The Organization Man

  Perhaps the greatest tyranny, however, applies not to the deviate but to the accepted. The group is a jealous master. It encourages participation, indeed, demands it, but it demands one kind of participation—its own kind—and the better integrated with it a member becomes the less free he is to express himself in other ways.

  In the planners’ meetings I spoke of earlier, most of those who wanted to plan for more participation assumed there is a unity to participation—that is, a layout that will stimulate neighborly social participation is the layout that will stimulate civic and cultural participation. They saw no antithesis; their primary goal was to develop “citizenship” rather than social activity, but they saw both kinds of participation as indivisible—parts of a satisfying whole.

  When I first went to Park Forest I thought so too. The courts and blocks that were most notable for the amount of friendliness and social activity, I presumed, would be the ones that contributed the greatest number of civic leaders, and as a check I plotted the location of all the leaders in the principal community organizations. To my surprise, the two did not correlate; if anything, there was a reverse relationship. By and large, the people who were active in the over-all community did not tend to come from the courts that were especially “happy.”

  The cause-and-effect relationship is not too difficult to determine. For some people, of course, it does not make much difference whether the neighborly gang is a happy one or not; they would be leaders in any event. But such people are a minority. The majority are more influenced by the good opinions of the group, and the cohesiveness of it has a considerable bearing on whether they will become active in community-wide problems. Where the group has never jelled enough to stimulate a sense of obligation, the person with any predilection for civic activity feels no constraints. The others would not be annoyed if he went in for outside activity; they don’t care enough. If the group is strong, however, the same kind of person is less likely to express such yearnings. It would be divisive. There are only so many enthusiasms a person can sustain, only so many hours in the day, and the amount of leisure one expends outside the group must be deducted from that spent inside.

  It is not merely that the group will resent the absenteeism. Again, on the part of the individual himself, there is a moral obligation, or, at least, the feeling that there should be. I recall how a young housewife put it to me. She had been toying with the idea of getting involved in the little theater, for she felt she and her husband were culturally very lacking. But she decided against it. “If we do it’ll mean we’ll have to spend more of our free evenings away from the gang. I’d hate to be the first to break things up. We’ve really worked things out well here. The two play areas for the kids—my, how we all pitched in on that! I know we spend too much time just talking and playing bridge and all. Frankly, Chuck and I are the only ones around here who read much more than the Readers Digest. But have we the right to feel superior? I mean, should we break things up just because we’re different that way?”

  Is this simple conformity? I am not for the moment trying to argue that yielding to the group is something to be admired, but I do think that there is more of a moral problem here than is generally conceded in most discussions of American conformity. Let me go back to the case of the man who is wondering about something he knows would upset the group—like not painting his garage white, like the rest. He may have been one of the first settlers of a block where the people have suppressed potential dislikes in a very successful effort to solve their common problems. Quite probably, a piece of bad luck for one of the group might have further unified them. If one of the wives had come down with polio, the rest might have chipped in not only with their money but with their time to help out the family through the crisis.

  In other words, there has been a great deal of real brotherhood, and the man who is now figuring about his garage faces a decision that is not entirely ludicrous. He knows instinctively that his choice will be construed by the others as an outward manifestation of his regard for them, and he does feel a real obligation to help sustain the good feeling.

  If he goes along with them he is conforming, yes, but he is conforming not simply out of cowardice but out of a sense of brotherhood too. You may think him mistaken, but grant at least his problem. The group is a tyrant; so also is it a friend, and it is both at once. The two qualities cannot easily be separated, for what gives the group its power over the man is the same cohesion that gives it its warmth. This is the duality that confuses choice.

  This duality is a very unpleasant fact. Once you acknowledge how close the relationship is between conformity and belongingness —between “good” participation and “bad” participation—you cannot believe in utopia, now or ever. But progress is not served by ignoring it. Many current prescriptions for a better society do ignore it, and thus are delusory. However shrewd their diagnosis of what is wrong, their precepts could intensify the very problems they are intended to solve.

  Even so perceptive an observer as Erich Fromm has fallen into this trap. In his plea for The Sane Society, Fromm makes a searching diagnosis of man’s desperate efforts to escape the burdens of freedom in group conformity. In documentation Fromm cites the conformity of suburbia. Appropriately enough, he singles out Park Forest as an example and dwells at considerable length on the baneful aspects of the group pressures found there. But what is his antidote? In conclusion, he advocates a “democratic communitarianism”—a society in which, through a multitude of small, local groups, people learn to participate more actively with others.

