by Nikil Saval
The 1920s began inauspiciously for office workers. During the war, they had lost ground on bread-and-butter issues. Unions had cemented industrial privileges—the eight-hour day, pro-labor arbitration boards, the practice of collective bargaining—and as a result organized manual laborers started reducing the wage differential between themselves and office workers. In 1915, the average white-collar employee in industry earned over twice as much as the average factory worker; by 1920, this had decreased to less than one and a half times as much. In the same period, the cost of living nearly doubled.28
A brief but grim recession followed World War I, and it affected office workers in particular. Unemployment, reduced wages, and diminished chances for upward mobility had dented the middle-class dreams of many. With the distance between themselves and skilled laborers closing, the idea of organizing a union became more appealing. During the war and especially afterward, the white-collar labor movement in the United States began to grow. The Retail Clerks International Protective Association (RCIPA) grew from 15,000 members before the war to 21,000 in 1920. RCIPA began to organize women clerical workers, and their house magazine, The Advocate, adopted a radical tone, speaking of white-collar workers as members of the larger “toiling masses” of the country.29 The bookkeepers’, stenographers’, and accountants’ unions increased in size as well: from eight cities with locals before the war to forty cities afterward. The railway clerks’ union grew from 5,000 to 186,000 between 1915 and 1920.30
The “return to normalcy” of the 1920s, and the consequent upsurge in prosperity (if also inequality), destroyed these gains almost as quickly as they had been made. Though much of the income was paid out in dividends and interest—in other words, to people playing the finance game—real wages still increased continuously from 1920 to 1929. The white-collar unions lost numbers relatively as well as absolutely: the number of workers had grown, but the unions had failed to organize them, and many of their own members drifted away. A conservative turn in the country more generally also meant a turn against organized labor. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)—the most radical, anarcho-syndicalist movement of the previous two decades—was by 1924 a spent force. But even considerably less intransigent unions were in retreat.
The net result was a hardening of attitudes regarding white-collar workers on both the Left and Right. Office workers were of course a heterogeneous mass, cleaved by class and gender. But they became the subject of mass appeals, as if anyone who wore a white collar, no matter what his or her education or life chances or abilities, would have the same basic mental attitudes and outlook on life. For business more generally, the office employee was naturally the most loyal of figures, the deepest believer in the likelihood and rightness of upward mobility. Professional schools for aspiring business managers and executives, such as the Harvard Business School, promoted the idea that the higher rungs of the office world needed specialized training in the arts of management. Popular culture directed at office workers—film, light fiction, advertising—flattered the concept of self-improvement, often through the new resources of pop Freudianism. The French psychologist and public speaker Émile Coué electrified the country on his speaking tours, urging people to believe that the practice of “autosuggestion” would lead them to success. “Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better,” he urged his white-collar audiences to repeat.31
The business caricature of the white-collar worker as the perfect picture of American individualism was arguably less cartoonish than the one that came to be offered by radicals in the 1920s. In what were years of defeat for the American Left, the figure of the lower-middle-class office worker, spellbound by false consciousness, became a pervasive scapegoat. The “white-collar man” became the standard image of the harried American, losing ground when lesser people everywhere seemed to be gaining. When cartoonists wanted to depict John Q. Public, they showed a white-collar worker: as one contemporary account had it, “a frail man, timid, retiring, a tiny derby seated atop a worried brow.”32 Films like The Crowd showed offices as machines for producing conformity, churning out thousands of drones in cavernous spaces dressing in the same standard attire, working at the same kind of desk, talking in the same tired mannerisms. The phrase “white-collar slave” became a popular one in the press, particularly to describe the stereotype of the office worker who failed to recognize the fact of his own exploitation.
The office worker had become what the gum-chewing, racist “hard hat” would be for the 1970s: the symbol of a backlash. Like the hard hat, the stereotypical frustrated white-collar man avoided dealing with his own problems by lashing out at minorities stealing his job. In Elmer L. Rice’s critical, hallucinatory play The Adding Machine (1923), the protagonist, Mr. Zero, is a frustrated bookkeeper who sits on a stool in a room with an assistant adding numbers all day. At the same time we see him daydreaming about his managers praising him, or fantasizing about really sticking it to his boss. “I’ll say, ‘I ain’t quite satisfied. I been on the job twenty-five years now and if I’m gonna stay I gotta see a future ahead of me,’ ” he imagines himself saying. We discover that in fact he’s stayed in the same job for twenty-five years, never advancing or raising his voice. By the middle of the play, he is slated to be replaced by an adding machine. In frustration, he and his white-collar friends get drunk and launch into an impassioned peroration against various groups: “Damn Catholics! Damn sheenies! Damn niggers! Hang ’em! Burn ’em! Lynch ’em! Shoot ’em!” He eventually kills his boss and is executed for the crime. At the end of the play, we see Mr. Zero in the afterlife, discovering that he is going to be reincarnated as the operator of a “super-adding machine.”
