Rash's Surname Index
Notes for William Hollinsworth III WHYTE
William H. Whyte, the author who defined corporate conformity and warned against its growth in the classic book "The Organization Man," died yesterday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. He was 81 and lived in Manhattan.
Mr. Whyte, who was an editor of Fortune magazine when he wrote his best-selling 1956 work, went on to a distinguished second career as a scholar of the human habitat, specifically as a close observer of street life and urban space. As an urbanologist he wrote, taught, planned and once spent 16 years watching and filming what people do on the streets of New York. He also conducted a study showing that a large percentage of companies that moved from New York City ended up in locations less than eight miles from the homes of their chief executives.
But it was "The Organization Man" that first brought him to wide public attention. It was one of several works of literate and provocative social analysis to appear in the 50's, among them David Riesman's "The Lonely Crowd" (1950), which dealt with the formation of values of the urban middle class; Vance Packard's "The Hidden Persuaders" (1957), which critically dissected advertising and consumerism, and John Kenneth Galbraith's "American Capitalism" (1952), with its emphasis on oligopolies and countervailing powers.
Rethinking the Ethic Of American Business
Mr. Whyte's book challenged and refuted claims of entrepreneurial vigor and daring in business by describing an ongoing bureaucratization of white-collar environments -- board rooms, offices, laboratories. C. Wright Mills, the sociologist whose own pioneering work, "The Power Elite," appeared in 1956, said of Mr. Whyte in The New York Times Book Review: "He understands that the work-and-thrift ethic of success has grievously declined -- except in the rhetoric of top executives; that the entrepreneurial scramble to success has been largely replaced by the organizational crawl."
Mr. Whyte wrote that corporate norms based on the pursuit of safety and security and characterized by conformity had spread to academic and scientific institutions and prevailed in the white-collar suburbs then proliferating across America.
In his view, the bold visions of individualists had been replaced by "the modest aspirations of organization men who lower their sights to achieve a good job with adequate pay and proper pension and a nice house in a pleasant community populated with people as nearly like themselves as possible."
Mr. Whyte observed that the suburban housing developments where many organization men and their families were living were oriented around children in what he called "a filarchy." The age of a couple's children, he wrote, was probably the most important factor in determining which neighbors a couple would make friends with; typically, he said, they made friends with neighbors whose children were the same age as their own.
As for the wives of organization men, Mr. Whyte said, "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.
"In our attention to making the organization work we have come close to deifying it," he said. "We are describing its defects as virtues and denying that there is -- or should be -- a conflict between the individual and the organization. This denial is bad for the organization. It is worse for the individual. What it does, in soothing him, is to rob him of the intellectual armor he so badly needs."
Mr. Whyte prescribed resistance. "Fight the organization," he wrote in his book. "But not self-destructively." He added, "I write with the optimistic premise that individualism is as possible in our times as in others. I speak of individualism within organizational life."
Thirty years after "The Organization Man" appeared, Mr. Whyte recalled how some of the people he had called organization men were angered by the designation. "I meant no slight," he said in 1986. "Quite the contrary. My point was that these were the people who were running the country, not the rugged individualists of American folklore."
Despite changes brought about by the countercultural 60's, he concluded that "the organizational man is still very much alive."
William Hollingsworth Whyte was born on Oct. 1, 1917, in West Chester, Pa., in the bucolic Brandywine Valley where his father was a railroad executive. From childhood his friends called him "Holly." He attended St. Andrew's School in Middletown, Del., and went on to Princeton where he graduated in 1939. He then attended the Vick School of Applied Merchandising as preparation for a junior executive position with the Vick Chemical Company.
World War II intervened and he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1941. He was discharged in 1945 with the rank of captain and eight months later he joined the editorial staff of Fortune.
In Workplace and City, Advocating Spontaneity
By the time "Organization Man" was published, Mr. Whyte was assistant managing editor of Fortune, a post he kept until he left the magazine in 1958 to devote his time to understanding how man might best deal with living spaces, both urban and rural. In both his analysis of the corporate environment and the urban landscape, Mr. Whyte was a champion of spontaneity.
