The Organization Man

by William H Whyte

  * The disposition to segregate by age and income is also demonstrated by the Florida trailer-camp settlements. These have become permanent institutions, and the nature of the turnover and the social life of the old people within them is in many ways quite similar to that of the younger people’s suburbia. For a good description, see G. C. Hoyt’s “The Life of the Retired in a Trailer Camp” and L. C. Michelon’s “The New Leisure Class,” both in the American Journal of Sociology, January 1954.

  CHAPTER 25 The Web of Friendship

  In such characteristics as budgetism the organization man is so similar from suburb to suburb that it is easy to fall into the trap of seeing a “mass society.” On the surface the new suburbia does look like a vast sea of homogeneity, but actually it is a congregation of small neighborly cells—and they make the national trends as much as they reflect them. The groups are temporary, in a sense, for the cast of characters is always shifting. Their patterns of behavior, however, have an extraordinary permanence, and these patterns have an influence on the individual quite as powerful as the traditional group, and in many respects more so.

  Propinquity has always conditioned friendship and love and hate, and there is just more downright propinquity in suburbia than in most places. Yet in the power of the group that we see in suburbia we can see something of a shift in values as well. Just as important as the physical reasons is a responsiveness to the environment on the part of its members, and not only in degree but in character it seems to be growing.

  In suburbia friendship has become almost predictable. Despite the fact that a person can pick and choose from a vast number of people to make friends with, such things as the placement of a stoop or the direction of a street often have more to do with determining who is friends with whom. When you look at the regularities of group behavior, it is very easy to overlook the influence of individual characteristics, but in suburbia, try as you may to bear this in mind, the repetition of certain patterns makes the group’s influence abundantly obvious. Given a few physical clues about the area, you can come close to determining what could be called its flow of “social traffic,” and once you have determined this, you may come up with an unsettlingly accurate diagnosis of who is in the gang and who isn’t.

  Now this may be conformity, but it is not unwitting conformity. The people know all about it. When I first started interviewing on this particular aspect of suburbia, I was at first hesitant; it is not very flattering to imply to somebody that they do what they do because of the environment rather than their own free will. I soon found out, however, that they not only knew quite well what I was interested in but were quite ready to talk about it. Give a suburban housewife a map of the area, and she is likely to show herself a very shrewd social analyst. After a few remarks about what a bunch of cows we all are, she will cheerfully explain how funny it is she doesn’t pal around with the Clarks any more because she is using the new supermarket now and doesn’t stop by Eleanor Clark’s for coffee like she used to.

  I believe this awareness is the significant phenomenon. In this chapter I am going to chart the basic mechanics of the gang’s social life and what physical factors determine it, but it is the awareness of the suburbanites themselves of this that I want to underline. They know full well why they do as they do, and they think about it often. Behind this neighborliness they feel a sort of moral imperative, and yet they see the conflicts also. Although these conflicts may seem trivial to others, they come very close to the central dilemma of organization man.

  For comprehending these conflicts, park forest is an excellent looking glass. Within it are the principal design features found separately in other suburbs; in its homes area the 60 × 125 plots are laid out in the curved superblocks typical of most new developments, and the garden duplexes of its rental area are perhaps the most intense development of court living to be found anywhere. Park Forest, in short, is like other suburbs, only more so.

  Some might think it a synthetic atmosphere, and even Park Foresters, in a characteristically modern burst of civic pride, sometimes refer to their community as a “social laboratory.” Yet I think there is justification for calling it a natural environment. While the architects happened on a design of great social utility, they were not trying to be social engineers—they just wanted a good basic design that would please people and make money for the developers—and some of the features they built into the units turned out to be functional in ways other than they expected.

  But functional they have been. Perhaps not since the medieval town have there been neighborhood units so well adapted to the predilections and social needs of its people. In many ways, indeed, the courts are, physically, remarkably similar to the workers’ housing of the fifteenth century. Like the Fugger houses still standing in Augsburg, the courts are essentially groups of houses two rooms deep, bound together by interior lines of communication, and the parking bay unifies the whole very much as did the water fountain of the Fugger houses.

  Park Forest is revealing in another respect. There are enough physical differences within it to show what the constants are. When the architects designed the 105 courts and the homes area, they tried hard to introduce some variety, and because of differences in the number of apartments, the length of streets, and the way buildings are staggered around the parking bays, no two courts or superblocks are alike. Neither are they alike socially; some neighborhood units have been a conspicuous social success from the beginning, while others have not. There are more reasons than physical layout for this, of course, yet as you relate the differences in design of areas to the differences in the way people have behaved in them over a period of time, certain cause-and-effect relationships become apparent.

