by Nikil Saval
To catch the tone with which office workers were figured as agents of fascism, there’s no better place to look than New Masses, a lively and surprisingly popular magazine for American Marxists, which, alongside publishing Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos, as well as the early work of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, reported widely on the reactionary tendencies of the gray-flannel-suited stooges. One writer described his memory of watching office drones on Wall Street joining cops in beating up a group of radical protesters. “The sight of a group of radicals being beaten up was something in the nature of a circus to these white-collar workers,” wrote the author. “Up on the Treasury Building steps, out of the windows of office buildings, skyscrapers, twenty dollars-a-week clerks in striped collegiate cravats howled with delight as the police swung their clubs at the hapless heads of the manifestants.”43 A long poem in clumsy blank verse, “White Collar Slaves,” imagined a host of technicians, “movers of pencils,” singing woozily about their sinister craft of transforming hard labor into figures on a soft ledger:
We are three hundred strong, and every day
Over the tables where our bodies bend,
Our pencils juggle numbers, numbers, numbers,
Whether it be a heap of rusting iron,
Cutting of wages, or a newfound treasure,
We are the ones who mark it in our numbers—
We whom the workers scorn as “glossy pants
Who sit all day playing with pencils” while they
Sweat and bend for their little stack of pay:
Yet whom they know as the stronger, since we keep
Numbers that hold strange meanings: numbers that tell
Secret tales that they may never know.44
The nasty tone was relentless. Office workers were the “most unstable and deluded class in our social system.” The New Masses literary critic, Michael Gold, went so far as to locate the 1920s vogue for Ernest Hemingway in the way the writer expressed “the soul of the harried white-collar class.” “I know a hundred gay, haggard, witty, hard-drinking, woman-chasing advertising men, press agents, dentists, doctors, engineers, technical men, lawyers, office executives,” wrote Gold, describing what he saw as the white-collar source of the typical Hemingway hero. “They go to work every morning, and plough their weary brains eight hours a day in the fiercest scramble for a living the world has ever known … [they] become nervous wrecks under the strain of American business competition.”45 Hemingway’s aggressively wounded masculinity deriving from the travails of white-collar life: as literary analysis, it was ingenious. But the disingenuousness of the attacks on office workers was plain enough; despite their proletarian sympathies, the highly educated magazine staff of New Masses was white-collar through and through, their vituperations as much signs of self-loathing as a genuine exhortation to action. The fact that the left-wing writers of the country were engaged in “mental labor” themselves led to considerable contortions over their need to deny this fact in their own writing.
In the 1930s, white-collar unions urged office workers to mimic the “manliness” of their blue-collar brethren. Tamiment and Robert F. Wagner Library, New York University
But the stock-market crash and the Depression, with impressive speed, changed the tune of the Left. Rather than denying the figures in the mirror, the cultural workers of the Left began to see the white-collar workers as budding proletarians. “It is clear that the masses of lower salaried employees (including salaried professionals) are not members of the middle class,” wrote the Marxist Lewis Corey in his surprise best seller The Crisis of the Middle Class (1935), with the unflappable certainty common in those days, before launching into a fit of messianic italics: “They are economically and functionally a part of the working class: a ‘new’ proletariat.”46 The new, inclusive political awareness that came over organizers regarding office workers was ascribed to a new militancy from the workers themselves, but it seems just as likely that the desperation engendered by the financial crisis led organizers and writers to “discover” the new white-collar class consciousness. “White Collar Workers and Students Swing into Action” and “Technicians in Revolt,” proclaimed the headlines in New Masses, describing violent strikes and confrontations with police by the movers of pencils. “On the White Collar Front” covered a strike in the book publishing industry, where conditions were generally supposed to be grim. “Like horse breeding, a snob-and-specialty industry,” according to New Masses, book publishing was worse than most office environments for having cultivated “an aura of gentility which leads to self-deception on the part of many workers in it.” This was despite the fact that in publishing “the majority of office workers are miserably paid” and “unpaid overtime work is general.” (Plus ça change …) Nonetheless, it was surprising when the workers of Macaulay Company, members of the Office Workers Union, went on strike for improved working conditions—creating the “first labor trouble in the history of book-publishing.” Famous writers and editors such as Dashiell Hammett and Malcolm Cowley joined the strikers in support, with other authors withdrawing their books until the strike was settled—as, eventually, it was, and in favor of the workers. Some magazines were organized as well: Cowley’s own New Republic came to be represented by the United Office and Professional Workers of America, an affiliate of the Communist Party of America.47
This increasing politicization of mental labor—what the historian Michael Denning has called “the cultural front”—became an essential part of left-wing strategy in the era of the New Deal.48 The new class consciousness running through the office started to affect popular culture as well. Faith Baldwin, last seen purveying narratives of upward mobility in which secretaries married their bosses, wrote a post-crash novel, Skyscraper (1931), in which the upper-class professional heartthrob was figured as a malign influence on the economy, and the skyscraper as a symbol of speculation and excess. The ingenue secretary, Lynn Harding, though initially tempted by the wealth and power of lawyer David Dwight, comes to be disgusted with him for attempting to make money off an insider trading deal; she eventually realizes that her proper place is with her own right-thinking, moral class. After several spells of indecision, she marries the lower-middle-class clerk who has been courting her the entire novel. Meanwhile a linocut “graphic novel,” White Collar (1940), by the Italian immigrant Giacomo Patri (which bore an afterword by the powerful United Mine Workers president and New Deal architect John L. Lewis), told the wordless story of an advertising man who conspicuously ignores the rising tide of labor activism all around him, even though he gets laid off and begins to suffer deprivation. At the end of the novel, he becomes a convert to the cause of labor. The final image depicts a multitude of workers marching alongside their brothers and sisters in white collars.
