I have been talking of one book and one decade. Now I would like to broaden the angle of view, for the The Caine Mutiny is only one more step in a development that has been going on for a long time. Let me at once concede that much of what seems contemporary in popular fiction is fairly timeless. Black has always been black and white has always been white, with few shades of gray in between; coincidence outrageous and the endings happy, or at least symbolic of a better world ahead. The very fact that fiction does tell people what they want to hear, however, does make it a fairly serviceable barometer. Whether fiction leads people or merely reflects them, it is an index of changes in popular belief that might be imperceptible at closer range.
If we pick up popular fiction around the 1870s, we find the Protestant Ethic in full flower. It was plain that the hero’s victories over his competitors and his accumulation of money were synonymous with godliness. The hero was shown in struggle with the environment, and though good fortune was an indispensable assist, it was less an accident than a reward directed his way by a just providence. This didn’t always go without saying, but it could. As late as the turn of the century the ethic remained so unquestioned that the moralizing could be left out entirely. Heroes were openly, exultantly materialistic, and if they married the boss’s daughter or pushed anyone around on the way up, this was as it should be.
For a farewell look at this hero we have “Ottenhausen’s Coup” by John Walker Harrington in McClure’s magazine, March 1898 (several years before McClure’s muckraking phase). Young Carl Ottenhausen is sent by his company to take charge of an iron furnace, where, it so happens, the boss’s blue-eyed daughter is giving a house party at near-by Eagle’s Nest, the boss’s palatial summer house. After a brief brush with the daughter, Ottenhausen hears there is a crisis down at the furnace at the bottom of the hill. Some anarchist has gotten the men to revolt. Ottenhausen rushes down to the furnace, pulls out two guns, and advances on the workers. The surly devils cower before him. “The men of Laird’s Furnace had met their match.”
As Ottenhausen stands triumphant before the workers, the house party group comes down in evening clothes to see what’s going on. The president is among them. The last paragraph of the story:
In the top of a tall building, in Columbus, there is a door bearing a porcelain label which reads, General Manager; behind that door sits Carl Ottenhausen, who now directs the destinies of the Mingo Coal and Iron Company. He owns a handsome house in the West End which puts Eagle’s Nest to shame. There presides over that household a blue-eyed woman whose very look is merriment.
As time went on the materialism became more muted. Only a few years after “Ottenhausen’s Coup,” McClure’s articles were roundly denouncing people like Ottenhausen for their avarice. Fiction was much slower to respond to the changing temper, but once Veblen and Steffens and others had set to work, fiction heroes could not savor riches with the old innocence. By the twenties, money-conscious as they may have been, heroes who married the boss’s daughter married a girl who turned out to be the boss’s daughter. Not so many years later there wasn’t much point even in that; and now, with the social changes of the last two decades, stories are just as apt to have the hero who marries someone who turns out not to be the boss’s daughter. In a recent Saturday Evening Post story, for example, the hero falls in love with a rich heiress who owns a near-by boat. Actually, she’s a secretary who is taking care of her boss’s boat. A happy ending comes when the hero finds this out.
But this does not mean that our fiction has become fundamentally any less materialistic. It hasn’t; it’s just more hypocritical about it. Today’s heroes don’t lust for big riches, but they are positively greedy for the good life. This yen, furthermore, is customarily interpreted as a renunciation of materialism rather than as the embrace of it that it actually is. The usual hero of the postwar rash of “New York” novels, for example, is overweeningly spiritual on this score. After making his spurious choice between good and evil, the hero heads for the country, where, presumably, he is now to find real meaning in life. Just what this meaning will be is hard to see; in the new egalitarianism of the market place, his precipitous flight from the bitch goddess success will enable him to live a lot more comfortably than the ulcerated colleagues left behind, and in more than one sense, it’s the latter who are the less materialistic. Our hero has left the battlefield where his real fight must be fought; by puttering at a country newspaper and patronizing himself into a native, he evades any conflict, and in the process manages to live reasonably high off the hog. There’s no Cadillac, but the Hillman Minx does pretty well, the chickens are stacked high in the deep freeze, and no doubt there is a hi-fi set in the stable which he and his wife have converted. All this may be very sensible, but it’s mighty comfortable for a hair shirt.
