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23 NOVELS OF
SINCLAIR LEWIS
SESSION TWO: Novels 5, 6, 7 & 8. October 12 (5) 1917 THE INNOCENTS, (6) 1919 FREE AIR, (7) 1920 MAIN STREET, (8) 1922 BABBITT I. INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW In our first class we looked at Lewis's first four published books of fiction: (1) 1912 HIKE AND THE AEROPLANE. (2) 1914 OUR MR. WRENN. (3) 1915 THE TRAIL OF THE HAWK. (4) 1917 THE JOB. The first three were notably romantic and quixotic, with elements of realism increasing till realistic description dominated THE JOB. Today we complete Lewis's "apprentice works" with the serialized (5) 1917 THE INNOCENTS, (6) 1919 FREE AIR. None of his first six books earned enough money to live on. For them his basic income came from his New York work in various publishing houses. It was his short stories for magazines that allowed Sinclair Lewis to quit his office jobs and begin to live full time as a writer. By the end of the apprentice books, Lewis has introduced his readers to his whimsy, quixotism, restlessness, belief that happiness must be "elsewhere," the importance of travel with a "Glorious Playmate" and the tension between ordinary day to day work, drudgery, marriage and children and "adventuring. After (7) 1920 MAIN STREET, (8) 1922 BABBITT Sinclair Lewis began to earn more per year from his fiction than any previous American author. He moved from MAIN STREET to Easy Street. He had just written his two best books, but was far from finished as a fiction writer. -=-===-=-=-=- REMINDER: Structure of our presentations of novels (5) to (8): II. PLOT OUTLINE. III. READINGS. IV, BIOGRAPHIC. V. IMPACT. VI. METHODS. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- (5) 1917 THE INNOCENTS; A STORY FOR LOVERS. II. PLOT OUTLINE. On the brink of WW I at story's beginning there lives In New York City a couple, born a decade before the American civil war, married for 40 years . They are Mr Seth Appleby and Mrs Sarah Jane Appleby, often called simply 'Father' and 'Mother.' They have a married daughter, Lulu, who lives with husband and young son in a New York town. Mother and Father are THE INNOCENTS of Sinclair Lewis's 1917 serialized short novel. After some decades in Pilkings & Son's Shoe Parlor, Seth Appleby has worked his way up to become to Mr Pilkings roughly what Dagwood Bumstead is to Julius Dithers, albeit even more under-appreciated and under-challenged than Dagwood. During their annual two week vacation on Cape Cod, Father and Mother treat the owners of their vacation home to a snack at Ye Tea Shoppe. Expecting a bill for their simple fare of no more than ninety cents, Father is astonished to be charged $3.60. He calculates that sum to represent a 500% markup on the food served. Suddenly, in a road to Damascus moment, running a tea shop seems an attractive alternative to fitting big city swells with footwear. They sell all they own and open their own Tea Shop on Cape Cod. It fails. Seth cannot get his old job back. They wander from New York to West Virginia where they transform manners and morals of a hobo jungle. The hoboes scatter and begin the legend of two rich old eccentrics wandering the world doing good. Ultimately, the Applebys find happiness back in the shoe business in small town Indiana. ^^^^^^^^^ COMMENTS: Sinclair Lewis often had difficulty describing married couples who were each other's equals or at least contributed something nearly equal as partners in their "divisions of labor." This negative charge cannot, however, be laid against THE INNOCENTS: A STORY FOR LOVERS. Call it flight. Call it travel. Call it greener grass across the road. But one persistent theme in both Sinclair Lewis's personal life and in his novels is that sheer movement, sheer trying out something completely new and different, simply hitting the long trail -- all or some of these -- will almost surely bring good results, something better. "It's always easier to be a bold adventurer in some town other than the one in which you are" (Ch. XIII). Seth to Sarah Jane: "Let's see. New York doesn't want us. But somewhere there must be a village of folks that does. .. Come on, we'll start for Japan, and see the cherry-blossoms. Come on, old partner, we're going to pioneer, like our daddies that went West" (Ch. XII). Finally, Chapter