“The Price of Money”: Stanley Elkin’s The Franchiser and the Economic Crisis of the 1970s

Franchising has become an updated version of the American dream.

—Ray Kroc, McDonald’s Corporation

He was . . . a stumbling Dow-Jones of a man.

—Stanley Elkin, George Mills

Stanley Elkin’s 1976 novel The Franchiser opens with its titular protagonist, Ben Flesh, on the road, looking out on a panoramic view of an American landscape that has been fully colonized by the recognizable brand markings of corporate franchises:

Past the orange roof and turquoise tower, past the immense sunburst of the green and yellow signs, past the golden arches, beyond the low buff building, beside the discrete hut, the dark top hat on the studio window shade, coming up to the thick shaft of the yellow arrow piercing the royal-blue field.¹

Elkin need not even name for his readers these chains—Howard Johnson’s, McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken—whose iconic signs and architecture had seemingly supplanted the natural environment by the early 1970s. Franchising may have rendered the topography of the country so homogeneous that Flesh has no idea where he is—he has to ask a gas station attendant, “Can you tell me just where the hell I am?” (4)—but Flesh “feels he is home” in this franchised world (3). Unlike most other travelers on the road, Flesh is not simply a wary consumer who, facing an unknown area, is reassured by the familiar sameness promised by corporate chains. Although “Forbes would not have heard of him” (14), Flesh feels a sense of pride in his modest contribution to America Inc.: “He bought and sold franchises. He had maybe twenty, twenty-five franchises in his career. He was this small businessman with lots of small businesses. He had a hand in making America look like America” (201).

Earlier in his life, Flesh would not have dared to dream of becoming a man who helped make “America look like America.” After serving in World War II, he attended the Wharton School of Business with lowered expectations. Unlike his namesake Ben Franklin, whom Max Weber singled out as embodying the spirit of capitalism,² Ben Flesh “knew he had no calling, no one thing among his talents that he did better than any other one thing, and nothing at all that he did better than others” (48). He therefore studied “principles of business administration, finance, and double-entry sobriety” (261) in the hope of finding an “an office job” (15) in someone else’s firm. Flesh’s focus on business professionalization was eminently safe but quite suitable for the dawn of the postwar boom, when the expanding managerial hierarchies of large, vertically integrated corporations seemed more than willing to absorb the identities and aspirations of a steady stream of Organization Men. The story of that period in American culture and business history has been told many times and from many different perspectives.³ By the time Elkin wrote his novel, Tom Rath’s naively optimistic decision at the end of Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) not to subsume his self in the organization had been transformed into Bob Slocum’s cynical embrace of the murderously inhuman logic of the bureaucratized firm in Joseph Heller’s Something Happened (1974).

Like these works, Elkin’s The Franchiser acknowledges the conspicuous limitations businesses placed on individuality during the postwar period. However, Elkin’s novel pioneers a middle road between idealistic individualism and organizational conformity by thrusting its protagonist into an unforeseen career owning and operating corporate franchises. As a business format that balances the independence of the small business owner with the power of the large corporation, franchising allows Flesh to retain an ambiguous amount of autonomy without totally rejecting the economic opportunities provided by the ongoing incorporation of America. Flesh’s personal and financial “investment” in franchising also provides the novel with its aesthetic program. Embracing rather than criticizing his protagonist’s adoption of a business career, Elkin infuses the novel’s language with the slogans and salesmanship of franchises and obsessively describes the standardized spaces and operations of...