Of late, sanctimonious materialism has been taking a somewhat different tack. Writers have been affected by the era of good feeling too, and heroes are now apt to stick around the market place. But they still have it both ways. Ponder the message of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. In this story of a man “heroically reconverting” to civilian life, hero Tom Rath is offered a big-money job by his boss. Tom turns it down; indeed, as we heard earlier, he virtually scolds the boss for so much as offering it to him. He’d have to work too hard and he wants to be with his family. Sacrifice? Blessed indeed are the acquiescent. The boss says he will give Tom a good job which won’t ask so much, and grandmother’s estate Tom inherited, it also transpires, can be chopped up into a development that will make lots of the money that Tom and Betsy so patently covet, (“One of the rare books of recent vintage,” an ad quotes a grateful reader, “leaving one with a feeling of pride to be a member of the human race.”)
In Patterns, another, equally curious business tale, the hero doesn’t mind work so much but he is similarly sanctimonious. He is appalled by the ruthless tactics of an industrial buccaneer. When the buccaneer offers him a top spot the hero says he wants no part of it. He is a moral man and he gives the boss a tongue-lashing. Having thereby saved his soul, he takes the job (at twice the salary). In a masterpiece of the have-your-cake-and-eat-it finale, he tells the boss he’ll punch his face if he doesn’t act right.
Not in the materialism of heroes but in their attitude toward society is where the change has taken place. In older fiction there was some element of conflict between the individual and his environment; no matter how much assisted by coincidence, the hero had to do something—or at least seem to do something—before he got his reward. Rarely now. Society is so benevolent that there is no conflict left in it for anyone to be rebellious about. The hero only thinks there is.
Stories must have at least the appearance of a conflict if they are to be stories, but contemporary writers get around this by taking a chunk of environment and then in some fashion disguising its true goodness from the hero. Since this means that the hero’s troubles stem from a false image of life, the climax is easily resolved. The author simply tears the veil away. It was really okay all along only the hero didn’t know it. Relieved, the hero learns the wisdom of accepting what probably would have happened anyway.
We have the small-town girl planning to marry good, safe old Joe, or already married to him. Just about the time she’s getting bored with Joe and the small-town life, an actor or celebrity of some kind comes to town from the city for a short stay. He gives her a mild rush, and she dreams of a glamorous life with him. Then some minor crisis comes up. Who rises to it? Surprisingly, safe old Joe. We leave her as she gazes at Joe, with his briar pipe and his lovable idiosyn-cracies and his calm, quiet strength. She would be stuck with him in any event, but now she is swept by a deep inner peace to boot.
It is a churlish critic who would gainsay people the solace of fairy tales. But good fairy tales frankly tell the reader that he is about to enter the land of make-believe and to relax as we go back once upon a time. Current slick fiction stories do not do this; the tales are not presented as make-believe; by the use of detail, by the flagrant plainness of their characters, they proclaim themselves realistic slices of life. They are much like the “situation” magazine covers and the pictures of American family life featured in ads like the “Beer belongs—enjoy it” series. The verisimilitude is superb—from the frayed cord on the bridge lamp to the askew hair of the young mother, the detail is almost photographically faithful to middle-class reality. But it is all sheer romance nonetheless; whether the scene is taking the first picture of the baby, a neighborly contretemps over shoveling snow, or a family reunion of one kind or another, the little humorous squabbles merely serve to high-light how lovable and conflict-less is the status quo beneath.
