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The corporate world described by the mid-century critics—indeed, the world that many office workers felt themselves belonging to—was one characterized by robust affluence as well as pervasive fear, by a sense of individual autonomy that was nonetheless not too free. This was the culmination of continuous growth in private bureaucracy, which had resulted, they felt, in a new social type, an inner change in the American character. Self-contradictory or paradoxical phrases proliferated in order to describe this situation. There was the “illusory freedom” that BusinessWeek applied to the research environs of Bell Labs; C. Wright Mills, typically more caustic, would call the white-collar class a group of “cheerful robots.” David Riesman and his junior research collaborators on The Lonely Crowd concluded from their interviews that the typical new middle-class man was an “antagonistic cooperator.” Desiring the approval of others, he nonetheless feels himself to be constantly in competition with others. His job entails both the emulation and the manipulation of other people. He begins to work even longer hours and breaks up the time by socializing—itself a kind of work—and on blowing tons of money on his expense account as a kind of “occupational therapy.” The office, in turn, becomes a scene of constant “glad-handing”:
The shortening of hours has had much greater effect on the life of the working class than on that of the middle class: the executive and professional continues [sic] to put in long hours, employing America’s giant productivity less to leave for home early than to extend his lunch hours, coffee breaks, conventions, and other forms of combining business with pleasure. Likewise, much time in the office itself is also spent in sociability: exchanging office gossip (“conferences”), making good-will tours (“inspection”), talking to salesmen and joshing secretaries (“morale”).31
For Riesman, the newly sociable office—far from the disciplined and heavily watched ideal of the Taylorists—carried the manager and the executive far from domestic life; work took on the psychic pleasures of home, and sociability itself became an essential ingredient in work. The obverse of this was the new internal “radar” that one carried—the constant, wearying attentiveness to the needs and judgments of others. The American novelist Joseph Heller masterfully exploited the paranoid potential of this setup in Something Happened (1974). The novel’s manager narrator Bob Slocum is a socially affable but privately high-strung middle manager, popular among the various secretaries in the insurance office where he works, whom he sleeps with on occasion. But he lives in a constant state of low-level tension, mild despair, and fear. “I get the willies when I see closed doors,” the novel begins. It’s a feeling he associates with a primal scene in childhood, when he stumbles upon his older brother having sex behind a closed door. But it applies equally to the world of the mid-century corporate office, with its casual blend of tedious, bland paperwork and unexploded emotional mines lying between and around people one sees more than one sees one’s own family. Rather than the site of great passions and vehement emotions, office sociability offers, at best, a low-level dread:
In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid. Each of these five people is afraid of four people (excluding overlaps), for a total of twenty, and each of these twenty people is afraid of six people, making a total of one hundred and twenty people who are feared by at least one person. Each of these one hundred and twenty people is afraid of the other one hundred and nineteen, and all of these one hundred and forty-five people are afraid of the twelve men at the top who helped found and build the company and now own and direct it.32
In describing his own private fears, Slocum was also describing the nature of private bureaucracy: its self-protecting, easily wounded nature, the need for higher-ups ceaselessly to be flattered by their lower-downs. For the critics who wanted more “individualism,” this was stifling to business itself. The team structure of business, Harrington wrote, “requires that we not do our best because it would make the boss look bad. In other words, the inefficient boss’s security is more important than getting the job done.”33
Fear in another sense—the unwillingness to take risks—pervades the signature classic of the era, William H. Whyte’s Organization Man. Whyte—a reporter for Fortune magazine, extraordinarily enough—saw conformity, an “idolatry of the system,” produced in every sector of society. An entire system had locked into place to foster the new social demand to participate, no matter what the cost; the “inner-directed” ethos that Riesman insisted still lingered in the American consciousness was, for Whyte, all but extinguished. Whyte’s primary target was middle management, where two generations of theorists about the office, from Taylor to Mayo, had placed their hopes. Whyte, by contrast, singled the middle managers out for a scathing condemnation. In his view, America had once been the natural home of the “Protestant work ethic,” the ethos of individual striving that had fueled the growth of capitalism. But gradually, as more and more workers became employees and filled the ranks of the ever more capacious middle of corporations, the Protestant ethic was turning into a “social ethic.” For the middle manager of a corporation, the individual was no longer a hero; society was.