XVII has a paean to small town living that could have been written by Paul Harris, who tried in 1905, via establishing the world's first Rotary Club, to re-create in cutthroat, impersonal Chicago the virtues and general chumminess of the Wallingford, Vermont village (population 1,000) where he grew up. It is hard to imagine Sinclair Lewis writing so glowingly of village life in 1917 when he would show its unlovely side only three years later in MAIN STREET. And yet, there it is: "In a village, every clerk, every tradesman, has something of the same distinctive importance as the doctors, the lawyers, the ministers. ... in Lippittsville Mr. Seth Appleby was not just a lowly person who helped one in the choice of shoes. He was a person, he was their brother, to be loved or hated." The indiscriminate call of everyone by first name that Lewis would condemn a decade later in ELMER GANTRY's Zenith Rotary Club appears perfectly natural and amiable in the village of THE INNOCENTS. Sinclair Lewis acquired early and never lost the ability to surprise, just as Babe Ruth, even aging, was always capable on any given day of hitting one out of the ball park. III.READINGS from THE INNOCENTS. --(A) [How Father acted in New York on his sudden yearning to open a Tea Room on Cape Cod, 34ff] "He began by informing himself on all the technicalities of tea-rooms. He lunched at tea-rooms. He prowled in front of tea-rooms. He became a dabbler at tucking paper napkins into his neat little waistcoat without tearing them. ... During his lunch-hours he frequented auction sales on Sixth Avenue, and became ... sophisticated in the matter of second-hand goods ... He rampaged through department stores without buying a thing, till store detectives secretly followed him." --(B) [How Mother and Father snuck away from from the stifling home of daughter and son-in-law, 106f] "Just below their window was the roof of the low garage, which was built as part of the house. Father opened the window, eased out the suitcase, followed it, and gave his hand to Mother ... It was an early November evening, chilly, a mist in the air. ... Mother slid and balanced and slid on the roof, irritably observing 'I declare to goodness I never thought that at my time of life I'd have to sneak out of a window on to a nasty slippery shed-roof, like a thief in the night, when I wanted to go a-visiting.' 'H'sh!' demanded Father. 'They'll hear us and lug us back.' 'Back nothing!' snapped Mother. 'Now that I've been and gone and actually snook out of a window and made a common gallivanting old hex out of myself this way, I wouldn't come back not if Lulu and Harry and that lump of a Harris Hartwig was all a-hanging on to my pettiskirts and trying to haul me back.' "Oof-flumpf." ""This last sound was made by the soft mud beside the garage as Mother landed in it. She had jumped from the roof without once hesitating, and she picked up her bundle and waited quite calmly till Father came flying frog-like through the mist." ... The prodigal parents hastily tugged suit-case and bundle ..." --(C) [Father and Mother go adventuring, 139ff] "It took Mother Appleby two days to recover from gas and two more to recover from lifelong respectability, to the end that she should become a merry beggar, gathering pennies while Father piped upon that antic instrument, the mouth-organ. "... It's always easier to be a bold adventurer in some town other than the one in which you are." (148) [A saloon keeper took up a collection for the wandering Applebys.] Father "realized that to these stay-at-homes the Applebys' wandering was a thing to revere, a heroism, like prize-fighting or religion or going to war. But he didn't psychologize about it. He believed in 'the masses' because he belonged to the masses.'" p. 156 "Most people do not know why they do things -- not even you and I invariably know, though of course we are superior to the unresponsive masses. ... Quite without knowing it, Father was searching for his place in the world. ... Maybe some day he'd get back into the shoe business in some town, and he'd show them. ... ... he was learning something ... weighty .. the art of handling people, in the two aspects thereof -- bluffing, and backing up the bluff with force and originality. ... When he smiled in a superior way and said nothing, people immediately