The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  Religion, however, explained only part of the reaction to the Scopes trial. In his Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter argues that particularly in the American South and Midwest, people used the Christianity/evolution struggle as a cipher for revolting against modernity. The rigid defence of Prohibition, then in force, was another side to this. Hofstadter quotes with some sympathy Hiram W. Evans, the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who, he says, summed up the major issue of the time ‘as a struggle between “the great mass of Americans of the old pioneer stock” and the “intellectually mongrelised Liberals.”’ ‘We are a movement,’ Evans wrote, ‘of the plain people, very weak in the matter of culture, intellectual support, and trained leadership. We are demanding, and we expect to win, a return of power into the hands of the everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualised, but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanised, average citizen of the old stock…. This is undoubtedly a weakness. It lays us open to the charge of being “hicks” and “rubes” and “drivers of second-hand Fords.” We admit it.’8 The words of the Klan wizard highlight the atmosphere in America at the time, so different from that in Europe, where in London and Paris modernism was flourishing.

  America had ended the war transformed: she alone was stronger, unravaged. The prevailing American mood was still pragmatic, practical, independent of the great isms of the Old World. ‘This is essentially a business country,’ said Warren Harding in 1920, and he was echoed by Calvin Coolidge’s even more famous words, uttered in 1922: ‘The business of America is business.’ All these different strands — anti-intellectualism, business, the suspicion of Europe, or at least her peoples – were brilliantly brought together in the novels of Sinclair Lewis, the best of which, Babbitt, appeared in that remarkable year, 1922.

  It would be hard to imagine a character more different from Dedalus, or Tiresias, or Jacob or Swann, than George F. Babbitt. A realtor from Zenith, Ohio, a medium-size town in the American Midwest, Babbitt is hardworking, prosperous, and well liked by his fellow citizens. But Babbitt’s success and popularity are just the beginning of his problems. Lewis was a fierce critic of the materialistic, acquisitive society that Oswald Spengler, R. H. Tawney, and T. S. Eliot so loathed. Eliot and Joyce had stressed the force of ancient myth as a way to approach the modern world, but as the twenties passed, Lewis dissected a number of modern American myths. Babbitt, like the ‘heroes’ of Lewis’s other books, is, although he doesn’t know it, a victim.

  Born in 1885, Harry Sinclair Lewis was raised in the small Minnesota town of Sauk Center, which, he was to say later, was ‘narrow-minded and socially provincial.’ One of Lewis’s central points in his books was that small-town America was nowhere near as friendly or as agreeable as popular mythology professed. For Lewis, small-town Americans were suspicious of anyone who did not share their views, or was different.9 Lewis’s own growing up was aided and eased by his stepmother, who came from Chicago – although not the most sophisticated place at the time, at least not a small town. His stepmother encouraged the young Harry to read ‘foreign’ books and to travel. He attended Oberlin Academy and then headed east to Yale. There he learned poetry and foreign languages and met people who had travelled even more than his stepmother. After Yale, he went to New York, where at the age of twenty-five he found work as a reader of manuscripts and as a press agent for a publisher. This introduced him to the reading tastes of the American public. He had a series of short stories published in the Saturday Evening Post. Each was slightly subversive of the American self-image, but the stories’ length did not do full justice to what he wanted to say. It was only when he published his first novel, Main Street, which appeared in October 1920, that ‘a new voice was loosed on the American ear’.10 Published in late autumn, in time for the Christmas rush, Main Street was that rare phenomenon, a best-seller created by word of mouth. It was set in Gopher Prairie, a small town that, naturally enough, had a lot in common with Lewis’s own Sauk Center. The inhabitants of Gopher, their prejudices and peccadilloes, were brilliantly observed, their foibles and their fables about themselves cleverly caught, so that the book proved as popular in middle America as it was among more sophisticated types who would not have been seen dead in ‘the sticks.’ The book was so popular that at times the publisher could not find enough paper to issue reprints. It even managed to cause a scandal back east when it was revealed that the Pulitzer Prize jury had voted for Main Street as winner but, unusually, the Columbia University trustees who administered the prize had overturned their decision and given the prize instead to Edith Wharton, for The Age of Innocence. Lewis didn’t mind; or not much. He was a fan of Wharton and dedicated his next book, Arrowsmith, to her.11

