children literature

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Timidity, Conformity, and the Search for Personal Identity

By DON MARTINDALE

ABSTRACT: Throughout America’s historical development to the 1930’s, Americans were repeatedly characterized as out- going, optimistic, and self-confident. The Great Depression brought a dependence on the collective which modified these qualities. Despite the affluence of the postwar period, there has been no return to the old type of individualism. Timid-

ity, conformity, and uncertainty as to personal identity have characterized increasing numbers of Americans in the post- depression era. The crisis in the self-concept of Americans is traced to various structural changes dramatized by the crisis of the 1930’s and associated with the rise of the mass society: the destruction of local autonomy; the rise of mass industry; the changed position of youth; and the role of the individual in large-scale organizations.

Don Martindale, Ph.D., Minneapolis, Minnesota, is Professor of Sociology, University of Minnesota. He previously taught at the University of Wisconsin. He is coeditor and translator of four books by Max Weber and author of American Society (1960), The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory (1960), Social Life and Cultural Change (1962), Community, Character, and Civilization (1963), Institutions, Organizations, and Mass Society (1966), and numerous other books and monographs. He is active in the fields of sociological theory, social organizations, and American community research.

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FROM time to time in the experience~ of peoples, critical events move to the forefront of their self-conceptions. These events may have actually been experienced by only a few, but they are appropriated by the whole people. Fa-

mous examples are the Exodus and Exile experiences of the ancient Jews; the Persian Wars of the Classical Greeks; the revolt of the barons and signing of Magna Carta at Runnymede of the

English; and the Revolution and fron- tier experiences of the nineteenth-

century Americans. In recent times, the Great Depression may represent such a significant turning point in the self- evaluations of Americans.

THE LAST STAND OF RUGGED INDIVIDUALISM

From the Colonial period to the jazz age, sensitive observers of the American scene have interpreted the everyday psychology of Americans as outgoing, optimistic, and self-confident. American folklore was typified by Paul Bunyan- esque excess. American humor was

epitomized by the tall tale, the exag- geration of outgoing men. F. J. Turner, the first truly national historian, be- lieved that the American outlook was

shaped by the mentality of self-reliant frontiersmen. America’s most charac- teristic philosopher, John Dewey, saw instrumentalism and pragmatism-with their emphasis on objective results-as keys to the American mind. All such observations were synthesized in the

stereotype of the American as a rugged individualist.

Americans had experienced panics and recessions before, but none compared in scope and intensity to the crisis of the 1930’s. The Great Depression occurred in a world that had only recently (World War I) lost its international

innocence, that had set irreversibly on a course toward large-scale industrializa-

tion and urbanism, that no longer pro- vided the symbol and reality of escape of the frontier. It was crushing to the self-confidence of millions willing to

work who could find none. Thousands

sought, as in earlier crises, to return to the farms to weather out the storm, but the blight had also marked them down for destruction, and one out of four farms was foreclosed. The concept of the self-sufficient locality was shattered, as every private charity was threatened with collapse under the burdens placed on it. Even the most arrogant symbols of government-defying rugged individu- alism, the business entrepreneurs, were brought to heel. In an entry to his

diary for May 4, 1933, Harold Ickes, then Secretary of the Interior, observed:

I went to the annual dinner of the Cham- ber of Commerce of the United States

tonight.... The great and mighty of the business world were there in force, and I couldn’t help thinking how so many of these great and mighty were crawling to

Washington on their hands and knees these days to beg the Government to run their businesses for them.1

Despite the gallant national gesture in the direction of the old self-reliance which disguised government relief for the unemployed in a variety of real and make-work projects, the blow to the self-confidence of the depression-crossed generation struck deep.

In the postdepression world, both the explanations of the individual and the self-experience of the average American have taken new forms. Interpreters of American psychology no longer looked to contexts such as the frontier to ex-

plain the origin of a spirit of rugged individualism, but to social contexts for a clue to the centrality of conformity in the American make-up. The Amer- ican and English social scientists

1 Harold Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, Vol. 1 (New York: Simon and

Schuster, 1954), p. 31.

