Babbitt

by Sinclair Lewis

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set from 1920 to 1922 in Zenith, an imaginary midwestern American city; published in 1922.

SYNOPSIS

Tracing two years in the life of George Babbitt, a self-proclaimed “representative business man,” lewis offers a sharp satire of America’s prosperous white middle-class.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The Novel in Focus

For More Information

Born and raised in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Harold Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) suffered a relatively awkward childhood. His mother died when “Harry” was five, and the orange-haired, gangly youth was less popular than his older brothers, remaining something of an outsider both at his hometown school and at Yale. His first novel, Our Mr. Wren, appeared six years after he received his Yale degree in 1908, and was followed by his best-known works, which were written during and about the rapidly changing America of the 1920s. The success of Main Street (1920), a novel that depicted the ways of a little midwestern town rather like Sauk Centre, earned him widespread acclaim. Babbitt, his next effort, succeeded even more impressively; largely on its strength, Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1930.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

Postwar politics

Surprisingly, perhaps, for a novel that opens in the spring of 1920, Babbitt seldom refers directly to the first world war. An armistice was declared on November 11, 1918, and the Treaty of Versailles, which set down the terms of peace, was signed the next spring. In the war’s aftermath, the country entered a period of drastic social, technological, and economic transformation; in politics, on the other hand, conservatism dominated the American scene during the 1920s, often taking the form of reaction against new developments that were perceived as threatening. In the novel, when Babbitt talks politics with his neighbors, it is generally agreed that the nation needs a probusiness administration. This attitude affected the outcome of the presidential election of 1920, in which voters chose the Republican, Warren Harding. While his Democratic predecessor, Woodrow Wilson, envisioned a continuation of America’s political and financial commitments in warweary Europe, Harding offered a comparatively easy and profitable return to peacetime industry and commerce. Harding promised, in campaigning for office, a return to normalcy.

Reaction

Yet just what was this “normalcy” to which Americans wished to return? It would prove to be a rather conservative one in some ways. Wartime propaganda had successfully inspired the nation with a sense of its patriotic duty to hate and combat an insidious foreign enemy, and many sought new enemies to replace the German kaiser and his agents when the war ended. This resulted in official attacks against the American Left. Alarmed by the successful revolution of the Bolsheviks in Russia (1917) and by an increasingly organized and recognized labor movement at home, the American business community and its supporters condemned communism, socialism, and labor unionism as barely distinguishable parts of a dangerous conspiracy involving dirty, ungrateful immigrants and their dupes. In 1919, faced with high inflation and increasing resistance in their efforts to bargain with employers, over a million workers took part in labor union strikes of one form or another. Repeatedly, these strikes failed as the public and the judiciary supported corporate interests against “the radicals.” At the height of the crisis, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer ordered a series of notoriously unconstitutional raids on communist meetings, making wholesale arrests without warrant. Although massive New Year’s Day raids on communist headquarters across the country yielded no evidence of any violent plot— despite the jailing of six thousand men and the seizure of all materials and documents found— fears of Bolshevism continued to haunt the popular imagination well into the 1920s.

Organized intolerance thrived in other forms. Zealous patriots formed various independent groups in order to keep a vigilant eye on “Reds,” or communists, and their sympathizers. Perhaps the most extreme of these groups, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), enjoyed a massive revival throughout the country at this time; its members persecuted as “un-American” black, Jewish, and, depending on the locale, Catholic, Asian, and other minorities, not excluding whites judged to be politically or morally undesirable.

In accordance with the times, the mushrooming growth of the KKK (a few hundred members strong in 1919, but an estimated 4.5 million in 1924) owed much to salesmanship; for every $10 membership a Klansman, or “Kleagle,” managed to sell, he could pocket four dollars. By encouraging its members actively to solicit other joiners, the Klan merely followed the example set by many of the more respectable brotherhoods, organizations, and clubs that also prospered during the 1920s—service clubs such as the Boosters and the Rotarians, and fraternal orders such as the Elks, the Knights of Pythias, and the endless college fraternities. The novel’s Babbitt—a Booster, an Elk, an active Republican, a Chamber of Commerce member, an Athletic Club member, a Sunday school committee member, a real-estate brokers’ association member, and a member of the antisocialist “Good Citizens’ League”—embodies this craze for belonging. The question of who or what Babbitt would be without the official identities these associations confer is one the novel returns to repeatedly.

