Observation as possession and legacy

Who was Holly Whyte? Richard K. Rein’s excellent 2022 biography, American Urbanist: How William H. Whyte’s Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life, attempts to list his many personae: “magazine editor, author, urbanist, urban anthropologist, filmmaker, pundit, public intellectual, politician (unelected and behind the scenes), consultant, teacher, mentor (to, seemingly, hundreds), as well as husband and father.”

Born in 1917, he served in the Second World War at Guadalcanal. After the war, he joined Fortune magazine, where he coined the term “groupthink,” a fitting phrase for his big assignment of 1955-6: writing a book-length profile of American corporate culture in hopes of capturing its future direction.

That meant: rising suburbia, the gray flannel suit, the steno pool, bridge clubs, and the importance of being “well adjusted.” (“To what?” he asked. “Nobody really knows.”)

In his many interviews with CEOs as well as “middle managers” for The Organization Man, Whyte caught the shift away from the individualistic Protestant ethic toward a new conformity—really an idolatry (in his words) of the system, along with the misuse of science. (By the latter, he meant the tools of social science like personality tests.)

The other great subject for Whyte was the life of cities, especially their street life, a topic on which he served as mentor to urbanist Jane Jacobs. (See our conversation about her here.) His The Last Landscape has been seen as the Silent Spring of urban sprawl and the loss of urban open space — and his Social Life of Small Urban Spaces is a bible for placemakers to this day.

Our guest, Alexandra Whyte, is the daughter of Holly Whyte.

Key takeaways from our conversation:

* Whyte was one of the chroniclers of the Age of Conformity, as the 1950s are often thought of. On the model of the Cold War’s “containment” policy, there was a political economy of containment, as Eugene McCarraher suggests. Whyte is partly acquiescent, partly critical—almost “Beat.”

* His elite origins, a descendant of politicians, growing up in a mansion, attending St. Andrews boys’ prep school (inspiration for the film Dead Poets Society). His full name: W. Hollingsworth White III.

* His talent for writing prose with a literary flair. Becomes part of a scene of “connected critics” of society, along with James Agee, Dwight MacDonald, John Kenneth Galbraith, and others.

* His Organization Man can be seen as part of a post-war concern about the direction of the new business culture and its potential capture by various kinds of experts. It is also filled with very funny quotes.

* His vivid descriptions of the new suburban culture and its “packaged villages” that have become the dormitories of the Organization Men.

* A huge fan of cities his entire life. When asked to name his three favorite, he replied: “New York City, New York City, New York City.”

* His intellectual practice (like that of so many of our Lost Prophets!) was intense observation, whether in his interviews of corporate executives or in his way of learning about cities by walking the streets and watching the interactions in public spaces. The brilliance of his “amateur sociology.”

* His fascination with townscape: the physical outlines of the downtown, the city center, the main street. (He wrote “The street is the river of life of the city, the place where we come together, the pathway to the center.”)

* His love of street life and even street people—he considered them an index of the health of a place and defended their legal rights to gather, play music, etc.

* In The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, he develops the key concepts of what becomes the art of placemaking.

* Whereas his more famous student, urbanist Jane Jacobs, tended toward lyrical, qualitative observations, Whyte loved data gathering (which could include hiding behind trash cans in order to watch the pedestrian traffic in a particular plaza).

Timestamps:

0:03:30 — Introduction: The Counterculture in a Suit

00:11:00 — Early Life: From Vicks VapoRub to the Marine Corps

00:14:30 — Fortune Magazine and the Invention of “Groupthink”

00:24:00 — Deep Dive: The Organization Man

00:41:00 — The “New Suburbia”

00:47:30 — The Pivot to Urbanism: The Exploding Metropolis

00:55:00 — Discovering Jane Jacobs

00:59:00 — Conservation Easements and the 1969 NYC Plan

01:04:30 — The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

01:15:30 — Interview with Alexandra White

Recommended:

* The Organization Man (1956)

* The Exploding Metropolis (1958)

* Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980)

* City: Rediscovering the Center (1988)

* American Urbanist: How William H. Whyte’s Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life, Richard K. Rein (2022)

* Social Life of Small Urban Spaces—documentary film (1980)

* James Howard Kunstler on “How Bad Architecture Wrecked Cities”