This was brought home to me when I made a study of several new Philadelphia row-house neighborhoods of the kind that are the stepping stones to suburbia. There were many similarities to suburbia—the median income was only slightly beneath the Park Forest and the Levittowns; the population was predominantly a young one, and they give it the look of the new market wherever you see it: the great forest of television aerials, the hard-top convertibles, the housewives in blue jeans and plaid slacks Kaffee-klatsching on the lawns, the hundreds of husbands stopping off at the giant supermarket to pick up the extra groceries on the way back home from work.
But there were differences, and if I had to single out the one that impressed me most, it would be, simply, the amount of plain, ordinary disagreeableness. Compared to the suburban communities, the tensions seemed much closer to the surface, the jealousies more intense. Nobody seemed to have settled down to take a long breath; the notion of survival of the fittest was omnipresent, and few blocks seemed to have the graces, the rules of the game that suburbia has acquired to muffle the conflict. These neighborhoods happen to be in Philadelphia, and there are factors peculiar to them. Yet I was persuaded by the talks I had there that this somewhat intangible atmosphere was a reality which all sensed and which had its roots in causes fairly universal.
As a check of former addresses indicated, these people are members of the great outward movement from the inner city wards—as they have been moving geographically toward the suburbs, they have been moving socially as well. But it is a transition, and there is the rub, for though they have left one world—the close-knit society of the padrone, for example—they have not quite joined another, and the influx of Negroes into the houses they left behind is a specter they do not for a moment forget. Except for the older people, for whom such neighborhoods can be ideal, suburbia is the dream, and the neighbor who puts the “For Sale” sign up as he prepares to move to suburbia does so with a feeling that he has made it.
It is not stretching the sense of the word too much to say that he has not made it so much, but that he is passing. Still fundamentally urban and lower middle class in his reflexes, he has a long acculturation ahead of him, and if he is not entirely sure how it is going to end up, neither can we be. His social enfranchisement is a great tribute to the vigor of our democracy, but we would do well to recognize the pitfalls of this dynamic.
Psychologically at least, the newcomers to suburbia are Living on the brink of a precipice. It is true that they are better buttressed than were their parents against a depression, but that much more have their expectations been raised. Broad as the middle class may be, there is a line, and a rather firm one, beneath which middle-class life is impossible. The line, suburbia would indicate, is somewhere between $4,800 and $5,200. It is not, furthermore, a static figure. It is constantly moving up as the couple ages, for while it may be all right to enter suburbia strapped for money, as time goes on it is abnormal for one’s income not to rise, and this will be painfully evident to the family which cannot follow other contemporaries as they expand the little luxuries of their life.
When they studied Middletown of the depression years, the Lynds were struck by the way in which the blurring of class lines denied people a sense of “sheltered arrival.” “Democracy under private capitalism,” they wrote, “has shaved off the edges of these plateaus, and the whole population moves, according to the ethos of our culture, endlessly and breathlessly up one long, unbroken sandy slope of acquisition…. from every point on the unbroken incline one can look ahead and see others with more than one has oneself.”
But private socialism offers no resting place either. The upward struggle is easier now, or seems easier, and though the couple who move into suburbia may do so with a feeling of “we made it,” their satisfaction is quite temporary. The longer they stay the more they recognize subtle gradations that at first were not apparent. There is no plateau in front of them, only the rungs of a ladder.
In this climb the young management man who sets suburbia’s styles can be a dangerous pace-setter. At a given time, his income and the income of the newly arrived white-collar man may be identical.* The potential rate of increase, however, is quite different. With much more safety can the organization man extend himself, for unless he does something extremely stupid in the company, his income will automatically increase by 30 per cent at the very least in the next three or four years. His white-collar neighbor is not in the same position, even though his salary be identical. This kind of disparity, however, is muffled by surface similarities, and many who will never enter management are stimulated to live as if they would. It is particularly hard for wives to grasp the fact, and husbands who are in a fairly static job are under constant pressure from them to keep up.
In those sections of the new suburbia where the houses are slightly less expensive than the norm, people are closest to the thin edge, and the social importance of small differences becomes assertive. The case of the Eastgate area is illustrative. Several years ago, the Park Forest developers decided to add a group of houses in the $10,000 class. The difference between these houses, in either price or attractiveness, and the $12,000 to $13,500 houses is not great, but there has been enough to strain Park Foresters’ pretensions of classlessness. (Asked to describe the kind of people living in Eastgate, Park Foresters grope with difficulty. No one can bring himself to say “working-class people”; the phrases are more likely to be “people who work with their hands more than their heads,” “artisans,” or, at worst, “blue collar.”) The homes are nice—some think the design better than the more expensive ones —and they are well kept up. But both the Eastgaters and the others in the community sense that Eastgate is not quite a part of Park Forest. Many Eastgaters have moved to another sector at the first opportunity, and it will probably always remain a bit of alien soil in the one-class society.*
While the vulnerability of the newcomers may never be put to a large-scale test, the effect of several localized recessions is suggestive. Economically, the impact has not been serious; most of the plant layoffs have been temporary, and in the midst of a generally rising economy the families affected have been able to weather the squall through renegotiated loans. Psychologically, however, the effect has been considerable. The possibility of going much under $4,800 does not threaten merely to rob a family of some luxuries; it threatens to take them away from a style of life. Suburbia does not condone shabby gentility. The amenities that a severe cutback in expenditures would put in jeopardy are not marginal; to the family on the edge of the middle class they are social necessities.
