Poor Arthur Burns, you press the levers and the right things don’t happen, and the problem is life itself. But maybe that is life; maybe that is the way things are going to be from now on. Good God, women marching in the streets, nobody responding in the usual ways. Mindboggling.

  So that is one of the reasons I am getting a bit bloated on Rolling Rock beer in the Pink Elephant Bar on Route 45 in Lordstown, Ohio. The economists have made their usual cheery predictions—ah, for the days when Keynes hoped that someday economists would be accorded the status of good dentists—and the analysts are off chasing the new nubile lovelies in a new game of après nous le déluge. But I do not have to show performance weekly or even quarterly, so I can take the time to worry these metaphysical questions that all the money folk will worry about some other time, that have Arthur Burns fingering his Gelusil.

  If you simply read the financial pages, you would find no hint of anything different. The type face is the same, the language is the same, and the reports are all of prices: bonds are up, the dollar is down, retail sales are up—sheer minutiae. So everything is back to normal, we had a bad turn there at the end of the sixties, we had to hold our breath a little, but now we can go back to the old stand, Eisenhower is on the throne, the pound is worth a pound and the bells ring out over the land on the Fourth of July. From Time magazine on the Fourth of July, 1955:From Franconia Notch, New Hampshire, to San Francisco, California, this week, there was clear and convincing evidence of patience, determination, optimism and faith among the people of the U.S. In the 29 months since Dwight D. Eisenhower moved into the White House, a remarkable change had come over the nation... The national blood pressure and temperature had gone down, the nerve endings had healed . . . In and around the cities, bulldozers and pneumatic drills and rivet guns played an unending symphony of progress . . . at the office coffee breaks, talk was easy and calm, not about the coming war or the coming depression.

  Has the symphony of progress come back? Or does Arthur Burns really have something to worry about?

  They say, for example, that the good old Protestant Ethic has died away. Whatever happened to work? Doesn’t anybody want to? And growth: the whole system is geared to growth, that is its justification, it works better. What is all this about no-growth, zero population growth, zero economic growth? There is only so much stuff in and on the planet, and at the rate we are using it up in x years there will be no planet. Apocalyptic literature arrives not only on the ecological side but on the cultural side. “The revolution of the twentieth century will take place in the United States,” writes a French critic, Jean-François Revel, “and it has already begun.” “There is a revolution coming,” writes Charles Reich. “It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act . . . this is the revolution of the new generation.”

  If any of this is true, we cannot simply go back to where we were. Radical change is very hard for most people to contemplate, and money managers are no different. Their attitude is: Sure, changes, we sell something and we buy something else to fit the changes. You say work is going out of style? We’ll buy play. Here are my six Leisure Time stocks, and let me tell you how long I’ve owned Disney. Money managers operate on the theory of displacement: the framework will be the same, but inside you move things around. My favorite is a gentleman I ran into after I got back from the Vega plant. I told him that one problem among others in certain localities was dope addiction, and at one plant—though the number sounded very high to me—the rate was reported to be 14 percent.

  “Well,” he said, “I haven’t owned an auto stock for years. But fourteen percent! Geez, who makes the needles?”

  The Chairman was pleased to report sharply higher profits for the year, due to increased sales of the entire line of hospital supply equipment. The reasons for the record profitability, said the Chairman, were Medicare, Medicaid, and the sharply increased use of the company’s new handy throwaway needle by the burgeoning heroin addiction market.

  Now it may be that displacement is all we have to consider. Ah, things are out, quality of life is in, back to the countryside; there is a waiting list for ten-speed bicycles, who makes the ten-speed bicycles? Ah, the ecologists are gaining strength, where is our list of water-pollution companies?

  That is probably good thinking on the tactical level, but there is also a strategic level, and the strategic level has to consider what the more profound changes are, and in fact it ought to even without the rather parochial justification of buying and selling.

