Willy Loman: Icon of Business Culture

In 1963, critic and director Esther Merle Jackson wrote a perceptive essay entitled "Death of a Salesman: Tragic Myth in the Modern Theatre," in which she argued that Salesman is "the most nearly mature myth about human suffering in an industrial age." In Salesman, she suggested, Arthur Miller "has formulated a statement about the nature of human crises in the twentieth century which seems, increasingly, to be applicable to the entire fabric of civilized experience." For Jackson, the unique power of this play, as opposed to other significant twentieth-century tragedies, lies in "the critical relationship of its central symbol—the Salesman—to the interpretation of the whole of contemporary life":

 
That Esther Jackson was right about Death of a Salesman's mythic relationship to modern culture is clearest from the play's impact on the young. In the fifty years of its life since the premiere, Salesman has found its way into university and secondary school curricula throughout the world, and the responses of succeeding generations of students have not diminished in immediacy or intensity. The description of one high school student's experience when he took the part of Biff in his class's staged reading will serve for many:

 
The student was so affected by the play that he engaged in a confrontation with his father that was inspired by Biff's confrontation with Willy:

 
The student's aesthetic criterion may not be sophisticated, but it is certainly valid. In many countries, in many languages, in cultures as different from that of the United States as Communist China's and capitalist Japan's, in all kinds of productions, from the most sophisticated efforts of London, Broadway, and Hollywood to a high school classroom reading, Death of a Salesman has proved its power to move audiences profoundly. There is no doubt that Arthur Miller has captured something in this play that is vital to human experience in the twentieth century.

The cultural impact of Death of a Salesman far exceeds the bounds of those who have encountered it as a theatrical or literary experience, however. Willy Loman and his failure and death have a status as defining cultural phenomena, both inside and outside America's borders, that began to be established in the first year of the play's life. In February 1950, as the original production approached its first anniversary, a newspaper reporter marveled that Salesman had "already become a legend in many parts of the world," commenting that "why this play has approached the stature of an American legend in these distant lands defies analysis."[4] In a single year, Arthur Miller had received more than a thousand letters explaining the personal ways in which the play was related to their writers' lives. A number claimed to be the model for Willy, or suggested that Miller record their lives too, because they were so much like Willy's. A number of sermons, both spiritual and secular, had been preached on the text of the play, with ministers, rabbis, and priests explaining its exposure of the emptiness of Willy's dreams of material success, and sales managers using Willy as an object lesson of how not to be a salesman.

In the years immediately following the original production, Willy Loman entered the world's consciousness as the very image of the American traveling salesman, an identity with which the business world was far from comfortable. Writing in the garment industry's own Women's Wear Daily shortly after the play's premiere, Thomas R. Dash articulated the conflict between identification with Willy and resistance to him that characterized the typical relationship that people in business were to have with the play. Noting that Willy's was an tragedy," and that "it does not follow that all salesmen necessarily are discarded to the ashcan after thirty-five years of service for one firm, that they crack mentally and that they dash themselves to pieces on a mad and suicidal ride to the hereafter," he nonetheless had to concede that, "if you have traveled the road and are honest with yourself, you may recognize certain traits of Willy's in your own behavior pattern, both professional and personal." Since the very art of salesmanship predicated upon a talent for fictionalizing and romanticizing," Dash suggested, "from the habits formed by this forgivable fantasy and hyperbolic praise of the product, certain illusions of grandeur inevitably creep into the mental fabric of the practitioner. Frequently, as in the case of Willy Loman, these habits percolate into the salesman's personal life." As for Willy's infidelities on the road, Dash wrote, "this writer does not propose to have the wrath of the whole craft descend upon him by making any generalizations . . . let each man probe his own conscience and answer 'True' or 'False.'"[5]

The most immediate and overwhelming response of the business world to the failure and death of Willy Loman was to try to erase it from the public's consciousness. When the first film adaptation of the play was done in 1950, the executives of Columbia Pictures, fearing a public reaction against the movie for its failure to uphold the values of American capitalism, made a short film which they planned to distribute to theaters along with the feature. The short was filmed at the Business School of the City College of New York, and consisted, according to Miller, of "interviews with professors who blithely explained that Willy Loman was entirely atypical, a throwback to the past when salesmen did indeed have some hard problems. But nowadays selling was a fine profession with limitless spiritual compensations as well as financial ones. In fact, they all sounded like Willy Loman with a diploma."[6] Only when Miller threatened to sue did Columbia withdraw the short film.

