Exurbia Revisited
Swados, Harvey
SALES MGR Intangible exp, must be able to move effectively at topmgmt level & effectively understand "Big Business" problems. Should be able to handle 12 martinis..........12,000...
...Should be able to handle 12 martinis..........12,000 —Advertisement in New York Times, 5 February, 1956 I looked up recently after a sojourn abroad to find that a new word had sneaked into the language while my back was turned, like the 8:55 crawling into the station at Weehawken...
...BUT I SAID that it is an exasperating book...
...But some of us may be stubborn enough to go on believing that social problems demand social solutions rather than individual solutions, or at least consideration of possible common avenues of progress...
...Spectorsky justly points out, are patho logically sensitive to criticism and hence addicted to gratuitous self-justification), will also search out anything that analyzes their life-patterns...
...Spectorsky has been to these exurbs—indeed, he is frighteningly knowledgeable about the minutiae of daily life in all five localities—and he has taken the trouble to gather some figures on income, railroad commutation, and the like, so that his study is grounded in reality, even though high4 ly impressionistic...
...What I am suggesting is that, even as the sheer numerical mass of the proletariat—or at least its percentile proportion to the rest of the population— is shrinking, its stigmata are perhaps being transferred to the swelling millions of suburbanites and exurbanites...
...For his boldness alone, Mr...
...Mr...
...Spectorsky has lifted the curtain on a desolate new landscape, he himself insists (when not busy cheerily minimizing the desolation he has described for 278 pages: "Not only do they do the best they can at the difficult and exciting job of living, but the job they do is, under the circumstances, often remarkably good") that the desolation is limited to the five areas named above and to those people who work in mid-Manhattan between 42nd Street and 57th Street, between Lexington Avenue and 6th Avenue...
...Spectorsky is a first-rate case history-teller, and he stimulates us to circulate others that he has not included: one hears, for example, of exurbanite wives in Nassau County who have formed a car pool to commute to their Central Park South psychoanalysts...
...One would assume that the principal reason for Mr...
...The drift from City to Suburb and beyond is not confined to the New York area...
...Spectorsky's determination to pin these, and many other, miseries like so many badges of dishonor on the breasts of the exurbanites is that it sustains a saleable thesis: outlanders—which means all other possible book buyers—will predictably read with pleasure books exposing the heartbreak behind the glamor that is Manhattan and environs...
...WHAT is MORE, there is an intimate interrelationship between the problems of the exurbanites and those of the proletariat...
...The drift is not temporary...
...Between the worker's prematurely-aged wife, with her backaches and her notorious lack of sexual fulfillment, and the exurbanite's isolated and overworked wife, with her fifteen-hour day and her (according to Mr...
...No, what is disturbing is that although Mr...
...Which is like saying: If you don't like what you see and hear on television and radio, why don't you turn them off...
...He can end on the jocular, thingsaren'treally-that-bad note that I have already quoted, and he can even invite us to grin wryly at this collective portrait of a group of sad sacks, to take it not as a descriptive analysis of a snowballing tendency but simply as a compendium of lively anecdotes...
...What is more, he is not afraid to say that exurbanites are manipulators rather than producers, husbands rather than lovers, providers rather than fathers, urban-focus ed rather than rural-focused, middlebrow rather than individual in their tastes, ambitious rather than visionary in their aspirations, enslaved rather than liberated by their incomes...
...Between the worker alienated from his tools, his craftsmanship and a genuine relation to what he produces, and the communications industry operator dealing in "intangibles," able to handle twelve martinis but with no more proof than the worker at the end of the weary day that he has actually produced anything at all...
...it is irreversible...
...Spectorsky would have us believe also that only in exurban families is one day a week given over to the children by fathers relieving their guilt at not having participated in their offspring's lives for the other six days...
...Spectorsky casts a wide net and inevitably comes up with many an interesting specimen...
...Spectorsky's book is a recommendation of the course he appears to have followed himself: "If you don't like it where you are, why don't you go back to the City...
...Of course, when he says that an exurbanite "cannot or will not remember the time when he did not grind his pepper fresh from a small mill" he is abstracting snobbisms as common to certain Greenwich Villagers, Detroiters, Buffalonians and San Franciscans as to exurbanites—witness the mail order advertisements for "smart" household objects in the New Yorker...
...But there is also a negative reward for Mr...
