Parenthesis

by Jay Neugeboren

  The Meadows, too, was a mistake, and I knew it the first night I arrived. Ginny and I had moved my belongings there in her car from Ralph’s mother’s house, and as we drove up to my new home, we both saw our welcoming symbol, looked at each other, shrugged, then laughed: one of the young executives was standing on the front lawn, his arms around a girl, showing her how to swing a golf club.

  On the outside, things were going better than ever. For the first time in my life, I began to have extra money in my pocket, and I used it. I bought the books, clothes, and records I wanted; I ate in restaurants; I went to bowling alleys several times a week; I went to any movie I wanted; Mike and I prided ourselves on the orgiastic meals we’d prepare every evening—huge porterhouse steaks, a pound each of shrimp cocktail—and within six months I would gain over twenty pounds.

  I became dulled, dull; on weekends I’d sit and watch football games on TV all day Saturday and Sunday, Ginny sitting next to me, neither of us speaking to one another. I’d apologize afterwards, but I didn’t change. Among the other young executives at The Meadows I soon developed—for the first time in my life—a reputation as a “shy, quiet guy.” I still wanted to do only one thing—write novels—and GM was supposed to be the means to that end, but after a day’s work at the factory I found myself spent, without even the energy to approach my typewriter.

  The only writing I did during those first few months were the mad exhortations I scribbled in the margins of my paperback copy of William Whyte’s The Organization Man. (In the margins of Chapter I: “Oh the horror! the horror!” “Define!” “Yes!” “Don’t grandiloquize the pathetic.” “No!” “Never! to make the best of the worst of all possible worlds is not to disarm! @ best: to endure!” etcetera.)

  As if Whyte’s book were a text in literary criticism, I fought him line by line, wrote critiques at the ends of each chapter. I was absolute and academic, and I was enraged. His “Introduction” ended with the following paragraph:

  There are only a few times in organization life when he [the Organization Man] can wrench his destiny into his own hands—and if he does not fight then, he will make a surrender that will later mock him. But when is that time? Will he know the time when he sees it? By what standards is he to judge? He does feel an obligation to the group; he does sense moral constraints on his free will. If he goes against the group, is he being courageous—or just stubborn? Helpful—or selfish? Is he, as he so often wonders, right after all? It is in the resolution of a multitude of such dilemmas, I submit, that the real issue of individualism lies today.

  To which I replied, scornfully:

  Wrong: your piecemeal individualism is pathetic in face of actual horror: of 5 day a week, 8 hours a day, 50 weeks, 45 year careers.

  Your organization man (as above) is already an imbecile—i.e., feeble-minded.

  You don’t worship: but you do worse: accept.

  Given the modern org: there can be no individualism [my def] because no self-expression, no creativity. Spasmodic assertion of individuality vs. brotherly coercion are like whimpers of dying cats.

  The most famous part of Whyte’s book—students at Columbia and Indiana had referred to it often, had seen in it a brilliant satire—was an “Appendix” on entrance requirements for those wanting to become organization men. It was titled “How to Cheat on Personality Tests” and Whyte’s point was the obvious one: large corporations wanted their young executives to be stable conformists—obedient, cheerful, kind, clean, neat, etc. Whyte told you how to “cheat” (since we were all, it seemed, nonconformists and idealists at heart) so that you could get into the organization. “Don’t be too dominant,” “Incline to conservatism,” “Don’t split hairs,” “…there does seem to be one moral: don’t think too much,” etc.

  What drove me crazy—what elicited more scribblings—was that Whyte refused to recognize what was, for me, the point of the tests (several of which I’d taken): GM and the rest did not want as a junior executive any young man who was not intelligent enough to see through the tests, to know the answers the corporation was looking for. I.e., the Organization wanted cheaters. The tests were the young organization man’s initiation into his new life. Everybody knew the kind of answers wanted, the kind of behavior deemed acceptable; everybody laughed with Whyte at the tests, at all the games in which nobody really believed—but everybody went along with them. This was all that mattered, I wrote. Whyte’s Ayn Rand-ish notion that the thing for young men to do was to cheat on the tests, get into the corporation and then inject new life into it (“resist” the Organization), seemed to me totally insane.

  Cheating (compromise) was required from the start, and the first time you refused to cheat, the first time you tried, in any important way, to be an individualist, you would fail in the company’s eyes. Nobody could question basic assumptions, values, and get ahead; one was only free to make things more efficient, more profitably benevolent—one was free to reform the “blandness” of organization life.

  I remember, for example, being called into Ralph’s office and being given an IBM card on which a deduction from my salary had already been programmed. The deduction was for the annual United Fund charity drive; our Plant Manager, Ralph explained, was one of the drive chairmen for the Indianapolis area. Ralph asked, with a pleasant laugh, if I wanted to contribute to this charity the amount which had already been deducted and he gave me a printed card showing how the amount each person contributed was scaled to his salary.

  “And if I say no?” I asked.

  Ralph shrugged, smiled: “You’ll lose your job.”

  We both laughed at that. I thought for a second, then: “You mean it, don’t you?” I said.