The protagonist of Giacomo Patri’s linocut novel, White Collar, trapped inside his class illusions.
The unrest in the air alarmed the denizens of executive suites. They were also panicking over the first worker-friendly measures of the New Deal, such as the Social Security Act, guaranteeing pensions to the aged partly through levying taxes on employers, and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which legalized the right of workers to bargain collectively. Amid all the turmoil, the office bull pens remained quiet. Despite pockets of successful unionization, office workers had resisted labor’s increasingly strident calls to organize. But was it the calm before the storm? Would they now, in a fit of inspiration proffered by their restive blue-collar brethren, break their pencils over their thighs, smash their counting machines and Dictaphones, and barricade their boss inside his glass-partitioned office until they got what they wanted? Had the paper pushers sitting quietly at the flat metal desks been revolutionaries all along?
The annual conference of the National Office Management Association, a group founded in 1919 by the Taylor-trained specialist on office space W. H. Leffingwell, began to turn its attention away from the usual fascinating discussions of filing methods and the latest
communications technology, devoting more and more time to the task of countering a labor menace that might rear its head any day. An industrial “consultant” who had spent time spying on workers in hot spots around the world, from Welsh mines to midwestern railroad offices, reassured the management association that all the office workers he had seen were “individualists” in the true American tradition. Only when the rungs of the company ladder began to rise out of reach, and the possibility of moving up appeared to vanish, would the office worker lose faith in the dream and begin to band together with his fellow paper pushers. Factory workers feared joblessness, the consultant argued, and therefore sought help in unions for job security; office workers by contrast feared that someone might not give them sufficient credit for their work—which in turn raised the specter that their promotion might be tied not to special ability or accomplishment but to some bureaucratic factor like seniority. In workplaces ruled by the norms of bureaucracy, rather than individual achievement, then, lurked the threat of a union.49
The way to counter the threat, the managers decided, was to design better offices.
Year after year during the Great Depression, the National Office Management Association affirmed, as it never had before, the importance of a good, clean, well-lit place for work. Under the spreading influence of Freud and theories of human psychology, the idea of the office worker as a figure who could be disciplined into productivity through proper incentives started to give way, making more room for theories of the “subconscious” (as the language of pop psychology had it). “The effect of clean offices … is more or less subconscious,” one human resources director said. “Nevertheless, unsatisfactory conditions are often the start of a complaining attitude of mind, that eventually leads up to the more serious grievances.”50 The tendency of offices to centralize all their operations—resulting in the vast caverns of bull pens and steno pools that the Taylorists had rationalized into spectacles of pure efficiency—was now faulted for giving workers the impression that their jobs were routine and dead-end. Where, the newly skeptical managers wondered, would future executives come from, if entry-level work had been pooled, parceled out, and de-skilled to within an inch of its life? How could anyone learn the mental habits for management if his work had been entirely stripped of mental activity?51 Another motivation for the change in managerial attitudes was the entry of women into the office. This meant for them that any whiff of the dirty frat-house atmosphere lingering from the nineteenth-century office had to be flushed out. Offices, managers now believed, had to have a good “matrimonial rating”—more cleanliness signifying, apparently, the wider availability of potential life partners.52
The transformation in the rhetoric of office management resonated with broader changes in American business. The Great Depression had stripped business of its Gilded Age swagger; union confidence, and the ever-present alternative of a “workers’ state” in the Soviet Union (which seemed from the outside to have survived the Depression better than the capitalist countries), produced a corporate ethos of being willing to bargain and compromise, in order to forestall more radical demands. The ruthless supervision and fiat solutions of the Taylorists survived in part, but they would be mollified with a veneer of pop Freudianism. The growing popularity of behavioral sciences—sociology, anthropology, psychology—led managers to try to discover how workers actually behaved rather than how they should behave. In turn, better workplaces more suited to workers’ actual needs would—the theory went—obviate any grievance that might snowball into a full-blown strike.