As a planner, he once said that planning the future more than five or ten years ahead was foolish and intellectually arrogant, "like playing tennis without a net."
While working at Fortune he came to know and impress the philanthropist Laurence S. Rockefeller, who had a keen interest in conservation. Mr. Rockefeller became Mr. Whyte's patron, subsidizing projects involving rural land use, beautification, reclamation, city planning, the shaping of suburban growth and civic design. Mr. Rockefeller said that Mr. Whyte "changed the way Americans look at themselves and their cities." He added, "From Bryant Park in midtown to many hamlets across the country, people are the better for Holly's creativity and enthusiasm."
Mr. Whyte's work paralleled and complemented that of Jane Jacobs. From her home in Toronto, Ms. Jacobs recalled that when Mr. Whyte was the editor of Fortune he commissioned her to write an article on downtowns for a magazine series that that would later appear as a book, "The Exploding Metropolis."
"He was a wonderful thinker about cities, both humane and hardheaded," she said, adding that the article she wrote for him led to her receiving the Rockefeller grant that enabled her to write her major work, "Death and Life of Great American Cities."
Lovers and Schmoozers As Planning Devices
Like Ms. Jacobs, Holly Whyte gained an understanding of how people used cities by walking the streets, sitting on benches and talking to people. In this way he gained many observations that he applied to his urban planning. Here, for example, are some of his perceptions on the life of urban plazas:
"The most used plazas are the most sociable. . . Lovers, incidentally, are quite regular. Contrary to plaza lore, they do not tryst mostly in secluded places. They're right out front.
"Schmoozing patterns are similarly consistent. When men gather in groups to stand and talk, they show a distinct liking for certain kinds of places. They are, for one thing, strongly attracted by pillars and flagpoles, obeying a primeval instinct, perhaps, to have something solid at their backs. They also favor edges. Schmoozers do not stand often or long in the middle of big plazas."
Such observations had a wide appeal. Margot Wellington, a city planner and former executive director of the Municipal Art Society, credited Mr. Whyte with both inspiring her to become a planner and then teaching her how to observe urban life. She said that when she came to New York, Mr. Whyte patiently taught her a methodology that combined anthropology, sociology, art history, statistics and common sense.
"You'd walk with him and he would show you tiny wonderful things," she said. "He spoke and wrote so clearly and he was the best ethnographer. He told us to watch, to ask questions, and that after we made some intervention, we had to go back and see how it was working. It sounds simple, but before him nobody was doing that."
Mr. Whyte spent hours, days and years watching the world go by, often filming the passing scene in time-lapse photographs or charting pedestrian movement on pads of graph paper. He found that the corner outside Bloomingdale's at 59th Street and Lexington Avenue had the most daytime pedestrian traffic. He learned that having peddlers on the street tended to increase sales in local stores, particularly if the peddlers sold food.
He said that what people wanted in the city was other people and that the inner city was as safe as suburban parking lots. He insisted that the best way to deal with undesirables was not to bring in more police officers but to make the area in question as attractive to as many other people as possible. This advice was specifically followed in the design of many places, among them Bryant Park.
His study, "Conservation Easements" (Urban Land Institute, 1959) was credited with helping to gain open-space legislation in California, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. Among Mr. Whyte's books on the environment were "Cluster Development" (1964), "The Last Landscape" (1968), "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces" (1980) and "City" (1989). He edited New York City's Master Plan in 1969, acted as a consultant on many building and zoning proposals, and was a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York.
He was a trustee of the Conservation Foundation and was active in the Municipal Art Society, the Hudson River Valley Commission and President Lyndon Johnson's Task Force on Natural Beauty.
Mr. Whyte is survived by his wife, Jenny Bell, a designer he married in 1964; a daughter, Alexandra, and a granddaughter, Madeleine Sperber, both of Boston.
Mr. Whyte was an enemy of what he called "the fortressing of America" -- windowless walls, forbidding cement courtyards, bewildering tunnels, relentlessly grim megastructures and spikes that discourage sitters. He was in favor of razzmatazz, good honky-tonk and anything that invested sidewalks with hustle and bustle. "Up to seven people per foot of walkway a minute is a nice bustle," he once decided.
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