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Margaret Mead and Geoffrey Gorer 2

interpreted American psychology as es- sentially feminine (earlier it had always been interpreted as masculine). They saw the woman as the decisive figure in shaping the personal outlook even of American men! They saw the social outlook of Americans as third-genera- tional, oriented to the successful adapta- tion to and assimilation by the sur-

rounding social milieu. David Riesman 3

characterized his contemporaries as

outer-directed, taking their directions from the opinions of their peers, in con- trast to their inner-directed forefathers, motivated by their personal ambitions and controlled by their consciences.

Meanwhile, the average American had begun to estimate his personal fate in terms of his place in the collective.

In the predepression world, self-

reliance, independence, and the drive for objective achievement formed the refer- ence points in the self-estimates of the average American; in the postdepres- sion world, timidity, conformity, and the search for personal identity haunt his insecure selfhood.

THE TRAUMA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION

The reasons why some collective crises do and others, apparently equally severe, do not become central reference

points in the self-conceptions of a people are unclear. Why, for example, should the Great Depression be more important for Americans than World War II?

Tentatively, it may be postulated that when collective crises accompany a

change in the basic institutions of a

community and initiate a new way of thinking and feeling appropriate to the

changed state of affairs, the crises ac- quire an emblematic character in the

interpretations of the people. The Great Depression was the death

struggle of the America of small, rela- tively autonomous towns, of a ruralism oriented around the family farm, and of entrepreneuring individualism which sustained a rags-to-riches ideology. The Great Depression forced recognition of the fact that, inasmuch as the fate of thousands of Americans had become de-

pendent on them, the great organizations had come to stay. The Great Depres- sion saw the formation of large-scale organizations in fields, such as labor, where they had previously been absent, and their vast extensions to new areas of government. The Great Depression confirmed the changing structure of the generations: providing social security for the aged, removing the young from the labor market, and crowding these same young into the educational institu- tions. The Great Depression burned into the brains of millions the realiza- tion that personal security depended on stable positions in the emerging large- scale organizations of government, busi- ness, labor, education, welfare, and the like. World War II, in organizing millions

of Americans into gigantic military oper- ations, in mobilizing the entire economy for war, in uprooting local labor en-

claves and transporting them to war

industrial centers, only continued the lesson of the Depression: the individu- al’s security and prosperity were hence- forth dependent on his place in the mass organizations.

THE OFFSPRING OF AFFLUENCE

It is a truism that social gains in one area are often marked by losses in an- other. Few persons would deny the social gains of the child labor and com- pulsory education laws. Children and

young people were taken off the job

2 Margaret Mead, And Keep Your Powder Dry (New York: Morrow, 1942) ; Geoffrey Gorer, The American People (New York:

Norton, 1948). 3 David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1950).

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market and pressed for longer periods into the educational institutions. Chil- dren could no longer be so easily ex- poited ; labor was protected from child competition; the young people could train for more complex occupations. The labor organizations legitimized by new legislation were also in a position to control entry into the ranks of labor, exaggerating the process still more. As educational institutions became a dump- ing ground for excess labor, masses of the lower-middle and lower classes be-

gan to press, for the first time, for col- lege degrees. Millions of young persons who, a generation ago, would have taken jobs at fourteen or sixteen now enter adult ranks at twenty-four or twenty-six or even later.

Formal education tends to be a rather bloodless substitute for everyday life to begin with. When masses of individu- als are crowded into the educational in- stitutions to get them off the job market and off the streets, the remoteness from everyday realities increases. Great numbers of such students intuitively know that they are in educational insti- tutions for want of something better to do, and tend to drift, doing only enough to stay afloat. It is often much easier for the indifferent masses to make an assault on the educational standards than to enter into fierce competition for grades. The presence in institutions of higher

learning of masses of indifferent students is, thus, in part, negative to these insti- tutions : in the larger classes, the oppor- tunities for individual attention vanish; the standards are dragged down toward the mass, and Gresham’s law operates, with the poor tending to drive out the better student; the pressure toward a cafeteria education is irresistible. There are also negative consequences for the wider society, for it has been deprived of the energy, imagination, and drive of young persons who are quite capable of

taking up adult roles. The ten to fifteen years beyond that of their forefathers that are spent by thousands of modern young people in educational institutions, in what is normally the most energetic and healthy time of life, have simultane- ously been lost to the wider society. At the same time, the staggered entry of young people into the adult world no longer occurs, and prolonged withdrawal from the world of work is followed, at some time in the individual’s twenties, by abrupt, total immersion. Finally, their structural position in the wider