Prohibition

The Eighteenth Amendment, which forbade the manufacture, transport, and sale of alcoholic beverages, passed into law in 1919, and took effect on January 16th, 1920; it was repealed in 1933. Called the Prohibition Amendment, it enjoyed widespread support from women. Also supporting the amendment were rural voters (Prohibition came to be regarded as the revenge of rural America on an increasingly urbanized nation), and a good number of drinkers who, possibly inspired by a spirit of self-discipline left over from the war, appear to have thought that they could quit anytime. However, the postwar peace brought with it a celebratory mood of self-indulgence that had to be reckoned with in the nation.

Although Babbitt was written well before the heyday of bootleggers like Al Capone, whose career was made possible by Prohibition, some of the weaknesses of this legislation were already obvious by 1922—for example, the tremendous difficulties of enforcement and the illicit glamour that drinking gained from illegalization. Sophisticates or would-be sophisticates, whether they came from major cities or towns anxious to become major cities, all hastened to dissociate themselves from the hick-town “Puritan” aura that clung to the advocates of “dryness.” This impulse comes into play in the novel when Babbitt, carousing at a sleazy burlesque show in Monarch, where he is attending a realtors’ convention, insists drunkenly that his hometown is just as disreputable: “Snothin you can’t find in Zenith. Believe me, we got more houses and hootch-parlors an’ all kinds o’ dives than any burg in the state” (Lewis, Babbitt, p. 175). Many ordinary citizens (thirsty, but otherwise beyond reproach) took to patronizing the “dives” where alcohol remained available.

Modern morals

In the same years that saw the failure of Prohibition, American culture went through other changes that disturbed moral traditionalists, especially in regard to courtship and sex. Women in particular showed the effects of this shift, not just in their daring new fashions (higher hemlines, higher heels, short hairstyles, and sleeveless, open-throated evening gowns), but in the cigarettes they now enjoyed and the alcohol they now imbibed. Additionally, the women showed more daring in taking part in new dance styles that involved much more physical contact and—as parents worried—while sitting in the cars that more and more young people were driving. Lewis’s novel calls attention to these new customs by comparing Babbitt’s memory of his engagement to Myra (in which the first kiss was trustingly accepted as implying a marriage proposal) to the more carnal understanding between Babbitt’s son and Eunice Littlefield.

This relaxation of the moral code—which did not affect the younger generation alone—sprang from other causes in addition to the unsupervised privacy offered by cars, the drinking habits altered by Prohibition, and the temptation sparked by immodest clothes. First, thanks to America’s participation in the war, over 2 million American soldiers had been sent to Europe, where many of them encountered a more tolerant attitude toward sex. Secondly, conventional American ideas on this topic were shaken by the popularization of Sigmund Freud’s psychological theories, which were interpreted (or misinterpreted) as an argument against sexual taboos. Finally, moral conservatives complained that the popular new motion pictures, with their passionate kissing scenes, were encouraging lewd behavior. While this last observation might make fears of a moral breakdown seem ridiculous from a more modern perspective, the change in moral standards could hardly be denied; even those who took part in it sometimes observed it with concern. Lewis’s novel raises some moral questions about the extramarital affairs of the characters Babbitt and Paul Riesling that were timely concerns during the era.

Car culture

Americans fell in love with the automobile in the 1920s; the number of cars on the road nearly quadrupled between 1919 and 1929, reaching well over 23 million. Mass production techniques pioneered by Henry Ford just after the turn of the century had continued to improve, and combined with successful mass marketing, yielded a phenomenal growth in ownership. By 1921, though, Ford’s reliable but primitive Model T was losing ground to faster, more comfortable, and more stylish competitors. With advances in paint technology, cars became available in dazzling colors; high-pressure “balloon” tires enhanced the handling and the ride; and roads improved to smooth the way for these gorgeous new machines. Those with old-fashioned tastes, like Babbitt, might hang on stubbornly to their old, open-air roadsters, but the future plainly belonged to the covered sedan, as Babbitt’s son points out to his father at one point in the novel.

