The effect this web of friendship has on the individual is a problem suburbanites think about a great deal. Like them, I am going to deal with the good aspects first, the adverse second. But the two are really inseparable, and it is this duality I wish to underscore. The Social Ethic denies it, and there is the problem. Finding a middle way in the conflicts of interest between the group and oneself has always been difficult, but it has become particularly difficult as people have come to believe there should be, ideally, no conflicts—and the happier the group, the more, not the less, intense is the problem. In the chapters on the corporation I argued that it was the very beneficence of the environment that made resistance to it so difficult. So in suburbia. As many people have sensed, it is all very well to say one should belong. But how much? Where is the line between co-operation and surrender?
On the credit side the suburbanites have much to say about the group. One of the first points they make is how it has altered their personality—or how they and the rest of the group altered someone else’s. For the good. “I’ve changed tremendously,” says one typical transient. “My husband was always the friend-maker in the family —everybody always loves Joe; he’s so likable. But here I began to make some friends on my own; I was so tickled when I realized it. One night when the gang came to our house I suddenly realized I made these friends.”
The cumulative effect can be summed up in a word. One is made outgoing. If the person is too shy to make the first move, others will take the initiative. In almost every court, patio, or superblock there is usually someone who enjoys doing the job, and the stiffer the challenge, the more the enjoyment. “When Mr. and Mrs. Berry came, they wouldn’t give you the time of day,” one leader recalls. “But I knew they were real shy and unhappy beneath it all. I said to myself, ‘I’m going to conquer them if it kills me.’ I have, too. She was one of the organizers for the Mothers’ March and he’s gotten tremendously interested in the school. They’re part of the gang now —you wouldn’t know they were the same people.”
Those who have been “brought out” bear witness to the transformation. They speak enthusiastically of it, and if their experiences had to be summed up in a phrase, it would boil down to one heartfelt note of joy: they weren’t introverts after all. “One of the reasons I took technical training in college,” explains one ex-introvert, “was that I thought I wasn’t the mixing type and wouldn’t be much good with people. Well, here I am, leading meetings and what not, and, frankly, not doing too bum a job. It’s changed a lot of ideas I had about myself.”
In theory, one could keep entirely to oneself, and some people attempt to do so. It is not, however, an easy alternative. The court, like the double bed, enforces intimacy, and self-imposed isolation becomes psychologically untenable. People so ingoing that they have been proof against “bringing out” usually seem to be rather troubled people, and though the causes of their unhappiness may antedate their entry into the court, some leave at the first opportunity. The court checks off another failure. “At the very end the Smithers were beginning to come out of their shell,” one outgoing resident recalls. “But it was too late; they’d already given up their lease. The night they left, you could tell by their faces, the way they tried to get friendly, they wished they weren’t leaving. It was so pathetic.”
On the matter of privacy, suburbanites have mixed feelings. Fact one, of course, is that there isn’t much privacy. In most small towns there is at least enough living room to soften the shock of intimate contact, and, besides, there is usually some redoubt to which the individual can withdraw. In Park Forest not even the apartment is a redoubt; people don’t bother to knock and they come and go furiously. The lack of privacy, furthermore, is retroactive. “They ask you all sorts of questions about what you were doing,” one resident puts it. “Who was it that stopped in last night? Who were those people from Chicago last week? You’re never alone, even when you think you are.”
Less is sacred. “It’s wonderful,” says one young wife. “You find yourself discussing all your personal problems with your neighbors —things that back in South Dakota we would have kept to our selves.” As time goes on, this capacity for self-revelation grows; and on the most intimate details of family life, court people become amazingly frank with one another. No one, they point out, ever need face a problem alone.
In the battle against loneliness even the architecture becomes functional. Just as doors inside houses—which are sometimes said to have marked the birth of the middle class—are disappearing, so are the barriers against neighbors. The picture in the picture window, for example, is what is going on inside—or, what is going on inside other people’s picture windows.
The walls in these new apartments are also dual purpose. Their thinness is occasionally a disadvantage; one court scandal, as a matter of fact, was provoked by a woman who chronically inverted a tumbler against the wall to eavesdrop. But there is more good than bad, many transients say, to the thinness. “I never feel lonely, even when Jim’s away,” goes a typical comment. “You know friends are near by, because at night you hear the neighbors through the walls.”
