The Organization Man

by William H Whyte

  * The cross section has remained constant. Old settlers at Park Forest like to tell you that they are being replaced by an “element” less worthy, but though the population has been greater each year (about 25,000 in mid-1956), there has been little change in basic characteristics. Median educational level for all adults remains about 2.5 years of college—the highest of any Illinois community. As far as occupation is concerned, a check of move-ins to the rental area in 1955 shows no change, save a few less university people. Here is a random sampling of newcomers in 1955: research chemist, Sinclair Oil Co.; salesman, Swift & Co.; major, Fifth Army; investigator, FBI; purchasing agent, Ford Motor Co.; industrial psychologist, Swift & Co.; space salesman, Business Week magazine; underwriter, Prudential Life; salesman, Du Pont Co.; buyer, Carson, Pirie, Scott store; trainee, Burroughs Adding Machine Co.; lieutenant colonel, Fifth Army; research engineer, Continental Can Co.; engineer, Western Electric; sales trainee, Atlas Box Co.; engineer, General Electric; pilot, American Airlines; public-relations assistant, Acme Steel Co.; teacher, Rich High School; labor-relations assistant, Ford Motor Co.; writer, Time, Inc.; accountant, Gulf Oil Co.; copywriter, Chicago advertising agency.

  * One can only stand in admiration of these ads—and hard selling they were. I have always wondered, however, why the developers and the advertising people neglected another, and quite important, appeal. In exploiting the loneliness of contemporary life they hit a nerve, but they left untouched the more material service of Park Forest as a temporary home for people who know they’ll be transferred. Many transients would be better off if they bought a home, and some discover this after a year or so at Park Forest. But often it is when it is too late and the knowledge that buying a home—even for a stay of only two years—as a riskless and economical proposition has not been openly advertised, and as a consequence many transients in the Chicago area never think of this possibility. In time this new concept of home-buying will probably become accepted practice, but it is still an appeal that offends many sensibilities. Those who want to stay put bridle at it. Even the developers themselves hate to say it out loud. They have become Park Forest citizens too, and hard-headed as they are on most things, they are a bit touchy on the matter of Park Forest’s turnover. It is quite a normal phenomenon, but they sometimes spend their own good money in ads that imply that nobody’s leaving Park Forest any more. The developers have a proper concern, of course, in that it takes some explaining before most nontransient home seekers will recognize that turnover is normal and not a rejection of the community. I still think, however, an opportunity is being overlooked, and since I have great respect for the resourcefulness of the developers I have no doubt that in time they’ll be advertising openly how good a way station for transients they have. In a decade or so, indeed, what may worry them is that people aren’t enough aware of the turnover. Park Forest is not so a home of aging people, of has-beens, they may feel impelled to argue; our junior-executive people get promoted and transferred as fast as people anywhere.

  * The experience of Levittown, Pennsylvania, demonstrates the importance of political unification. It straddles four townships, and quite possibly always will. There was a chance early for Levittown being incorporated as a town in its own right, but the civic leadership was inept and the move failed. Since then there has been less community-wide spirit, and many who otherwise would have been active have withdrawn from participation. There is plenty of local activity in the “sections,” but it does not stir banked passions.

  CHAPTER 23 Classlessness in Suburbia

  As far as social values are concerned, suburbia is the ultimate expression of the interchangeability so sought by organization. It is classless, or, at least, its people want it to be. As in The Organization, so in its dormitories there has been a great broadening of the middle, and a sort of “declassification” of people from the older criteria of family background. But there is also another parallel. As in The Organization, the more that distinctions are broken down, the more exquisite they become. The suburbanites’ impulse to the Social Ethic is understandable; to live without social class you must be socially skillful—consciously and continuously.

  Like the office with no division between carpet and linoleum, suburbia demands perception. How in the world, you wonder when you see Park Forest, can anyone tell rank—or, for that matter, pull it? To the stranger’s eye the usual criteria of status are almost entirely absent. There are a few exceptions; in the rental area there are some duplex units situated on roads rather than grouped court fashion, and these, renting for $117 (versus $92 to $104 for most court units) make something of a local Gold Coast. Similarly, though most homes are in the $13,000 bracket, there are a few areas with houses around $10,000, several in the $17,000 to $20,000 class, and a small area with “custom” houses ranging anywhere from $17,-000 to developer Klutznick’s $50,000 home. These differences, as I will touch on later, are not without significance. For the great bulk of residents, however, the houses are uniform enough in cost as to make them comparatively unimportant as a prestige factor, and physically they are so uniform that if it weren’t for paint and trim, newcomers would have trouble finding their unit in the labyrinth.

  Cars aren’t much help, either. Of the thousands that lie in the parking bays, few are more expensive than the Buick Special, and rakish touches are not too frequent. Only in near-by industrial towns do people show exuberance in the captainship of the American car; foxtails and triumphant pennants, like Cyrano’s plume, fly defiantly on cars there, and occasionally from the radiator a devil thumbs his nose at the passing mob. Not at Park Forest; whatever else it has, it has no panache.

