by Nikil Saval
As a self-professedly “caring” company, Connecticut General was also concerned to make its spaces as democratic as possible. Though this didn’t mean abolishing the distinction between private offices and desks out on the open floor, let alone changing the actual relations of power between higher-ups and lower-downs, it did mean not having a special executive wing. This was a desire that brought the management of Connecticut General into conflict with SOM. The architects had wanted a separate executive building for “Class II” offices (along with the executives, this included departments like legal and securities, whose staff levels remained largely static), in order to keep the interior as flexible and open as possible for Class I workers (clerical labor, with more turnover and shifting around of personnel). When these plans were unveiled, they were received with a slight measure of embarrassment; grumblings among the members of the Connecticut General building committee accumulated, with some middle managers publicly deploring the existence of an “ivory tower” for executives. At an informational meeting about the building, a Philadelphia client of the insurance company said, witheringly, “Well, I suppose it makes some sense, but in our part of the country we are more democratic than that and just don’t believe in a separate club for officers.”15 Eventually, Frazar B. Wilde, the company CEO, bowed to the logic of the architects and agreed, certainly with great reluctance, to the separate wing.
The zeal that Wilde, his colleagues, and Connecticut General’s clients attached to the semblance of a democratic workplace should strike us as curious. Many corporations followed the old mission of industrial betterment and “welfare capitalism” in providing amenities for their employees, but very few shied away from constructing extravagant executive floors, replete with separate bathrooms and elevator entrances. Something else appeared to be at stake in the desire to keep management and staff in close proximity.
It was not that the staff and the executives did comparable work. On the contrary: it might have been the sheer mechanical nature of the work done by the clerical workers, and the lonely decision-making goals of the higher-ups, that motivated the construction of a more harmonious-seeming (and less hierarchical-seeming) workplace. The basic features of insurance work were factory-like. Ensuring an even flow of paperwork was an important concern of SOM and Knoll’s design; as a result of their meticulous planning the entire building hummed with the smoothness of an assembly line. Even the fact that escalators rather than elevators conveyed people through the various floors enhanced this impression. Shirley Newman, one of the office workers, testified in the Saturday Evening Post to the efficiency of the teams of operations, referring to her own as a “five girl assembly-line”:
The girl at the end … is the clerk on our team. She opens and sorts mail. The next girl is our doer. She does whatever the mail calls for—a cancellation, a receipt or whatnot. Then I check the papers she hands me, and add whatever notations are necessary before I pass them along for copying to the first girl on my left, our team’s typist. She, in turn, gives the whole batch to the last girl, our assembler, who puts the papers together in proper order and forwards them, maybe to another department, or to central filing, or possibly back to a policyholder.16
Where the women office workers described the mechanical nature of the work, Wilde testified by contrast to the intimate, serendipitous effects of the arrangement of corridors. “In vertical buildings, where quick elevators take one from a small work level to the street level, there are few spontaneous meetings, few casual interchanges of work experiences,” Newman told the press, apparently attentive to the pressure of marketing the building. “Here in the cafeteria and lounges and on the daily routes of travel through the building we are getting to know each other better.”17 This was not meant to be like Bell Labs; there were no expectations that the clerical workers would run into their managers in a “serendipitous encounter” and produce a new innovation. The idea was rather to create a workplace in which status barriers seemed to dissolve, in which participation and friendliness all around made the work environment look less like the white-collar factory it was. And no detail was spared in making this impression. “The entire building is designed,” wrote a critic for Architectural Forum, “and there are no cracks showing between the approach to the over-all plan and the corners of the wood paneling. It is pervasively complete; the patterns of rectangles—everything is rectangles—range from the minute to the mammoth, but they are all so subtly related that the architect renders himself almost invisible.”18
The totally organized interior of Connecticut General. Ezra Stoller, ESTO
The scary side of the total corporate environment wasn’t lost on observers. In fact, during the 1950s, it became an obsession, which millions of readers bought into. The Lonely Crowd, The Hidden Persuaders, The Power Elite, The Affluent Society, The Human Condition, The Organization Man: from the works of social criticism, the doom-laden message of despair was relentless. People were told that society was tending toward a soft totalitarianism, shaped by hidden networks of elites or by tyrannical managers; by sinister human relations experts or callous economists; and, of course, by manipulative admen, who got you to buy things you didn’t need. And the overall shape of society was tending away from American individualism to a cage-like conformity. The 1950s are known as a golden age of this sort of sonorous, endlessly throat-clearing criticism, in which “ideal-types” sprang up like mushrooms after a spring rain. Not a small portion of it was inspired, or even written, by the German émigré sociologists who had found refuge in the United States after World War II. They carried with them their Freudian-Marxist obsession with der neue Mittelstand. As with the white-collar-girl novels of a generation prior, the protagonists of these books were the target audience as well: office workers who had emerged from a decade of depression and war to be inundated by waves of prosperity.