...Spectorsky for having provoked me, through his trenchant and admirably organized book, to raise it, even though he himself has thus far backed off from considering it...
...which means that he has under examination a variety of New York City-based salaryearners, ranging from $75,000 a year network executives close to the seat of real power if not actually warming it themselves, downwards to impecunious young agency men desperately anxious to look as though they are on the way up...
...Spectorsky, at any rate) notorious lack of sexual fulfillment...
...But Mr...
...His territory includes Bucks County (Pa...
...while its author persistently denies that these traits are anything more than the sadly amusing characteristics of a severely restricted group...
...Its coiner, A. C. Spectorsky, like Sinclair Lewis before him, has used it to title his book...
...The new stratum of white collar technicians and idea men is not confined to the New York area...
...Nassau, Westchester and Rockland Counties (N...
...Spectorsky in his special approach...
...I am not merely raising the petty objection that Mr...
...And indeed The Exurbanites is a commercially successful book...
...Spectorsky has deliberately narrowed his sights...
...or that "fear, insecurity, living beyond one's means, drinking too much," are peculiar to "life in exurbia...
...in the Los Angeles and Chicago areas, and indeed in every sizable American community the communications industry is burgeoning— branch offices as well as local advertising agencies, TV stations, newspapers, department stores, public relations outfits are claiming an ever-larger proportion of the ever-growing white-collar community...
...It is of course perfectly true that a special kind of tension is engendered within families when the husband is bound to a train schedule and the wife is forced back on her own resources twelve hours a day...
...or that it is only exurban wives whose "most frequent complaint" is that "their husbands are sexually inadequate...
...Are we actually becoming a nation of tense, anxious and wretched white-collar proletarians, with nothing to lose but our uninsured TV antennae...
...And of course if that's all we're after...
...Mr...
...Mr...
...The word is exurbanite, and unlike the West Shore Railroad it is probably here to stay, since it fulfills what the social workers call an unmet need...
...It is good because it is a pioneering investigation into the mores of the new middle class who have spilled out of their city apartments into the country areas beyond the suburbs and who have become commuters but remain big-city types...
...Spectorsky's The Exurbanites is both a good and an exasperating book...
...Since he disclaims any general validity to his survey beyond the confines of those in the communications industry in the New York area, he is thereby absolved from the necessity of commenting even in passing on the implications of his picture of exurban life for American society as a whole...
...SALES MGR Intangible exp, must be able to move effectively at topmgmt level & effectively understand "Big Business" problems...
...it is nationwide...
...This is one of the questions that the readers and contributors of DISSENT might address themselves to, and I should like to express my gratitude to Mr...
...Far more important is the fact that this book includes a clinical analysis of certain developing traits in the national character, traits which—if there is any substance to the analysis—add up to a condemnation of the entire way of life which is producing them...
...If these people do not live like the New York exurbanite it is not for lack of trying...
...Between the worker who has become, as we used to say, bourgeoisified, whose main conversational topics are the soldier's staples of cars, women and spectator sports, who is becoming transformed into a TV-passive mass man, and the exurbanite who mistrusts, envies and ridicules the "egg-head," who is ahead of the highbrows "in everything but the most intellectual aspects of life," and who lends himself so easily to caricature as a faceless type...
...Between the debt-burdened worker, oftener than economists know shouldering two jobs at once or relying on a second family wage earner to help pay the freight on his mortgaged TV, car, washer, house and kids, and the living-beyond-his-m e a n s exurbanite, taking his work home at night and swearing that he could break even on just three thousand more a year...
...Implicit throughout Mr...
...Spectorsky would be entitled to our respectful attention...
...Just how much difference is there between the worker enslaved to the time clock he must punch twice daily and the exurbanite enslaved to the train he must catch twice daily...
...This insistence I find unacceptable...
...The Exurbanites is a more original and provocative description of what is going on around us than the pronouncements of many another commentator with more impressive academic qualifications...
...HARVEY SwADOS...
...Y.), and Fair field County (Conn...
...This is partly because it has been hoked up to sell, although I for one prefer my reading matter about the American scene in a lively style rather than in the tone of a monograph for the American Sociological Review...
...while exurbanites themselves, always eager for self-anatomizing (the advertising men among them, Mr...
...Since New York is the center of the "communications" industry, the exurbanites are inevitably associated with it in one way or another...
Vol. 3 • April 1956 • No. 2
