by Nikil Saval
Tailer was momentarily gratified when he at last received the raise he asked for—including the potential of a $50 bonus. Then the firm’s profits began to skyrocket, and Tailer, in full possession of the details of these profits (after all, he was the one depositing and withdrawing the checks), began once again to feel agitated over his compensation, the mere hundreds he received compared with the “thousands” pocketed by Alden. Two and a half years later, Tailer found a position with another firm as a salesman; upon leaving, he was told by Alden that his “greatest failing was too strong an anxiety to force myself ahead.” Yet the anxiety paid off. Only a few years later, at age twenty-five, Tailer would count himself a merchant; later in life he would have the money to travel extensively in Cuba and western Europe, and he had meetings with the Mormon pioneer Brigham Young, President Franklin Pierce, and Pope Pius IX.
The simultaneous impatience and obsequiousness of a figure like Tailer would become a leitmotif of white-collar workers in the century and a half since the clerk first rose to prominence. As such, offices became highly ambiguous spaces in the fast-developing world of American capitalism. Were clerks part of the growing industrial working class, replacing the artisans and small farmers of the old-world economy? Or were they merely stopping points on the way to becoming part of the “ruling class”? The answer appears to be that they were somewhere uncomfortably in between: not “middle class” exactly, or not yet—the phrase was never used, and the concept hadn’t yet sprung up among nineteenth-century Americans—but somehow neither of the working class nor of the elite holders of capital. White-collar workers rarely knew where they were, whom they should identify with. It was an enduring dilemma, rooted in what might be called a class unconsciousness, that would characterize the world of the office worker until the present day.
In one sense, early office workers were definitely part of an elite. For one thing, immigrants were virtually barred from becoming clerks; overt racism of course played a role, but more pertinent was the fact that clerking required an exceptional command of English, and specifically business English, which meant that it was comparatively easier for immigrants to slip into factories or other kinds of manual labor that hardly required speaking or writing at all. In their pay structure, appearance, and style of dress, early office workers seemed to be elite as well. Clerks were salaried, not waged; they often dressed to the nines; and they had the thin wrists and creamily pale complexions of aristocrats unused to hard labor, in a country born in a revolt against an aristocracy.
Politically and culturally, clerks began to form their own caste institutions. While most recoiled from the brutal, backslapping world of mid-century urban politics—with its ward bosses, gangsters, canned soapbox speeches, and blatant corruption, all of which clerks like Tailer dismissed as “electioneering”—they developed their own, semi-genteel spaces in which to pursue political and intellectual questions. They joined debating societies and subscription libraries, forming the core constituencies of lyceums and athenaeums all over the country’s cities. The Mercantile Library Association, a private library formed in 1820, counted among its members a sizable number of clerks, Tailer among them, who argued in his diary that the “cherished institution” was “destined to perform a great deal of infinite good for some of the more unenlightened members of the mercantile community.” This was all part of the dogma of “self-improvement” that young clerks could count as their collective contribution to society.
It also signified a commitment to gentility and honor, when many in the media were contending that young effete clerks were ruining the morals of their customers in retail stores, or, worse, dissipating in brothels and public houses.34 Some clerks, like Tailer, went out of their way to affirm their own virtuousness. Tramping around the city, as he often did for work and pleasure alike, Tailer would come across scenes like one recorded in his diary, where Broadway “litterally [sic] swarmed with the most depraved of women.”35 But many other clerks succumbed, with considerably less sanctimony, to the “vices” offered in abundance by the antebellum city. Clerks’ barrooms—called “porterhouses”—often became the preserve of low-level clerks who were about to set out for a “spree” with prostitutes. Magazines with titles like Whip, Rake, and Flash, as well as a host of erotic novels, offered gossip about especially enterprising clerks who exhibited impressive powers of seduction—tales that might have helped clerks manage their own identities in the face of repeated charges against their manliness.36
The one collective movement that clerks engaged in might have turned into a confrontation, in which the status of clerks might have been posed in the open and contested (if not resolved), but clerks made every effort to keep it civil and friendly to their employers, leaving things ambiguous—where, it seemed, clerks wanted them to be. This was their movement to regulate the closing hours of the retail stores where their firms sold goods. In the early nineteenth century, these stores had arbitrary hours, and merchants and retailers were thereby able to keep their clerks at the stores late into the night, usually until 10:00—preventing them from the few hours of leisure available to them, in which they could have gone to the gym or the library. By 1841, enough of them had banded together to form a demand to close the stores significantly earlier, at 8:00 p.m. But these demands were couched in the countinghouse language of friendship and bonhomie: they sought a “solicitation” of merchants’ goodwill and argued that a few hours of rest would make more “willingly devoted servants” in the store.37 They earned the enmity of a few owners and newspaper editors, who muttered imprecations over the moral lassitude of brothel-going clerks in one breath and more deep-seated fears over a labor revolt in another. The clerks responded agilely, arguing in petitions and letters that they merely wanted to devote themselves to study; as for a labor revolt, they had no plans of striking, instead hoping to win over their owners by softly voiced requests.