  So this is why I am in Lordstown, just as one stop, looking for the sources of Arthur Burns’s angst: Will life quiet down?

  In the automobile industry, to consider the parochial side for a moment, rewards and punishments are very tangible, and since the automobile industry is such a fantastic part of America, that would affect us all. General Motors—my God, nobody can comprehend the size of General Motors; it makes one out of every seven manufacturing dollars in the country; its sales are bigger than the budget of any of the fifty states, and of any country in the world except the United States and the Soviet Union. But even General Motors has problems. As Henry Ford II said, the Japanese are waiting in the wings. Someday, he said, they might build all the cars in America. The problem, or one of them, is that imports keep rising, in spite of the theology of Detroit, which always maintained: little cars, fah! Americans won’t buy them; Americans want power, a sex symbol, racing stripes, air scoops for nonexistent air, portholes for nonexistent water; they want to leave two big black tire marks going away from the stoplight, rubber on the road. And the names went with the technology: Firebirds and Thunderbirds, Cougars and Barracudas and Impalas, growrrrr, nothing about driving a handy little car there—so the handy little cars sold were foreign.

  Eventually enough handy little cars were sold that the balance of payments continued in its sickening ways and even Washington began to lean on Detroit, and Detroit figured Okay, we’ll build a handy little car. General Motors was not about to have any more of the problems of urban Detroit; it put its $250 million Vega plant in the middle of an Ohio cornfield. And then this work force showed up, the youngest work force around, and look at them—hair down to the shoulder blades, mustaches, bell bottoms, the whole bit; it looks like Berkeley or Harvard Square.

  It was a Ford official who wrote the following paragraph, but the same thing applies not only everywhere in the automobile industry but probably in much of factory work. The memo is from an industrial relations man to his superiors, and he is talking about the present and the future. This gentleman is nobody’s fool, and his memo should be in the sociology texts, not in the filing cabinets. (The memo was xeroxed, and a friend of mine got a xerox and xeroxed it again, so I have one, and I guess the UAW has one, because its vice-president Ken Bannon used some of the same phrases word for word in an interview. Communication by samizdat: think what Xerox will do in Russia when it gets going.) The rate of disciplinary cases was going up; turnover was up two and a half times; absenteeism was alarming on Mondays and Fridays. (Hence the useless advice never to buy a car built on a Monday or a Friday. But your dealer will tell you his cars are built only on Tuesdays and Thursdays.) Furthermore, the workers weren’t listening to the foremen and the supervisors. And why?

  For many, the traditional motivations of job security, money rewards, and opportunity for personal advancement are proving insufficient. Large numbers of those we hire find factory life so distasteful they quit after only brief exposure to it. The general increase in real wage levels in our economy has afforded more alternatives for satisfying economic needs. Because they are unfamiliar with the harsh economic facts of earlier years, [new workers] have little regard for the consequences if they take a day or two off . . . the traditional work ethic—the concept that hard work is a virtue and a duty—will undergo additional erosion.

  General Motors was going to outflank that stuff with the newest, most automated plant; machines would take over a lot of the repetitive jobs; the plant would be in that cornfield in Ohio, near Youngstown, away from all those problems of the, uh, you know, core city. Everything at Lordstown would be made in America, no imported parts, the apogee of American industrialism. The head of Chevrolet buzzed in for a Knute Rockne pep talk. America was going to make the small car, by golly, and that was the end of the elves in the Black Forest and the industrious Yellow Peril in Toyota City, who thought they had been in the small-car business. Planeloads of newsmen were flown in. The line is going to do a hundred cars an hour, lots of it without any people; kachunk goes the machine that pops the wheel rim into the tire, pffft goes the machine that blows up the tire.