The new, kinder, gentler American workplace took shape under the auspices of what came to be called the “human relations” movement. Its sources lay in the failure of one kind of social science experiment, based on faulty assumptions, which ironically enough would give rise to new kinds of speculation based on equally questionable methods. From the late 1920s through the early 1930s, a series of lighting experiments were conducted by researchers in behavioral psychology at Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois. The researchers were trying to discover the effect of changes in lighting on factory productivity. According to the premises of the experiment, there would have been an easy cause and effect to measure: raise the lights, raise productivity—or, potentially, vice versa. Frustratingly, there appeared to be no relationship at all between lighting and workers’ productivity. Sometimes more lighting did the trick; sometimes less. After endless soul-searching, the researchers deduced their conclusion: it was the fact of being watched that affected how much the workers worked, not the intensity of the lighting.
The findings were disturbing enough to the complacency of social scientists; it took another turn of the intellectual screw for the deductions to be applied to the workplace. In the early 1930s, Elton Mayo, a professor of business at Harvard, began work on a pamphlet meditating on the meaning of the Hawthorne experiments. The resulting conspectus, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization, became the founding document of human relations. Mixing accounts of Hawthorne and other social science experiments with somber exegeses of Freud’s and Émile Durkheim’s studies on suicide, Mayo concluded his exploration with the doom-laden sentiment that human beings were lost in a state of anomie, which they neither understood nor desired. Mayo argued that it was an impoverished view of man which held that he was only Homo economicus, blindly pursuing his own self-interest. Unintentionally echoing the ideas of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, he affirmed that cooperation was as much part of nature as competition. Only human collaboration on the widest scale, fostered by a corporate world more attuned to the needs of its employees, could save the earth from otherwise inevitable chaos. Administrators needed to become “listeners,” he said; they needed to become anthropologists, even biologists of their own workplaces.53 Human beings needed to feel a sense of belonging, of togetherness. Only then would workers feel at peace in their organizations—and managers feel at peace with their workers.
Architects, like managers, saw themselves as confronting a revolutionary situation—one in which agitation meant that what was needed was a new style of building entirely. For architects, as for others, it was an age of polemics, with contending schools rising one after the other, each devoted to attacking the problem of finding a proper home for man in an industrial age. But where “modernism” in the arts often found itself allied to mass movements, left and right, the fantasies of architects were opposed to turmoil; because built environments were meant to last, architects more often than not wanted to reestablish quiet and harmony—even if this meant revolutionizing all hitherto existing styles to find a new, safe middle ground.
The Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, whose penchant for strikingly large glass panes might have been his most widely followed contribution to the discipline, was paradigmatic. He posed the problem starkly in his vatic, mirthless, brilliant little book from 1923, Towards a New Architecture. After several sections of justly famous (if also dubious) aphorisms (“There is no such thing as primitive man, there are only primitive resources”; “The house is a machine for living in”) outlining the technological means (chiefly, concrete) now available for the “new spirit” taking over the globe, he wrote his most directly political material. “It is a question of building which is at the root of social unrest today,” he argued.54 He meant that building had failed to keep pace with technological progress, which had accelerated with such rapidity at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth that man was left both exhilarated and bewildered. Le Corbusier charged architects with signally failing to understand the “deep chasm” existing between previous eras and the modern age. A transformation in means had to result in a transformation in ends. The transcendental homelessness of man would be solved by architecture—or it would be solved in the streets: “Society is filled with a violent desire for something which it may obtain or may not. Everything lies in that: everything depends on the effort made and the attention paid to these alarming symptoms.”55
The choice was clear: “architecture or revolution.” He concluded, laconically, “Revolution can be avoided.”56
Le Corbusier—the nom de plume of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret—was an autodidact who insisted constantly on his professionalism, a deeply political thinker who considered himself above politics. The most influential architect of the twentieth century, he spent much of his career devising plans that were never built, and fomenting committees and organizations to transmit ideas that few accepted. In his zeal to plan, to corral, and to reshape the living and working arrangements of humankind, he resembled Frederick Taylor—another prophet-like figure who achieved prominence (and vilification) late in life. The resemblance isn’t entirely coincidental. Le Corbusier was one of the earliest advocates for Taylorist thinking in France. He seems to have become familiar with scientific management, and the writings of its founder, during World War I. In the wake of the war’s devastation, he, like many of his contemporaries, came to propound Taylorism as a source of social renewal, a productivity miracle for a ruined and needy continent. Though his chief concern was mass-producing homes—a genuine social concern in the 1920s, when thousands of Parisians died from inadequate provision of housing—he eventually came to conceive of technocratic, centrally planned solutions for organizing work, as well.
In the 1930s, Le Corbusier made a much-publicized visit to the land of Taylor, and to New York, recorded in his travelogue When the Cathedrals Were White. New York thrilled him, but not just for its architecture: pages and pages of his memoir record the powerful effect that jazz had on him—its long, improvised musical lines floating on swift-moving currents of chords, at once atavistic and incomparably modern. (Around the same time, the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian would try to give his dancing red-and-yellow abstract streetscape of Manhattan the imagistic feel of jazz, calling it Broadway Boogie-Woogie.) But jazz seemed to Le Corbusier to outpace the actual quality of Manhattan architecture. Something about the coolness of jazz exposed what was so square about the stiff, classical tones of New York’s fat, shuffle-footed towers.