Let me detour a moment to nonfiction, for it shows the same change of emphasis. Take, for example, that American staple, the self-improvement book. A half-century ago the usual self-improvement book bore down heavily on the theme of individual effort to surmount obstacles. It was a sort of everyman’s Protestant Ethic; you too, went the message, can become rich and powerful. This buoyant doctrine reached its apotheosis in the “New Thought” movement, which, by conceiving the individual mind as an emanation of God, confidently asserted that “anything is yours if you only want it hard enough.” Typical book titles tell the story: The Conquest of Poverty, Your Forces and How to Use Them, Mastery of Fate, Pushing to the Front, or Success under Difficulty, The Victorious Attitude.*
This theme has by no means disappeared. Best-selling books for salesmen preach the same message, and with a gusto that seems downright anachronistic. Frank Bettger’s How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling, for example, could, save for a few topical references, have been written in 1910. There is nothing that our old friend Henry Clews would not have subscribed to—and, like him, Bettger winds up with the maxims of Benjamin Franklin. (If I may add a somewhat extraneous comment, the comparative anachronism of this viewpoint helps explain why selling has fallen into such low esteem. The beliefs of the salesmanship ideal remain unchanged—in a world where everything else has changed.
But the general run of current self-improvement books shows a rather sharp divergence from the old tradition. On the surface they do not seem to, and their titles promise the old fare. Essentially, however, what they tell you to do is to adjust to the situation rather than change it. They are full of ambiguities, to be sure, and many still borrow heavily from the mental-power concept of the New Thought movement. But for all this the picture they present is one of an essentially benevolent society, and the peace of mind or the positive thinking extolled is a kind of resignation to it.
“What should a person do,” a puzzled man asks Norman Vincent Peale, “who is unhappy and bored in his job after twenty years but who earns a nice salary and hasn’t the nerve to leave? He’ll never go any higher in salary and position but will always have a job.” Peale, one of the few who can preach the Social Ethic and the Protestant Ethic at one and the same time, answers thus: “The trouble here seems to be the tragedy of treadmill thoughts. This individual has gone stale, dull and dead in his thinking. He needs an intellectual rebirth. That job of his is filled with possibilities he never sees, with opportunities he hasn’t realized. Tell him to wake up mentally and strive for some understanding of what he can accomplish in his present position.” (“Norman Vincent Peale Answers Your Questions,” Look, March 6, 1955.)
Life, as it is, is beautiful enough, and one could easily gather from current reading that God is so merged with society that the two are just about indistinguishable. In an advertisement for the movie, A Man Called Peter, there is a picture of a man walking up a hill through some dry-ice mist. In his white shirt and four-in-hand tie, he looks uncommonly like a thoughtful young executive, but we find that he is a minister: “He was a first-name kind of guy…. He was everybody’s kind of guy.… He unpomped the pompous, played baseball with kids, turned a two-hour leave into a honeymoon for a sailor and his girl, and gave voice to all the longings in a man’s soul…. He was a lovin’ kind of guy.… Every woman secretly had her eyes on him, but he had eyes for only one—Catherine —who learned from him what a wonderful thing it was to be a woman—and wrote this story that topped the nation’s best-seller list for 128 weeks…. He was God’s kind of guy.”
This profanity, for that is what it is, is bold, even for the popular press, but it is characteristic. God likes regular people—people who play baseball, like movie nuns. He smiles on society, and his message is a relaxing one. He does not scold you; he does not demand of you. He is a gregarious God and he can be found in the smiling, happy people of the society about you. As the advertisements put it, religion can be fun.
Oddly, the only time popular culture gives us a momentary glimpse of the beast in the jungle is when it reverses the usual process and masquerades reality as a fairy tale. Through the thin convention of animals, the animated cartoons show man in conflict with unabashed sadism, and with vicarious enjoyment people roar as human beings gotten up as cats and pigs torture and kill one another. In some television programs, the tradition of the two-reel comedies is perpetuated; here the environment is capricious and sardonic and the protagonist is not merely beset but defeated by the unglamorous impedimenta of everyday life—leeching friends, in-laws, icy sidewalks, stupid waiters, mean superiors. Perhaps it is for the same reason that people still seek out the old W. C. Fields pictures; through the sanction of laughter they can surreptitiously enjoy his detestation for little children, motherhood, and mankind.