Those who have counseled with people in such situations say that in almost every case the prime fear is the fear of “going back.” Often it is an unreasoning fear—houses in suburbia, after all, are often the cheapest houses available—but it can be a tremendous one nonetheless to those who suffer it. They can feel so isolated. Back in the depression, millions were in a predicament not of their own making, yet social workers tell us that despite the generalness of the depression people had strong feelings of individual guilt. Today the feelings of guilt could be much more intense. Psychologically, they have more to lose than any other group in our society, and a turndown that would be moderate by the standards of two decades ago would place them in a perilous position. They are not going back, and if their fears were exploited, their discontent could become ugly indeed. If our economy has an Achilles’ heel, this might be it.
But if return seems a specter, let us remember, it is because there is advance, and on balance it is the dynamic of this forward movement rather than the danger of it that seems most impressive. There must be a thin edge, for we cannot expect to celebrate the gains of a rising standard without bearing this price. The fruits of social revolution are always more desirable in anticipation than fact, and the pink lamp shade in the picture window can be a sore disappointment to those who dreamed that the emancipation of the worker would take a more spiritual turn.* It is a sight, however, that we can well
endure. The phase in which people stand poised on the brink of the middle class is not a pretty one, but it is a phase. In somewhat the same way that Americanization affected succeeding waves of immigrants, acclimatization to the middle class will lessen the feeling of social vulnerability that can turn these newcomers ugly.
The melting-pot analogy is still apropos. For all the differences in background, no fixed class structure has congealed in places like Park Forest. Occupation and family background have provided a certain kind of status—but for individuals, and the individuals have not jelled into groups on this basis. Similarly, while many people get together according to common interests—interest in world politics, for example, or in gardening—these are only part-time associations and they are so fluid that they carry few overtones of social status. The same is true of religion: vigorous as church activity is, religious allegiances have far less of the clan effect than they have in traditional communities. Not so incidentally, many mixed-marriage couples have come to Park Forest, for here, they have correctly sensed, is a refuge from the conflicting loyalties that would beset them elsewhere.
The nearest thing to an upper class are the remaining pioneer settlers who are still active in the village government. Interestingly, this group has a heavy representation of Democrats of the egghead kind, for though the Democratic leaders can’t get much support during national elections, as private citizens and “independents,” they virtually run the place. To some intellectuals this has been something of a cruel blow; for those who like to feel themselves embattled against the forces of Philistinism, it has been almost embarrassing to be so powerful, and a few, almost eager to see the hopelessness of it all, have left lest they compromise their idealism. Most are quite happy, however, and though they speak harshly of the anti-intellectualism of suburbia, they are—aside from the developer’s people they so regularly combat—the nearest thing to fat cats Park Forest has. Because of the fact of their having been there quite some time, most of them are now in the income bracket which can support one of the more expensive houses (the block in which they are concentrated is called “Government Row”).
But though the civic leaders have prestige, they are not, in any customary sense, an upper class. An elite, perhaps, but not a social one. Their cohesion is functional; they are not, like the upper class of Newburyport, members of a primary group which envelops most of one’s allegiances and kinship ties. True, they tend to come from a middle-class background, but this is a corollary, not a cause, of their situation. Like the national elite of which they are fractions, their prestige is a sort of ex-officio prestige, awarded for performance and function and revocable for lack of it. And they do not want for people eager to do the revoking. By reflex, the new suburbanites are stringently anti-cabal, and indignant letter writers to the newspapers habitually refer to “self-appointed” leaders, “so-called” saviors, and similar threats to the open utopia.
When the current “Aquacenter” pool was a-building, there was resistance to the idea and, significantly, the principal basis was the fear of people that this might be a first step toward stratification. Instead of there being a municipal pool, as many had hoped, a private organization was set up to undertake the business. “The town pool that was originally planned was right,” says one resident, “but then we would have had to admit Chicago Heights people and some of our ‘democratic’ people wouldn’t like that at all.” Modest as the family expenses are ($100 bond plus usage fees), many believe that it is just high enough to keep many of the marginal-income people in Park Forest away from the pool and the result will be the formation of a “country-club set.”
The classlessness also stops very sharply at the color line. Several years ago there was an acrid controversy over the possible admission of Negroes. It threatened to be deeply divisive—for a small group, admission of Negroes would be fulfillment of personal social ideals; for another, many of whom had just left Chicago wards which had been “taken over,” it was the return of a threat left behind. But the people who were perhaps most sorely vexed were the moderates. Most of them were against admission too, but though no Negroes ever did move in, the damage was done. The issue had been brought up, and the sheer fact that one had to talk about it made it impossible to maintain unblemished the ideal of egalitarianism so cherished.