  He nodded. “Yes. That’s right, but…”

  “All right,” I said, and I okayed the deduction.

  Whyte was on the side of the Corporation (he merely wanted to improve it from within), and I railed at him for page after page because, I suppose, I had discovered that I was not.

  When, in the last paragraph of the last chapter, Whyte declared that the organization man “must fight The Organization,” I replied in capitals, “NO—He must leave the Org.”

  In the margins of his book, I was quickly becoming a pamphleteer: the System was all-powerful, it could not be changed, reformed from within; therefore, I explained to Whyte again and again, it had to be overthrown. My feelings were those of an anarchist—tinged with Marxism: all my sympathies were with the workers. The thrill I felt at the idea of working “on the line” told me that I had entered the training program still believing in the union man, still believing that there was something inherently more real about physical work and poor people than about intellectual work, the lives of middle- and upper-class people.

  My sympathies stayed with the workers (and against “the bosses”) even though I saw, too quickly, that any ideal notion of The Working Man I’d held had been based on romance, wish, myth. The men in the factory were, by and large, bigoted, lazy, uninteresting. Their desires were identical to the desires of those who worked in the executive wing of the plant: they wanted more money to buy more goods; they seemed to want no say in what was produced or how it was produced.

  They were profoundly conservative politically: anything that threatened, or that they thought—were taught—threatened the relative stability of their jobs, their lives (e.g., poor people, black people, smart-aleck professors, beatniks) was to be derided, kept down. Jokes about “niggers” and “kikes” were the staple of their humor; hate sheets were often shown to me for my approval; veterans of the Second World War, not knowing I was Jewish, would tell me that the only mistake we’d made at the end of the war was “not to join up with the Nazis against the Commies.”

  During my months in the factory, I heard, a half-dozen to a dozen times, conversations which began—“I’m not saying Hitler should of had all those camps—but maybe a lot of them Jews had it coming to them….”

  Workers would tell me stories about the times they’d gone �
�coon-huntin” on Saturday nights when they were young—four or five guys, with chains, riding dark southern roads and looking for a young black guy. Others told me about the homes—of blacks who’d moved into their neighborhoods—they’d broken windows in, torn the plumbing from, burned down.

  The force with which anger rose in me was jolting; but I felt helpless to reply, to do anything. My satisfactions were slim. Once, driving home from work, I nearly killed a group of us by cracking the driver over the head with a rolled-up newspaper for calling me a “nigger-lover.” Another time, after spending a day with a foreman who seemed to find my presence at his side the occasion for eight hours of nigger-cursing, I thanked him, shook his hand, and informed him that my mother was Negro.

  For the most part, during my days at the factory, I was on my own. Although some foremen and executives I was assigned to made efforts to educate me concerning their departments, most of them regarded my assignment to them as a nuisance. As soon as I thought that they felt they’d discharged their duties by giving me a half-hour or an hour rundown on what went on in their office, their assembly line, I’d generally tell them that I knew they had enough to worry about without me, and that I’d just as soon roam around on my own. If there were any work they needed done, I’d be available—and if I had any questions I assured them I’d ask.

  They were usually pleased with this deal. Thus, though I spent many days doing tedious, menial work—taking time-motion studies, running off blueprints, working simple machines and presses—I spent an equal number of days doing nothing. Nobody seemed to mind, or notice. I walked around with a serious, concerned look on my face, and thought of escape.

  One of my favorite time-passing activities was to find a desk somewhere and read through minutes of labor-management hearings. Some of the stories (the causes for grievances, suspensions) were good, and I would spend hours typing out those which interested me. One, I thought, would be the basis for my next novel—and I planned to begin the novel with a reprint of a grievance procedure: the case concerned an Irish worker who was accused of starting a wildcat strike. What fascinated me were the accounts—amid bureaucratic jargon—of the man’s prodigious drinking abilities. The document listed the bars he drank at, the amounts he drank, the things he reportedly said to workers.

  I found other pastimes. During my time in the machine-repair shop, I helped the men with what they referred to as their “government projects”—tool chests for themselves, toys for their kids, knicknacks to bring home. I learned to work some of the machines, and I made myself several letter openers (steel blades, lucite handles). I enjoyed one of the games the workers in machine-repair taught me: to demonstrate the strength and thickness of the sheet metal being used to make truck bodies, one worker would hold a piece of the steel while another worker would see if he could pierce the sheet in one stroke with a nail (or letter opener). At the assembly plants, I was told, there were inspectors whose sole job was to check for workers’ “playfulness” (sabotage): tools under the hood, cigarettes in the fuel line, etc.

  Some of the older workers would sometimes tell me stories about what things had been like in the days before the unions had power. The stories were out of Dos Passos—police disrupting rallies, union organizers losing jobs—and I loved them. Several of the workers remembered the time when, after breaking up a union rally across from the plant (before it was Chevrolet-Indianapolis it had been a carriage factory), Indianapolis police had cornered the speechmakers and beaten them senseless while the workers looked on.

  Though I was well aware of all the goldbricking that went on because of the union, and though I knew to my disappointment that the union itself had given up the desire to have any say about what was made in the factory, I found myself remaining more impressed by what the situation would have been had there been no unions.