Since 1900, to recapitulate, the vision of life presented in popular fare has been one in which conflict has slowly been giving way to adjustment. But there is more to this change than mere degree, and I would now like to take up a further development.
For many years most writers of popular fiction have portrayed society amenably enough, but once they were guileless in this respect, and now they have lost their innocence. Instead of merely showing people not masters of their destiny—and leaving the moral latent—there now seems a disposition to go out of the way to show that people cannot be. Society is no longer merely an agreeable setting in which they place their subjects; it is becoming almost the central subject itself.
Fiction heroes and heroines, as we have seen, have been remarkably passive for some time. It is not enough, however, to show that they are not masters of their own destiny; there now seems to be a growing disposition on the part of writers to go out of their way to show that they cannot be. To what degree one can be is of course a matter for deep debate, and many of the best novels of the last decade have been concerned with the impotence of man against society. But where these books deplore, slick fiction seems to rejoice. The new society, it says—often quite forcefully—is such that the hero does not have to wrestle with external forces. He may mistakenly believe this for a while, but eventually he is shown how unnecessary it is.
Society itself becomes the deus ex machina. In such cases one of the characters is a sort of accredited spokesman for the system in which the protagonists operate. The system, with an assist from its spokesman, resolves the hero’s apparent dilemma, and lest the point be lost on the hero, the spokesman usually has a few sententious words at the end.
In a Saturday Evening Post story we see how the system solves the problem of a baffled couple. An Army captain and his wife have gotten in trouble by adopting a Japanese child while they are serving in a regiment stationed in Japan. A mean major and his wife spend most of their time making life miserable for the couple and the child. The captain feels he cannot buck the system by strife with the major; the only way out that he can see is to give up the struggle entirely, resign his commission, and take his wife and the child back to the United States.
Then the wife of the colonel comes to tea. She is especially gracious to the little Japanese girl and thus tacitly announces to all that the little girl is now part of the system. The villainous major is not punished. He and his wife remain just as mean underneath, but they are members of the system too, and thus, we gather, will now be nice to the little girl. The story ends with the captain and his wife happily ascending the stairs to their bedroom.
In a sort of ultimate example of the system spokesman, another Saturday Evening Post story rings in the President himself. (“Unexpected Hero,” by Paul Horgan, March 26, 1955.) A lawyer is trying to convince a widow to marry him, but her little boy stands in the way; the boy idolizes too much the memory of his war-hero father. One day the lawyer takes him to look at the sights in Washington. The boy is unimpressed. At length, the two stop by the White House where the lawyer runs across an old acquaintance. Suddenly, a presence comes into the room. He puts his arm on the little boy’s shoulders, and from above, to judge by the full-page illustration, a luminous light encircles him. After a long, and what would seem to a taxpayer needlessly garrulous, conversation, the President recognizes the lawyer from the war days in Europe. Wasn’t he at the Rhine crossing near Wesel in March 1945? The President recalls the details of the then major’s fine work and how he had put him in for the Legion of Merit. The little boy now admires the lawyer and the two go back home, happy.
Sometimes society is personified by an animal or by an inanimate object. In his study of Saturday Evening Post fiction, Robert Brustein was struck by the religious overtones writers invoked. “The theme is adoption. A powerful person experiences a difficulty which is resolved through the generous impulse of someone weaker; by his own considerable power or through mysterious intimacy with ‘higher-ups,’ the stronger then rewards the weaker, and the weaker is sub sequently adopted. It is the weaker character—the adoptee—who is the central hero with whom the reader is meant to identify, and his face is featureless so that the reader can substitute his own.” (“The New Faith of the Saturday Evening Post,” Robert Brustein, Commentary, October 1953.)