By the 1960s, businessmen were nearly desperate to divorce the salesman's identity from that of Willy Loman. Only one in seventeen college students was willing to try selling as a career in 1964.[7] Business executives blamed this largely on Arthur Miller. "To many novelists, playwrights, sociologists, college students, and many others," wrote Carl Reiser in Fortune magazine, the salesman "is aggressively forcing on people goods that they don't want. He is the drummer, with a dubious set of social values—Willy Loman in the Arthur Miller play."[8] In direct opposition to Willy's image, American business was trying to define a "new salesman" in the 1960s, "a man with a softer touch and greater breadth, a new kind of man to do a new—much more significant—kind of job."[9] Despite the best efforts of corporate America, however, Willy's image remained the public's clearest vision of the salesman. "To be sure," suggested Newsweek in 1964, "the old-style drummer is no longer in the mainstream. But he's still paddling around out there with his smile and shoeshine, his costume a bit more subdued and his supply of jokes, sad to relate, a bit low."[10] Newsweek's article,"The New Breed of Salesman—Not Like Willy," was tellingly illustrated with the familiar Joseph Hirsch drawing of Willy with his sample cases, over the caption: "Willy Loman: An image lingers on."

When plans were announced for the CBS television production of Salesman in 1966, the Sales Executives Club of New York mobilized itself to prevent further erosion of the salesman's image. Complaining that "Willy Loman has been plaguing our 'selling as a career' efforts for years," the club suggested changes in the script "to improve the image of the salesman depicted in the drama." As had been tried with the Columbia picture, the sales executives suggested a prologue to the play, "alerting viewers that they were about to see the tragedy of a man who went into selling with the wrong ideas, a man who had been improperly trained by today's standards. The prologue would warn that Willy Loman would have been a failure 'in anything else he tackled.'" In case that wasn't enough, an epilogue could be added, called "The Life of the Salesman." The epilogue would indicate that, "with modern, customer-oriented selling methods, Willy Lomans are ghosts of the past." The Xerox Corporation, which sponsored the telecast, had a golden opportunity, the sales executives thought, "to enlighten the public about what a well-trained modern salesman really does, and dispel the idea that the rewards of a selling career are often disillusionment and death."[11] Arthur Miller, the writer of the newspaper report on this effort noted, "could not be reached for comment." It is not hard to imagine what his comment would have been.

In the year following the telecast, an industrial film producer, David R. Hayes, made a film called "Second Chance," an inspirational film for salesmen that featured football coach Vince Lombardi in a narrative that allowed him to use his "break-'em up football coaching technique on a fictionalized typical salesman." Hayes explained that the reason for scripting the film as a play rather than an inspirational talk was that "we had to undo for the art, science and business of selling . . . what Arthur Miller had done in damage to the field in his stageplay, 'Death of a Salesman.' I decided to do it with Miller's own tools—that is, drama."[12] Within two years, the trade film had been sold to 7,000 companies, and had made the fortune of Hayes's industrial film company, Take Ten, Inc. The introduction of dramatic conflict into trade films wrought a major change in the industry, one of Willy Loman's many influences on American business.

Throughout the 1970s, the effort to expunge the image of Willy Loman from the public's view of the salesman continued without much success, despite the continually improving material circumstances of the typical salesman, and the greater security that came from an ever-higher ratio of salary to commission throughout the sales profession. Willy and the play had become an unconscious part of the businessman's vision and vocabulary, as is evident from the titles of articles in business publications. "The Salesman Isn't Dead—He's Different" and "The New Breed of Salesman—Not Like Willy" were succeeded by titles like "Deaths of a Salesman," "The Rebirth of a Salesman," and "The New Life of a Salesman."

With the worsening economy of the 1980s, the cultural resonance of Willy Loman had a new meaning for the generation that had not been born when the play was first produced. Speaking of "underemployed 30-year-olds" who were being forced to "bring their families home to live with bewildered and resentful parents," and middle-aged people "with kids and mortgages who have been out of work for three months," Jeff Faux suggested in 1983 that "Willy Loman could again symbolize a widespread middle-class tragedy—people trapped by expectations of status that no longer fit the cruel realities of the labor market."[13] Meanwhile, business executives were moving salesmen off salary and back onto commission—just as Howard Wagner had done to Willy—and calling it "Motivating Willy Loman."[14] As one executive put it, "You really should get the carrot as big as possible without making the guy die to reach it . . . Give him salary for the essentials, to help pay the rent and put food on the table, but not much else. Hell, he's supposed to be a salesman."[15]

