The cumulative effect can be summed up in a word. One is made outgoing. If the person is too shy to make the first move, others will take the initiative. In almost every court, patio, or superblock there is usually someone who enjoys doing the job, and the stiffer the challenge, the more the enjoyment. “When Mr. and Mrs. Berry came, they wouldn’t give you the time of day,” one leader recalls. “But I knew they were real shy and unhappy beneath it all. I said to myself, ‘I’m going to conquer them if it kills me.’ I have, too. She was one of the organizers for the Mothers’ March and he’s gotten tremendously interested in the school. They’re part of the gang now —you wouldn’t know they were the same people.”
Those who have been “brought out” bear witness to the transformation. They speak enthusiastically of it, and if their experiences had to be summed up in a phrase, it would boil down to one heartfelt note of joy: they weren’t introverts after all. “One of the reasons I took technical training in college,” explains one ex-introvert, “was that I thought I wasn’t the mixing type and wouldn’t be much good with people. Well, here I am, leading meetings and what not, and, frankly, not doing too bum a job. It’s changed a lot of ideas I had about myself.”
In theory, one could keep entirely to oneself, and some people attempt to do so. It is not, however, an easy alternative. The court, like the double bed, enforces intimacy, and self-imposed isolation becomes psychologically untenable. People so ingoing that they have been proof against “bringing out” usually seem to be rather troubled people, and though the causes of their unhappiness may antedate their entry into the court, some leave at the first opportunity. The court checks off another failure. “At the very end the Smithers were beginning to come out of their shell,” one outgoing resident recalls. “But it was too late; they’d already given up their lease. The night they left, you could tell by their faces, the way they tried to get friendly, they wished they weren’t leaving. It was so pathetic.”
On the matter of privacy, suburbanites have mixed feelings. Fact one, of course, is that there isn’t much privacy. In most small towns there is at least enough living room to soften the shock of intimate contact, and, besides, there is usually some redoubt to which the individual can withdraw. In Park Forest not even the apartment is a redoubt; people don’t bother to knock and they come and go furiously. The lack of privacy, furthermore, is retroactive. “They ask you all sorts of questions about what you were doing,” one resident puts it. “Who was it that stopped in last night? Who were those people from Chicago last week? You’re never alone, even when you think you are.”
Less is sacred. “It’s wonderful,” says one young wife. “You find yourself discussing all your personal problems with your neighbors —things that back in South Dakota we would have kept to our selves.” As time goes on, this capacity for self-revelation grows; and on the most intimate details of family life, court people become amazingly frank with one another. No one, they point out, ever need face a problem alone.
In the battle against loneliness even the architecture becomes functional. Just as doors inside houses—which are sometimes said to have marked the birth of the middle class—are disappearing, so are the barriers against neighbors. The picture in the picture window, for example, is what is going on inside—or, what is going on inside other people’s picture windows.
The walls in these new apartments are also dual purpose. Their thinness is occasionally a disadvantage; one court scandal, as a matter of fact, was provoked by a woman who chronically inverted a tumbler against the wall to eavesdrop. But there is more good than bad, many transients say, to the thinness. “I never feel lonely, even when Jim’s away,” goes a typical comment. “You know friends are near by, because at night you hear the neighbors through the walls.”
Even the most outgoing, of course, confess that the pace of court life occasionally wears them down, and once in a while they reach such a point of rebellion they don’t answer the phone. Such a purely negative response, however, is not enough. To gain privacy, one has to do something. One court resident, for example, moves his chair to the front rather than the court side of his apartment to show he doesn’t want to be disturbed. Often a whole court or a wing of it will develop such a signal; a group in one Drexelbrook court has decided that whenever one of them feels he or she has finally had it, she should draw the Venetian blinds all the way down to the bottom of the picture window. This lowered position is an unusual one, and the rest spot it as a plea to be left alone—for a little while, anyway.