Even the most outgoing, of course, confess that the pace of court life occasionally wears them down, and once in a while they reach such a point of rebellion they don’t answer the phone. Such a purely negative response, however, is not enough. To gain privacy, one has to do something. One court resident, for example, moves his chair to the front rather than the court side of his apartment to show he doesn’t want to be disturbed. Often a whole court or a wing of it will develop such a signal; a group in one Drexelbrook court has decided that whenever one of them feels he or she has finally had it, she should draw the Venetian blinds all the way down to the bottom of the picture window. This lowered position is an unusual one, and the rest spot it as a plea to be left alone—for a little while, anyway.
But there is an important corollary of such efforts at privacy—people feel a little guilty about making them. Except very occasionally, to shut oneself off from others like this is regarded as either a childish prank or, more likely, an indication of some inner neurosis. The individual, not the group, has erred. So, at any rate, many errants seem to feel, and they are often penitent about what elsewhere would be regarded as one’s own business, and rather normal business at that. “I’ve promised myself to make it up to them,” one court resident recently told a confidant. “I was feeling bad that day and just plain didn’t make the effort to ask them in for coffee. I don’t blame them, really, for reacting the way they did. I’ll make it up to them somehow.”
Privacy has become clandestine. Not in solitary and selfish contemplation but in doing things with other people does one fulfill oneself. Nor is it a matter of overriding importance just what it is that one does with other people; even watching television together —for which purpose, incidentally, several groups have been organized—helps make one more of a real person.
However one may view this responsiveness to the group, it is important to acknowledge its moral basis. That friendship in the new suburbia transcends personal characteristics so much is due in part to the increasing homogeneity of American middle-class values. But it is also due to a very active kind of tolerance, and unless this is recognized one cannot appreciate the true difficulty of the suburbanites’ dilemmas.
Very consciously, they try to understand one another’s backgrounds and prejudices. As the unresolved segregation problem indicates, the millennium is still some way off, but the fact remains that they make a great effort to meet one another halfway. If misfortune strikes a family, the neighbors are not only remarkably generous but remarkably tactful. If, say, the child of a couple in straits accidentally breaks someone’s windshield, the group may not only chip in to pay for the damage but will try to conceal the fact that they have done so. Those in trouble are often irrationally antagonistic, but this the group takes in stride. They may have “a personality problem,” and there is nothing so challenging to the others as its diagnosis and therapy.
In the more humdrum aspects of daily life, much of what could pass for lazy conformity is in fact a very energetic, and in many ways unselfish, quest for consensus. Just as the Bunco player may put his mind to mastering bridge, so the shy housewife makes herself have fun at a coffee party; just as the Fundamentalist unbends with a risqué story and a beer now and then, so his neighbors tone down their own stories.
For the intellectual also Park Forest is a melting pot. “When I first came here I was pretty rarefied,” a self-styled egghead explained to me. “I remember how shocked I was one afternoon when I told the girls in the court how much I had enjoyed listening to The Magic Flute the night before. They didn’t know what I was talking about. I began to learn that diaper talk is important to them and I’m not so highbrow about it now. I still listen to The Magic Flute, but now I realize that it’s not wrong that most people care about other things.”
In similar fashion, farm-bred Republicans learn to appreciate that not all urban Democrats are Communists. ‘The people who lived in the other half of our duplex,” recalls one Republican, “were as different as could be from us. They were the kind who worshiped F.D.R.’s name. But we got to like them just the same. We just didn’t talk politics. We used to go bowling together and that sort of thing. I didn’t make him a Republican, but I think he appreciates my views a lot more than he did before, and I understand him better.”
This seeking of common values applies markedly to religion. The neighborhood friendship patterns would be impossible unless religious beliefs had lost much of their segregating effect. And it is more than a passive, live-and-let-live attitude. Several people of other faiths, for example, have joined the National Council of Jewish Women; they like the intellectual content of its discussion programs, and they feel no conflict with their own beliefs.