SOUND THE ALARM!

Journalist Parkhurst Whitney wrote an ironic headline-to-headline description of concerns in the turbulent early ’20s for H.L. Mencken’s magazine, American Mercury: “The Bolsheviks are Coming! So is Christ! Japan Preparing to Attack the U.S.! So is Russia! So is Everybody! U.S. Getting Drier, Says Anti-Saloon Leaguer! Strikes Ruining Industry! Petting Parties Ruin Younger Generation!… Anglo-Saxon Supremacy Menaced by Inferior Race… Rotary Speaker Says Business is Service!” (Whitney in Smith, p. 36).

Cars began to take on a special symbolic value during the 1920s, a mysterious importance they would retain in future decades. They stood for the wonders of technology and industry; Ford was hailed as a hero, the genius of the modern era. Repeatedly, Lewis’s novel pokes fun at the car-worship indulged in by his hero: “To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous citizens of Zenith, his motor car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism. The office was his pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion ashore” (Babbitt, p. 24).

Boomtowns

American agriculture suffered terribly when the high wartime demand for food crops decreased in 1920. Overproduction brought down the price of wheat and other foodstuffs, which brought down rural real estate values as a result. Many farmers went bankrupt, unable to keep up mortgage payments that had been based on the inflated land values of the war era. As a result, millions left the countryside for the more prosperous cities and towns, creating a boom in the urban and, above all, suburban real estate business. Developers bought and subdivided rural properties at the edges of urban centers at a record rate, quickly erecting houses of all styles: colonial, Tudor, or, for more exotic tastes, Venetian (complete with canals) and Spanish-Alhambra.

Speculators did their best to anticipate the developers’ moves, sometimes unethically, with the help of information from friends in public office or in industry. In Lewis’s novel, a corrupt deal between the Babbitt-Thompson Realty Company and the Zenith Street Traction Company (a streetcar company) offers a fair illustration of how the land market could be exploited. By a secret agreement, Babbitt-Thompson and the officers of the Traction Company cooperate on land deals when, for example, a new repair garage is to be built in a suburban town. The streetcar company officers illegally inform the Babbitt-Thompson real estate firm of the plan for the new garage before the plan is made public. The Babbitt-Thompson realtors quietly and cheaply buy up land in the suburb; since the law only permits realtors to act as brokers in such purchases, they pretend to act on behalf of a wealthy, well-connected politician who, for 10 percent of the take, also distributes bribes to a few key friends in public office who might otherwise uncover and blow the whistle on the scam. The property, in high demand because it is needed for the repair garage, then gets sold to the streetcar company at inflated prices. The streetcar company’s officers pretend to be horrified at such gouging, knowing all along that once Babbitt-Thompson secretly rewards them for their cooperation, the streetcar company’s loss will have become their personal gain.

Broadly, this scam suggests just how well business and government could get along together. Although it only came to light in 1923, the Teapot Dome scandal confirms Lewis’s depiction of current government corruption; in the spring of 1922, Albert Fall, Harding’s Secretary of the Interior, leased federal oil-reserve lands to private oil companies, secretly and without competitive bidding, in return for bribes.

The Novel in Focus

The plot

Though his review praised Babbitt enthusiastically, H. L. Mencken said that the novel had “no plot whatever” (Babbitt, p. 20). Certainly the early chapters support this claim to the extent that they describe George Babbitt’s comfortable daily life without giving many hints of a noteworthy event or chain of events that might affect it. The reader learns about Babbitt’s suburban neighborhood, Floral Heights; his house, with its many convenient electric sockets; his kindly, unglamorous wife, Myra; and his children—Rona (stuffy), Ted (fashion-conscious), and Tinka (the baby). Also introduced are the real estate office that Babbitt and his father-inlaw own, the local socialites whom he envies, and, somewhat ominously, the “fairy child” who visits him in his dreams.