  Let us start with the differences. In “spirit” they are considerable, and the lottery that takes place in the rental office when a couple is assigned to Court B 14 or Court K 3 is a turning point that is likely to affect them long after they have left Park Forest. Each court produces a different pattern of behavior, and whether newcomers become civic leaders or bridge fans or churchgoers will be determined to a large extent by the gang to which chance has now joined them.

  Court residents talk about these differences a great deal. In some areas, they will tell you, feuding and cussedness are chronic. “I can’t put my finger on it,” says one resident, “but as long as I’ve been here this court has had an inferiority complex. We never seem to get together and have the weenie roasts and anniversary parties that they have in B 18 across the way.” In other courts they will talk of their esprit de corps. “You would be lucky to get assigned here,” says one housewife. “At the beginning we were maybe too neighborly—your friends knew more about your private life than you did yourself! It’s not quite that active now. But it’s still real friendly—even our dogs and cats are friendly with one another! The street behind us is nowhere near as friendly. They knock on doors over there.” Community leaders explain that they have to become professionally expert at diagnosing the temper of different areas. In a fund-raising campaign they know in advance which areas will probably produce the most money per foot pound of energy expended on them, and which the least.

  When I first heard residents explain how their court or block had a special spirit, I was inclined to take it all with a grain of salt. But I soon found there was objective proof that they were right. I began a routine plotting of the rate of turnover in each area, the location of parties, and such, and as I did so the maps revealed geographical concentrations that could not be attributed to chance. The location of civic leaders, for example. In the nucleus of courts that were settled first one would expect to find a somewhat higher proportion of leaders than elsewhere, but except for this I thought the distribution of leaders would be fairly random. Where potential civic leaders live, after all, had been determined more or less by chance, and three years of turnover had already shifted the personnel in every court.

  But when I plotted the location of the leaders of the church civic organization
s, certain courts displayed a heavy concentration while others showed none at all. The pattern, furthermore, was a persistent one. I got a list of the leaders for the same organizations as of two years previous and plotted their location. The same basic pattern emerged. Some of the similarity was due to the fact that several leaders were still hanging on, but there had been enough turnover to show that the clustering was closely related to the influence of the court.*

  Other indexes show the same kind of contagion. A map of the roster of the active members of the United Protestant Church indicates that some areas habitually send a good quota of people to church while other areas send few. Voting records show heavy voter turnouts in some areas, apathy in others, and this pattern tends to be constant—the area that had the poorest showing in the early days is still the poorest (six people voting out of thirty-eight eligibles). Sometimes there is a correlation between the number of complaints to the police about parking-space encroachments, litter left on the lawns, and similar evidences of bad feeling. Much in the way one college dorm remains notorious as a “hell’s entry,” some courts keep on producing an above-average number of complaints, and these courts will prove to be the ones with relatively poor records of churchgoing and voting. Another key index is the number of parties and such communal activities as joint playpens. Some courts have many parties, and though the moving van is constantly bringing in new people, the partying and the group activities keep up undiminished. On closer investigation, these areas with high partying records usually prove to be the ones with the layout best adapted to providing the close-knit neighborly group that many planners and observers now feel needs to be re-created on a large scale.

  Let me now get ahead of my story a bit with a caveat. These indexes I have been speaking of do not necessarily measure different aspects of the same quality. I had mistakenly thought that if I put all these indexes together I would have a rough over-all measure of group cohesion. But I found that areas that had an excellent score on one kind of participation, for example, often had a markedly poor one on another. This pattern was common enough, furthermore, to indicate that there must be some basic reasons why the groups couldn’t have their participation both ways.

  I believe there is a lesson to be learned from these disparities. Most of those who speak of man’s need to belong tend to treat belongingness as a sort of unity—a satisfying whole in which the different activities a man enters into with other people complement one another. But do they? The suburban experience is illuminating. The comparison of physical layout and neighborliness will show that it is possible deliberately to plan a layout which will produce a close-knit social group, but it also will show that there is much more of a price to be paid for this kind of neighborliness than is generally imagined.

  Before going into the conflict between types of neighborliness, let’s look first at how these traditions came about. It is much the same question as why one city has a “soul” while another, with just as many economic advantages, does not. In most communities the causes lie far back in the past; in the new suburbia, however, the high turnover has compressed in a few years the equivalent of several generations. Almost as if we were watching stop-action photography, we can see how traditions form and mature and why one place “takes” and another doesn’t.

  Of all the factors, the character of the original settlers seems the most important. In the early phase the impact of the strong personality, good or otherwise, is magnified. The relationships of people within a small area are necessarily rather intense; the roads separating one court from another will become avenues but they are more like moats at this stage, and the court’s inhabitants must function as a unit to conquer such now legendary problems as the mud of Park Forest, or the “rocks and rats” of Drexelbrook.