Even where there is conflict, suburbanites lean over backward to see the other point of view. “When Will and Ada had to dash East last month—they’re devout Catholics—I took care of little Johnny for them,” recalls one non-Catholic. “It really tickled me. Here I was picking Johnny up at St. Irenaeus School every afternoon and seeing to it that he said his Rosary every night before he went to bed.” Park Forest abounds with such stories, and the good will implicit in them is real.*
The suburban group also has a strong effect on relations between husband and wife, and in many ways a beneficent one. The group is a foster family. In the transient organization life the young family has to take a good part of its environment with it; no longer is there the close complex of aunts and uncles and grandparents to support the couple, and when they come to their first crisis this absence can have a devastating effect. Thus the function of the suburban group. All the other young couples are in the same boat, and in a sort of unspoken mutual assistance pact they provide for one another a substitute for the big family of former years.
What unites them most are the concerns of parenthood, and this preoccupation with children is a potent factor in keeping marriages on keel. “The kind of social situation you find here discourages divorce,” says United Protestant Church minister Dr. Gerson Engelmann. “Few people, as a rule, get divorces until they break with their groups. I think the fact that it is so hard to break with a group here has had a lot to do with keeping some marriages from going on the rocks.”
So pervasive are the concerns of parenthood that adjustment to court life is almost impossible for childless couples. Unless the wife obviously loves children—unless she is the kind, for example, who keeps a cooky jar for the neighbors’ kids—her daily routine is painfully out of kilter with the others’. Understandably, the recourse of adopting a child is sought very frequently. Complementing the social pressure of the group on the couple is the readiness of social agencies to give a Park Forest couple preference, for they look on the environment as ideal for adjustment. (Social workers’ liking for Park Forest has been so strong as to force local authorities to yell uncle; so many problem children have been sent out that in several areas the problem children are having more impact on the normal ones than the normal ones on the problem children.)
Personal morals? The court is the greatest invention since the chastity belt. In company, young suburbanites talk a great deal about sex, but it’s all rather clinical, and outside of the marriage no one seems to do much about it. There have been, to be sure, some unpleasant occurrences: in one court there was talk of wife-trading several years ago, and there have been affairs here and there since. The evidence is strong, however, that there is less philandering in the package suburbs than in more traditional communities.
For one thing, it’s almost impossible to philander without everyone’s knowing about it. One’s callers are observed, and if neighbors feel there is anything untoward, suburbia’s phenomenal grapevine will speed the news.* This is not mere venom; in a web of relationships as delicate as that of the court an affair can harm not only two marriages, it can upset the whole court applecart. Infidelity, to put it another way, is an ethical as well as a moral problem.
More important, the neighborliness of court life fills a void in the life of the young wife that is not always filled elsewhere—and this is particularly important for the wife whose husband travels. “You don’t find as many frustrated women in a place like this,” says one young wife. “We gals have each other. A young girl who would get to brooding if she was in an apartment all by herself on the outside can talk things over with us. She’s just too busy to get neurotic. Kitty, for example. She’s married to a real creep—pardon me, but that’s what he is—but when she’s disturbed she comes over here for coffee and a little chat, and we have a fine old time yakking away. It helps, for people like her.”
The participation also mitigates the “retrograde wife” problem that affects many corporation couples. If the husband is moving up rapidly this introduces a wedge between husband and wife, for while he is getting a postgraduate finishing through travel and exposure to successful older men, her tastes are often frozen at their former level by lack of any activity but child rearing. In the new suburbia this is somewhat less likely to happen. “Before we came here,” one wife, typical of many another, says, “I was such a stupid little thing. I didn’t think about anything except shopping and the babies and things like that. Now that I’m in the League of Women Voters and the school board I feel so much more worth while. When Joe comes home at night I have so many interesting things to talk to him about.”
In this mutual seeking of denominators, to recapitulate, the young suburbanites have been re-creating something of the tight-knit group of old. It is an achievement not to be dismissed lightly. They have come together with many more differences in religion, background, and expectations to adjudicate than troubled communities of old. Tensions they suffer for the suppression of their differences, but the consensus that is the result bespeaks a pretty high quotient of kindliness and fundamental decency.