By this time, Willy Loman had taken on a life of his own, with little or no reference to the play. Edward Spar, the president of a marketing statistics firm, used Willy's putative sales route as an example of sensible county-based marketing for the Association of Public Data Users in 1987. Noting that Willy's territory was simply a matter of convenience and logic, Spar commented that, "if that company existed in reality, Willy's territory wouldn't have changed."[16] Interestingly, the route that Spar gave to Willy was completely imaginary: "Up to Westchester, through Putnam—all the way to Albany, Route 23 over to Pittsfield in Berkshire County, then down to Hartford and back to New York." Although Willy does mention having seen a hammock in Albany, the only indications of his route in the play are his turning back from Yonkers on the night the play begins and his description of his route to the boys when he returns from his trip in the first daydream scene: Providence, where he met the Mayor, Waterbury, Boston, "a couple of other towns in Mass., and on to Portland and Bangor and straight home,"[17] a not very logical and rather improbable route. To Spar, however, Willy was not a character in a play, but the prototypical salesman with the "New England territory."

Evidence of the extent to which Willy and the American salesman have become identical to the culture at large is everywhere, in the most casual of references. A 1993 Wall Street Journal article on the certification, and thus professionalization, of salesmen is entitled, "Willy Loman Might Have Had a Better Self-Image."[18] One on the introduction of portable computers to the sales force is called "What Would Willy Loman Have Done with This?"[19] Neither has any reference to Miller's play. An article on the faltering U. S. balance of trade in U. S. News and World Report, called "The Yankee Trader: Death of a Salesman," makes no reference to the play, but carries the familiar Joseph Hirsch image of Willy with his sample cases as an icon on each page of the article.[20] An article opposing advertising for law firms is entitled "Willy Loman Joins the Bar: Death of a Profession?"[21] An article on Fred Friendly's efforts to use television to popularize the U. S. Constitution is called "TV's 'Willy Loman' of the Law."[22] And so on. There is no doubt that, at the end of the twentieth century, Willy Loman, and the Joseph Hirsch image of him, have achieved the status of cultural icon.

The conflict between identification with and resistance to Willy is obvious for members of the sales profession. As Miller has so eloquently put it, "Willy Loman has broken a law without whose protection life is insupportable if not incomprehensible to him and to many others; it is the law which says that a failure in society and in business has no right to live."[23] Willy has failed in business, and the wages of his sin is death. Having experienced his own father's failure during the Depression, and its personal consequences, Miller knew this business creed intimately when he wrote Salesman. The extraordinary thing about the universality and endurance of Willy Loman as cultural icon, however, is that is it not necessary to have experienced Willy's sin and its wages at first hand in order to respond to Willy in the most primal way. This may be because Willy Loman has become the prime site for working out our deepest cultural conflicts and anxieties about the identity and fate of the salesman. And, being Americans, we are all salesmen in one way or another.

The extent to which the American way of life is identified with the salesman, and with Willy, becomes obvious from a cursory look at the numerous obituaries each year that are entitled "Death of a Salesman." This phrase has been used recently to sum up the lives of many successful businessmen, among them Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, who was lauded for his efforts to forge commercial links between the U. S. and China; record promoter Charlie Minor, who was shot by his former girlfriend, stripper Suzette McClure; and Victor Potemkin, known to a generation of New Yorkers for the TV commercials advertising his car dealerships. Less immediately evident is the connection between Willy Loman and counterculture guru and LSD promoter Timothy Leary, or Jerry Rubin, who, noted the Hartford Courant, "came to stand for hypocrisy" for the counterculture "when he committed the mortal sin—selling out." As the Courant pointed out, however, "Mr. Rubin was always a good salesman who knew how to market a message. Like many others of his generation, he realized that idealism alone doesn't put bread on the table."[24]

There is affection and even respect in identifying Willy Loman with men who are as successful in their fields as Ron Brown and Victor Potemkin. Potemkin, whose death, according to Automotive News, was "mourned by the whole automotive community,"[25] might be said to embody Willy's dream of achieving business success and being "well-liked" at the same time. Most often, however, identification with Willy Loman is cultural shorthand for failure, no matter what the field of endeavor. A review of the movie Cop Land refers to the local sheriff played by Sylvester Stallone as "a failed American dreamer, a Willy Loman of the police world, a profoundly poignant figure."[26] Failed presidential candidate Phil Gramm is described as "a pathetic self-destroyer like traveling salesman Willy Loman."[27] Political pundit George Will describes President Bill Clinton as "a political Willy Loman" in his unsuccessful attempt to sell his Mideast foreign policy to the American people.[28]