Popular culture is not monolithic in this counseling of resignation, nor is the audience in accepting it. It too is rife with ambiguity, and just as the executive confuses himself by paying homage to mutually incompatible precepts, so the audience still responds to themes directly contrary to the usual fare. High Noon, one of the most successful movies in years, was a clear throwback to the Protestant Ethic. In this morality play the sheriff, who is the hero, starts out as a team player; when he is confronted by evil he diligently seeks the co-operation of the townspeople for a group effort to combat the killers who are coming to town. But the group fails him and the hero is left alone—and afraid. But he conquers his fear and he conquers the killers. The townspeople come out of hiding and congratulate him, but, contemptuous, he spurns them and rides off with his wife, unforgiving. When I saw the movie the audience applauded when the hero told off the townspeople. Conceivably, the same people cheered just as much when Barney Greenwald told off Keefer for questioning the system, but the point is that they can still do both.*
In any treatment of man’s isolation and his need to belong, diagnosis does not have to lead to precept. In From Here to Eternity Prewitt cannot exist outside the cocoon of the Regular Army, but the author presents this as a fact of life and a rather harsh one at that. In many recent books, however, there is an unmistakable note of approval; J. P. Marquand’s protagonists, for example, are etched with great detachment yet they are impelled to peace through acceptance, and though there is no exaltation over their acquiescence, neither is there a sense of tragedy. When Sid Skelton, the successful commentator in Melville Goodwin USA, goes to a cocktail party for Army brass, the reader braces himself for some sharp comment on Army life. He gets none; Skelton, prototype of the Connecticut suburbanite made miserable by success, envies too much the Army people’s sense of belonging and their rootedness in a firm system. He is the man on the outside looking in.
For all the ambiguities and cross currents the dominant strain in popular culture does seem to be adjustment to the system. To what degree this is conscious direction on the part of authors is, of course, impossible to determine. On any one story critics could long split hairs as to whether the author was resolving for or against the system, and perhaps the author might be in some doubt himself. Nonetheless, there does seem to be a sense of direction, and whether it is conscious or not, popular writers are showing an increasing affinity for it.
One way to chart the direction would be to provide a cross section of slick fiction writers with a new plot situation, let each of them make what he will of it, and then do a follow-up study of the results to see how they played back the material. By accident, I found myself involved in what was in effect, if not in design, an almost controlled experiment along these lines, and I would like to present the results in evidence for my thesis.
The plot situation came out of a study my colleagues and I did of the tensions in the life of corporation wives and their families. One article, essentially reportorial, described the growing domination of the family by the corporation and the active “wife programs” some large corporations were instituting to make the domination more absolute. The other article went into the wives’ attitudes toward all this. I thought this the more important, for the interviews indicated that most wives agreed with the corporation; they too felt that the good wife is the wife who adjusts graciously to the system, curbs open intellectualism or the desire to be alone. There were exceptions, and they were significant ones, but the majority view was so depressingly strong, particularly among the younger wives, that we felt compelled to add a special editorial “In Praise of Ornery Wives.” In some small way, we hoped, the articles would be a counter-irritant.
We were soon inundated with letters. Many readers were furious at the conformity described, and so furious they blamed us for it. This wasn’t so bad, but the praise was something else again. Soon articles began to appear in trade journals and the women’s pages of newspapers on “the wife problem.” Congratulations to Fortune, they said, for breaking the ice and showing how wrong was the old hands-off policy. The rules of the game we had paraphrased tongue-in-cheek were reprinted verbatim as psychologically sound guides for peace of mind in corporate life; worse yet, the examples of company wife programs we had described were stimulating other companies into devising even more stringently controlled programs.*
At length the fiction began to appear, and by the end of the year there was hardly a women’s magazine that hadn’t printed a story along the lines of “I Was a Company Wife,” “Management Bride.” On first glance, the stories would appear to be heartening omens of protest. The pictures in the opening layout were of women deeply troubled and apparently in some kind of bondage. As one caption asked, How is a wife to fight when an intangible force comes between her and her husband? But this was only the come-on. No praise of ornery wives; by the end of the story both the heroine and the reader learn that the good wife, as corporations said all along, is highly gregarious and highly adaptable.