But there is another side to the coin. Contemporary prophets of belongingness point out the warmth and security the tight-knit group produces for the individual, but they generally stop short at diagnosing some of the other things it produces. The suburbanites are more troubled, for they experience the double-barreled effects of belongingness, and in highly practical, immediate ways. It is not the question of conformity, though many speak of it as such. It is, rather, the question of determining when one is conforming, when adjustment is selflessness, or surrender. It is a moral dilemma—the one, I believe, central to the organization man, and while the suburban group affords the most concrete illustration, the underlying problem will not be shed when he moves on.
Let’s take a second look at that tolerance. There is one trouble with it. In the happy group, people are very intolerant of those who aren’t tolerant. This is using the same word in two senses, I admit, but suburbanites are ambiguous about it too. Their tolerance, as they are so proud to point out, goes downward. It does not, however, go upward very far. The leveling process is just that—leveling—and those financially above the norm who let the fact be visible are risking trouble. Though neighbors speak kindly of someone who “has not had all the advantages,” the phrase “they are more … fortunate than the rest of us” is likely to be spoken with a real bite.
Now let me make an important qualification. How much bite depends on how happy the group is. In the block which never quite jelled there is little of the belongingness, the mutual support characteristic elsewhere; for the same reason, however, there is not much pressure on the individual to adjust. There is no working group to adjust to. In the tight-knit group, however, each member feels an equity in others’ behavior. With communication so intensive, the slightest misunderstanding can generate a whole series of consequences. If Charley ducks his turn at the lawn mower, if little Johnny sasses Mrs. Erdlick just once more, if Gladys forgets to return the pound of coffee she borrowed, the frictions become a concern of the group and not just of the principals.
The more vigorous the search for common denominators, the stronger the pressure to alikeness. Sometimes this extends even to house design. The architects have tried to vary the façades of each house, and one might assume that in putting up aluminum awnings, making alterations, repainting and the like, residents try hard to enlarge the differences. This is not always so; in some areas residents have apparently agreed to unify the block with a common design and color scheme for garages and such.
In such blocks an otherwise minor variation becomes blatant deviance; if a man were to paint his garage fire-engine red in a block where the rest of the garages are white, he would literally and psychologically make himself a marked man. So with fences; if they are obviously designed to keep the children safe, eyebrows are not raised. But if the height or elaborateness of the fence indicates other motives, there will be feeling.
An unkempt lawn is another symbol of malaise. The state of the lawn is an effect as well as a cause, and in talking to owners of neglected lawns one gets the suspicion that they have subconsciously used the unkemptness as a weapon to tell the others where they can head in. “I suppose I should do more about it,” said one resident, waving to a rather weedy expanse outside, “but my wife and I think there are other things more important in life.”
Reprisal is inevitable. The sanctions are not obvious—indeed, people are often unconscious of wielding them—but the look in the eye, the absence of a smile, the inflection of a hello, can be exquisite punishment, and they have brought more than one to a nervous breakdown. And the more social the block, the rougher it is on those who don’t fit in.
In some areas it is questionable if the Gemütlichkeit of the gang compensates for the misery of the deviate. It is frightening to see the cruelty with which an otherwise decent group can punish the deviate, particularly when the deviate is unfortunate enough to be located in the middle of the group, rather than isolated somewhat out of benevolence’s way. “Estelle is a case,” says one resident of a highly active block. “She was dying to get in with the gang when she moved in. She is a very warmhearted gal and is always trying to help people, but she’s, well—sort of elaborate about it. One day she decided to win over everybody by giving an afternoon party for the gals. Poor thing, she did it all wrong. The girls turned up in their bathing suits and slacks, as usual, and here she had little doilies and silver and everything spread around. Ever since then it’s been almost like a planned campaign to keep her out of things. Even her two-year-old daughter gets kept out of the kids’ parties. It’s really pitiful. She sits there in her beach chair out front just dying for someone to come and Kaffeeklatsch with her, and right across the street four or five of the girls and their kids will be yakking away. Every time they suddenly all laugh at some joke she thinks they are laughing at her. She came over here yesterday and cried all afternoon. She told me she and her husband are thinking about moving somewhere else so they can make a fresh start.” (The woman in question has since moved.)
