissioner Philip Klutznick, as president.

  The plan was to build clusters of rental garden apartments (rent for two-bedroom duplex: $92) around a central shopping center, and then, as time went on, build ranch-type houses for sale ($11,-995) on the periphery of the area. The housing would be merchandised at bargain rates. The real money would come from the waterworks and the company’s cut (ranging up to 10 per cent) of every dollar spent in the shopping center. In effect, the developers were building a city to provide a sort of captive market—a constantly replenished, nonsatiable reservoir of 30,000 people, many of whom would ever be poised at that stage when families just begin to lay up possessions.

  When the doors were thrown open in 1948 the rental courts were islands in a sea of mud, but the young people came streaming out of Chicago. The first wave of colonists was heavy with academic and professional people—the place, it appeared, had an extraordinary affinity for Ph. D.s. Since Chicago is one of the great business-training grounds of the U.S., however, another kind of affinity proved even stronger: poised at the nexus of America’s junior-executive migration, Park Forest quickly became a haven for the organization man. Out came trainees for the big corporations, research chemists with the AEC, captains and majors with the Fifth Army, airline pilots, FBI men—in total, a cross section of almost every kind of organization man in America.*

  Why the attraction? Since I am going to emphasize some of the nonmaterial factors let me at once put first things first. The people who went to Park Forest went there because it was the best housing for the money. Some psychiatrically-minded observers have hazarded the thought that they really went there to seek a father image and such, and that Park Forest is not a normal sampling because it tends to select such people. I do not agree. Undoubtedly, it does have some selective appeal, but it should be noted that people in the income and age group of Park Forest have very little luxury of choice in housing. Even though they might dislike the idea of so much propinquity—many Park Foresters, indeed, say that they almost decided not to go there because of the propinquity—other considerations weigh far more in the balance. The space for the money, the amenities not elsewhere available, and, most important, the fact that it was so well set up for children have been in most cases the dominant factors.

  Park Foresters, in short, went there for quite rational, and eminently sensible, reasons. Once there, however, they created something over and above the original bargain. Together, they developed a social atmosphere of striking vigor, and while it might have been as one to ten with the more material attractions, it was to be a significant extra. The developers were quick to recognize it. At first they had advertised Park Forest as housing. Now they began advertising happiness. They retained an advertising agency, Weiss and Geller, famed as the most motivation-minded of all agencies, and after a bout of depth interviews and psychiatric panel discussions, the ads began belting away at the overtones of Park Forest more than the homes themselves.

  Here’s the way they went:

  You Belong

  in PARK FOREST!

  The moment you come to our town you know:

  You’re welcome

  You’re part of a big group

  You can live in a friendly small town

  instead of a lonely big city.

  You can have friends who want you—

  and you can enjoy being with them.

  Come out. Find out about the spirit of Park Forest.

  (Ad for Park Forest Homes, Inc., November 8, 1952)

  Here is a magnificent one:

  a cup of coffee—symbol of

  PARK FOREST!

  Coffeepots bubble all day long

  in Park Forest. This sign of

  friendliness tells you how much

  neighbors enjoy each other’s company—

  feel glad that they can share their daily

  joys—yes, and troubles, too.

  Come out to Park Forest where small

  town friendships grow—and you still live

  so close to a big city. (November 19, 1952)*

  The ads are quite right. Let’s take, for example, a couple we shall call Dot and Charlie Adams. Charlie, a corporation trainee, is uprooted from the Newark office, arrives at Apartment 8, Court M-12. It’s a hell of a day—the kids are crying, Dot is half sick with exhaustion, and the movers won’t be finished till late.

  But soon, because M-12 is a “happy” court, the neighbors will come over to introduce themselves. In an almost inordinate display of decency, some will help them unpack, and around suppertime two of the girls will come over with a hot casserole and another with a percolator full of hot coffee. Within a few days the children will have found playmates, Dot will be Kaffeeklatsching and sunbathing with the girls like an old-timer, and C
harlie, who finds that Ed Robey in Apartment 5 went through officers’ training school with him, will be enrolled in the Court Poker Club. The Adamses are, in a word, in—and someday soon, when another new couple, dazed and hungry, moves in, the Adamses will make their thanks by helping them to be likewise.