  In Babbitt, Lewis moved on, from small-town America to the medium-size midwestern city. This was in many ways a more typical target; Zenith, the city where the story is set, exhibited not only America’s advantages but also its problems. By 1922 there had already been a number of novels about businessmen in America – for example, Dean Howells’s Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and Theodore Dreiser’s Financier (1912). But none of them had the tragic structure of Babbitt. Lewis, with his passion for ‘foreign’ literature, took a leaf out of Emile Zola’s book. The Frenchman had ridden the railways on the footplate and descended into the mines to research his great series of Rougon-Macquart novels in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Likewise, Lewis travelled by train to visit several midwestern towns, lunching in the Rotary associations with realtors, mayors, chairmen of the chambers of commerce. Like Zola, he took copious notes, recording in his grey notebooks typical phrases and figures of speech, collecting suitable names for people and places. All this produced Babbitt, a man who lies ‘at the very heart’ of American materialist culture.12 The central quality that Lewis gives Babbitt is his success, which for him entails three things: material comfort; popularity with his fellow citizens, who think like he does; and a sense of superiority over the less successful. Complacent without recognising his complacency, Babbitt lives by a code of Efficiency, Merchandising, and ‘Goods’ – things, material possessions. For Lewis, paralleling Eliot, these are false gods; in Babbitt’s world, art and religion have been perverted, in the service, always, of business. The point at which Lewis makes this most clear is when one of the characters, called Chum Frink, delivers a speech to the ‘Booster’s Club,’ a sort of Rotary association. The theme of Chum’s speech concerns why Zenith should have its own symphony orchestra: ‘Culture has become as necessary an adornment and advertisement for a city to-day as pavements or bank-clearances. It’s Culture, in theaters and art galleries and so on, that brings thousands of visitors…. [So] I call on you brothers to whoop it up for Culture and A World-beating Symphony Orchestra!’13

  The self-satisfaction is all but unbearable, and Lewis doesn’t let it last. A shallow begins to form in this perfect world when Babbitt’s closest friend kills his wife. There is no mystery about the death; and it is manslaughter, not murder. Even so, the friend is sent to prison. This set of events is thoroughly dislocating for Babbitt and provokes in him a number of changes. To the reader these are small changes, insignificant rebellions, but each time Babbitt tries to rebel, to lead what he thinks of as a more ‘bohemian’ life, he realises that he cannot do it: the life he has made is dominated by, depends on, conformity. There is a price to pay for success in America, and Lewis presents it as a kind of Faustian bargain where, for Babbitt and his kind, heaven and hell are the same place.

  Lewis’s indictment of materialism and the acquisitive society is no less effective than Tawney’s, but his creation, certainly more memorable, is much less savage.14 He made Babbitt’s son Ted somewhat more reflective than his father, a hint, perhaps, that middle America might evolve. This slight optimism on Lewis’s part may have been a clever move to aid the book’s success. Upon its publication, on 14 September 1922, the word Babbitt, or Babbittry, immediately entered the vocabulary in America as shorthand for conformism. Even mor
e strongly, boosterism came into widespread use to describe an all-too-familiar form of American self-promotion. Upton Sinclair thought the book ‘a genuine American masterpiece,’ while Virginia Woolf judged it ‘the equal of any novel written in English in the present century.’15 What sets Babbitt apart from the European literary figures being created at the same time is that he doesn’t realise he is a tragic figure; he lacks the insight of classic figures in tragedy. For Lewis, this complacency, this incapacity for being saved, was middle America’s besetting sin.16

  As well as being a classic middle American, Babbitt was also a typical ‘middlebrow,’ a 1920s term coined to describe the culture espoused by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). However, it applied a fortiori in America, where a whole raft of new media helped to create a new culture in the 1920s in which Babbitt and his booster friends could feel at home.