Perhaps it proved their rightness about conformity that a good number of these books turned out to be crazy best sellers. Since everyone was talking about them, you had to buy in. Terms that the sociologists had introduced as technical became common features of everyday middle-class speech. The Lonely Crowd, for example—a spectacularly successful, dense work of sociology—rimmed the martini glasses of not just a few cocktail parties with intellect, contributing terms like “inner-directed” (that is, self-motivated) and “other-directed” (that is, requiring and seeking the approval of others). The inner-directed man had pushed forward the American frontier, had built the railroads, forded the rivers, thrown up the dams that made the country great; he operated by an “inner gyroscope.” The other-directed man, a new type in larger metropolitan areas, depended on the approval of others, whether those he associated with or the masklike personalities he encountered in the mass media; lacking an inner compass, he moved through life as if watching it from above, by “radar.”
Meanwhile, the title The Organization Man, much like The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, came to provide an easy shorthand for designating a conformist corporate stooge. “Are you an ORGANIZATION MAN … who’s sick of his organization? Are you a STATUS SEEKER … who’s disgusted with his status? Are you a CONFORMIST … who’s sick of conforming? Then this book is for you!” ran the jacket copy of Mad magazine’s cartoon parody, The Organization Mad (1956). The psychoanalytic and sociological tone that was taking over everyday conversation (psychology was the most popular college major of the 1950s) apparently became so insistent that even the practice of talking about conformism became the object of caustic satire—as in Richard Yates’s powerfully depressing novel Revolutionary Road (1961), where gutless suburban office workers routinely get together for boozy dinner parties in which their conversation invariably revolves around “the elusive but endlessly absorbing subject of Conformity, or The Suburbs, or Madison Avenue, or American Society Today.”19 Titles like The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit had also exploited the new market for books about conformity. Its author, Sloan Wilson, was a relative unknown when his book was published; however, h
is story about a PR man who joins a major broadcasting corporation and resists the pressures to conform was immediately identified by its editors as capturing the spirit of the age—or at least it could be marketed that way. An entire apparatus sprang up around the book in order to suggest that it was the book about corporate conformity. Movie rights were sold in advance of the book’s publication; the silhouette of the suited businessman on the cover was taken from a photograph of Gregory Peck, who would play the character in the (extremely tedious) film.
It was true, of course, that the world of business had tended toward gigantism, dwarfing the individual worker much as the skyscraper loomed over the average pedestrian. “Our home office has 31,259 employees,” C. C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) says at the opening of Billy Wilder’s satirical masterpiece The Apartment (1960), describing his work at the giant Consolidated Life Insurance company; a bell rings at the end of each workday, staggered by floor, so all the thousands don’t try to jam the elevators at once. With companies this size, the old remnants of middle-class entrepreneurship were being extinguished. By the 1950s, small firms existed—millions of them—but they operated in the shadow of larger firms that they depended on; these firms had consolidated monopoly or oligopoly power over entire industries. Already by the 1920s, as the business historian Richard Edwards has written, “consolidation had taken place in industries producing goods such as dairy products, grain mill products, meat, bakery products, refined sugar, tobacco, soaps and toilet articles, chemicals, petroleum, tires and rubber, shoes, shoe machinery, steel, aluminum, copper, fabricated metal, electrical products, household appliances, communications equipment, motor vehicles, railroad equipment, photographic equipment, telephones, and gas and electricity, and services such as life insurance and commercial banking.”20 Firm sizes had grown as well; their financial bases grew accordingly. In 1919, there were five or six firms with over $1 billion in assets; by 1969, there were nearly one hundred.21 These same firms diversified, with merger after merger leading companies to take on business activities that had hitherto been completely separate from their core business. Larger firms gained access to political power in a way they never had before, affecting regulatory policy as well as securing lucrative government contracts.
Overall, though economic growth had slowed by the end of the 1950s, leading to a substantial increase in private direct investment overseas by American multinationals (at a faster pace, too, than domestic investment), the United States remained largely protected from foreign competition, and, therefore, safe.22 From the inside of the corporate world, office workers expressed this as a kind of unholy postwar calm—the feeling of having walked away from a train wreck that injured everyone else, not only unscathed, but healthier, happier, and stronger. “There arrives a day when the corporate sanctuary becomes our whole world,” wrote Alan Harrington in his memoir of being a PR man in a major corporation, Life in the Crystal Palace (1958). “We can’t imagine existing outside of it. From our safe place we watch others struggling amid uncertain currents, and thank our stars and the lucky winds that brought us here.” From the outside, the brilliant Austrian émigré economist Joseph Schumpeter verified the paradox of safety/sapping of human vim and heroic entrepreneurship. In his masterpiece of political economy, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (published in multiple editions from 1942 to 1950), he argued that, with the rise of monopolistic practices in industry and the consequent vanishing of investment opportunity, managerial bureaucracy was starting to replace the entrepreneur, the economy was drifting toward central planning, and bourgeois life was becoming unheroic, tedious. “The bourgeoisie … needs a master,” he wrote in scorn.23 They needed entrepreneurs questing like medieval knights after invention; otherwise they would choke themselves in bureaucracy—leading to inevitable socialism. Harrington tacitly agreed. “Every so often I hear my seniors at the corporation inveigh against socialism, and it seems strange,” he wrote. “I think that our company resembles nothing so much as a private socialist system. We are taken care of from our children’s cradles to our own graves.”
