The Organization Man

by William H Whyte

  When residents want to start a social activity on their own, Kelly is usually glad to lend a hand. Several years ago, for example, a group of wives were sitting around wondering what they could get up. Somebody suggested maybe a garden club. They called up Kelly and he told them to count on him. As soon as they got things going he provided free busses for the club’s first trip to the Philadelphia flower show and stimulated them in every way he could. The garden club now absorbs more of the wives’ excess energies than any other activity. Another tradition partially subsidized by Kelly is the annual Christmas decoration contest. During December each court vies with the others to win the prize for the best Christmas displays, and they do such a striking job that over 100,000 people drive out each year to see the sight.

  But it remains a development, more than a community. Understandably, no group has turned into a protest group against the developer; there have been mutterings about paternalism, but they have never coalesced into any active movement. As for the politics of the township of which Drexelbrook is a part, there occasionally is some ferment about matters which touch the immediate interests of the residents, like school-bus arrangements, but other than this, residents don’t take much interest. Besides, they don’t have the time.

  Statistically, the people at park forest are much the same as those of the Park Merceds or the Drexelbrooks. What makes their community so much more expressive than the demi-utopias lies in two factors: (1) it is a town in its own right, a real town with real problems;* (2) it has had a socially conscious developer.

  From the beginning Klutznick decided that the affairs of the town would be turned over to the citizenry. This would put the tenants in the curious position of being able to tax the landlord, but Klutznick, a practical visionary, reasoned that this would be best for all—and for commercial reasons as well as idealistic ones. The more people get involved in running the place, he figured, the more they take root and thus the more stable would be the community—and the investment.

  What happened was a severe wrench for Klutznick. Like many extremely dynamic men, he is not patient with what he feels is misguided opposition, and in no time he had plenty of it. Park Foresters fell to organizing their community, and what unified them more than anything else was the developer. Instinctively, they were against what he was for, and while they talked darkly of feudal barony and serfs, they certainly didn’t act like serfs. No matter what the issue—the developer’s rule against dogs, school appropriations—they reacted with the vigor of all those who feel they must do battle against tyranny. When Klutznick, in a moment of anger, expelled an activist tenant they organized a mass march on Klutznick’s office complete with sound truck and placards. Even when Klutznick came bearing gifts they were contentious. “Father Klutznick, father of the village, eh!” I heard one tenant exclaim after a particularly handsome gift of land to the community was made by Klutznick. “He won’t get away with it!”

  But the autonomy was good for all concerned. For the tenants the result was a rich diet of issues on which to cut their teeth, and for the developers a disciplining force that helped them resist the temptation to cut corners. Klutznick, who can reflect that it will be a hell of a day when Americans come to love the landlord, became more philosophical about it all. Heavy as the cross may have appeared, he is a formidable debater, and few things were so stimulating to him as a public tussle with the equally vigorous young lawyer who was the village president.

  But the pot had to simmer down. Democracy, Klutznick once remarked, meant the day when he could drive around Park Forest in his Cadillac Sixty Special without anyone’s saying, “Look at that lousy bastard Phil Klutznick driving a Cadillac.” That day has long since arrived. Patently, Park Forest works superbly, and even those for whom tilting with the landlord is reflex hold that while Klutznick has an immensely shrewd eye for the dollar, he has proved himself a wise and fundamentally idealistic partner. The new era of good feeling has by no means dulled the citizenry’s reflexes, but lately some have confessed that they did wish there were more iniquities to get excited about. Writing in a vein unthinkable before, a local columnist, Al Engelhard, has asked for a substitute ogre: “Of itself, harmony between tenant and landlord is a salutary thing, testifying to the tenant’s intelligence and the landlord’s good will. But the price has been high. Apathy has been the child of Peace, Indifference the spawn of Concord…. Since he is a man of many parts, I have hope that Phil Klutznick, alert to the disservice he has done us by becoming a sweet and lovable old bug, is even now pondering some issue which will redynamize us. We need a common enemy we can magnify into a monster, whisper about, conspire about, hang in effigy.”

  Writing of the period 1848-1853 in the california mining camps, Charles Shinn wrote how a great wave of communal sharing and democratic participation stirred people to believe that “the ‘social contract’ ideas of Rousseau and his followers seemed to have suddenly found a practical expression.” Shinn also tells how in very short order this dream soured as the camps became more organized and the lawyers came in. Now, old-timers complained, the camps were just like any other place. Somewhat similarly, the Kibbutzim of Israel have lost something of their former communitarianism as they have grown larger. In Life in a Kibbutz (New York: The Reconstruction Press, 1955) Murray Weingarten sketches the impact of hired labor on one Kibbutz. “It seems much easier to maintain a communal setup in a poorly developed, impoverished society where there is little to divide and no opportunity to become an ‘executive’ than it is when the community begins to expand its wealth and activity.”