Union organizers lamented their inability to make inroads into the ranks of office workers, tending to chide the white-collar slaves for their false consciousness. In an article from August 1929, noting the increasing similarities between office work and factory work, the editors of American Federationist, the magazine of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), implored the office workers to “be wise” and “lose no time in providing for their future protection and welfare.” “You cannot stop progress,” they counseled. “You should be ready to have an intelligent part in progress.”33 But this politely urgent tone didn’t last. Confronted with the growing mass of unorganized white-collar workers, Samuel Gompers, the powerful head of the AFL at the time, is alleged to have shouted in frustration, “Show me two white-collar workers on a picket line, and I’ll organize the entire working-class.”34 Gompers’s (possibly apocryphal) line captured the contradictory understanding of the office worker, who was of the working class but refused to believe it or participate in any of its activities, political (“a picket line”) or otherwise. And not only that: the office workers’ resistance to unions was in fact preventing the entire working class from getting organized. They were acting as a buffer between capital and labor.
Though the class nature of the office worker was becoming an obsession in the United States, analysis tended to fall into predictable patterns of confirmation of American business prowess on the one hand, and the sign of political idiocy on the other. But contemporary political changes in Europe would resonate at home, and transform the nature of the American conversation irrevocably. This was above all the case in Germany, the country most obviously convulsed by changes after the war.
German scholarship on the growth of employment in the office is easily the richest body of work on white-collar workers anywhere in the world. German sociologists had been interested in the rise of what they had been calling the “new middle class” (der neue Mittelstand) for generations; the best work on American white-collar workers before World War II is by a German (Jürgen Kocka), and the theoretical apparatus of C. Wright Mills’s White Collar depends heavily on German sources. The main impetus for this efflorescence of thinking had been an arcane but unusually intense debate that took place around the turn of the century within the ranks of German socialists and their newly forme
d Social Democratic Party (SPD) over the nature of class divisions in society. Following the usual interpretation of The Communist Manifesto, one faction of so-called orthodox Marxists had argued that society was broadly dividing into two opposed groups, capitalists and proletarians, and politics had to shore up working-class power particularly. Another “revisionist” group (who, had they looked, might have found writings by the mature Marx noting this class diversity) pointed out that classes in society weren’t simplifying into a schema, but rather growing more complex. One had only to look, they said, at the growing mass of white-collar workers—themselves split into various class fractions. What side of the orthodox schema did they fall into? For the orthodox, the answer was simple enough: they were by and large members of the working class, a “stiff-collar working class” (Stehkragenproletariat), who, under the pressure of the gradually unraveling contradictions of capitalism, would eventually recognize their place in the mass of toiling people. For many of the revisionists, the answer was considerably less clear.
These questions gained particular urgency in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, when the stability of the buffer supposedly offered by white-collar workers was beginning to shake uncontrollably. The old question that had attended the clerks in the mid-nineteenth century—who were they? where did their loyalties lie?—became unignorable. The reason lay in political crisis. Inflation and depression hit Weimar Germany earlier than elsewhere, thanks to the fallout from the war, and office workers were thrown into unemployment. Economic crisis threw salt on already festering political wounds, opened by the German defeat in World War I. Pitched street fights between far-right and far-left groups became common throughout the country. Seeing that Germany’s Communist Party largely focused on uniting the industrial working class, journalists and social scientists worried that the driftless and disorganized office workers—the Angestellte, or “salaried employees,” in German—would be up for grabs by the rising Nazis.
In the midst of this turmoil, the German sociologist Emil Lederer began to explore the notion that white-collar workers belonged to a “new middle class.” Despite the repeated appeals by politicians to small business, the old middle class of shopkeepers and entrepreneurs was disappearing; salaried employees—office workers—had emerged in their place. There was a time, Lederer noted, when salaried employees were strong in number and could imagine themselves as “mediators”—again, a buffer—in the growing strife between capital and labor. Indeed, Lederer had himself endorsed this position when he made his first inquiry into the problem in 1912. But the war and economic stress had made the salaried employee’s middle status precarious:
… his permanent dependence on an employer; the fact that he is at the mercy of the labor market; the development of a remunerative system based on the prevailing economic and financial situation; finally, the ever growing practice of compensation in proportion to one’s efficiency—which means that the employee’s pay decreases the older he grows—all these factors help to undermine the social and economic status of the salaried employee, who thus finds himself exposed to the danger of proletarization.”35
In other words, the employee became exposed to the idea that he might, without too much trouble, fall into the ranks of the working classes. The salaried employee would have to take sides. Channeling the apocalyptic mood of 1920s Germany, Lederer suggested that the coming years would indicate which side the office worker was on. His prediction was that the salaried masses would join the stratum of the working class in a union of all who were employed.