While accepting the iconography of failure that is associated with Willy and his death, business writers often situate themselves in opposition to its implications about the American socio-economic system. Willy Loman didn't have to die, these writers contend. If only he had had better sales training, or better job counseling, or a laptop computer, he would not have failed. The anxiety of having to master new technology, or at worst, of being replaced by it, is displaced by a hopeful rhetoric that suggests technology might be the salesman's salvation. The references to Willy Loman in these articles simultaneously evoke and attempt to dispel the typical salesman's anxiety about losing a job for failing to keep up with technology. "If Only Willy Loman Had Used a Laptop" explains the "competitive edge" that salespeople can get from "having access to product information at the point of sale."[29] Similarly optimistic portrayals of the necessity for updating the salesman's technology are presented in articles like Business Week's "Rebirth of a Salesman: Willy Loman Goes Electronic" and Advertising Age's "Willy Loman Never Had It So Good: New Technologies Enhance the Job of Selling." Upbeat reminders to the sales force that they need to keep up in order to compete have pervaded business journals since the early part of the century. What the evocation of Willy Loman provides is the subliminal suggestion of failure and its consequences should the reader disregard the writer's advice.

Willy Loman appears more substantially in another group of articles that purport to save his successors from his fate by addressing some of the issues that Miller addressed in the play, but within the context of the business environment. "He had the wrong dreams," says Biff of Willy, "All, all wrong." Writing for Industry Week, Joseph McKenna asks, "Was Willy Loman in the Wrong Job?" In the article he suggests that the reason Willy Loman "never made a lot of money" was that he "should have been plying another trade—just as many of today's real-life salesmen should be."[30] He goes on to cite an industry consultant who estimates that 55% of those working as sales professionals "don't have the ability to sell" and another 25% are selling the wrong product. This can be remedied through the consultant's method of "job matching," "marrying the appropriate job to the appropriate person with the appropriate skills or correctable weaknesses or both." Similarly, an article on "Career Entrenchment" uses Willy as a case study of the tendency to remain in a job despite one's obvious unfitness for it and suggests ways out of this inappropriate career direction.[31] In "Taking a Lesson from Willy Loman: Brokers Must Move Beyond Sales to Satisfy Risk Manager Demands," readers of Business Insurance are advised to "break free of their sales roles" and "act as consultants and partners to risk managers" if they are to avoid Willy's fate.[32] In "The Death of Some Salesmen," Allen Myerson writes that "the old-style career salesman is dead," but that a new force of part-timers is replacing "the likes of Willy Loman," eschewing the old door-to-door methods and replacing them with home parties and demonstrations.

The subliminal message of these articles is clear. To be like Willy is to be a failure. Therefore we will make the job of sales as different as we can from the job as Willy did it. These articles all define the modern, successful salesperson in opposition to a putative Willy Loman. Of course, this is a cultural, not a literary evocation. The fact that Miller's character did not sell door-to-door, nor did he sell insurance, matters little. The point is that he represents the conjunction of traditional sales methods and failure to sell—precisely the formula that the business advisors want to place in opposition to their own ideas. To escape Willy's fate, the salesperson need simply follow this good advice. As one advisor to life insurance salespeople writes in the hopefully entitled "Goodbye, Willy Loman": "as long as we continue to participate in solutions to society's insurance problems and are receptive to change, the challenges that lie before us will be easy to meet . . . if only Willy Loman had known what we do now."[33]

Sometimes the context is darker than this, however. Death of a Salesman and Willy Loman are also evoked in cultural commentary that is not selling a quick fix for the individual, but is pointing to significant economic changes and trends that create deep anxiety for some part of the populace. In these cases, Salesman's cultural iconography is a shorthand that reaches the reader's emotions before the analysis begins. In "Ageism and Advertising: It's Time the Ad Industry Got Past Its Death of a Salesman View of Employees Over 40," for example, Blake Brodie complains that executives in ad agencies are worried about being seen as surrounding themselves with "older staff," which is "death" in most ad agencies, making it rare to find a creative director who is over thirty-nine or an account executive over forty-five. Associating the anxiety of these relatively youthful executives over the possible loss of their jobs with Willy's predicament—"you can't eat the orange and throw the peel away. A man is not a piece of fruit!"—not only heightens the reader's emotional response but suggests that what might be viewed as an isolated difficulty in a particular "fast-track" yuppie career is part of a pervasive social problem—what the writer is calling "Ageism." Similarly, the mounting fear that one's chosen career could evaporate in the context of the rapidly developing technologies of the business world is expressed in serious articles like The Economist's "Death of a Salesman: Travel Agents," which analyzes the declining profits of travel agents as customers do more of their own travel reservations online, and Maclean's "Death of a Car Salesman," which delineates major changes in the tactics of car sales as a result of online buying and the increasing replacement of commissioned agents by salaried sales forces at large car dealerships. These articles are fundamentally optimistic. They endorse the changes in the ways of doing business as better uses of technology that will result in greater efficiency and productivity. But the reference to Willy Loman creates a subtext of anxiety that undermines the positive rhetoric. Older salespeople will not be able to keep up, it reminds the reader. People will lose their jobs. Smaller agencies will be swallowed up by bigger ones. Humanity is losing out to technology.