  Suburban residents like to maintain that their suburbia not only looks classless but is classless. That is, they are apt to add on second thought, there are no extremes, and if the place isn’t exactly without class, it is at least a one-class society—identified as the middle or upper middle, according to the inclination of the residents. “We are all,” they say, “in the same boat.”

  They are not. People may come out of the new suburbs middle class; a great many who enter, however, are not. Middle-class, college-educated organization people give the communities their dominant tone, but there are other residents for whom arrival in the Park Forests and Levittowns is, psychologically at least, a crossing of the tracks. This expansion of the lower limits of the middle class is happening in towns and cities as well, but it is so pronounced in the new suburbs that it almost seems as if they were made for that function.

  They have become the second great melting pot. The organization man furnishes the model, and even in suburbs where he is a minority he is influential out of all proportion to his numbers. As the newcomers to the middle class enter suburbia, they must discard old values, and their sensitivity to those of the organization man is almost statistically demonstrable. Figures rather clearly show that people from big, urban Democratic wards tend to become Republican and, if anything, more conservative than those whose outlook they are unconsciously adopting. Pondering the 1952 Park Forest vote, the Chicago Tribune, with vengeful pleasure, attributed the large Republican majority to the beneficial influence of fresh country air on erstwhile Democrats. Whatever the cause, it is true that something does seem to happen to Democrats when they get to suburbia. Despite the constant influx of Democrats, the size of the Republican vote remains fairly constant from suburb to suburb. (The vote for Eisenhower in 1952: 66 per cent in Levittown, Long Island; 69.4 per cent in Park Forest.)

  Suburbanites make a great to-do about being independent—the 1952 plurality, they maintain, was due to their crusading spirit. Maybe so, but even without this extra stimulus they vote Republican just the same. In the 1950 senatorial election, Everett Dirksen—a Republican never accused of any great appeal for “independents”—polled 68.5 per cent of the Park Forest vote, only .9 per cent less than Eisenhower two years later. After a study of all the different election returns, local Democrats have concluded that the best they can hope for i
s a 14 per cent spread—30 per cent of the vote at worst; 44 per cent at best.

  The social factor is only one of many in the making of converts to Republicanism, but it is a powerful one. “I’ll be frank about canvassing,” one Democratic precinct leader told me. “We’ve got to concentrate on people with foreign names and Jewish names.” He took out a voter list and showed me the check marks he had made. “I’ll try to concentrate on these people. On form, the Jews are more likely to be the intellectual type and the people with foreign names strong Democrats. But we’ve got to get to them quick.”

  The conversion process can take place rather rapidly. A Democratic allegiance is part of an environment which the newcomers wish to leave behind, and in attuning themselves to the values of the group they now wish to join, they soon find that “acceptance,” to use a favorite word of suburbia, is more difficult if one persists in obdurately sticking to what others regard as a lower-class habit. They should graduate, and though the gang may adopt a live-and-let-live attitude most of the time toward such idiosyncrasy, when election time comes near and morality complicates the issue, the pressure becomes intense. In desperation, local Democratic organizations have turned to fighting fire with fire. To counteract the social process, they have been giving a series of parties for newcomers; at these events they dress up the house with the most respectable Democrats available, command them to put on their best bib and tucker, serve tea, and in every way possible try to fortify potential waverers with the knowledge that they can have kindred souls just as chic and well educated as anybody else.

  Acclimation to suburbia also stimulates switches in religious affiliations, and the couple from, say, a small Ozark town is likely to discard their former fundamentalist allegiance to become Methodists or Presbyterians. So with personal tastes: wives are particularly quick to pick up the cues from the college-educated girls on the street, and their clothes, be they slacks or cardigans and pearls, begin to show it. Home furnishings are another symbol of emancipation. Merchants are often surprised at how quickly their former customers in city stores discard old preferences when they arrive in suburbia. “They won’t touch ‘Polish Renaissance’ any more,” the manager of a chain store in Levittown, Pennsylvania told me. “When I was over in the Trenton store I had to stock the most hideous stuff you ever saw. I couldn’t sell them a nice Lawson sofa; they’d go for borax and the purplest purples and pinkest pinks. When they get over here they want something plainer—exactly the same people who only a year or so ago would have wanted some overstuffed thing.”

  Suburbanites are perfectly aware of this educating process, and though they may want to be egalitarian, they are not unconsciously so. They miss few of the clues to family background provided by slips in speech or peculiarities of taste, and in almost every block there is someone—to use a favored euphemism—who the others say ‘has not had all the advantages some people have had.” As the use of the word “advantages” implies, such a person is not snubbed; quite the opposite—the others will go out of their way to make him feel at home and, through a sort of osmosis, to educate him in the values of the group. There are, of course, failures; some newcomers are so shy, so sensitive about their background that they rebuff advances, and occasionally they see no reason to acclimate themselves at all. (One court was thoroughly confounded by the arrival of a housewife who was an ex-burlesque stripper and, worse yet, volubly proud of the fact. She never learned, and the collision between her breezy outlook and the family mores of the court was near catastrophic. “They’re just jealous because I’m theatrical folk,” she told an observer, as she prepared to depart with her husband in a cloud of smoke. “All these wives think I want their husbands. What a laugh. I don’t even want my own. The bitches.” The court has never been quite the same since.)