  But though the level of communal sharing and brotherhood is high in all courts in this period, even then important differences develop. Two or three natural leaders concentrated in one court may so stimulate the other people that civic work becomes something of a tradition in the court; or, if the dominant people are of a highly gregarious temper, the court may develop more inwardly, along the one-big-family line. Conversely, one or two troublemakers may fragment a court into a series of cliques, and the lines of dissension often live long after they have gone.

  In time, the intensity of activity weakens. As the volunteer policemen are replaced by a regular force, as the mud turns to grass, the old esprit de corps subsides into relative normalcy. First settlers will tell you that the place is in a dead calm. “We used to become so enraged,” one nostalgically recalls. “Now it is just like any other place.”

  Not really. What seems like dead calm to the now somewhat jaded pioneers will not seem so to anybody from the outside world, and for all the settling down the court continues to be a hothouse of participation. Occasionally, there are sharp breaks in the continuity of tradition; in one court, for example, several forceful women ran for the same post in a community organization, and the effect of their rivalry on the court spirit was disastrous. Most courts, however, tend to keep their essential characters. The newcomers are assimilated, one by one, and by the time the old leaders are ready to depart, they have usually trained someone to whom they can pass on the baton.

  The rules of the game that are transmitted are more tacit than open, yet in every court there are enough rules to provide an almost formal ritual. “We live as we please,” the old resident will tell the newcoming couple, who then proceed to learn about the tot yard, about the baby-sitting service, about the history of the court and The Incident, how the round-robin bridge group alternates, and how, frankly, they are lucky they didn’t get assigned to the next court—brother, what a weird crew they are!

  There are more subtle aspects to the court character, and through sheer absorption the couple will pick these up too. Their language, for example. With surprising frequency, residents of a particular area will use certain vogue words and phrases, and the newcomers’ vocabularies will soon reflect this. (In one group of duplexes at Drexelbrook, the girls use the word “fabulous” incessantly; in a Park Forest court once dominated by a psychology instructor and his wife, both “interaction” and “permissive” frequently punctuate the most humdrum conversations.) Leisure-time hobbies are similarly infectious. “Charlie used to make fun of us for spending so much time planting and mowing and weeding,” one superblock resident says of a neighbor. “Well, only the other day he came to ask me—oh so casually—about what kind of grass seed is best for the soil around here. You should see him now. He’s got sprays and everything.”

  We have been looking at the differences between courts and blocks as they affect behavior; now let us move in for a close-up of the differences within areas. Here the tremendous importance of physical design becomes apparent. The social patterns show rather clearly that a couple’s behavior is influenced not only by which court they join but what particular part of the court they are assigned to.

  This was first brought home to me when I was talking to a housewife in one large court. She had been explaining to me how different people went with each other and how they decided who was to be included in parties and who was not. When I seemed somewhat surprised at the symmetry of these groupings, she asked me if I had heard about The Line. They wouldn’t know what to do without it, she said, with some amusement. The court was so big, she went on, that things had to be organized, and so they had settled on an imaginary line across one axis of the court. This made the larger division; certain secondary physical characteristics, such as the placement of a wing, took care of the subgroupings.

  Was layout that important? Intrigued, my associates and I decided to make this court the object of considerable study. For a month we went into every other factor that could account for the friendship patterns. We looked into the religion of each one of the forty-four couples, their family background, where they were born, how much education they had had, their taste in books, in television, whether or not they drank, what games t
hey liked to play, the husband’s salary, and so on. With all this in hand we correlated this way and that way, but when we were finished we found we were right back where we had started from. Just as the resident had said, it was the layout that was the major factor.

  The social notes of the Park Forest newspapers offer further corroboration. On this matter I speak with no modesty; I have read every single one of the social notes in the Park Forest Reporter for a three-and-one-half-year period and, believe me, that’s a lot of social notes. The Reporter is an excellent paper and the social doings are reported in sometimes overpowering detail. If you plot the location of the members of each gathering reported in the social notes, you will see certain recurring patterns appear. Wherever areas have common design characteristics—such as a cul-de-sac road —the friendship groupings also tend to be similar.

  On pages 338-9 is a fair sampling of parties held in the homes area of Park Forest between December 1952 and July 1953. If you look closely you will note certain patterns—and these patterns, it should be added, would be even clearer if all the parties could be put on the map. You will note, for one thing, that the guests at any one party came from a fairly circumscribed geographic area. Gatherings that drew their cast from a wide area, like the meeting of the Gourmet Society, were the exception. Note also that the groups usually formed along and across streets; rarely did the groupings include people on the other side of the back yard. And these patterns persist. On pages 340-1 is a sampling of parties in the same area three years later (Jan.-June 1956). New people have moved in, others have moved out, yet the basic patterns are unchanged.