The powerfully influential editor of the New-York Tribune, Horace Greeley, welcomed the movement as a sign that the clerks were at last moving toward becoming true citizens of the Republic. “The ignorance, emptiness and foppery of Clerks have been the theme of popular ridicule long enough,” he wrote in his first editorial. But if the satire were true, he argued, then naturally “means should be taken to improve [the clerks’] condition.”38 After the passage of the early closing petition in the clerks’ association, the editor wrote again, urging the adoption of the act, arguing that with their new freedom the clerks could take advantage of moral education: “Under the old system the time of the Clerks was so incessantly occupied as to deprive them entirely of that leisure for mental, moral and social improvement which should be enjoyed by every one just entering upon the duties and responsibilities of active life.”39 He hoped ardently that the newly “emancipated” clerks would take it upon themselves to enjoy their new liberty in hallowed sanctuaries, like the “New-York Lyceum” and other debating and education societies.
But most merchants continued to resist. It didn’t help that the clerks were making requests rather than demands and forming associations rather than unions. A strike would have utterly crippled the commercial life of New York; a petition merely made most of the merchants chuckle. The clerks were determined, however, to minimize any similarities between their meek and courteous requests for more time and the violent means usually employed by striking manual laborers. When unsigned members of the Committee of the Dry Goods Clerks wrote in to the Tribune to threaten a particular merchant who refused to close early (“you had better look out for your glass if you want to save them [sic] from being smashed”), the chairman of the early-closing committee went out of his way to disassociate his body from the more radical sentiments, claiming the letter as sabotage by “some malicious person” attempting to “thwart our measures.”40 Despite several larger associations, and even a concession to forming an alliance with the Industrial Congress of trade unions, by 1852 the early-closing movement had run out of steam, dissipating in failure.
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sp; Did the clerks want to win? Or, in winning, would they have compromised their own position—as junior businessmen rather than workers? By their own lights, clerks were not a threat to anything. In the varied world of American work, they portrayed themselves as baby workers, always on the verge of tears but stunned into passivity at the offer of a symbolic pacifier. “Bartleby,” which exploited the ambiguous nature of clerical work that Melville had known firsthand, is a story of the only kind of resistance a clerk could offer: passive resistance. “You will not?” the fatherly narrator asks. “I prefer not,” Bartleby corrects—stumping his boss by substituting a mild preference for a stubborn desire. One clerk put their situation thus:
The interest which clerks generally feel in the business and success of their employers, is, I believe, estimated too cheaply and that many feel so little, is, perhaps, as often the fault of their employers as their own. The majority of clerks are young men who have hopes and prospects of business before them. They have not yet thrown off that trusting confidence and generous friendship peculiar to youth—they are disposed to think well of themselves and the world, and they feel it deeply when too great a distance is maintained between themselves and their superiors …
A good clerk feels that he has an interest in the credit and success of his employer beyond the amount of his salary; and with the close of every successful year, he feels that he too, by his assiduity and fidelity, has added something to his capital—something to his future prospects, and something to his support if overtaken with adversity; and a good merchant encourages and reciprocates all these feelings.41
Years before the rise of the clerk, American economists had worried over a growing distinction between producing classes, who did all the work, and consuming classes, who simply enjoyed the products. But from the 1830s to the 1850s, when clerks conducted their inauspicious rise into the lower frequencies of the American imagination, the discourse shifted away from this distinction toward discussing the possibility of a “harmony of interests” between employers and workers.42 Prompted most obviously by the threats from socialists in Europe and America—people like Charles Fourier and Karl Marx, Robert Owen and Henry George—who proclaimed an irreconcilable conflict between capital and labor, these writers were also describing, perhaps inadvertently, the world that the office world was giving harbor to: one where workers were in harmony with their employers. To be sure, the office, from its earliest days, was rich in antagonisms, petty grievances, and outright hostility. But in the mind of the typical office worker, there never appeared to be a contradiction in pursuing his own interests alongside those of his employer. The Civil War would puncture the national harmony engendered in American workplaces—especially the southern cotton fields that were the most unequal workplaces of all. But the office, which grew to prominence in the years that followed, expanding to rows upon rows of desks and engulfing American cities in skyscrapers, admitted little of the strife clamoring outside its walls. With reformers promising a utopia of one kind, the office promised another, which would prove more enduring: an endless, placid shaking of hands.
2
THE BIRTH OF THE OFFICE
In every city, town, and farmhouse, were myriads of new types,—or type-writers,—telephone and telegraph girls, shop clerks … running into millions on millions, and, as classes, unknown to themselves as to historians.
—HENRY ADAMS, The Education of Henry Adams (1907)1
Imagine a bookkeeper pausing to look down at his ledger in 1860, only to look back up in 1920. He might be surprised to see that his familiar small surroundings had melted away entirely, converted into a space whose high ceilings and tall columns resembled nothing so much as a cave swollen with stalactites. His lone colleague and brother-in-arms, the clerk, was gone, replaced by dozens of unfamiliar faces surrounding him in neat serried rows of desks. The cigar-chomping partner at the nearby rolltop desk would be gone too, having multiplied into a small squadron of bosses locked away in snug executive suites high up in the stratosphere.