Perhaps the greatest tyranny, however, applies not to the deviate but to the accepted. The group is a jealous master. It encourages participation, indeed, demands it, but it demands one kind of participation—its own kind—and the better integrated with it a member becomes the less free he is to express himself in other ways.
In the planners’ meetings I spoke of earlier, most of those who wanted to plan for more participation assumed there is a unity to participation—that is, a layout that will stimulate neighborly social participation is the layout that will stimulate civic and cultural participation. They saw no antithesis; their primary goal was to develop “citizenship” rather than social activity, but they saw both kinds of participation as indivisible—parts of a satisfying whole.
When I first went to Park Forest I thought so too. The courts and blocks that were most notable for the amount of friendliness and social activity, I presumed, would be the ones that contributed the greatest number of civic leaders, and as a check I plotted the location of all the leaders in the principal community organizations. To my surprise, the two did not correlate; if anything, there was a reverse relationship. By and large, the people who were active in the over-all community did not tend to come from the courts that were especially “happy.”
The cause-and-effect relationship is not too difficult to determine. For some people, of course, it does not make much difference whether the neighborly gang is a happy one or not; they would be leaders in any event. But such people are a minority. The majority are more influenced by the good opinions of the group, and the cohesiveness of it has a considerable bearing on whether they will become active in community-wide problems. Where the group has never jelled enough to stimulate a sense of obligation, the person with any predilection for civic activity feels no constraints. The others would not be annoyed if he went in for outside activity; they don’t care enough. If the group is strong, however, the same kind of person is less likely to express such yearnings. It would be divisive. There are only so many enthusiasms a person can sustain, only so many hours in the day, and the amount of leisure one expends outside the group must be deducted from that spent inside.
It is not merely that the group will resent the absenteeism. Again, on the part of the individual himself, there is a moral obligation, or, at least, the feeling that there should be. I recall how a young housewife put it to me. She had been toying with the idea of getting involved in the little theater, for she felt she and her husband were culturally very lacking. But she decided against it. “If we do it’ll mean we’ll have to spend more of our free evenings away from the gang. I’d hate to be the first to break things up. We’ve really worked things out well here. The two play areas for the kids—my, how we all pitched in on that! I know we spend too much time just talking and playing bridge and all. Frankly, Chuck and I are the only ones around here who read much more than the Readers Digest. But have we the right to feel superior? I mean, should we break things up just because we’re different that way?”
Is this simple conformity? I am not for the moment trying to argue that yielding to the group is something to be admired, but I do think that there is more of a moral problem here than is generally conceded in most discussions of American conformity. Let me go back to the case of the man who is wondering about something he knows would upset the group—like not painting his garage white, like the rest. He may have been one of the first settlers of a block where the people have suppressed potential dislikes in a very successful effort to solve their common problems. Quite probably, a piece of bad luck for one of the group might have further unified them. If one of the wives had come down with polio, the rest might have chipped in not only with their money but with their time to help out the family through the crisis.
In other words, there has been a great deal of real brotherhood, and the man who is now figuring about his garage faces a decision that is not entirely ludicrous. He knows instinctively that his choice will be construed by the others as an outward manifestation of his regard for them, and he does feel a real obligation to help sustain the good feeling.
If he goes along with them he is conforming, yes, but he is conforming not simply out of cowardice but out of a sense of brotherhood too. You may think him mistaken, but grant at least his problem. The group is a tyrant; so also is it a friend, and it is both at once. The two qualities cannot easily be separated, for what gives the group its power over the man is the same cohesion that gives it its warmth. This is the duality that confuses choice.
This duality is a very unpleasant fact. Once you acknowledge how close the relationship is between conformity and belongingness —between “good” participation and “bad” participation—you cannot believe in utopia, now or ever. But progress is not served by ignoring it. Many current prescriptions for a better society do ignore it, and thus are delusory. However shrewd their diagnosis of what is wrong, their precepts could intensify the very problems they are intended to solve.