What they meant by “bureaucracy” was chiefly the size and hierarchy of administration—what one conservative theorist, James Burnham (in his book The Managerial Revolution), interpreted as a budding bureaucratic takeover of the United States. The hugeness of the corporations had derived in no small part from the growth in the number of office workers. Manufacturing and farm employment actually declined relative to the growth of white-collar workers: a consequence of consumers (many of them white-collar workers already) demanding more in the way of services (entertainment, education, travel) than commodities.24 More services meant more kinds of white-collar employment. Sales teams of independent agents came to be employed by the firms themselves. The incorporated sales teams needed administrative staff. Employees became directly involved in advertising; the popularity of “psychological” approaches to selling products and services required marketing and public relations—the quintessential mid-century jobs (precisely why Wilson made the protagonist of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit a PR man)—which in turn became professionalized. In order to measure white-collar productivity, companies imposed cost accounting, financial reporting, budgeting, and controls for inventory, which in turn required more staff. The ratio of non-production staff to production staff began to become more balanced (or, depending on your perspective, grew completely out of whack); in 1960, white-collar workers were a full third of the total workforce.25 Being middle-class in America used to mean starting your own business; by 1950, it meant, almost invariably, that you put on a suit and tie and went to work in an office, alongside millions like you.
Sometimes the modular, repetitive surfaces of the glass curtain wall really did symbolize an even deeper sameness within. The technology company International Business Machines, or IBM, was among the biggest of the big corporations (Big Blue, they called it), and it made no bones about the importance it put on loyalty to the organization. In its Eero Saarinen–designed flat glass-box complexes out in Minnesota and upstate New York, it developed a thoroughgoing culture of corporate uniformity that rivaled any college fraternity, with employees asked to learn songs and slogans … about IBM. In every room hovered an image of the CEO, Thomas J. Watson Sr., sitting behind a shiny wooden table, arms folded, his gray facial features expressionless; above the built-in bookcase behind him was a sign with the company slogan in capital letters: “THINK.”26 Watson insisted on a uniform dress code of dark gray suits, black ties, and white shirts with extremely stiff, starched collars. The uneasiness of a computer company having slotted its employees into a uniform corporate dress, like so many lines of indistinguishable code, was lost on nobody—including the company. In a publicity booklet from 1955, IBM reminded its customers, “[We] first came into your life when your birth was recorded on a punched card. From then on many such cards have been compiled, giving a lifetime of history of your important decisions and actions. If you went to school, entered a hospital, bought a house, paid income tax, got married or purchased an automobile, the chances are that permanent punched records were made of these and other personal stories.”27 Just as it had no problem fitting its employees into the same uniform and commanding them to think, it had no compunction about telling everyone in the world that all their significant life milestones, including their births, could be reduced to hole punches on a card.
IBM was frightening to people outside their offices as well. Its machines symbolized the ruthless automation of everything, which in turn meant tossing people out of work. Automation in the workplace—blue- or white-collar—became the subject of congressional hearings, as well as a stream of business press writings.28 Giant computers, such as Remington Rand’s UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer), began to be deployed in offices to process the increasingly gargantuan amounts of paperwork, such as payroll, cost accounting, and insurance billing. The mainstream press regularly ran stories with headlines like “Office Robots” and “Will Machines Replace the Huma
n Brain?,” scaring enough people into imagining an all-robot future.29
The response of the computer companies was to conduct an enormous public relations campaign, assuring office workers that their jobs would not be obviated—on the contrary, automation would make their lives brighter and would take the drudgery out of labor. UNIVAC appeared on the news with Walter Cronkite in 1952, successfully predicting the election that brought Eisenhower to the presidency. In 1955, an IBM 701 appeared on the Today show to solve a math problem. The star designers Charles and Ray Eames were hired to make an animated film, The Information Machine: Creative Man and the Data Processor (1957), which would show the importance of machines for a cleaner, brighter human future. The film depicted the progress of technology from the wheel onward, and it showed the results of that progress: an older, urban, industrial environment filled with smokestacks and crisscrossed with electrical and telephone wires. But hope remained: “Something has now emerged that might make even our most elegant theories workable. The recent acceleration has been fantastic. The electronic calculator has already become a tool upon which much of our daily activities depend.”30 The film segues to an office floor patterned with squares and neatly filled out with gleaming computers. A man in shirt and tie, a creative white-collar worker, labors at his desk (with “THINK” just over it) to make the data that he can feed into the machine. The message is clear enough: Life after computers will be clearer, healthier, and offer more opportunities for better work. Individuals will at last be able to realize themselves.