The central plot line emerges more clearly in the fifth chapter: Babbitt confesses to vague feelings of discontent when he lunches at the Athletic Club with his dearest friend, the discontented and unhappily married Paul Riesling. Solid and complacent as he seems, Babbitt shares some of Riesling’s unease: “I belong to the church, I play enough golf to keep in trim, and I only associate with good, decent fellows. And yet, even so, I don’t know that I’m entirely satisfied” (Babbitt, p. 61). Ultimately, Lewis’s novel examines the nature and the consequences of Babbitt’s restlessness.

The consequences weigh heavily because in Zenith, U.S.A., “normalcy” is so much the rule that even such hesitant complaints as Babbitt’s run the risk of social condemnation. As a “Regular Guy” who ordinarily enjoys the stodgy banter of the club’s lunchtime gang, Babbitt knows it is “very bad form” to dine with his old friend in private (Babbitt, p. 60)—all the more so, in view of his social-climbing ambitions. Soon enough, this friendship sets him at odds with the community. After Paul goes to jail for shooting his wife, Zilla, Babbitt goes through a crisis. He drinks to excess; he defends the right to strike and other “liberal” views, he declines to join the “Good Citizens’ League,” he has an affair, and he begins to lead a double life. At last, alarmed by Myra’s appendicitis, he repents and returns to the paths of duty and conformity. In the final chapter, Babbitt’s rebellion against conventional morality and politics is behind him, but he decides (for better or worse) to condone his son’s hasty elopement with the girl next door.

The training ground

As indicated above, Lewis’s career as a fiction writer became successful only after he published Main Street, but he had been writing (some fiction, but also poems, reviews, editorials, and articles) since 1903, his first year as a student at Yale. At different points he held jobs as copy editor at the San Francisco Evening Bulletin; journalist-editor for the Waterloo, Minnesota, Daily Courier; assistant editor for Adventure Magazine and Transatlantic Tales; syndicated book reviewer for the Publishers’ Newspaper Syndicate; and advertising manager for the George H. Doran publishing company. On these jobs Lewis developed a sharp eye for the unintentionally funny moments in the everyday literature of newspapers, advertising, and popular speeches.

“YOU’VE GOT A TREAT COMING”

Lewis was never known for his modesty or tact. As George Jean Nathan, The Smart Set’s theater editor, tells the story, he and his friend H. L. Mencken ran into Lewis for the first time at a cocktail party in New York. The novelist had just finished Main Street, but the novel was still at the printer. Although he was at that point nothing more than a drunken stranger to the two editors, Lewis threw his arms around their shoulders, bellowing: “l’m so far ahead of most of the men you two think are good that I’ll be gottdamned if it doesn’t make me sick to think of it! Just wait till you read the gottdamned thing. You’ve got a treat coming…, and don’t you boys make any mistake about that!” (Lewis in Schorer, p. 284).

In Babbitt, the hero’s own promotional letters and speeches overflow with moments of this sort, and his friends Howard Littlefield (a Ph.D. in economics who works as an advertising consultant). and Cholmondley “Chum” Frink (syndicated newspaper poet, inspirational lecturer, advertising agent) are authors as well. At a dinner party, Frink discusses a “literary problem” with Babbitt and some other guests—namely, the wording of an ad for the Zeeco automobile. Awkwardly, he admits his inferiority to a greater man: “Do you know the fellow who’s really the American Genius? The fellow who you don’t know his name and I don’t either, but his work ought to be preserved so’s future generations can judge our American thought and originality today? Why, the fellow that writes the Prince Albert Tobacco ads!” (Babbitt, p. 120). Of course, Lewis’s novel itself preserves dozens of slogans and sales pitches in the form of barely exaggerated parodies of ads during that era—for example, the ad that impresses Frink so deeply: “Prince Albert is john-on-the-job—always joy’usly more-ish in flavor; always delightfully cool and fragrant! For a fact, you never hooked such double-decked, copper-riveted, two-fisted smoke enjoyment!” (Babbitt, p. 120). Lewis took delight in mimicking the advertisers’ elaborate fantasies of fulfillment and, in so doing, he captured an important early phase in twentieth-century consumer-culture.

