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.”In source 4, what does Whyte mean by “classless”? Why would suburbanites wish to think of their communities as not beset by class inequality? Were they right in this point of view?
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.”In source 4, what does Whyte mean by “classless”? Why would suburbanites wish to think of their communities as not beset by class inequality? Were they right in this point of view?
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