  At this end of the century the electronic media – television in particular, but also radio – are generally regarded as more powerful than print media, with a much bigger audience. In the 1920s it was different. The principles of radio had been known since 1873, when James Clerk Maxwell, a Scot, and Heinrich Hertz, from Germany, carried out the first experiments. Guglielmo Marconi founded the first wireless telegraph company in 1900, and Reginald Fessenden delivered the first ‘broadcast’ (a new word) in 1906 from Pittsburgh. Radio didn’t make real news, however, until 1912, when its use brought ships to the aid of the sinking Titanic. All belligerents in World War I had made widespread use of radio, as propaganda, and afterwards the medium seemed ready to take America by storm – radio seemed the natural vehicle to draw the vast country together. David Sarnoff, head of RCA, envisaged a future in which America might have a broadcasting system where profit was not the only criterion of excellence, in effect a public service system that would educate as well as entertain. Unfortunately, the business of America was business. The early 1920s saw a ‘radio boom’ in the United States, so much so that by 1924 there were no fewer than 1,105 stations. Many were tiny, and over half failed, with the result that radio in America was never very ambitious for itself; it was dominated from the start by advertising and the interests of advertisers. Indeed, at one time there were not enough wavelengths to go round, producing ‘chaos in the ether.’17

  As a consequence of this, new print media set the agenda for two generations, until the arrival of television. An added reason, in America at least, was a rapid expansion in education following World War I. By 1922, for example, the number of students enrolled on American campuses was almost double what it had been in 1918.18 Sooner or later that change was bound to be reflected in a demand for new forms of media. Radio apart, four new entities appeared to meet that demand. These were Reader’s Digest, Time, the Book-of-the-Month Club, and the New Yorker.

  If war hadn’t occurred, and infantry sergeant DeWitt Wallace had not been hit by shrapnel during the Meuse-Argonne offensive, he might never have had the ‘leisure’ to put into effect the idea he had been brooding upon for a new kind of magazine.19 Wallace had gradually become convinced that most people were too busy to read everything that came their way. Too much was being published, and even important articles were often too wordy and could easily be reduced. So while he was convalescing in hospital in France, he started to clip articles from the many magazines that were sent through from the home front. After he was discharged and returned home to Saint Paul, Minnesota, he spent a few more months developing his idea, winnowing his cuttings down to thirty-one articles he thought had some long-term merit, and which he edited drastically. He had the articles set in a common typeface and laid out as a magazine, which he called Reader’s Digest. He ordered a printing of 200 copies and sent them to a dozen or so New York publishers. Everyone said no.20

  Wallace’s battles to get Reader’s Digest on a sound footing after its launch in 1922 make a fine American adventure story, with a happy ending, as do Briton Hadden’s and Henry Luce’s efforts with Time, which, though launched in March 1912, did not produce a profit until 1928. The Book-of-the-Month-Club, founded by the Canadian Harry Scherman in April 1926, had much the same uneven start, with the first books, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, T. S. Stribling’s Teeftallow, and The Heart of Emerson’s Journals, edited by Bliss Perry, being returned ‘by the cartload.’21 But Wallace’s instincts had been right: the explosion of education in America after World War I changed the intellectual appetite of Americans, although not always in a direction universally approved. Those arguments were especially fierce in regard to the Book-of-the-Month Club, in particular the fact that a committee was deciding what people should read, which, it was said, threatened to ‘standardise’ the way Americans thought.22 ‘Standardisation’ was worrying to many people in those days in many walks of life, mainly as a result of the ‘Fordisation’ of industry following the invention of the moving assembly line in 1913. Sinclair Lewis had raised the issue in Babbitt and would do so again in 1926, when he turned down the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Arrowsmith, believing it was absurd to identify any book as ‘the best.’ What most people objected to was the mix of books offered by the Book-of-the-Month Club; they claimed that this produced a new way of thinking, chopping and changing between serious ‘high culture’ and works that were ‘mere entertainment.’ This debate produced a new concept and a new word, used in the mid-1920s for the first time: middlebrow. The establishment of a professoriate in the early decades of the century also played a role here, as did the expansion of the universities, before and after World War I, which helped highlight the distinction between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow.’ In the mid- and late 1920s, American magazines in particular kept returning to discussions about middlebrow taste and the damage it was or wasn’t doing to young minds.