  In the court, they find, their relationships with others transcend mere neighborliness. Except for the monastic orders and the family itself, there is probably no other social institution in the U.S. in which there is such a communal sharing of property. Except for the $200 or $300 put aside for the next baby, few of the transients have as yet been able to accumulate much capital or earthly possessions, and so they share to make the best of it. One lawn mower (with each man doing his allotted stint) may do for the whole court. For the wives there may be a baby-sitting “bank” (i.e., when one wife baby-sits for another she is credited with the time, and when she wishes to draw on it one of the wives who has a debit to repay will sit for her). To hoard possessions is frowned upon; books, silverware, and tea services are constantly rotated, and the children feel free to use one another’s bikes and toys without asking. “We laughed at first at how the Marxist society had finally arrived,” one executive says, “but I think the real analogy is to the pioneers.”

  But the court social life, important as it is in rooting the transient, is only part of the acclimation. Before long Charlie Adams may feel the urge to shoot out a few extra roots here and there and, having normal joining instincts, may think a mild involvement in some community-wide organization just the thing. When the matter is bruited to him he may be tentative—nothing strenuous, understand, awfully busy with company work; just want to help out a little. Instantaneously, or no longer than it takes one person to telephone another, the news is abroad. Charlie will never be quite the same again.

  He has plunged into a hotbed of Participation. With sixty-six adult organizations and a population turnover that makes each one of them insatiable for new members, Park Forest probably swallows up more civic energy per hundred people than any other community in the country. For the wife who gets fully involved, the blackboard in the kitchen is indispensable, for scheduling oneself to keep from being expected at two different meetings at the same time is not always easy. Every minute from 7:00 A.M. to 10:00 P.M. some organization is meeting somewhere. Looking through the picture windows of one of the community buildings one typical night I saw: on the top floor, the church choir rehearsing; the Explorer Scouts (waiting for a quorum to plan next week’s hike); world politics discussion group (to discuss what causes war; a second discussion group was to meet on a different evening to take up American foreign policy). Bottom floor: school board meeting (to talk over interior decoration of the new school); an organizing committee to organize a new organization (the Protestant Men’s Club); Husanwif Club (to watch slides on safety rules for children).

  As elsewhere, of course, the apathetic greatly outnumber the active—but not by so much as elsewhere, and the active are so active that they generally feel compelled to laugh at themselves for their folly. “Actually, neither Fred nor I are joiners, like some of these silly characters around here,” one wife explains, “but it’s gotten so now I practically have to make an appointment to see him Saturdays. During the week we alternate; when I have my meetings, he baby-sits for me, and when he has his political meetings, I baby-sit for him.” Says another: “What a rat race! Even staying at home I do a lot more than you think. I act as Dick’s secretary and handle all the phone calls when he’s away, and then there’s my League [of Women Voters] work and the P.T.A. and the Great Books Course. Some of my friends think I’m nuts. They ask me, what do you do it for? Sometimes I wonder myself.”

  They hate it and they love it. Sometimes it seems as if they are drawn to the participation just for participation’s sake—the ease with which signatures for petitions—any petition—are obtained, for example, is nothing short of startling. Nor are meetings necessarily directed to any substantive purpose. Sometimes they appear to be chiefly a medium by which anxious, uncertain people can vent aggressions they must elsewhere repress. Without the disciplining effect of a dominant older group and of custom, they are enticed into precocity, and this, unfortunately, stimulates many to a form of free expression in which name-calling and rancor seems to be an end in itself.

  But there is real purpose to all this. If they do act like precocious brats at times, they do, eventually, get a great deal accomplished, and the fact that the community has solved so many problems so well outweighs the bloody noses and ferocities along the way. But the most important compensation is of another nature. The civic activities are in no sense make-work, but while they have grown out of quite practical community needs, they have also grown out of personal needs, and these are needs that far transcend Park Forest.

  I speak of the problem of “rootlessness.” It is a term that needs re-examination. Are the transients a rootless people? If by roots we mean the complex of geographical and family ties that has historically knitted Americans to local society, these young transients are almost entirely rootless. They are very much aware of the fact; surprisingly often they will bring up the home town, and though they have no intention whatsoever of going back, they dwell on what they left behind. Interestingly, the minor note that recurs most frequently is trees. “You know, the birds don’t sing here yet,” one transient explained to me, waving disgustedly at the little sapling outside the picture window. “The trees are so small. When I was a child in Jeffersonville I remember so well the great big trees outside the house. There were squirrels and birds around all the time. I think that’s what I miss most of all.”