society has negative consequences for the young: they are much less able from the age of twelve on to take over adult roles by degrees, and to acquire a flexible complex of skills ultimately valuable to them as adults. They often experience their condition as a social vacuum. Few students who have examined the situa- tion seriously have not come to the con- clusion that under different conditions the young people in institutions of

higher learning should be able to obtain two to three times the skill and informa- tion which they ultimately acquire, in one half to one third the time that is

normally spent. Not a little of higher education has the properties of a gigan- tic boondoggle. And, having nothing better to do with its time, youth elabo- rates its own culture, with all its familiar forms. A Thorstein Veblen would quite pos-

sibly see the youth of contemporary American society as a peculiar kind of leisure class, marked by its lack of an &dquo;instinct of workmanship,&dquo; with a &dquo;pecuniary standard of value&dquo; and driven by vigorous motivations of &dquo;con-

spicuous consumption.&dquo; It has devel-

oped an elaborate culture centering in the sports hero and the beauty queen, around which many of its rituals are

performed with an energy and enthu- siasm unnerving to the teachers of its formal studies. It is affluent and para-

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sitic, earning little of the vast amounts of money it spends. Its toys are the implements of the wider society which, at times (as in the case of high powered sports cars), assume the properties of deadly weapons in its hands. It has elaborated its own jargons and musical styles. It sustains an extensive amount of sexual experimentation and experi- mentation in the control of experience (the use of liquor, tranquilizers, and other drugs). At the same time, it ex- periences the deep undertow of futility and alienation which leads to the formu- lation of the most surprising radicalism ever witnessed-the New Left, a radical- ism without definable social objectives. Its sense of alienation is appeased by civil disobedience demonstrations in the civil rights movement and against a

variety of institutions and authorities of all types.

In the hippie movement-to which a number of young people seem to be recruited by way of early practices of

glue-sniffing, graduating to pot and other drugs-a variety of the factors signifi- cant to the contemporary young come

together: opposition to middle-class con- ventions ; the urge to protest even when there is nothing to protest about; the uninhibited pursuit of sex; and the ex- periments on the control of experience by use of drugs.

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

Both American young and their

elders, if we are to believe what we hear from many quarters, are unhappy. Happiness is a passionately pursued but elusive quarry. Americans are more

wealthy than any people in the world before them but, like poor little rich children, dreadfully bored in their affluence.

Happiness is a reflexive state, at-

tendant upon the filling of expectations. The unhappy are most tempted to its

pursuit, a pursuit as destined to fail

as the attack of a Siamese fighting fish attempting to drive its reflection from the walls of an aquarium. When a man’s achievements match his

expectations, he is, if not happy, so

content that it does not occur to him to ask the question. When his achieve- ments exceed his expectations, the aver- age man treats it is a windfall, though if such bonuses recur, he soon approaches each situation with mounting expecta- tions of the size of the appropriate tip for service. When achievement falls short of expectations, life becomes

empty, frustrating, painful-unhappy. The expectation-achievement gap in any society is the single best index to its

happiness level. Powerful processes in

contemporary society generate an extra- ordinarily high level of expectations, to which contemporary achievement poten- tial is hardly appropriate.

Massive activity is continuously di- rected to the mobilization of desire. The operations of the contemporary in- dustrial plant require the organization of demand for the mass-produced prod- uct. Endless minor modifications are

made in contemporary products to per- suade the modern buyer to discard them for the latest models of the same thing with only a fraction of their use ex-

tracted from them. His buying power is widened by credit devices which simul- taneously snare him in a web of debt. While the individual’s desires for the material products of modern industry are endlessly inflamed, the mass organi- zations that deal with him are less and less able to treat him as an individual. His properties are quantified, taped, and processed by computers, and he is bombarded with computer-programmed injunctions. The effect of such manipulations is

to create an ever-expanding horizon of expectations beyond the individual’s

capacity for achievement. His pre- dicament is typified by the man who

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possessed three bathrooms but was con- stipated.

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE VERSUS A SEGREGATED FAMILY LIFE

An ever larger number of people hold jobs in the central cities. Families are

uprooted and pulled toward these cen- ters, requiring the confinement of family life to a comparatively small, expensive apartment or, if one persists in holding the ideal of the family home, separating the life of the breadwinner, who spends much of every day in the central city, from that of the rest of the family, who live in the suburbs.