Sources

In regard to real-life models, Lewis can hardly have chosen the name for Babbitt’s wife without thinking of Myra Hendryx, the girl he worshipped from a distance as a teenager in Sauk Centre. Babbitt’s father-in-law is his business partner; likewise, Lewis worked briefly (and not very happily) at the Sauk Centre Herald for C. F. Hendryx, Myra’s father.

Literary influences can be identified too. Babbitt belongs to a fairly well-established American tradition of businessman-novels; some of the more important authors to contribute to this tradition—authors whose work Lewis knew well— were W. D. Howells (The Rise of Silas Lapham, The Quality of Mercy) and Theodore Dreiser (The Financier). From Upton Sinclair, best known for The Jungle, an investigative novel that exposed the abuses of the Chicago meat-packing business, Lewis learned the power of realistic social criticism. Also, as a regional novel set in the Midwest, Babbitt owes a debt to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.

If anyone had an impact on Lewis’s satirical side, it was the magazine editor, H. L. Mencken, who ran The Smart Set from 1914 to 1923 (and, from 1924-1933, the widely read American Mercury). The Smart Set featured a regular section devoted to ridiculous “clippings” (collected in the same spirit as the ones that appear in Babbitt) taken mostly from small-town newspapers. Mencken once lamented that the United States was “the first great empire in the history of the world to ground its whole national philosophy on business” (Mencken in Bode, p. 168), and he always expressed a hearty contempt for the self-satisfied ignorance that— in his opinion—the thriving herd of middle-class Americans constantly displayed. Lewis first met Mencken in 1920 and was understandably delighted when the critic, whom he had admired for some time, praised Main Street in the pages of The Smart Set. A year later, Mencken wrote to inquire about Lewis’s next novel (Babbitt), Lewis replied, “I think you’ll like it—I hope to Christ you do” (Lewis in Bode, p. 186).

Reviews

Mencken liked Babbitt, as he wrote in a review that probably helped the novel’s sales. Babbitt’s great strength, Mencken claimed, was its faithful depiction of a typical citizen: “I know of no novel that more accurately presents the real America” (Mencken, p. 22). Sherwood Anderson’s review in The New Republic runs counter to this assessment, finding that Lewis had missed something crucial in his depiction of America’s towns and cities: “Here is a man writing who, wanting passionately to love the life around him, cannot bring himself to do so, and who, wanting perhaps to see beauty descend upon our lives like a rainstorm, has become blind to the minor beauties our lives hold” (Anderson, pp. 27-8). “There’s a lot more to America,” concurred Robert Littell in another New Republic review (Littell in Knight and James, p. 318). The question of whether Babbitt is too one-sidedly harsh could not help but arise in the reviews. Certainly the novel offended some readers, as satires typically do. A review in the Greensboro Daily News anticipated the negative responses, then went on to pronounce its own judgment on Lewis’s work

His book will be reviled from one end of this land to the other. It will be hated, spat upon, possibly burned.... But it will be read. And it ought to be read… because it attacks shams and hypocrisies and poltrooneries and dishonesties.”

(G. W. J. in Knight and James, p. 318)

For More Information

Anderson, Sherwood. “Sinclair Lewis.” In Sinclair Lewis: a Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by Mark Schorer. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962.

Bode, Carl. Mencken. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969.

Knight, Marion A., and Mertice M. James. Book Review Digest. Vol. 18. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1923.

Lewis, Sinclair. Babbitt. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922.

Mencken, Henry Louis. “Portrait of an American Citizen,” In Sinclair Lewis: A Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by Mark Schorer. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962.

Schorer, Mark. Sinclair Lewis: An American Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961.

Smith, Page. Redeeming the Time: A People’s History of the 1920s and the New Deal New York: Penguin, 1987.