  Sinclair Lewis might decry the very idea of trying to identify ‘the best,’ but he was unable to stop the influence of his books on others. And he earned perhaps a more enduring accolade than the Pulitzer Prize from academics – sociologists – who, in the mid-1920s, found the phenomenon of Babbitt so fascinating that they decided to study for themselves a middle-size town in middle America.

  Robert and Helen Lynd decided to study an ordinary American town, to describe in full sociological and anthropological detail what life consisted of. As Clark Wissler of the American Museum of Natural History put it in his foreword to their book, Middletown, ‘To most people, anthropology is a mass of curious information about savages, and this is so far true, in that anthropology deals with the less civilised.’ Was that irony – or just cheek?23 The fieldwork for the study, financed by the Institute of Social and Religious Research, was completed in 1925, some members of the team living in ‘Middletown’ for eighteen months, others for five. The aim was to select a ‘typical’ town in the Midwest, but with certain specific aspects so that the process of social change could be looked at. A town of about 30,000 was chosen (there being 143 towns between 25,000 and 50,000, according to the U.S. Census). The town chosen was homogeneous, with only a small black population – the Lynds thought it would be easier to study cultural change if it was not complicated by racial change. They also specified that the town have a contemporary industrial culture and a substantial artistic life, but they did not want a college town with a transient student population. Finally, Middletown should have a temperate climate. (The authors attached particular importance to this, quoting in a footnote on the very first page of the book a remark of J. Russell Smith in his North America: ‘No man on whom the snow does not fall ever amounts to a tinker’s damn’)24 It later became known that the city they chose was Muncie, Indiana, sixty miles northeast of Indianapolis.

  No one would call Middletown a work of great literature, but as sociology it had the merit of being admirably clearheaded and sensible. The Lynds found that life in this typical town fell into six simple categories: getting a living; making a home; training the young; using leisure in various forms of play, art, and so forth; engaging in religious practices; and engaging in co
mmunity activities. But it was the Lynds’ analysis of their results, and the changes they observed, that made Middletown so fascinating. For example, where many observers – certainly in Europe – had traditionally divided society into three classes, upper, middle, and working, the Lynds detected only two in Middletown: the business class and the working class. They found that men and women were conservative – distrustful of change – in different ways. For instance, there was far more change, and more acceptance of change, in the workplace than in the home. Middletown, the Lynds concluded, employed ‘in the main the psychology of the last century in training its children in the home and the psychology of the current century in persuading its citizens to buy articles from its stores.’25 There were 400 types of job in Middletown, and class differences were apparent everywhere, even at six-thirty on the average morning.26 ‘As one prowls Middletown streets about six o’clock of a winter morning one notes two kinds of homes: the dark ones where people still sleep, and the ones with a light in the kitchen where the adults of the household may be seen moving about, starting the business of the day.’ The working class, they found, began work between six-fifteen and seven-thirty, ‘chiefly seven.’ For the business class the range was seven-forty-five to nine, ‘but chiefly eight-thirty.’ Paradoxes abounded, as modernisation affected different aspects of life at different rates. For example, modern (mainly psychological) ideas ‘may be observed in [Middletown’s] courts of law to be commencing to regard individuals as not entirely responsible for their acts,’ but not in the business world, where ‘a man may get his living by operating a twentieth-century machine and at the same time hunt for a job under a laisser-faire individualism which dates back more than a century.’ ‘A mother may accept community responsibility for the education of her children but not for the care of their health.’27