  For me, the harried, frantic, sour dispositions of most shop foremen accurately reflected the nature of things: a man at the lowest level of management, being in the most precarious position (there were no unions for foremen), had to peck hardest at those under him if he expected to get ahead, to keep his job.

  The Working Class sensibilities which swelled in my chest, the feelings of hostility I developed toward my Employer—I seemed to have no trouble controlling them. I did my job, I was friendly to all, I remained in favor; I was able to grasp the functions of departments and workers quickly, and the reports I wrote were considered excellent…“The function of the Personnel Department is to process and care for all the personnel, hourly and salaried, employed at Chevrolet-Indianapolis. This involves many activities….” The progress report on me which was sent to Detroit at the end of my first three months gave me the highest possible rating.

  Away from the factory, I began to retreat more deeply into myself; I hated and feared the people around me—especially the young people at The Meadows—I despised them, for reasons that weren’t, even at the time, difficult to figure out, more than I believed possible, and I began to deal with my fears and hatreds by waging my own silent and private wars.

  The newspapers I read every day became ready—and impersonal—targets. The two major Indianapolis papers, the News and Star, were both owned by the same man, Eugene C. Pulliam, and were both conservative. I was able that fall, in the factory, at The Meadows, to debate the relative merits of Nixon and Kennedy, but I felt lost when it came to arguing against the editorial pages of these papers. Here, the views of the people around me were trapped up in a rhetoric I found baffling; thus, an editorial in the Indianapolis News, of November 21, 1960, against school desegregation:

  TRAGEDY IN NEW ORLEANS

  The tragedy which has gripped the city of New Orleans is grim testimony to what men can do when they try to coerce one another into virtue.

  …The stated object of school integration is to promote the welfare of the Negro in the South. But what has in fact happened? The real result has been to marshal economic pressures against Negroes, to inflame latent prejudice, to incite racial violence. Moreover, it would seem the integration effort has not achieved the explicit point on which the entire struggle has been staked…

  …The end of discrimination, in the psychological sense which so concerned the [Supreme] court, can come only when the white people of the South want it to corne. If they do not want it there is no way to force them into willing compliance…

  In dealing with this kind of argument, where could one begin? Still, I began: I discovered that I would, day after day, when I got home from work, struggle to refute the logic, to probe the assumptions, to devastate the reasoning that exemplified and sustained all I was beginning to feel was wrong with the world.

  Little in my first twenty-one years had prepared me for the America I was living in, or for my reactions to it. In New York, if I’d even given it any thought, I’d probably comforted myself with the notion that there existed in the world an efficient division of labor: I worked on novels, “somebody else” worked against injustice. In Indianapolis, though, nobody seemed to be working against injustice—and everybody seemed unjust. The feeling was obsessive, ferocious: if I didn’t do something to fight the evil (the people) around me, nobody would.

  What was wrong in the factory, in The Meadows, seemed to me to be preserved—paralleled, reinforced—by the rhetoric of the Indianapolis News and Star. Support for segregation, for Trujillo, for invasion (“liberation”) of Cuba, for a Monroe Doctrine for Africa—that most people I met in Indianapolis did not seem to feel that these positions were extreme ones only made their extremity seem more terrible to me.

  In the fall of 1960 I found a particular, and personal, opponent—a man I’d never heard of before I’d read the Indianapolis papers. His syndicated columns seemed to speak most directly to the people around me, for their way of seeing things. His columns reflected what was for me an impenetrable double standard in which morality and self-interest were used not only to justify one another, but were confused, sincerely, as far as I could tell—which made
matters worse, for one another.

  I read the columns religiously, copied out paragraphs, debated them—but the more I did so, the less capable I became of reason or reasonableness.

  We would hold on to Africa, in part because Western survival there is essential to victory over Communism, but no less than because we know that the privilege of being born in the West carries with it the responsibility of extending our good fortune to others.

  We are the bearers of Western Civilization—the most noble product of the heart and mind of man. If, in Africa, the West has failed in the past to do the full measure of its duty, then all the more reason for doing our duty now.

  Justice is a worthy objective, but if justice for the Bantus entails driving the government of the Union of South Africa away from the West, then the Bantus must be prepared to carry their identification cards yet awhile longer.

  Under the press of my GM experiences, the doubts I had about extending the benefits of Western Civilization to the rest of the world were severe enough; the belief that these benefits were to be imposed forcibly on others by us, and the fact that such a belief did not seem, to those who held it, incompatible with beliefs in “freedom,” in the “right to self-determination,” etc., left me furious—and incapable of argument.

  Moreover, the way in which such columns continually, easily spoke of using military power to bring about such benefits terrified me.

  Only in one instance have we moved purposefully and effectively to dislodge existing Communist power-in Guatemala. And contrary to what has been said recently, we did not wait for “outside pressures” and “world opinion” to bring down the Communist government.

  As everyone knows [I did not, until then], we moved decisively to effect an anti-Communist coup d’état and there is no need to apologize for what we did. We served our national interests and by so doing we saved the Guatemalan people the ultimate in human misery.