Whyte’s argument was crude, far cruder than any tossed-off aperçu of The Lonely Crowd, but it was effective. And much of his research was strong. To understand the beginnings of the process of turning free men into organization men, Whyte spent time talking to college seniors. He discovered that universities were now neglecting humanities educations for engineering and business education, under pressure to compete with the science-heavy Soviet Union.34 Years of financial hardship had made new students—members of what would later be called “the silent generation”—shy away from risk, and they made depressing statements about economic depression. “I don’t think AT&T is very exciting,” he quoted one senior as saying, “but that’s the company I’d like to join. If a depression comes there will always be an AT&T.”35 Big corporations, which to people like Whyte once seemed enormous and impersonal, now offered the womb-like safety and security that colleges provided. On-campus recruiting campaigns, then a novelty, promised prospective employees a world of adventure in the rolling landscape of American business: “A MAN CAN GROW AND KEEP ON GROWING WITH OWEN-ILLINOIS GLASS CO.” “VITRO OFFERS YOUR GRADUATES THE ENGINEERS OF TOMORROW!” “THE SKY IS OUR WORLD.” “THE SKY IS THE LIMIT!”36 A smooth pipeline from the dorm room to the desk made organization life irresistible. And though production jobs were available to them, only 12 percent of the seniors he studied went into factory work; the majority preferred to be in an office, on staff.37 The average college senior, Whyte concluded, “does not want to rebel against the status quo because he really likes it.” “Whatever their many differences, in one great respect they are all of a piece: more than any generation in memory, theirs will be a generation of bureaucrats.”38
Whyte had long been businessmen’s favorite critic. They let him into their offices because he worked for a reputable magazine, and he proceeded to excoriate them on their practices. Skilled at invective and sarcasm, and gifted with an unerring bullshit detector, Whyte lambasted the rise of business-speak—for which he coined the term “businessese.” He noted two general trends: one was the massive increase in jargon; the other was seemingly counter to it, the penchant for plain talk. The jargon he found is familiar even today: “please be advised,” “in reference to yours of …,” “we wish to draw attention,” “to acknowledge your letter,” “in the process of,” “at this time,” “under consideration,” “in the not-too-distant future,” “company policy.” Stenographers were even taught shorthand for these phrases.
But the other trend, one equally and balefully with us today, was what Whyte called a kind of “reverse gobbledygook.” Rather than long-winded empty phrases, this “shirtsleeve” English was full of gruff exclamations and terseness. There were never people, only “folks.” You never endured anything; you only “took it on the chin.” The employees were always your “greatest asset.” All businessmen wer
e “forward-looking.” And they were all quarterbacks, leading the team. For when there was a football metaphor in sight, it was pretty much a crime for a businessman not to take it. Why say, “Employees and management should work together,” when you could say something much more pungent? Here is a real example: “The team can’t put the ball across for a first down just by wishing it. The guards and the tackles can’t do their job if the quarterback doesn’t let them in on the play. And we, the quarterbacks, are muffing the ball.”39
The amazing thing about shirtsleeve English was that it could be traced to a single source: The Art of Plain Talk, by Rudolph Flesch, a linguist who had turned his PhD thesis at Columbia into a best seller. “Do not use rhythm”; “do not use periodic sentences”; “do not use rhetorical questions”; “do not use irony (half the people won’t get it)”: these were the choice words of advice that Flesch spiraled at his receivers downfield. Even Churchill’s blood, sweat, and tears speech was singled out for censure. “The reader gets a vague notion,” Flesch writes confidently, “that Churchill used a little word picture of three wet things instead of saying war; and that’s that.” Almost overnight, businessese found a partner in the clenched terseness of tough-sounding, manly business-speak.40
American conformity and conformist business-speak didn’t come out of nowhere; internal pressure within business wasn’t sufficient. As with the rise of public relations, the fastidious attention to language came out of the corporations’ profound need to justify themselves to what they saw as a potentially hostile public. Business in the 1940s and 1950s was gripped in the (almost totally unfounded) fear that Americans might be rejecting the capitalist system. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), a lobby group that, alongside the Chamber of Commerce, sought to promote the political interests of business, saw free enterprise as imperiled by government planning, on the one hand, and agitating labor unions, on the other. It launched a campaign to win. “Today’s challenge, today’s dire necessity,” NAM’s president, Claude A. Putnam, said in 1950, “is to sell—to resell, if you will—to free Americans the philosophy that has kept us and our economy free.”41 The Advertising Council produced eight thousand posters and three million radio spots testifying to the importance of free enterprise. NAM distributed a comic book to hundreds of thousands of workers that showed how the American Revolution had been sparked by “government planners” in London, seeking to take away our freedoms.42 “It is an unfortunate fact,” one Chicago businessman said at a dinner as part of the campaign, “that the majority of the American people are ready to destroy business for state socialism.”43 All of Whyte’s reporting suggested that this wasn’t quite the case. But business persisted in attempting to refine its communications apparatus, transforming the language itself in the process.