  So what is all this about trouble in Lordstown? The line is not going at a hundred cars an hour—at least not much of the time—and there are all these characters, all good UAW Local 1112, average age twenty-five, the youngest work force practically anywhere, peace medals, bellbottoms, and hair like Prince Valiant, and the union president is twenty-nine and has a Fu Manchu mustache like the one Joe Namath shaved off, and GM is going up the wall. Where is the productivity? Curtis Cox, the supervisor of standards and methods, is getting apoplectic. “I see foreign cars in the parking lot,” he says. “The owners say they are cheaper. How is this country going to compete?” The GM people practically weep when they think about Japan: all those nice, industrious workers, singing the alma mater in the morning (“Hail to Thee, O Mitsubishi”); whistling on their way to work like the Seven Dwarfs, for God’s sake—never a strike, never a cross word; playing on the company teams; asking the foreman if it is okay to get engaged to this very nice girl as soon as the foreman meets her.

  So I ask General Motors quite routinely if I can go see this apogee of American industrialism, say, Tuesday, and General Motors says no, never.

  I admit to being a bit stunned. Do they not fly planeloads of people there all the time? Did they not fly alleged same planeloads at the end of the GM strike, together with appropriate refreshment, to watch the first Vega come off the line, with a handout about how the Vega was going to Mrs. Sadie Applepie, library assistant of Huckleberry Finn, Illinois, with a quote all ready from Mrs. Applepie: “Oh, I have been waiting so long for my Vega, I can’t believe it’s finally here, I’m so excited,” did they not? What do they mean, No, not that guy? Who the hell do they think I am, Ralph Nader? I begin thumbing my other notebook that has the number of the pay phone in the hallway of Nader’s boarding house, and it’s off to Lordstown. Because even with plant guards, General Motors is not Russia, and anybody who has graduated from the good ol’ U.S. Army knows how to deal with the lower levels of great bureaucracies. (Where you going with that rake? What rake, sir? That rake. Oh, this rake, the captain, sir, he said take it over there. What captain? The other captain. What other captain? Beats me, lieutenant, they just told me take the rake.)

  So we are walking around the plant at Lordstown, all $250 million of it very visible, like an iron-and-steel tropical rain forest with the electric drills screaming like parakeets and the Unimate robot welders bending over the Vegas like big mother birds and the Prince Valiants of Local 1112 zanking away with their new expensive electrical equipment. Vegas grow before your eyes. Beautiful. I recommend it, next time you are taking the Howard Johnson tour across the land of the free.

  But what are these cars waiting for repair, marked no high beam signal, dome lite inoperative, no brakes . . . no brakes? no brakes. But what is this on the bulletin board?

  Management has experienced serious losses of production due to poor quality workmanship, deliberate restriction of output, failure or refusal to perform job assignments and sabotage.

  Efforts to discourage such actions through the normal application of corrective discipline have not been successful. Accordingly, any further misconduct of this type will be considered cause for severe disciplinary measures, including dismissal.

  “Corrective discipline”? My God, you can get courtmartialed in this place. They should have an industrial psychologist read the language on the bulletin board. I can hear the Glee Club louder, “Hail to Thee, O Fair Toyota.”

  Hi there.

  Hi.

  What is that?

  That’s the window trim.

  Is this a good place to work?

  Well, it will be, as soon as we get it shaped up.

  Would you buy one of these cars?

  Sure, if it wasn’t so expensive; it’s a well-engineered little car.

  Wouldn’t you rather be out on your own, say, a garage?

  Naw, a garage don’t have no benefits.

  Say, I don’t want to bother you, two of those Vegas just went by without window trim.

  Well, they all go by without somethin’, this line is moving too fast.

  That’s productivity, man.

  Oh, is that what they call it?

  I can give you a few notes of our brilliantly unscientific survey of Lordstown, but they are just that. Our people would rather have had the time off than the overtime. But their wives worked because they needed the extra income. They would tell their brothers to get a job there, and in fact some of them did. Supervisors bugged everybody. Sabotage ? Beer cans welded to the inside of a fender? Well, there might be a few hotheads, but that’s silly, man, the Vega is our bread and butter—the more Vegas they sell, the better for us. If the foremen bugged our people too much, they would get another job somewhere else; they took for granted there would be such a job.