But there is an important corollary of such efforts at privacy—people feel a little guilty about making them. Except very occasionally, to shut oneself off from others like this is regarded as either a childish prank or, more likely, an indication of some inner neurosis. The individual, not the group, has erred. So, at any rate, many errants seem to feel, and they are often penitent about what elsewhere would be regarded as one’s own business, and rather normal business at that. “I’ve promised myself to make it up to them,” one court resident recently told a confidant. “I was feeling bad that day and just plain didn’t make the effort to ask them in for coffee. I don’t blame them, really, for reacting the way they did. I’ll make it up to them somehow.”
Privacy has become clandestine. Not in solitary and selfish contemplation but in doing things with other people does one fulfill oneself. Nor is it a matter of overriding importance just what it is that one does with other people; even watching television together —for which purpose, incidentally, several groups have been organized—helps make one more of a real person.
However one may view this responsiveness to the group, it is important to acknowledge its moral basis. That friendship in the new suburbia transcends personal characteristics so much is due in part to the increasing homogeneity of American middle-class values. But it is also due to a very active kind of tolerance, and unless this is recognized one cannot appreciate the true difficulty of the suburbanites’ dilemmas.
Very consciously, they try to understand one another’s backgrounds and prejudices. As the unresolved segregation problem indicates, the millennium is still some way off, but the fact remains that they make a great effort to meet one another halfway. If misfortune strikes a family, the neighbors are not only remarkably generous but remarkably tactful. If, say, the child of a couple in straits accidentally breaks someone’s windshield, the group may not only chip in to pay for the damage but will try to conceal the fact that they have done so. Those in trouble are often irrationally antagonistic, but this the group takes in stride. They may have “a personality problem,” and there is nothing so challenging to the others as its diagnosis and therapy.
In the more humdrum aspects of daily life, much of what could pass for lazy conformity is in fact a very energetic, and in many ways unselfish, quest for consensus. Just as the Bunco player may put his mind to mastering bridge, so the shy housewife makes herself have fun at a coffee party; just as the Fundamentalist unbends with a risqué story and a beer now and then, so his neighbors tone down their own stories.
For the intellectual also Park Forest is a melting pot. “When I first came here I was pretty rarefied,” a self-styled egghead explained to me. “I remember how shocked I was one afternoon when I told the girls in the court how much I had enjoyed listening to The Magic Flute the night before. They didn’t know what I was talking about. I began to learn that diaper talk is important to them and I’m not so highbrow about it now. I still listen to The Magic Flute, but now I realize that it’s not wrong that most people care about other things.”
In similar fashion, farm-bred Republicans learn to appreciate that not all urban Democrats are Communists. ‘The people who lived in the other half of our duplex,” recalls one Republican, “were as different as could be from us. They were the kind who worshiped F.D.R.’s name. But we got to like them just the same. We just didn’t talk politics. We used to go bowling together and that sort of thing. I didn’t make him a Republican, but I think he appreci
ates my views a lot more than he did before, and I understand him better.”
This seeking of common values applies markedly to religion. The neighborhood friendship patterns would be impossible unless religious beliefs had lost much of their segregating effect. And it is more than a passive, live-and-let-live attitude. Several people of other faiths, for example, have joined the National Council of Jewish Women; they like the intellectual content of its discussion programs, and they feel no conflict with their own beliefs.
Even where there is conflict, suburbanites lean over backward to see the other point of view. “When Will and Ada had to dash East last month—they’re devout Catholics—I took care of little Johnny for them,” recalls one non-Catholic. “It really tickled me. Here I was picking Johnny up at St. Irenaeus School every afternoon and seeing to it that he said his Rosary every night before he went to bed.” Park Forest abounds with such stories, and the good will implicit in them is real.*
The suburban group also has a strong effect on relations between husband and wife, and in many ways a beneficent one. The group is a foster family. In the transient organization life the young family has to take a good part of its environment with it; no longer is there the close complex of aunts and uncles and grandparents to support the couple, and when they come to their first crisis this absence can have a devastating effect. Thus the function of the suburban group. All the other young couples are in the same boat, and in a sort of unspoken mutual assistance pact they provide for one another a substitute for the big family of former years.