Others were skeptical. Around the same time, the left-wing journalist and early film theorist Siegfried Kracauer took up the same theme, but with a different method: in what he called “more of an adventure than any film trip to Africa,” he set out to spend time among the “salariat,” as a reporter. He interviewed them at and around their places of work or traveled to the pleasure palaces that kept them distracted after hours—bars that doubled as brothels, sports arenas, massive upscale restaurants. Berlin, where he did his reporting, seemed to him to be “a city with a pronounced employee culture: i.e. a culture made by employees for employees and seen by most employees as a culture.”36 The sentiment should strike us as odd, living as most of us do in cities largely characterized by white-collar and service labor. But in the industrial 1920s this was absolutely strange; it was alienating enough that Kracauer could see the office worker from a distance. He found in the “salariat” a generation and a class that he declared to be “spiritually homeless.” “They are living at present without a doctrine to look up at or a goal they might ascertain,” he wrote. “So they live in fear of looking up and asking their way to the destination.”37
He found them stratified, distinguished from blue-collar workers by their places of work and their styles of life. German firms, following American customs, insisted on elaborate tests of personality and aptitude (and sometimes handwriting and phrenology) to ensure that their office workers fit properly into their organization—standards no one used for blue-collar workers. The rigors of the test, the total view that they demanded, meant that “a salaried type” was beginning to develop in Berlin: “Speech, clothes, gestures and countenances become assimilated and the result of the process is that very same pleasant appearance, which with the help of photographs can be widely reproduced.”38 The children of the former middle class were seeing their bourgeois skills put to new uses: “Many girls who now punch cards used to stumble through études at home on the pianoforte.” He compared the feel of the office hierarchy to the atmosphere of modernist novels: “If literature usually imitates reality, here it precedes reality. The works of Franz Kafka give a definitive portrait of the labyrinthine human big firm—as awesome as the pasteboard models of intricate robber-baron castles made for children—and the inaccessibility of the supreme authority.”39 And he recognized that the employee unions were doing little to nothing to stop the tedious mechanization of the workplace. “The machine,” one union official tells him, “must be an instrument of liberation.”40 Employee unions for salaried workers in Germany existed and represented many thousands of workers, yet many of them tended to dissociate themselves from the blue-collar unions affiliated with the Social Democratic and Communist Parties; many employee unions were essentially close to business. White-collar unions insisted on their difference, both from each other and above all from the blue-collar workers they saw as socially beneath them. “The distinct mania in bourgeois Germany to raise oneself from the crowd by means of some rank, be it only an imaginary one, hampers solidarity among salaried employees themselves,” Kracauer wrote, contradicting Lederer’s prediction of a gradual “proletarianization” of white-collar workers.41
As the German economy and Weimar Republic staggered from one crisis to another, culminating in the blowup of 1929, a vague anxiety that the lower stratum of white-collar workers was beginning to form a reactionary mass, and a natural base for the growing Nazi party, became a fixation among left-wing writers. The socialist Theodor Geiger argued that lower-middle-class office workers were uniquely susceptible to claims of prestige and status; to him, it was a matter of political logic that their sliding economic position would come into conflict with their elevated sense of being middle class—a phenomenon that came to be known in sociology as “status panic”—and they would naturally vote for the Nazis.42
The problem with this position, as with the analogous Left caricature of the “white-collar slave” in the United States, was that it lacked an empirical basis. Though a portion of white-collar workers did move rightward in their voting patterns over the course of the 1920s, these tended to be the richer and more secure of the white-collar workers. The Nazis themselves made no specific appeal to white-collar workers, and received only a small proportion of their votes. Even after 1929, when unemployment scythed the ranks of white-collar workers, the great mass of white-collar votes went to the other parties (the socialist Social Democrats, the nationalist German National People’s Party
, and the liberal German Democratic Party). Still, in the wake of the Nazi victory, the caricature not only persisted, but grew in stature and acceptance. The roots of fascism were complex; the Nazis’ rise to power did not depend on a single class or stratum. But part of the party’s success derived from the fracturing of the country’s Left, alongside the failure of the more traditional parties. An inability to completely acknowledge this led to the construction of the lower-middle-class white-collar worker as natural reactionary, a scapegoat for much deeper failures. The desire to locate the failures or success of a political movement by looking at a country’s office workers was irrepressible. In the United States the unusual struggle over the soul of the office worker had only just begun.
It didn’t take long for the news of the white-collar Nazis to make it over to America. The United States had its own worries about creeping fascism—as Sinclair Lewis, author of The Job, demonstrated in his counterfactual story of authoritarian America, It Can’t Happen Here (1935)—and more than a few of them involved office workers. The specter of fascism in America produced, with considerable speed and aplomb, the same basic outlines of the debate taking place in Germany.