  So at Park Forest. Because the emergency pressures have vanished, the emergency spirit has too, and many pioneers see this as a flight from virtue. Several, indeed, actually moved away they were so disappointed. Many of those who remain are similarly disillusioned to find that without the stimulus of necessity most people can take issues or leave them alone, and you will be assured that it’s disgraceful how few turn up for meetings.

  The rather high quotient of idealism generated there is immensely valuable; without it there would not be the esprit, the agitation that so animate the community. All the idealism does, however, tend to make some residents discontented with anything less than the complete Welfare Community. Thus aroused, they measure the very achievements against perfection—and the result is a sense of paradise lost that bedevils many of them. “We moved here because we decided this would be a brave new world,” says one resident, without conscious irony. “But so many compromises have been made. We’re disgusted.” Now they say it’s just like any other place.

  It isn’t, of course. Apathy is a relative matter, and to newcomers from outside the amount of participation is still a phenomenon. Since the issues are now those of a “maturing” community rather than one a-borning, there has of necessity been some change in the way of meeting them—symptomatically, the able young chemist who is the new village president is known as a noncontroversialist. But the élan is still there, and if Park Foresters are a little more good humored about their new furors these days, they can still burn over them. For an idea of the flavor, I append a sampling of recent headlines in the Park Forest Reporter:

  ACB, TRUSTEES CLASH ON BLDGS

  TEMPORARY SCHOOLS WRANGLE CONTINUES

  DEVELOPER OBJECTS TO NEW REGULATIONS

  TRUSTEES REFUSE APPROVAL OF ACB’S AREA TO UTILITY PLANS

  LIQUOR LICENSE HASSLE CONTINUES AT SECOND PUBLIC HEARING

  TRUSTEES PONDER ACB PARK AND SEWER OFFER

  CAT ORDINANCE AROUSES FUROR

  AREA 11 PLAT OKAYED BY VILLAGE IN SHORT AND PEACEFUL MEETING

  I would not maintain that this activity fully compensates for the old kind of roots. The participation, as I have remarked, is often participation for the sake of it, and sometimes one is tempted to apply H. G. Wells’s description of the town of Bromstead—“a dull, useless boiling up of human activities, an immense clustering of futilities.” But this would miss an important point. In a community where
there are real issues—schools to be built, segregation problems—its residents are immersed in the main stream of life, not insulated. If they appear stimulated over and above the call of community necessity, this itself is evidence of how very much they seek ties more meaningful than those of bridge and canasta and bowling.

  For no one is this quest more important than the organization man. One of the dangers in the transient life is that these young people, because they must move about so frequently, will more and more identify their total destiny with one particular organization. For society as well as for themselves, the organization transients need to multiply their allegiances—to the church, to community, and the like. These additional allegiances provoke no great ideological conflicts with the office, certainly, but they do turn the executive away from complete preoccupation with one encompassing organization. Places like Park Forest do not solve this problem—The Organization will still come first—but they do ameliorate it.

  This becomes evident when you talk to organization transients who have made their pause in more conventional environments. As might be expected, those who are in the cities have the least chance for participation, but the traditional small towns are not much better, and transients who have spent a tour in them speak feelingly of rebuffs and cold shoulders. “We just play around with company people,” says a resident of one elm-shaded town. “The regular people here are pleasant enough, I suppose, but they don’t want our help in anything that really counts—except when they come around to solicit money for the hospital.” Such transients may make common cause with one another; in many a ranch-type block on the new outskirts of old towns the Du Pont engineers and the G.E. men and other fellow transients turn inwardly to one another and create something of the Gemütlichkeit of life at a Drexelbrook or a Park Merced. But it doesn’t mean much. The activity is at a superficial level and the residents know it. One may dispute how much deeper is the activity of a Park Forest. The fact remains, however, that its people do feel an importance there they do not elsewhere.

  The ability to chew on real problems is functional in another respect too. On a purely utilitarian level it provides young transients a leadership training it would take them years to get otherwise—and one of their few opportunities to acquire a sense of capital. “We are a young group without mature leadership,” explains a rising young banker, “so we are forced to take on responsibilities that older people usually assume. For the last two years I have been chairman of the board of the church, a job held by a fifty-five or sixty-year-old man in most communities. This gives me a training valuable in business. The church is a corporation with a $50,000 budget, and we’ve had to think about a $100,000 capital loan. How else could people our age get a chance to deal with that much capital? We’re forced ahead of our time.”

  Many feel that community work is viewed with high approval by their companies—a fact that Park Forest leaders do not forget to mention in proselyting the laggard. Both of the two contenders for the village presidency in a recent election, they point out, worked in the research department of the same oil company, and it is a reasonable conclusion that the company does not view such activity with displeasure.

  Compared to lawyers, academic, and professional people, the young businessman is not markedly a civic joiner. There is evidence that those who are, however, are more likely to be “comers.” A few of the civically active may have seized on the activity as compensation for a blocked career, but on the whole the active would appear to be more likely to get ahead than their less active brothers.