believed that he must have been places, done brave things. He didn't so much bluff them as let them bluff themselves." --[Lessons from the Hobo Camp, 174 ff. Crook McKusick took Father in hand] "Crook added a course in psychology. ... the hobo ... must have an expert working knowledge of psychology if he is to climb in his arduous profession. ... the hobo, Crook McKusick ... taught Father that there was no reason why, with his outdoor life and his broadened experience, he should not be a leader among men wherever he went ... it was just as easy to be unusual, to live a life excitedly free, as to be a shop-bound clerk. Adventure, like fear of adventure, consisted in going one step at a time, keeping at it, forming the habit. ... So ... Seth Appleby began to think for himself, to the end that he should be one of the class that rules and is unafraid." --(D) [Last page of the novel] Father to Mother in bed: "My old honey, we've come home. ... Say, look here, young woman, don't you go to sleep yet. I'm a hard-working man, and it's Doc Schergan's orders that I got to be played with and hold your hand like this for fourteen minutes every night, before I go to sleep. .. My old honey!' "'How you do run on!" said Mother, drowsily.'" -OOO- IV, BIOGRAPHIC. In 1914 Sinclair Lewis married sophisticated Grace Livingston Hegger in New York. She quit her job with VOGUE magazine. They soon moved from Greenwich Village to Port Washington on the north shore of Long Island. In 1915 he resigned from his office job to do full-time writing. He lived from writing short stories for popular magazines. V. IMPACT. Saturday Evening Post rejected THE INNOCENTS as too sentimental (Schorer, 230). Harper published in Sept. 1914: 4,000 copies. Schorer calls it the worst thing HSL ever wrote and notes its disingenuous paean to village life. VI. METHODS. Although Father and Mother were born before the Civil War, Lewis writes about them as they were only a year or two before the time of publication: a rather constant feature of his coming works, for the most part. --=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= (6) 1919 FREE AIR II. PLOT OUTLINE. The tale is set in early months of World War One, before America's entry. Miss CLAIR BOLTWOOD of the fashionable Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY, drives a heavy Gomez-Deperdussin roadster towards a visit with cousins in Seattle in order to relax her widowed father's overworked nervous system. For small-town Minnesota mechanic MILTON (MILT) DAGGETT who rescues Claire and their touring car from a mud-hole, it is love at first sight. It is the apostles throwing down their fishing nets to follow Jesus. It is Don Quixote setting out on his quest. "Milt was in love with Claire; she was to him the purpose of life" (p. 257). Milt almost instantly decides to drive in his modest Teal "tin beetle" or "bug" with or near Claire and her father all the way to Seattle. This is a magazine serial pot boiler romance of frontier boy and car mechanic (Milt Daggett) pursuing a sentimental girl (Claire Boltwood) worth an impressive $5,000 around 1916. The girl, a high living Brooklynite, is driving her ailing workaholic father in a heavy Gomez-Deperdussin roadster long day after weary day across northern plains and mountains towards Seattle. She wonders whether she can ultimately avoid marrying Geoffrey (Jeff) Saxton, a notably older (39 to Claire's 23) beau back in sophisticated New York. In every town where the Boltwoods overnight, they routinely drive their "Gomez-Dep" (a make apparently invented by Sinclair Lewis) into a sure-to-be-there full service garage for the night. These and other cross country garages often display a sign "Free Air," which must have been a reassuring come-on in the early days of cross-continental motoring. And so it goes, with Claire wondering if she can (or should) civilize the manly Milt up to the level of suave and prosperous Jeff or whether that is too, too patronizing. Should she, alternatively, simply sweep off to Alaska with Milt -- heeding the call of the wild? Jeff and his Seattle relatives concoct a plot to show Claire just what a loser Milt is by inviting him to dinner, taking him to the opera and the like. They drop in unexpectedly for tea at Milt's and find his crude hometown chum and lush Bill McGolwey. Claire