What unites them most are the concerns of parenthood, and this preoccupation with children is a potent factor in keeping marriages on keel. “The kind of social situation you find here discourages divorce,” says United Protestant Church minister Dr. Gerson Engelmann. “Few people, as a rule, get divorces until they break with their groups. I think the fact that it is so hard to break with a group here has had a lot to do with keeping some marriages from going on the rocks.”
So pervasive are the concerns of parenthood that adjustment to court life is almost impossible for childless couples. Unless the wife obviously loves children—unless she is the kind, for example, who keeps a cooky jar for the neighbors’ kids—her daily routine is painfully out of kilter with the others’. Understandably, the recourse of adopting a child is sought very frequently. Complementing the social pressure of the group on the couple is the readiness of social agencies to give a Park Forest couple preference, for they look on the environment as ideal for adjustment. (Social workers’ liking for Park Forest has been so strong as to force local authorities to yell uncle; so many problem children have been sent out that in several areas the problem children are having more impact on the normal ones than the normal ones on the problem children.)
Personal morals? The court is the greatest invention since the chastity belt. In company, young suburbanites talk a great deal about sex, but it’s all rather clinical, and outside of the marriage no one seems to do much about it. There have been, to be sure, some unpleasant occurrences: in one court there was talk of wife-trading several years ago, and there have been affairs here and there since. The evidence is strong, however, that there is less philandering in the package suburbs than in more traditional communities.
For one thing, it’s almost impossible to philander without everyone’s knowing about it. One’s callers are observed, and if neighbors feel there is anything untoward, suburbia’s phenomenal grapevine will speed the news.* This is not mere venom; in a web of relationships as delicate as that of the court an affair can harm not only two marriages, it can upset the whole court applecart. Infidelity, to put it another way, is an ethical as well as a moral problem.
More important, the neighborliness of court life fills a void in the life of the young wife that is not always filled elsewhere—and this is particularly important for the wife whose husband travels. “You don’t find as many frustrated women in a place like this,” says one young wife. “We gals have each other. A young girl who would get to brooding if she was in an apartment all by herself on the outside can talk things over with us. She’s just too busy to get neurotic. Kitty, for example. She’s married to a real creep—pardon me, but that’s what he is—but when she’s disturbed she comes over here for coffee and a little chat, and we have a fine old time yakking away. It helps, for people like her.”
The participation also mitigates the “retrograde wife” problem that affects many corporation couples. If the husband is moving up rapidly this introduces a wedge between husband and wife, for while he is getting a postgraduate finishing through travel and exposure to successful older men, her tastes are often frozen at their former level by lack of any activity but child rearing. In the new suburbia this is somewhat less likely to happen. “Before we came here,” one wife, typical of many another, says, “I was such a stupid little thing. I didn’t think about anything except shopping and the babies and things like that. Now that I’m in the League of Women Voters and the school board I feel so much more worth while. When Joe comes home at night I have so many interesting things to talk to him about.”
In this mutual seeking of denominators, to recapitulate, the young suburbanites have been re-creating something of the tight-knit group of old. It is an achievement not to be dismissed lightly. They have come together with many more differences in religion, background, and expectations to adjudicate than troubled communities of old. Tensions they suffer for the suppression of their differences, but the consensus that is the result bespeaks a pretty high quotient of kindliness and fundamental decency.
But there is another side to the coin. Contemporary prophets of belongingness point out the warmth and security the tight-knit group produces for the individual, but they generally stop short at diagnosing some of the other things it produces. The suburbanites are more troubled, for they experience the double-barreled effects of belongingness, and in highly practical, immediate ways. It is not the question of conformity, though many speak of it as such. It is, rather, the question of determining when one is conforming, when adjustment is selflessness, or surrender. It is a moral dilemma—the one, I believe, central to the organization man, and while the suburban group affords the most concrete illustration, the underlying problem will not be shed when he moves on.