In one story, to cite a typical example of the genre, an inexperienced company wife is trying to figure out how to make the next promotion go to her husband instead of the husband of a somewhat older friend down the street. Since the boss and his wife will be making the decision when they come to town for a week’s stay, the heroine decides to throw a fancy dinner with caviar and all the trimmings. Her friend, she correctly estimates, will probably serve a much plainer dinner.
The day arrives. The boss and his gracious wife—boss’s wives are usually gracious in today’s fiction—come to dinner. Too late, our heroine realizes that she has made herself seem pretentious, and, sure enough, the other couple get the job. As with the colonel’s wife, however, the system the boss’s wife personifies is a warm one, and so she stops by for a friendly chat. Delicately she tells the heroine that it would have been better if she had served a plainer meal, but not to worry, her chance will come again.
I found one ostensible exception. It was a story called “Fireworks for Michelle,” a complete-in-one-issue novel in the Ladies’ Home Journal, May 1953. Michelle and her husband are enslaved to a particularly noxious company. The personnel people use all of the many different devices noted in our study and a couple we hadn’t heard of yet. The boss tells Michelle’s tousled-haired husband, Garry, how Michelle should dress, who her friends should be, and what decoration scheme she should use. Garry doesn’t altogether like this, but he’s a good corporation man and passes the word along to Michelle. Michelle, apparently made of stronger stuff than her husband, decides that she has had it. She and Garry invite the top executives and their wives for dinner. At dessert they turn and insult their guests.
“Well, ladies and gentlemen,” Garry said, “I’m through racing after your mechanical rabbit. I’m not going to climb any further up your blasted ladder. This is where I get off.”
She got up somehow on wobbly knees and went to meet him between the tables. His strong arm held her close against his chest.
“To love and to cherish,” he said softly.
“To love and to cherish,” she repeated.
A soul-searing decision? Not a bit of it; just in time for this bravura scene, it seems, old Grandpa Fitch died and left them a prospering farm.
Phony as this revolt was, most protagonists are not allowed so much as the appearance of one, and if the husbands have a common denominator it is acceptance. The movie Woman’s World is a particularly good example. The gist is the idea of a company president selecting between men on the basis of their wives. No moral was intended—the writers didn’t use the ending of the original magazine story (which antedated our study) and evidently had some trouble settling on the winner. As to the ethics of the whole business, however, they admirably reflect the current climate; they hardly bother to raise an eyebrow over the appalling tactics of the boss (cast as Clifton Webb); they playfully accuse him of being a bit of a torturer, but they make his tactics seem reasonable enough. He needs a general manager, ergo he must bring three men and their wives to New York for several days of scrutiny to see which couple should get the job.
Why any of this sorry crew should be considered at all is difficult to understand. One contending couple, Katie and Bill, consists of a juvenile and an equally juvenile wife who is interested chiefly in staying home and being dowdy. Another contender, Sid, is an ambitious fool who has forgotten how to be a husband to his wife; at length he and his wife revisit one of those quaint Italian restaurants with a comic-dialect proprietor (Tomaso, by name), and the emotional hang-over of this experience helps the wife reform him out of his ambition.
This leaves only one man fit for the job. He is Jerry Talbot, a hard-working husband with a sexy, ambitious wife. In terms of the values of the world depicted in the film, she’s the only worth-while person in the bunch. Unlike the others, busily sabotaging their husbands, she’s actually trying to do something for her husband, albeit a little too pushily. She has the same zest for manipulation as the top man, and her ambition will provide her husband just the same economic motivation companies are so keen on. By the curious morality of popular fiction, however, she is too materialistic. Openly, she savors the idea of high life in New York. The movie does too—that’s what its “production values” are all about—but, like the biblical movies, it must in the end smite that which it has exploited. She has to go. Some ten minutes before the dinner at which the boss has promised to award the prize, the husband viciously tells her to get packing. He won’t even let her eat supper with the others. He gets the job. The boss explains that by ditching a person inimical to the team the man has shown his true mettle. To quote from the shooting script:
GIFFORD: Talbot, I think you have that …
“X plus” … that makes a big man big.