  Always, they will be moving on. For most of its renters Park Forest is a sort of way station, a phase in life, and beyond a certain point continued residence can carry overtones of failure. Very few “flunk out” of Park Forest because they are not making the grade; far more leave precisely because they have made the grade. However glowingly they speak of the no-keeping-up-with-the-Joneses and the other attractions of Park Forest, transients say frankly that they expect eventually to graduate to someplace like Winnetka, the Main Line, or Westchester County. Anyway, they explain, the decision is out of their hands; someday soon the boss may call John in for a little chat and they will be moving on.

  They speak of their impermanence in terms of their children more often than of themselves, but the overtones are unmistakable. “The kids look forward to moving, and yet they dread it,” as one young parent put it. “They hear that if they move to a house they can have a little dog or cat. They like that. But their friends—they hate to leave their friends. My little daughter got worried over this and I had to reassure her we are going to stick around for a while…. It’s this temporary attitude we all have.”

  But unsettling as this mobility has been, it has provoked its own compensations. The transients are rootless, in the old sense of the term, but is the old sense the only possible one? The analogy we usually think of involves a large, venerable tree. But another analogy may now be as appropriate. I cite from a catalogue for a forest nursery:

  Stock is transplanted in our nurseries from one to four or more times. Each time, the longer, more easily damaged roots are reduced so that more small feeder roots develop near the stem. The more feeder roots, the more quickly the tree is established on your land. Also, the resulting compact mass of small feeder roots makes the tree easier to plant. Each year in the spring and summer, we transplant hundreds of thousands of seedlings to build more feeder roots. Results prove extra cost is repaid many times over. (From 1954 catalogue of Musser Forests’ Catalogue.)

  The more small ones, in short, the easier the transplanting. The transients do hunger for deeper roots, but because they have sought so hard they have found something of what they have been looking for. They are beginning to find it in one another. Through a sort of national, floating co-operative, they are developing a new kind of roots. The roots are, to be sure, shallow—but like those of the redwood t
ree, even shallow roots, if there are enough of them, can give a great deal of support.

  In much of the current writing about the need for belongingness, it is implied that participation is a kind of unity and that differences in what people are participating about are only differences in degree. Park Forest proves that it is not this simple; that there is a profound antithesis between different kinds of participation. But Park Forest indicates this, let me now point out, not because it is a failure, but because it is a success. Precisely because it comes so much closer to providing so full a spectrum of participation than other communities, the dilemmas of participation are more apparent there.

  In the huge new life-insurance housing developments there is often a good bit of social activity—the “patio” at Park Merced, for example, functions very much like Park Forest’s courts in this respect. There is little real civic or political activity, however. The developments are not political entities but parts of established communities, and the old residents do not solicit the help of the newcomers, nor are the newcomers particularly interested in giving it. Within the development itself, furthermore, issues remain latent. With what can be called semi-benevolent paternalism, the developers have attended to almost all of the community’s physical problems, including even the cutting of grass (done at Park Merced by a corps of uniformed attendants). The developers provide room for hobby shops and the like, but they are not at all anxious to stimulate too active a sense of community. As one landlord confided to me, some originally innocuous group might easily become the nucleus of a tenants’ organization and there would be no telling what would happen then.

  Going up the scale of participation, there are quite a few new communities in which the developers do encourage social activities. Drexelbrook is an outstanding prototype. Here the paternalism is fully benevolent; builder Dan Kelly, a genial promoter who loves parties himself, runs his development on a bread-and-circuses principle. Unifying the 1,223 garden apartment units is the Drexelbrook Swimming and Tennis Club—a handsome affair with veranda terrace, swimming pools, and clubrooms which is made available at bargain rates. There is a full-time recreation director and in summer a corps of young girls to shepherd the children so mothers can take off for some shopping or the theater. Parties abound: “hunt balls” on Washington’s Birthday, celebrity parties, “splash” parties (all you can eat for a dollar).