Not content to mangle its workers’ language, the corporate office set out to mold their personalities as well. This strategy surfaced in the postwar mania for personality testing. Possibly because their leader Taylor had been so maniacal, the scientific managers of a previous generation had been little interested in their workers as human beings: their brute interest lay in testing aptitude, to make sure that organizations were efficient and got things done. Rather, it was the human relations school of Mayo that wanted a warm and friendly workplace, with personalities to match. But if human relations was the spirit presiding over the tests, the source of their actual content was distinctly more sinister. Applied psychologists for years had been working in asylums and prisons, developing tests to understand the roots of madness and abnormality, and “in the course of this work,” says Whyte, “they had developed some ingenious pen and pencil tests.” It took no leap of the imagination to think of applying these tests to otherwise “normal” individuals. Though they had originally been designed to measure abnormality, it was of course only possible to figure out what was abnormal by having first determined what was normal. Soon these tests became widespread measures for corporations to figure out whether their prospect would be a willing organization man: Was he radical or conservative? Did he have good practical and social judgment? Would he persevere or fold under pressure? Was he stable or unstable? Was he happy or unhappy? Was he a reforming type or a status quo man? Did he have a sense of humor or not? Refusing to answer the questions was itself revealing, for the tests made provisions for understanding what the answers, or lack of them, had suppressed.44
In theory, the testing regime might have helped to slot congenial types into proper departments and work groups. In practice, it made corporate culture more uniform across the board. By steadily eradicating abnormalities, the tests enforced loyalty. Besides tending to select participants who were more conservative, cautious, and modestly “other-directed,” testing produced its own Hawthorne effect: just the fact of being tested meant that you were more likely to reshape your personality according to some perceived company doctrine. Answering the test questions became a game in guessing what the company wanted. If “Have you enjoyed reading books as much as having company in?” and “Do you sometimes feel self-conscious?” elicited positive answers, that might tell you something about an employee’s degree of introversion, which was usually a bad thing. But trying to fake being extroverted might lead to the charge of excessive sociability, a sign of an unreflective and unthinking personality, just as bad as excessive inwardness. But were you supposed to agree with “It is worse for a woman to have extramarital relations than a man”? Answering yes might indicate a strong, manly conservatism and put you in good standing with the executive boys. But too many affirmative answers to things like “Modern art should not be allowed in churches,” and you might start to seem like a John Birch Society loon. All in all, people who did best on the questions tended to be middle-of-the-road or good at making themselves seem that way—perfect for the enforced gregariousness of the mid-century corporate office.
The testing regime was so exciting to the new “human relations” corporation that it became a staple of American corporate life after the war. In 1952, one-third of U.S. corporations used testing. In 1954—just two years later—it was over 60 percent, including signature firms such as Sears, General Electric, and Westinghouse.45 Pseudoscientific research and consultancy firms sprang up by the hundreds, competing with each other to gain coveted testing contracts at corporation personnel departments. These tests were mostly used for screening job applicants. But occasionally tests would be used internally on people already in the company workforce. Sometimes this was deliberately to conduct layoffs, when business was slow. Other times this was to make it easier to get rid of managers who were now over the hill, their wits blunted by age—which a test could easily be designed to confirm. In the eyes of the corporation, office workers were converging with their tests, the tests with their people. Since companies were already using IBM punch cards to tabulate every other important statistic, Whyte suggested, it was only a matter of time before test scores were punched in too, making the card as complete a picture of a life as any man could want.
Testing registered widely in popular culture as one of the more potent symbols of office conformity. In The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the suburban protagonist Tom Rath gets an unusual test for a PR job at the fictional United Broadcasting Corporation. Walker, the personnel man, asks Rath to take an hour to write up his autobiography. It’s a test that he’s administered to the twenty or thirty other applicants for the job. The one requirement of the genre is that Rath has to finish by completing the sentence “The most significant fact about me is …” “You’d be surprised how revealing the results are,” Walker says. Rath sits and agonizes, stifled by the question. The one thing he can’t talk about is the one that comes insistently to his mind, a fact as powerful as any. It’s “seventeen men”: the tally of men he killed in the war. One of them was his best friend, who died walking inadvertently into one of Rath’s errant grenades. Rath knows it would be “melodramatic” to say something so baldly on the test, yet every other note he tries to strik
e, from plainly cynical to cheaply humorous, rings false. Finally, fed up with the whole purpose of the exam, he writes down the bare biographical facts of his life: his birth date; his educational history; his marital status and dependents—indeed, everything that might be contained on a company’s IBM punch card. “From the point of view of the United Broadcasting Corporation,” he concludes, “the most significant fact about me is that I am applying for a position in its public-relations department, and after an initial period of learning, I probably would do a good job. I will be glad to answer any questions which seem relevant, but after considerable thought, I have decided that I do not wish to attempt an autobiography as part of an application for a job.”46
If The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit were the scathing indictment of a conformist society that it has been held to be since its publication, Rath might not be rewarded for such willful insubordination. But in the world of the novel, he does, in fact, get the job. And every act of nonconformism thereafter only pushes him higher up the ladder. When he is asked to evaluate a speech written by his boss—Hopkins, the chief executive of the United Broadcasting Corporation—Rath considers not saying what he really thinks: that the speech is terrible. Instead, goaded on by his wife, Rath ditches the last shred of his yes-man garb and, gingerly, speaks the truth. Though he is initially stunned by Rath’s uncommon forthrightness, Hopkins quickly recognizes its value. He promotes Rath to his personal assistant and tries to mold him after his own image—that of an imperious executive whose entire life is devoted to work. Yet Rath resists again. He sees the danger—to his health, home, and family—of committing himself fully to his job. His boss, jealous and admiring of Rath’s sheer lack of ambition, gives him a lower, easier middle-management position that pays pretty well. Fortuitously, Rath’s suburban life works out too: he gets permission from the local town council to parcel out his grandmother’s enormous estate, which he had inherited at the beginning of the book, so he can sell the additional lots and make more money. The novel concludes with Rath held up as a hero by the society that allows him to pursue all of his small-bore needs, a model corporate citizen.