Even so perceptive an observer as Erich Fromm has fallen into this trap. In his plea for The Sane Society, Fromm makes a searching diagnosis of man’s desperate efforts to escape the burdens of freedom in group conformity. In documentation Fromm cites the conformity of suburbia. Appropriately enough, he singles out Park Forest as an example and dwells at considerable length on the baneful aspects of the group pressures found there. But what is his antidote? In conclusion, he advocates a “democratic communitarianism”—a society in which, through a multitude of small, local groups, people learn to participate more actively with others.
Well? Fromm might as well have cited Park Forest again. One must be consistent. Park Foresters illustrate conformity; they also illustrate very much the same kind of small group activity Fromm advocates. He has damned an effect and praised a cause. More participation may well be in order, but it is not the antidote to conformity; it is inextricably related with it, and while the benefits may well outweigh the disadvantages, we cannot intensify the former and expect to eliminate the latter. There is a true dilemma here. It is not despite the success of their group life that Park Foresters are troubled but partly because of it, for that much more do they feel an obligation to yield to the group. And to this problem there can be no solution.
Is there a middle way? A recognition of this dilemma is the condition of it. It is only part of the battle, but unless the individual understands that this conflict of allegiances is inevitable he is intellectually without defenses. And the more benevolent the group, the more, not the less, he needs these defenses.
For ultimately his tyranny is self-imposed. In earlier chapters on life within The Organization we saw how the increasing benevolence of human relations, the more democratic atmosphere, has in one way made the individual’s path more difficult. He is intimidated by normalcy. He too has become more adept at concealing hostilities and ambitions, more skillfully “normal,” but he knows he is different and he is not sure about the others. In his own peculiarities he can feel isolated, a fraud who is not what he seems.
Wives also. Like their husbands in the office, they are easily misled by the façades of those about them in suburbia, and a frequent consequence is the “superwoman” complex. Only a minority of wives are really successful at handling both a large agenda of social or civic obligations and their home duties, but everyone puts up such a good front that many a wife begins to feel that something is wanting in her that she is not the same. Determined to be as normal as anyone else, or a little more so, they take on a back-breaking load of duties—and a guilt feeling that they’re not up to it. “I’ve seen it so many times,” says Arnold Levin, Park Forest’s overworked family counselor. “They may feel inadequate because they haven’t a college degree, or haven’t made the League of Women Voters, or can’t be a “model” mother like someone else in the court. I’m not worth enough,’ they tell me.”*
To bring the problem full circle, you often find wives in deep emotional trouble because they can no longer get understanding or help from their husbands on their social problems. The wife’s talk about the court or the block is not just idle gossip; this is the world she and the children must live in, and the personal relationships in it are quite analogous to the ones that are the basis of the husband’s worries. But husbands have a double standard on this: office politics they see as part of a vitally important process, but the same kind of relationships in the community they dismiss as trivia, the curse of idle female tongues. “I often wonder,” says Levin, “does the husband look to the job in self-defense against his wife’s lack of interest? Or does she go in for civic activity because he’s withdrawn into the job? I don’t know which cause comes first, but it’s tragic how many couples have lost the ability to meet each other’s inadequacies.”
Those who seem best able to steer their own course care about the good opinion of the group, but they have this distinction: they are professionals. They know the conflicts of interest between themselves and others are natural; they have been through many environments and they have the intelligence to grasp this recurring feature of group life. To use Everett Hughes’s phrase, they know how to routinize crisis.
Unlike the deviate, they pay the little surface obeisances to the group. Thus do they defend themselves. They have to. Usually, those who seek their friendships through civic or cultural interests have palpably different tastes than those who accept propinquity. Members of the League of Women Voters, for example, are apt to be somewhat absent-minded about their clothes and their housekeeping. (“Most of us League gals are thin,” says one, after some comments on the Women’s Club. “We’re so busy, and we don’t have time for coffee and doughnuts.”) Such people, however, have much less friction with their neighbors than might be imagined. They do not give the group enough familiarity to breed contempt; although they may draw a firm line at intimacy, they are good about baby-sitting, returning borrowed lawn mowers, and the other neighborly graces.