  For newcomers, the teaching of sociability is perhaps the greatest achievement of suburban education. The newcomers need it. They are more lonely than the others, for they are strangers to this world, yet they markedly lack the social skills by which to overcome their loneliness. This is particularly apparent in a new block that does not have the leavening influence of one or two organization couples. Often it is months before the people even strike up a conversation with the neighbors about them. They don’t know how, and they want so desperately to know that they will respond to any activity, no matter what the ostensible purpose, that furnishes a catalyst. This is one of the reasons for the popularity of the “home commercial parties” in such neighborhoods. In one small subdivision outside Hartford, Connecticut, it was not until ten months after everyone had moved in that they got to know one another, and a Stanley Home Party was the cause; the first party broke the ice, and in a surge of gratitude all of the wives pleaded to be hostesses in turn. It was the best way they knew of to get friendship started.

  To understand how suburbia fills this kind of void, an under standing of the nature of turnover within them is necessary. It is not a subject suburbanites like to talk about. When I first went to Park Forest, I found the residents rather touchy about the fact that the turnover in the rental apartments was running at roughly 35 per cent annually, and in the homes area at about 20 per cent. Only temporary, many assured me. One man even went so far as to work up an ingenious mathematical formula to demonstrate the imminent decline of turnover. Of every 100 persons moving in, he argued, a given number will stay permanently; the more these people move in, accordingly, the fewer apartments and houses there will be on the market for the transient type—ergo, in time there should be practically no turnover at all.

  Meanwhile, the turnover continues. In the rental courts a third of the tenants still move out every year. In 1954, out of 3,000 rental apartments there were 1,059 move-outs; in 1955, 1,100. As Park Foresters are quick to point out, some of these move-outs didn’t leave the community but moved to the homes area, and this movement has lent a measure of stability to the community. Nonetheless, over-all turnover remains high. A comparison of the 1954 phone directory with the 1955 directory indicates that in one year’s time 18 per cent of Park Foresters had moved on to other communities (948 families out of a total listing of 5,363). A closer check on one court shows that since 1953 all of the original thirty-nine couples had left save eight; of the couples who left, a third had moved to other parts of Park Forest, while the rest moved away.

  It is a perfectly normal phenomenon. Some of the people who leave Park Forest do so because they want something “better,” but most leave because they have to. In 1953, 44 per cent of the move-outs were corporation couples being transferred away from the Chicago area; 12½ per cent were Army and Navy couples assigned to new stations. Since then there has been little shift in this pattern and little shift in the kind of people who are moving in to fill up the vacancies. Periodic checks on the occupational breakdown of the rental people show that from year to year the proportion of engineers, junior executives, and such remains roughly the same.*

  This constant replenishing assures that, as the community ages, there will always be a cadre of young, middle-class organization people on the way up. People who stay are not necessarily less successful; Park Forest has a strong adhesive power for those who have become involved in its activities, and many people who ordinarily would have moved away to the North Shore or its equivalent have stayed on. But the transients are still the key. Whether they actually move or not, it is the people successful enough to have the option who set the dominant style of life in suburbia.

  While it cannot be called a “class” division, there is an important difference in attitude between these transients and the others, and to explore it is to recognize the great amount of insecurity many of the latter have over their middle-class status. A resident’s attitude toward the community is an index. The usual organization man tends to affect an attitude of fond detachment—swell place, lots of kicks, but, after all, the sort of place you graduate from. For others, however, such an attitude is impossible. It is most impossible of all for the man who has expected to g
o ahead in the organization world but finds that he will not. He dislikes thinking about turnover, not so much that he sees it as a slur on the community, but as a slur on himself. For him, the ever-present moving van is a standing rebuke—a reminder of an organization world to which he does not truly belong.

  Then there are the people for whom suburbia is a social achievement. They are not envious, like the unsuccessful organization man, of those who leave; much as enlisted men feel toward a comrade who has won a bid to officer’s training, they can speak quite equably, sometimes proudly, of ex-neighbors who have gone on to better things. But it is the permanence of the community, not its impermanence, that they wish to see. They cannot joke about it with detachment, and they can be extraordinarily sensitive about references that no one else would think invidious. When I first started interviewing, one of the women’s magazines had just come out with a picture story on life in the homes area. It was a pleasant story, full of praise, but the housewives were very annoyed. “Those pictures they published are absolutely disgraceful,” one exclaimed to me. “Why did they have to take so many of back yards? The way they angled them makes it look like a development! ”

  Let us pause briefly to retrace their steps back from suburbia. It is important to remember that the move is not a sudden one from the lower to the middle class but rather the most critical of several moves. To a degree the people affected have been moving simultaneously with others—which is to say, the mobility hasn’t been a case of the individual outracing the people he was brought up with, but a concurrent movement. Yet it is not so uniform a movement that some have not gone past others, and the awareness of this competition has produced some very powerful tensions.