But the force of the ideal should not be deprecated. Let me make perverse use of the concept of those who believe we are highly stratified: if one holds that class divisions exist because people think there are class divisions, to be consistent one would have to concede that they do not exist when people think they do not exist. The new suburbanites do indeed obscure some harsh realities when they talk of their democratic ideals, yet their unwillingness to concede class divisions is itself a very powerful factor in keeping the divisions from crystallizing. I am not trying to argue that paradise is imminent; the breakdown of the old divisions of class has left people vulnerable to other kinds of webs, and these too have their tyrannies. But they are not tyrannies fixed upon the individual, like class; they are self-imposed, and the individual has at least the choice of declining them.
* As of April 1954, a check made by Thomas McDade of ACB of 700 rental families showed the following breakdown: business administration, 28.2 per cent; professional, 25.2 per cent; sales, 22.1 per cent. Of the remaining 24.5 per cent: supervisors, production workers, and independents, 6.3 per cent; publicity, 4.2 per cent; retail workers, 5.7 per cent; transportation workers, 6.1 per cent; miscellaneous, 2.2 per cent.
* How illusory the “average” income of a community can be is apparent if you plot the rate of increase of its members’ incomes. In 1953 we obtained financial data on every tenth rental family in Park Forest which included the husband’s salary on entering the community and the periodic raises he may have obtained in succeeding years. At the end of their second year, most of the husbands were fairly near the median income of $5,800, but their rates of ascent varied considerably. Salesmen, for example, went up only about $150 a year, while chemists went up in $500 to $600 leaps, and lawyers raced past everybody. People in the latter categories could afford to mortgage themselves very heavily and they did. The others could not afford to, but they did too.
* The segregating effect even small differences can provoke has been well illustrated in the new towns of England. F. J. Osborn, in Green Belt Cities (London, 1946), tells how homes had been sited in the new towns of Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City so there would be much mixing of classes. At first they did seem fairly classless; their residents were caught up in the same wave of pioneer spirit that characterized Park Forest’s early days. As in Park Forest, however, the unifying pressures slackened, and latent differences began to show up. “There is less segregation of the classes than in other towns,” writes Osborn. “It has been found, however, that whatever the town planner may desire, people have a marked tendency to segregate themselves by class or income…. The better-off tenants (whether they are clerical workers or the more highly paid factory workers) spontaneously move to streets in which, even if the houses are no larger, the social atmosphere is regarded as superior.” (Quoted from Harold Orlans, Utopia, Ltd., New Haven, 1953, p. 89.)
* This kind of disappointment has been very strong in England. For years liberal intellectuals fought to extend middle-class security to the workers, and now that they are succeeding they are discomfited. Writing in The Spectator (January 20, 1956), Charles Curran talks of life in the vast municipal housing estates where so many workers now live. He speaks of how they read the tabloids exclusively because the tabloids “offer a simple, cheerful, manageable universe, a warm, cozy place of sex, excitement, triviality and fantasy … the daydream heaven of wealth, luxuries, and sexual attraction to which the football-pool coupon will one day provide a ticket of admission. An interior life of this kind and on this scale is something that has not previously existed in England. It contrasts sharply with the expectations that buoyed up the social reformers—that once the manual worker was f
ree from the clutches of poverty and insecurity, he would begin to participate in our social heritage. Nothing of the kind has happened.”
CHAPTER 24 Inconspicuous Consumption
In defining the good life, the suburbanites have to get down to cases, and when they do these social pressures can become highly visible. On the one hand, suburbanites have a strong impulse toward egalitarianism; on the other, however, they have an equally strong impulse to upgrade themselves. Somewhere in the middle lies the good life, but like that elusive plateau they seek in The Organization, it vanishes as quickly as one finds it.
In an environment that seems so homogeneous, one might think there were few distinctions one would have to worry about. To the practiced eye, however, there is much more diversity in the scene than the bystander sees, for the more accustomed one becomes to the homogeneity, the more sensitized is he to the small differences. At Levittown, Pennsylvania, residents are very much aware of who has what “modification” of the basic ranch-house design, and one house on which the owner mounted a small gargoyle became so famous a sight that many residents used to drive out of their way to show it to visitors. People have a sharp eye for interior amenities also, and the acquisition of an automatic dryer, or an unusually elaborate television set, or any other divergence from the norm is always cause for notice. Those who lack such amenities, conversely, are also noted. In one suburb, to cite a rather extreme example, a wife was so ashamed of the emptiness of her living room that she smeared the picture window with Bon Ami; not until a dinette set arrived did she wash it off.
Necessity has been buttressed with ideology. It’s inconspicuous consumption now, and suburbanites are quite articulate about it. One of the most frequent observations they will volunteer is that “there’s no keeping up with the Joneses here,” and they protest it with unwonted frequency. The precept does more than condone their lack of money to do anything else; it praises the behavior as ultimately ethical. It is a social compact they are voicing. Openly stated, the reasoning would go something like this: Most of us are at a pretty critical stage in our careers; it is just about now that we will realize that some of us are really going to go ahead and some of us aren’t. If you find you’re going ahead, it’s rubbing it in unfairly to make it obvious to the others who aren’t. You have broken the truce.
The Organization Man Page 37