If one attempts to keep the family together as a unit in the central city, one has to face the fact that areas of the city where the family could afford to live are often not fit. The congested depersonalized areas of the central city provide environments where delinquent gangs thrive and serve as training grounds for adult crime. The informal social controls that operate in a small community are absent. The individual is not safe on the streets at night and even, at times, by day. In the past ten years, there has been an increase of some 60 per cent in reported crimes, while reported crimes are only a fraction of actual crimes. This increase, which is not simply an artifact of better re-

porting, is bound up with such struc- tural changes in the society as the in- creased separation of youth from adult culture and the decline of the central city as a place fit to live. The rush to the suburbs is motivated by the desire for less depersonalized, less congested, less dangerous areas with light, fresh air, and better schools. With the flight, the environment of the central city dete- riorates further. The alternatives for the family, thus,

are to keep family life together as a unified whole in the asphalt jungles of the central city or to fragment its unity

by dividing the life of its members into semisegregated spheres. The husband of the family may find no understanding of, or sympathy for, his problems at

home; the wife receives no understand- ing of, or sympathy for, the problems of the home and children from her hus- band. The bond between mother and children tends, thus, to be strengthened, and the father, to be excluded from their concerns, supplying the structural basis for the feminization of the American conscience. Meanwhile, the natural in- clination to bring life into a unity and to have a woman to whom he can pour the problems of the office supplies an additional motive, beyond the elemental joy of sexual adventure, for the func-

tionary in the central city to set up liaisons with an office wife, perhaps in such a manner as was brilliantly satirized in the film, The Apartment.

THE NARROWING SPHERE OF PERSONAL AUTONOMY

Contemporary individuals typically earn a living in the service of large-scale structures and experience themselves as small fractions in the equations of the giant organization.4 At this stage, the constructive forces in the individual’s nature which incline him to control his own destiny can have negative conse- quences for the organization and for himself. He may jealously guard the secrets of his niche, insisting on the

inviolability of its rules and its impor- tance. He may derive a sense of signifi- cance from interpreting the rules of his office in such manner as to slow all traffic through it as long as possible. The degree of discomfort that can be administered in this manner to others

may be interpreted as a measure of his personal worth. Though the individual in the large 4 William H. Whyte, The Organization Man

(New York: Doubleday, 1957).

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organization may stop short of turning his tiny position into a positive menace, he is always driven somewhat in this direction. If he does not guard his po- sition, he may find it hollowed out and taken over by others; if he intentionally or inadvertently invades the preserve of another, he may be severely rebuffed.

Thus, most persons in large organiza- tions treat their offices as their castles. The individual’s office often becomes more important than the goals of the

organization as a whole. The indi- vidual’s life expectations become geared to the ladders of an organizational hierarchy. The position in the large organization

presents a natural point at which to

press for solution to a variety of life

problems: annual vacations, sick leave and sick benefits, insurance programs, and retirement benefits. The degree to which this organizational strategy typi- fies contemporary expectations at all social levels appears in the pressure by large-scale labor organizations for a

guaranteed annual wage and a vari-

ety of fringe benefits comparable to

those of the functionaries in large-scale organizations.

Such are some of the predicaments of an increasing number of contemporary Americans: earning a living at jobs that often have little apparent relevance to the total organizational task; finding the

point of gravity of existence determined by powerful organizations over which

they have little control; living in cities which possess areas where they them- selves, or their children, dare not ven- ture at night, or living in suburbs that fragment the domestic and work roles into separate compartments; pummeled and manipulated by the mass media which endlessly incite their tastes and

desires; entrapped in a web of credit

obligations; largely unable to integrate life into an autonomous system in which the major problems of existence are

under personal control. It is little wonder under such circumstances that

contemporary men often decline to come forward and testify to accidents, or even to murders committed before their very eyes, to say nothing of offering help. It is little wonder that conformity often emerges as the primary strategy for

dealing with life’s problems. It is no

surprise that contemporary men, despite their material wealth, feel that they are harried, pestered by the large organiza- tions they serve, de-individualized, and alienated, and that they have little more than a variety of organizational sym- bols such as driver’s license, social secu- rity number, insurance policy number, credit card, checking account number, credit rating, and a set of keys fitting a variety of locks to prove personal identity.