  Undeniably, places like park forest do tend to spoil one. While most of the people who move to package communities move out of a simple economic necessity, after exposure to such an environment some people find a warmth and support in it that makes the prospect of other environments seem unduly cold to them—it is somewhat unsettling, for example, to hear the way some residents of the new suburbs refer to “the outside.” Frequently, alumni of package communities go considerably out of their way to seek out a similar community when the next move comes up, even when they are making quite enough for a more fashionable spot.

  On balance, however, the training of a Park Forest stimulates them more than it coddles them. The test is what happens to Park Foresters when they leave. Those who haven’t left like to tell stories of how “lonely” ex-residents have become in other places, and there is the strong imputation that it very well served them right for leaving. But most are not homesick. Thanks to the “bringing out,” transients are all the better fitted for the moves ahead of them. If they are annoyed at the disinterest they find in a traditional town, it is because they want to be active, and know how to, and the disinterest serves more often to challenge than inhibit them. We looked up ex-Park Foresters now living in other kinds of communities and found that most were more active in the com munity than their contemporaries. “I learned at Park Forest how to take the initiative,” goes a typical explanation. “It certainly stood me in good stead. I found out when I got here that most of the people really didn’t know one another, and I just naturally started getting them together.” The majority of alumni confess they wouldn’t want to go through Park Forest again, but they look back with fondness on Park Forest. “It all got pretty hectic at times,” one recalls, “but one thing’s sure—we were living.”

  I am not trying to argue that more places just like park forest are to be the pattern of the future, or should be. I do believe, however, that the kind of rootedness it illustrates will be. Better than most communities, it reveals the transients’ need for a conscious, almost professional, attitude toward the environment, but transients everywhere feel this need. The shifting, fluid course of their lives demands it, and if our society continues to expand, this increasingly professional approach to human relationships is going to be more and more evident, whatever the nature of the community. Critics may mourn the passing of the days when people didn’t have to think about roots, but it is futile nostalgia for the transients and they know it. Give them credit. In becoming so self-conscious about adjustment and participation they are erecting some shaky idols, but we should not turn to this side of the coin until we recognize how tremendously difficult a problem they face.

  They have to be professional. On the one hand, they cannot sink roots too deep. They will be moving on some day, and if they become too involved they risk an emotional shock they do not wish to sustain. On the other hand, however, they cannot forever wait for the eventual home, for they do not know when, if ever, they will find it. They must, in short, make a home of the home away from home, and to accomplish this feat they must act in the present. “The trick,” one veteran puts it, “is to pretend to yourself that you’re here for keeps and to join. If you don’t, you’ll keep putting off doing anything year after year, and you’ll just make yourself feel more temporary than you actually are.”

  All of this puts a tremendous premium on “adjustment.” “The best-adjusted people are the ones who are constantly adjusting,” says the wife of a plant engineer. “My father says we’re just a bunch of gypsies. Maybe so, but we always have something ahead of us. People who have houses already—what’s left for them? For us, though, there is always something that’s coming up next. You couldn’t exactly call it adventure, but it is a challenge.”

  Once adjusted to the mobile life, transients say, they find as much stability in the new kind of roots as in the old, geographical ones. “If you haven’t been moving around before, a development like this makes you unsettled,” an Army wife explains. “These places are not right for people who want to stay forever. But for people like us, who are already ‘unsettled,’ it makes you settled, if you know what I mean.”

  If one loses some old friends, there will always be comparable ones to replace them. Furthermore, because the old friends are being exposed to the same kind of environment, you can pick up with them where you left off when you meet again. “Even if you’re separated by time and space, you know their thinking will be
the same,” says a transient, “It’s the underlying values that count, and they’ll stay the same.”

  * These chapters are based on research I did for a Fortune study in 1953, and on subsequent research in 1955 and 1956. Originally, I had started to study Drexelbrook, Pennsylvania, but in late 1952, after visiting several other suburbs, I decided to use them for reference and comparison and concentrate on Park Forest, for it was the largest one that was a political as well as a social unit. Work commenced in December 1952 and continued over a six-month period until June 1953. During this period additional research was done at Drexelbrook, Levittown, Pennsylvania, and several developments in California. In 1955 I returned to Park Forest, after a deep breath, to check up on what had happened in the intervening time, and in January and February 1956 did further research at Levittown, Pa.

  I would like to acknowledge the help of Mrs. Selma Wolff, the principal researcher on the study; of Edward Engberg (who, as an ex-Park Forester, was well equipped to do research in Levittown, Pennsylvania; of the Mesdames Priscilla Shames and Jean Martin, two of the shrewdest of Park Forest’s many shrewd social observers. Thanks also to Philip Klutznick and his organization, American Community Builders, Inc., the developers of Park Forest, who gave us their full co-operation. A word of thanks too to the people of Park Forest, Levittown, and Drexelbrook who gave so much of their time, thought, and coffee.