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thesis perfectly compatible with his own anti-Reformation bias. For it
is Weber's thesis that the restless, anxiety-ridden Protestant, always in
quest of evidence of his salvation, was transformed by the very success
of his quest into a very different, and now dominant, type-the com–
petent technician who becomes, after hours, the dull sensual man.
Thus, the Protestant, having discovered how to snatch plenty out
of a world of scarcity, and even how to produce a world of plenty,
nevertheless lost himself amid his goods and buried his culture under
it. It is "this nullity" of the capitalist spirit, now entirely divorced from
the Protestant ethic, that William Whyte explores. He is a brilliant and
chivalrous journalist, and he withholds censure wherever he can. Whyte
has written a sympathetic and remarkably full account of the American
moral athlete in premature middle age. But his unfailing generosity as a
critic cannot hide the fact that the American character has been fatally
damaged. After three centuries of heroic struggle against an economy of
scarcity, the American character has caved in just at the threshold of an
economy of abundance. It is a national character Freud would have de–
lighted to analyze: a character wrecked by success. Whyte's Organization
Man is still mainly Protestant on Sundays, but without the moral egoism,
the heroic self-centeredness that once characterized him on the other six
days. The pious smile of sociability, once reserved for women and
younger children and ministers, has frozen on the American face. Ameri–
cans smile too readily. And when they smile, it is no longer to bare their
teeth in fraternal greeting to a competing athlete met in the race. The
smile does not crack our faces, for the remainder of the American face
has been composed around the smile. Sociability, like predestination, is
an iron creed. The American must smile, or risk challenging the sacra–
mental bond that unites him in one overpoweringly friendly people. In
that wide, ever-ready smile the material abundance of America may be
said to be transsubstantiated into the personality of the American.
I t is well known that the American is a joiner of Organizations. He
works for them, he plays in them. In a culture of joiners, the line
between 'community' and 'organization' grows vague, particularly as
the joiners move more and more frequently from one community to
another while remaining in the same organization. Thus one's native
organization receives some of the reverence once reserved for one's
native community. That the subjects of Whyte's study tend increasingly
to remain in the same organization while becoming geographically ever
more mobile is one of the many interesting correlations he adduces in
a convincing way. Regionalism may be ignored as a factor in shaping
the new American character. Suburbia, and the employees of the great
