1. "Peacetime Cornucopia," The New Yorker, October 6, 1945. Oct. 6, 1945 THE Price 15 cents NEW YORKER
4. William H. Whyte Jr., The Organization Man, 1956. Whyte, a prominent journalist, wrote about the decline of individualism and the rise of a national class of interchangeable white-collar workers. And is this not the whole drift of our society? We are not interchangeable in the sense of being people without dif- ferences, but in the externals of existence we are united by a culture increasingly national. And this is part of the momentum of mobility. The more people move about, the more similar American environments become, and the more similar they become, the easier it is to move about. More and more, the young couples who move do so only physically. With each transfer the décor, the architec- ture, the faces, and the names may change; the people, the conversation, and the values do not — and sometimes the décor and architecture don’t either. . . . Suburban residents like to maintain that their subur- bia not only looks classless but is classless. That is, they are apt to add on second thought, there are no extremes, and if the place isn’t exactly without class, it is at least a one-class society — identified as the middle or upper middle, according to the inclination of the residents. “We are all,” they say, “in the same boat.” 6. Herbert J. Gans, The Levittowners, 1967. One of the first sociological studies of the new postwar suburbs and their residents. The strengths and weakness of Levittown are those of many American communities, and the Levittowners closely resemble other young middle class Americans. They are not America, for they are not a numerical majority of the population, but they represent the major constituency of the latest and more powerful economic and political institutions in American society — the favored customers and voters whom these seek to attract and satisfy. . . . Although they are citizens of a national polity and their lives are shaped by national economic, social, and political forces, Levittowners deceive themselves into thinking that the community, or rather the home, is the single most important unit of their lives. . . . In viewing their homes as the center of life, Levi- towners are still using a societal model that fit the rural America of self-sufficient farmers and the feudal Europe of self-isolating extended families.Compare sources 1, 4, and 6. How do they reinforce or contradict one another?
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