  We asked the older types if the young bucks were any different. They said, “Yes. They’re smarter. They don’t put up with what we did.”

  Our favorite Prince Valiant haircut said: “I am not going to bust my ass for anybody. I don’t even bust my ass for myself, you know, working around the house.”

  But beware. One has to be an epistemological agnostic considering any such report, whether done by journalists or social scientists. How do we know people who talked to us are representative of a work force of ten thousand? Further: journalists and social scientists are verbal, conceptual people. They would probably score very low in electrical repairs around the house; unconsciously they feel: How do they stand it? I wouldn’t like to work here. They did not sleep through senior year in high school with Sister Maria Theresa droning on about Wordsworth and look at the plant as a relief from that. My companion Bill once did a piece about labor for The New York Times Magazine, and some paragraphs were picked up by a social scientist writing a paper. When he subsequently went to do research for a book, properly in awe of all the academic sources, he found the sources quoting him: a second social scientist quoted the first, with appropriate footnotes, and a third quoted the second, with footnotes and notes, and so on—the old beagle pack in cry. This doesn’t mean the job can’t be done, but it takes a large, thorough, well-funded effort, with the appropriate discipline of statistics and all the modes and variants in place.

  So all right, it makes sense to have a demurrer for the statistical discipline, but the feeling is there, Something Else Is Going On: the world is not necessarily going to settle back to the Fourth of July, Eisenhower Regency, with life all quieted down. The key phrases are from the xerox of the xerox of the xerox of the confidential memo at Ford; the next key phrases are from the banks of the Charles River. Lordstown is the biggest and bestest example from industrial America, and the Harvard Business School is the West Point of capitalism, or at least so its denizens tell each other, and certainly the place has provided one of the great Old Boy networks of modern times. Let a Business-School-type foul up out there in the world and he need not fear: another Business-School-type will come to his rescue and they will call it merger, or recapitalization, or synergy, or something. I have two straws in the wind to submit from the West Point of capitalism.

  Admittedly, these come from an unusual time. Two years before, the greedy little bastids in Investment Management could hardly wait to get going on their first five million, as I said before. Now there is a new crop of greedy little bastids; naturally, the course is still wildly popular, but outside, the Cambodian invasion has been timed neatly with my spring visit. The feeling that all is not well in the world has even penetrated the clouds of greed in my three sections. Around Harvard Square the graffiti was getting political; nobody had written Heloise Loves Abelard in quite a while; instead this flowed in large letters for a third of a block: JOHN HANCOCK WAS A REVOLUTIONARY, NOT AN OBSCENE LIFE INSURANCE SALESMAN. But that, of course, was on the College side of the Charles River, where the life style is different—beards and mustaches and poor-boy clothes, almost as much a uniform as the gray flannel jackets and khaki pants of a generation before. But across the river at the Business School, the budding apparatchiks are coming to class in Brooks Brothers suits and buttondown white shirts, looking like sub-assistant secretaries in the Nixon Administration.

  There is no revolutionary chatter in the course catalog at the B School. You find one of the major preoccupations of the catalog is control: “The field of Control deals with the collection, processing, analysis, and use of quantitative information in a business.” In a previous year, when an SDS faction took over University Hall in the College and there was a big bust, the College as an institution seemed very confused, but the Business School had a Contingency Plan in a fat binder with colored index tabs. I had the classes at that time, too, and one B-School faculty member, fearing some Dickensian carmagnole in the streets, Paris, 1789, said of the dissenters: “They’ll never make it to this side of the river. We’ll blow the bridges first.”

  So: this is not the Last Bastion, it is not Bob Jones University or even Utah State; it is where they grow the apparatchiks, the technicians who sop up the top spots a generation hence, and if Something Else Is Going On, these types will either lead it or fight it or try to take it over after it gets going.