  Well? Fromm might as well have cited Park Forest again. One must be consistent. Park Foresters illustrate conformity; they also illustrate very much the same kind of small group activity Fromm advocates. He has damned an effect and praised a cause. More participation may well be in order, but it is not the antidote to conformity; it is inextricably related with it, and while the benefits may well outweigh the disadvantages, we cannot intensify the former and expect to eliminate the latter. There is a true dilemma here. It is not despite the success of their group life that Park Foresters are troubled but partly because of it, for that much more do they feel an obligation to yield to the group. And to this problem there can be no solution.

  Is there a middle way? A recognition of this dilemma is the condition of it. It is only part of the battle, but unless the individual understands that this conflict of allegiances is inevitable he is intellectually without defenses. And the more benevolent the group, the more, not the less, he needs these defenses.

  For ultimately his tyranny is self-imposed. In earlier chapters on life within The Organization we saw how the increasing benevolence of human relations, the more democratic atmosphere, has in one way made the individual’s path more difficult. He is intimidated by normalcy. He too has become more adept at concealing hostilities and ambitions, more skillfully “normal,” but he knows he is different and he is not sure about the others. In his own peculiarities he can feel isolated, a fraud who is not what he seems.

  Wives also. Like their husbands in the office, they are easily misled by the façades of those about them in suburbia, and a frequent consequence is the “superwoman” complex. Only a minority of wives are really successful at handling both a large agenda of social or civic obligations and their home duties, but everyone puts up such a good front that many a wife begins to feel that something is wanting in her that she is not the same. Determined to be as normal as anyone else, or a little more so, they take on a back-breaking load of duties—and a guilt feeling that they’re not up to it. “I’ve seen it so many times,” says Arnold Levin, Park Forest’s overworked family counselor. “They may feel inadequate because they haven’t a college degree, or haven’t made the League of Women Voters, or can’t be a “model” mother like someone else in the court. I’m not worth enough,’ they tell me.”*

  To bring the problem full circle, you often find wives in deep emotional trouble because they can no longer get understanding or help fr
om their husbands on their social problems. The wife’s talk about the court or the block is not just idle gossip; this is the world she and the children must live in, and the personal relationships in it are quite analogous to the ones that are the basis of the husband’s worries. But husbands have a double standard on this: office politics they see as part of a vitally important process, but the same kind of relationships in the community they dismiss as trivia, the curse of idle female tongues. “I often wonder,” says Levin, “does the husband look to the job in self-defense against his wife’s lack of interest? Or does she go in for civic activity because he’s withdrawn into the job? I don’t know which cause comes first, but it’s tragic how many couples have lost the ability to meet each other’s inadequacies.”

  Those who seem best able to steer their own course care about the good opinion of the group, but they have this distinction: they are professionals. They know the conflicts of interest between themselves and others are natural; they have been through many environments and they have the intelligence to grasp this recurring feature of group life. To use Everett Hughes’s phrase, they know how to routinize crisis.

  Unlike the deviate, they pay the little surface obeisances to the group. Thus do they defend themselves. They have to. Usually, those who seek their friendships through civic or cultural interests have palpably different tastes than those who accept propinquity. Members of the League of Women Voters, for example, are apt to be somewhat absent-minded about their clothes and their housekeeping. (“Most of us League gals are thin,” says one, after some comments on the Women’s Club. “We’re so busy, and we don’t have time for coffee and doughnuts.”) Such people, however, have much less friction with their neighbors than might be imagined. They do not give the group enough familiarity to breed contempt; although they may draw a firm line at intimacy, they are good about baby-sitting, returning borrowed lawn mowers, and the other neighborly graces.

  Above all, they do not get too close. The transients’ defense against rootlessness, as we have noted, is to get involved in meaningful activity; at the same time, however, like the seasoned shipboard traveler, the wisest transients don’t get too involved. Keeping this delicate balance requires a very highly developed social skill, and also a good bit of experience. “It takes time,” explains one transient. “I had to go through fraternity life, then the services, and a stretch at Parkmere before I realized you just get into trouble if you get personally involved with neighbors.”

  More basically, what they have is a rather keen consciousness of self—and the sophistication to realize that while individualistic tastes may raise eyebrows, exercising those tastes won’t bring the world crashing down about you. “One day one of the girls busted in,” one upper-middlebrow cheerfully recounts. “She saw I was reading. ‘What you got there, hon?’ she asked me. You might have known it would be Plato that day. She almost fell over from surprise. Now all of them are sure I’m strange.” Actually they don’t think she’s overly odd, for her deviance is accompanied by enough tact, enough observance of the little customs that oil court life, so that equilibrium is maintained.