To read these publications is to discover a mindset that simultaneously loathes Willy Loman and identifies with him. The writers want to put as much distance as possible between themselves and what Willy stands for—failure and death—but they can't help embracing him like a brother. After all, he has enacted their own deepest fears, and the experience has killed him. In Willy Loman, Arthur Miller has supplied to America's business culture—and as Calvin Coolidge reminded us, the business of America is business—the site where these deeply conflicted feelings can be engaged with some safety. Much as we try to deny it, Americans need Willy Loman. As long as our socio-economic system survives, Willy Loman will be right there with it, reminding us of our lyrical, fantastic dreams, and our darkest fears.

NOTES

1. CLA Journal 7 (September 1963), 64.

2. Quoted in Meredith Kopald, "Arthur Miller Wins a Peace Prize: Teaching, Literature, and Therapy," English Journal 81 (March 1992), 59.

3. Ibid.

4. Luke P. Carroll, "Birth of a Legend: First Year of 'Salesman,'" New York Tribune (5 February 1950), section 5, 1.

5. Thomas R. Dash, "'Life' of a Salesman," Women's Wear Daily (24 February 1949), 51.

6. Timebends: A Life (New York: Grove, 1987), 315.

7. "The New Breed of Salesmen—Not Like Willy," Newsweek 64 (5 October 1964), 94.

8. Carl Reiser, "The Salesman Isn't Dead—He's Different," Fortune 66 (November 1962), 124.

9. Ibid.

10. "The New Breed," 94.

11. Val Adams, "Willy Loman Irks Fellow Salesmen," New York Times (27 March 1966).

12. Morry Roth, "Un-Do 'Death of a Salesman'" Variety (16 April 1969), 7.

13. "What Now, Willy Loman?" Mother Jones (8 November 1983), 52.

14. John A. Byrne, "Motivating Willy Loman," Forbes 133 (30 January 1984), 91.

15. Ibid.

16. Martha Farnsworth Riche, "Willy Loman Rides Again," American Demographics 10 (March 1988), 8.

17. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, Acting Edition (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1952), 21.

18. 2 April 1993, B1.

19. The Wall Street Journal (26 November 1990), B1.

20. 98 (8 April 1985), 64-70.

21. ABA Journal 76 (October 1988), 88-92.

22. The National Law Journal 9 (6 October 1986), 6.

23. Arthur Miller's Collected Plays (New York: Viking, 1957), 35.

24. "Death of a Salesman," Hartford Courant (30 November 1994), A18.

25. Jim Henry, "Death of a 'Salesman,'" Automotive News (12 June 1995), 3.

26. Brian D. Johnson, "Cop Land," Maclean's 110 (25 August 1997), 74.

27. Francis X. Clines, "Downbeat Days for Salesman Gramm," New York Times (10 February 1996), 10.

28. George F. Will, "A Political Willy Loman," Newsweek (2 March 1998), 92.

29. Jonathan B. Levine and Zachary Schiller, "If Only Willy Loman Had Used a Laptop," Business Week (12 October 1987), 137.

30. Joseph F. McKenna, "Was Willy Loman in the Wrong Job?" Industry Week 239 (17 September 1990), 11.

31. Kerry D. Carson and Paula Phillips Carson, "Career Entrenchment: A Quiet March Toward Occupational Death?" Academy of Management Executives 11 (February 1997), 62-75.

32. Sally Roberts, "Taking a Lesson From Willy Loman: Brokers Must Move Beyond Sales to Satisfy Risk Manager Demands," Business Insurance 30 (6 May 1996), 49.

33. Alan Press, "Goodbye, Willy Loman," Best's Review (Life-Health-Insurance) 90 (September 1989), 70.

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