(pause)
But there was something that made me doubt that you could ever function successfully as a general manager—a handicap—and frankly it caused me to decide against you.
I was convinced you were not aware of this handicap and I wanted to call it to your attention. I found an opportunity that gave me a chance to do so. I can only guess at the details, but this much I know: that suddenly you did become aware of it and had the courage to get rid of it—and just as suddenly I’d found my new general manager! Congratulations!
Jerry looks up at Gifford, dazed, and it is a moment before he can grasp the hand that is offered him. Liz turns quickly to Sid and when she sees the unutterable relief in his eyes her own are suddenly filled with tears. Sid reaches for her hand.
And now his arms are around Liz and she presses against him with a warmth he hasn’t felt in years. And next to them Katie and Bill are hugging each other ecstatically.
Hardly a morality tale. Nor are most such stories, singly. Taken together, however, they constitute a sort of ever continuing serial, and innocent of thought as any one story may be, cumulatively they have a message. And for all the fluff, what a dismal one it is! Accept.
To compare it with the theme George Orwell tackled in 1984 might seem to be freighting popular fiction with more portent than it deserves; Orwell was writing of totalitarianism, specifically Communism, and because he makes the leaders of society so villainous, the terrible world he sketched would seem far remote, a hell to our heaven. Yet in the final paragraph there is a scene which is hauntingly similar to the endings of our current fiction. As the erstwhile rebel Winston sits idly at a café, he gazes up at a picture of Big Brother. He begins to babble incoherently. Tears of gratitude well up in his eyes. At last, as the officers of the Caine had learned to love Queeg, he had won the victory over himself. He had learned to love Big Brother.
* I am indebted to Reinhard Bendix’s analysis of the New Thought movement. In his excellent study, Work and Authority in Industry (N.Y. 1956), Bendix points out the dilemma the Protestant Ethic had forced upon the middle class. In the older version there was a sharp division between the haves and have-nots, with very little comfortable middle ground in between. Only a few could be successful; the rest would have to accept their station as an indication of lack of necessary personal qualities. As N. C. Fowler wrote in 1902 in The Boy, How to Help Him Succeed: “Many a man is entirely incapable of assuming responsibility…. He lacks the courage of willingness to assume responsibility and the ability of handling others. He was born for a salaried man, and a salaried man he had better remain.” This, as Bendix points out, was much too harsh a doctrine and the New Thought movement, which denied such exclusive-ness to success, furnished a badly needed modification.
* High Noon seems to be susceptible to some much more involved interpretations. In “The Olympian Cowboy” (The American Scholar, Summer 1955, Vol. 24, No. 3) a Swedish critic named Harry Schein manages to interpret it as a piece of American propaganda. He writes: “I see High Noon as having an urgent political message. The little community seems to be crippled with fear before the approaching villains; seems to be timid, neutral, and halfhearted, like the United Nations before the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea; moral courage is apparent only in the very American sheriff…. High Noon, artistically, is the most convincing and, likewise, certainly the most honest explanation of American foreign policy.”
* Sales Management, January 15, 1952, describes how U.S. Machine Corporation saw the problem: “All too often, so often in fact that it becomes almost a common situation, a sort of ‘love triangle’ develops in the lives of salesmen. The three sides of the triangle are salesman, wife, company. The wife sees the company robbing her of her husband’s time and companionship, becoming a rival, she feels, for his affection. At first she is slightly resentful. In time she may become openly jealous. This, unless brought under control, can end up in irreparable damage to the salesman’s worth to his employer.”