His work is now harried, insistent, relentless. Farewell the tranquil, languorous days of the countinghouse; greetings to the factory-like labor of the office. The texture of time has grown rougher, tighter—a moment as difficult to pinpoint as it is decisive. Men with stopwatches record the motions of his pencil, his filing habits, when and whether he goes to the bathroom, how long he lingers at the watercooler, how many minutes he wastes. The viscous silence of the old office is sliced through with the high-pitched metal clack of the typewriter, the adding machine, the sliding and slamming of file cabinets. He clocks in and out; shrill bells ring in his workday and push him out squinting into the early evening darkness, shoved and jostled by the black-coated thousands following him, out of his office, in an endless, dark stream.
Between 1860 and 1920, business became big business, and the number and kinds of positions in the office ballooned. The change in the work environment reflected a change in work itself. Administration and bureaucracy had taken over the world of business. Walden was a powerful protest against the tedium of pointless labor in the antebellum era, but its quiet, sturdy aperçus were rendered inaudible by the clang of a new, aggressive industriousness. The postbellum era gave figures like Thoreau one riposte after another; the new tone of the world of work was sounded by one of the best-selling pamphlets of the 1880s, Blessed Be Drudgery, written by the Christian evangelist William Gannett. Rather than preaching the importance of the contemplative life against the evils of a new, greedy age, as one might have expected from a religious man, Gannett created an improbable—and improbably intoxicating—reconciliation. He acknowledged the awfulness of work, the way it intervened between ourselves and our ideals—he noted how one might “crave an outdoor life” and yet still have to “walk down town of mornings to perch on a high stool [in an office] till supper-time.”2 But our desire for culture and leisure, Gannett argued, could only be guaranteed by “our own plod, our plod in the rut, our drill of habit.” “In one word,” he said, it “depends upon our ‘drudgery.’ ”3 Drudgery wasn’t antithetical to culture; on the contrary, drudgery was the source of all culture. The argument reversed the entire history of Western thought since the Bible, which held that labor was the curse of man since the expulsion from paradise. Work was not a burden; it was freedom—the road back to paradise.
The place that was supposed to guarantee this freedom most was the office. In a series of tremendously popular novels, Horatio Alger Jr., the greatest ideologue of self-reliance since Emerson, depicted again and again the improbable rise of a street urchin to white-collar respectability. Not just statistics but much personal and anecdotal evidence suggested this sort of trajectory wasn’t very likely; even Alger’s own protagonists always depended on the sudden intervention of a wealthy patron. Despite that, a “Horatio Alger story” became shorthand for ascending from the bottom of the heap to the top. The belief that little lay in a poor urchin’s way not only took root; it persisted and grew. “Why should he not rise to a position of importance like the men whom he had heard of and seen, whose beginning had been as humble as his own?” one of the eponymous heroes of Rough and Ready; or, Life Among the New York Newsboys wonders.4 The sentiment had once captured thousands; by 1920, it held millions.
In 1889, inspired by Alger’s books, the board game company Parker Brothers (which would eventually become famous for Monopoly) created a fantasy for children called Office Boy. Cleverly fashioned as a spiraling series of honeycomb cells representing way stations of the office boy’s progress, the simple dice-based game showed how, with patience and fortitude, a young office minion could rise to the top of his company. Starting as “office boy” and moving through “porter” and “stock boy,” the steadfast office worker, as long as he steered clear of the cells marked “careless,” “inattentive,” and “dishonest” and landed instead on the classic bourgeois virtues—“capable,” “earnest,” and “ambitious”—might eventually reach the center of the board, and become “Head
of the Firm.”
Yet these were old fantasies—powerful and apparently indelible, given their staying power—which had little application to the world of the office at the turn of the century. Their persistence helped workers cope with, rather than understand, the changes of the world around them. For whatever heroic, quixotic air still attended the cheery countinghouse and dandyish dry goods clerks, sequestered in unmarked little rooms along quaintly narrow urban streets, had dissipated by 1900. No longer earthbound, they worked by the hundreds in office buildings numberless to man, which spun upward from the ground, flouted the horizon, and cut jaggedly into the skyline. Church spires were humbled by the gargoyles and finials crowning the new office buildings, which, hundreds of feet high, appeared from the pavement like masters of their cold stratosphere, as much affronts to nature and scale as testaments to human power and inventiveness. The wide, free shop floors of the steel mills that circled Ohio and Pennsylvania, Youngstown and Pittsburgh, were rivaled by row after row of typists machine-gunning pages high above them in New York and Chicago—indeed, so much American steel was going into building these office towers, from which a steel executive might direct his empire of industry. In this historic ferment, untold millions who might otherwise have been small entrepreneurs steadily became employees of newly enormous corporations, in which only a few could ascend. But in the discourse of office work, the potential for upward mobility and respectability was ritually affirmed. This dissonance between the perceived potential of the office and its actual nature would remain unresolved. It challenged, and was fundamental to, the idea of white-collar work as middle class.