Let’s take a second look at that tolerance. There is one trouble with it. In the happy group, people are very intolerant of those who aren’t tolerant. This is using the same word in two senses, I admit, but suburbanites are ambiguous about it too. Their tolerance, as they are so proud to point out, goes downward. It does not, however, go upward very far. The leveling process is just that—leveling—and those financially above the norm who let the fact be visible are risking trouble. Though neighbors speak kindly of someone who “has not had all the advantages,” the phrase “they are more … fortunate than the rest of us” is likely to be spoken with a real bite.
Now let me make an important qualification. How much bite depends on how happy the group is. In the block which never quite jelled there is little of the belongingness, the mutual support characteristic elsewhere; for the same reason, however, there is not much pressure on the individual to adjust. There is no working group to adjust to. In the tight-knit group, however, each member feels an equity in others’ behavior. With communication so intensive, the slightest misunderstanding can generate a whole series of consequences. If Charley ducks his turn at the lawn mower, if little Johnny sasses Mrs. Erdlick just once more, if Gladys forgets to return the pound of coffee she borrowed, the frictions become a concern of the group and not just of the principals.
The more vigorous the search for common denominators, the stronger the pressure to alikeness. Sometimes this extends even to house design. The architects have tried to vary the façades of each house, and one might assume that in putting up aluminum awnings, making alterations, repainting and the like, residents try hard to enlarge the differences. This is not always so; in some areas residents have apparently a
greed to unify the block with a common design and color scheme for garages and such.
In such blocks an otherwise minor variation becomes blatant deviance; if a man were to paint his garage fire-engine red in a block where the rest of the garages are white, he would literally and psychologically make himself a marked man. So with fences; if they are obviously designed to keep the children safe, eyebrows are not raised. But if the height or elaborateness of the fence indicates other motives, there will be feeling.
An unkempt lawn is another symbol of malaise. The state of the lawn is an effect as well as a cause, and in talking to owners of neglected lawns one gets the suspicion that they have subconsciously used the unkemptness as a weapon to tell the others where they can head in. “I suppose I should do more about it,” said one resident, waving to a rather weedy expanse outside, “but my wife and I think there are other things more important in life.”
Reprisal is inevitable. The sanctions are not obvious—indeed, people are often unconscious of wielding them—but the look in the eye, the absence of a smile, the inflection of a hello, can be exquisite punishment, and they have brought more than one to a nervous breakdown. And the more social the block, the rougher it is on those who don’t fit in.
In some areas it is questionable if the Gemütlichkeit of the gang compensates for the misery of the deviate. It is frightening to see the cruelty with which an otherwise decent group can punish the deviate, particularly when the deviate is unfortunate enough to be located in the middle of the group, rather than isolated somewhat out of benevolence’s way. “Estelle is a case,” says one resident of a highly active block. “She was dying to get in with the gang when she moved in. She is a very warmhearted gal and is always trying to help people, but she’s, well—sort of elaborate about it. One day she decided to win over everybody by giving an afternoon party for the gals. Poor thing, she did it all wrong. The girls turned up in their bathing suits and slacks, as usual, and here she had little doilies and silver and everything spread around. Ever since then it’s been almost like a planned campaign to keep her out of things. Even her two-year-old daughter gets kept out of the kids’ parties. It’s really pitiful. She sits there in her beach chair out front just dying for someone to come and Kaffeeklatsch with her, and right across the street four or five of the girls and their kids will be yakking away. Every time they suddenly all laugh at some joke she thinks they are laughing at her. She came over here yesterday and cried all afternoon. She told me she and her husband are thinking about moving somewhere else so they can make a fresh start.” (The woman in question has since moved.)
The Organization Man Page 42