  Just where the happy mean lies, however, still depends greatly on the degree of the group’s cohesion. Relatively, the seasoned transient steers his course more intelligently than the others. But he too is not proof against beneficence. “Every once in a while I wonder,” says one transient, in an almost furtive moment of contemplation. “I don’t want to do anything to offend the people in our block; they’re kind and decent, and I’m proud we’ve been able to get along with one another—with all our differences—so well. But then, once in a while, I think of myself and my husband and what we are not doing, and I get depressed. Is it just enough not to be bad?” Many others are so troubled. They sense that by their immersion in the group they are frustrating other urges, yet they feel that responding to the group is a moral duty—and so they continue, hesitant and unsure, imprisoned in brotherhood.

  * This denominator-seeking is also illustrated in the commercial “parties” held in suburbia (Linda Lee clothes demonstrations, the Beauty Counselor, etc.). Stanley Home products demonstrators, for example, ask the hostess to serve only two refreshments, preferably coffee and doughnuts. If the choice is left to her, she may overdo it and others will fear to be hostesses lest their own offerings suffer in comparison. Similar care marks the games that precede the product demonstration. “The best kind of thing to start with,” says one Park Forest housewife who has demonstrated Stanley products, “is something like the waistline game. That’s where you lay a piece of rope on the floor and start making an ever-bigger circle; one by one the girls tell you when they think it’s as big as their waistline. They always overestimate, because your waistline is oblong and not a circle. They get a big charge out of that. But if you do anything that shows up people’s intelligence, it’s tricky. With a spelling game or naming states—you’d be surprised how many people can’t name ten states—they just get uncomfortable.”

  * One of the occupational hazards of interviewing is the causing of talk, and I am afraid my presence seriously embarrassed some housewives in several suburbs. In one of the instances I later learned about, a husband arrived home to be greeted by a phone call. “You don’t know who I am,” a woman’s voice announced, “but there’s something you ought to know. A man stopped by your house this afternoon and was with your wife three hours.” This was malicious, but not all such gossip is. Unless he is a deliveryman or doctor or such the man who enters suburbia during the day can make the female group feel that here comes Trouble, and their protective instincts come to the fore—stroll by a bunch of wives Kaffee-klatsching on a lawn and you will feel very forcefully their inquiry.

  * The impulse to self-punishment sometimes takes a more pathological form. Barbiturate addiction and attempted suicides are not over average at Park Forest related to national statistics, but there is enough to mock the façade of well-adjusted normality. In the spring of 1955 there was a rash of publicity over the number of women found lifting groceries in the supermarket. Actually, the number was not really very high, the main reason for the excitement being the merchants’ faith in publicity as a deterrent. The news about who the women were, however, was something of a shocker. The average shoplifter, the police chief told the newspapers, was not a low-income wife; she was the wife of a junior executive making $8,000, she belonged to a bridge club, was active in the PTA, and attended church. Usually she had about $50 a week to spend on food and sundries. Perplexed, the police chief and the village chaplain had to put it down as part of the “middle-class neurosis.” Rarely was there any obvious motive; even the repentant of the wives could not explain. Perhaps, as some psychiatrists might venture, they stole to be caught—as if they were asking to be punished for wearing a false face to the world.

  CHAPTER 27 The Church of Suburbia

  This brings us to a question. Is the organization transients’ emphasis on the social a passing phase in their lives—a convenient accommodation to current reality? In the early stages of their life in suburbia, patently, the sheer fact of living so close together is bound to make them put a heavy premium on fellowship, and to a degree they are preoccupied with other people because they have to be. Yet there is more than expediency to this impulse. There is internal conviction as well, and in evidence I would now like to turn to the church. I will concentrate largely on one church, Park Forest’s United Protestant Church, for it is perhaps the most outstanding example of its kind in the country. It is outstanding, however, precisely because it so well expresses the temper of organization man, and the needs that it fulfills are deeply felt by him wherever he may be.

  The story begins in 1946. To church the community, Klutznick decided to give free land to the churches. But to how many and which? Obviously there would be a Catholic church and a Jewish synagogue, but the Protestant denominations posed a problem. To help him out, the leading denominations made estimates of how many people each would probably serve. Not t
oo surprisingly, each was generous in its projections, and when Klutznick added up the estimates, it appeared that there would be more Protestant churchgoers than people.

  Klutznick tried a different tack. In effect, he would give the land to the people rather than to the churches. He would provide the church sites, he told the denominations, but only if they got together and, by impartial survey, determined what the young people themselves wanted. What was the actual number in each denomination? As time went on, how many would probably switch from one denomination to another? Or were they tired of denominations altogether? If the churches would send out a man to make the study—preferably a veteran—Klutznick said he would abide by the results.

  Thus, one day in 1948, Chaplain Hugo Leinberger arrived in Park Forest. It was one of those catalytic moments when the man and the environment come together. Leinberger had no strong denominational bias; he was, furthermore, a veteran. During the war he had served as a Navy chaplain at sea, and this experience, in an analogy he was later to draw on often, was almost a dry run for the chaplaincy of a village.