Above all, they do not get too close. The transients’ defense against rootlessness, as we have noted, is to get involved in meaningful activity; at the same time, however, like the seasoned shipboard traveler, the wisest transients don’t get too involved. Keeping this delicate balance requires a very highly developed social skill, and also a good bit of experience. “It takes time,” explains one transient. “I had to go through fraternity life, then the services, and a stretch at Parkmere before I realized you just get into trouble if you get personally involved with neighbors.”
More basically, what they have is a rather keen consciousness of self—and the sophistication to realize that while individualistic tastes may raise eyebrows, exercising those tastes won’t bring the world crashing down about you. “One day one of the girls busted in,” one upper-middlebrow cheerfully recounts. “She saw I was reading. ‘What you got there, hon?’ she asked me. You might have known it would be Plato that day. She almost fell over from surprise. Now all of them are sure I’m strange.” Actually they don’t think she’s overly odd, for her deviance is accompanied by enough tact, enough observance of the little customs that oil court life, so that equilibrium is maintained.
Just where the happy mean lies, however, still depends greatly on the degree of the group’s cohesion. Relatively, the seasoned transient steers his course more intelligently than the others. But he too is not proof against beneficence. “Every once in a while I wonder,” says one transient, in an almost furtive moment of contemplation. “I don’t want to do anything to offend the people in our block; they’re kind and decent, and I’m proud we’ve been able to get along with one another—with all our differences—so well. But then, once in a while, I think of myself and my husband and what we are not doing, and I get depressed. Is it just enough not to be bad?” Many others are so troubled. They sense that by their immersion in the group they are frustrating other urges, yet they feel that responding to the group is a moral duty—and so they continue, hesitant and unsure, imprisoned in brotherhood.
* This denominator-seeking is also illustrated in the commercial “parties” held in suburbia (Linda Lee clothes demonstrations, the Beauty Counselor, etc.). Stanley Home products demonstrators, for example, ask the hostess to serve only two refreshments, preferably coffee and doughnuts. If the choice is left to her, she may overdo it and others will fear to be hostesses lest their own offerings suffer in comparison. Similar care marks the games that precede the product demonstration. “The best kind of thing to start with,” says one Park Forest housewife who has demonstrated Stanley products, “is something like the waistline game. That’s where you lay a piece of rope on the floor and start making an ever-bigger circle; one by one the girls tell you when they think it’s as big as their waistline. They always overestimate, because your waistline is oblong and not a circle. They get a big charge out of that. But if you do anything that shows up people’s intelligence, it’s tricky. With a spelling game or naming states—you’d be surprised how many people can’t name ten states—they just get uncomfortable.”
* One of the occupational hazards of interviewing is the causing of talk, and I am afraid my presence seriously embarrassed some housewives in several suburbs. In one of the instances I later learned about, a husband arrived home to be greeted by a phone call. “You don’t know who I am,” a woman’s voice announced, “but there’s something you ought to know. A man stopped by your house this afternoon and was with your wife three hours.” This was malicious, but not all such gossip is. Unless he is a deliveryman or doctor or such the man who enters suburbia during the day can make the female group feel that here comes Trouble, and their protective instincts come to the fore—stroll by a bunch of wives Kaffee-klatsching on a lawn and you will feel very forcefully their inquiry.
* The impulse to self-punishment sometimes takes a more pathological form. Barbiturate addiction and attempted suicides are not over average at Park Forest related to national statistics, but there is enough to mock the façade of well-adjusted normality. In the spring of 1955 there was a rash of publicity over the number of women found lifting groceries in the supermarket. Actually, the number was not really very high, the main reason for the excitement being the merchants’ faith in publicity as a deterrent. The news about who the women were, however, was something of a shocker. The average shoplifter, the police chief told the newspapers, was not a low-income wife; she was the wife of a junior executive making $8,000, she belonged to a bridge club, was active in the PTA, and attended church. Usually she had about $50 a week to spend on food and sundries. Perplexed, the police chief and the village chaplain had to put it down as part of the “middle-class neurosis.” Rarely was there any obvious motive; even the repentant of the wives could not explain. Perhaps, as some psychiatrists might venture, they stole to be caught—as if they were asking to be punished for wearing a false face to the world.