turns the table by taking the tea drinkers to visit 80 year old Aunt Harriet, pensioned off matriarch of the "Boltwood-Gilson-Saxton tomb. With her brother she had come west from Boston Heights. And took in laundry decades ago. Not long after Milt proposes to Claire and she accepts. Their life together begins. FREE AIR can also be read just for its sweaty heft as a part of midwestern and western America not long before the nation declared war on the Kaiser. On the drive through Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana and Idaho to Washington state, roads are rarely paved. Gravel is luxury. Dust is daily. Mud is just around the bend. Tires are thin and frequently burst or are punctured. Steep slopes demand drivers with braking and gear shifting skills. And don't forget low spots covered by running water. COMMENTS: The author, just one year before his first masterpiece, MAIN STREET, convincingly presents his personally experienced North American driving world from an expert mechanic's point of view: revealing an automobile-crazed USA with its starters, carburetors, rumble seats, dubiously effective head lamps, oil leaks, hitchhikers, flea-bag hotels, country stores, a haunted house and country people who speak German and at first seem gruff but then are seen by sophisticated Easterner Claire Boltwood to have hearts of gold. As does as well her rustic new suitor, Milt Daggett. This is an all-American world where even auto mechanics are romantic and knightly. Boys and girls should read FREE AIR a year or so before they tackle TOM SAWYER and HUCKLEBERRY FINN. One leads to the others. III. READINGS from FREE AIR. (Quoting from the 1993 Bison Paperback edition) (1) [Language. List Making. Cf. Stephen Vincent Benet's 1931 verse written 12 years after the verses of FREE AIR, (A) "I have fallen in love with American names The sharp names that never get fat, The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims, The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat, Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.] ^^^^^^^^^^ FREE AIR (1919) (p. 208f) "Not Kanakee nor Kalamazoo nor Oshkosh can rival the names of towns in the state of Washington, and Claire combined the town-names in a lyric so emotion-stirring that it ought, perhaps, to be the national anthem. It ran: Humptulips, Tum Tum, Moclips, Yelm, Satson, Bucoda, Omak, Enumclaw, Tillicum, Bossburg, Chettlo, Chattaroy, Zillah, Selah, Cowiche, Keechelus, Bluestem, Bluelight, Onion Creek, Sockeye, Antwine, Chopaka, Startup, Kapowsin, Skamokawa, Sixprong, Pysht! Klickitat, Kittitas, Spangle, Cedonia, Pe Ell, Cle Elum, Sallal, Chimacum, Index, Taholah, Synarep, Puyallup, Wallula, Wawawai, Wauconda, Washougal, Walla Walla, Washtuena, Wahluke, Solkulk, Newaukum, Wahkiakus, Penawawa, Ohop, Ladd! Harrah, Olalla, Umtanum, Chuckanut, Soap Lake, Loon Lake, Addy, Ace, Usk, Chillowist, Moxee City, Yellepit, Cashup, Moonax, Mabton, Tolt, Mukilteo, Poulsbo, Toppenish,, Whetstone, Inchelium, Fishtrap, Carnation, Shine, Monte Carlo, Conconully, Roza, Maud! China Bend, Zumwalt, Sapolil, Riffle, Touchet, Chesaw, Chew, Klum, Bly, Humorist, Hammer, Nooksack, Oso, Samamish, Dusty, Tiger, Turk, Dot, Scenic, Tekoa, Nellita, Attalia, Steilacoom, Tweedle, Ruff, Lisabeula, Latah, Peola, Towal, Sol Duc, Twisp! 'And then' complained Claire, 'they talk about Amy Lowell! I leave it to you, Henry B., if any union poet has ever written as gay a refrain as 'Ohop Ladd'!" (B) Ish Kabibble p. 339) (Bill McGolwey to Milt Daggett, after dropping in unannounced in Seattle) "they got the last twenty bones off'n me, and I was fltter 'n a pancake. So I says 'ish kabibble,' and I sneaks onto the blind baggage, and bums my way West." (2) [GOPHER PRAIRIE -- prelude to MAIN STREET] p. 36f "Gopher Prairie has all of five thousand people ... at least a thousand more population and an infinitely better band than the ridiculously envious neighboring town of Joralemon. p. 47 "She noticed the sign on the air-hose of the garage -- 'Free Air.' There's our motto for the pilgrimage! she cried.' " p. 231 (Claire) "Do you suppose for one second I'd give up my feeling of free air?" (3) [TRAVELING MEN] " ... (86f) Milt's best tutors were traveling men. ... He knew that not only were they the missionaries of business ... ; but also that they, as much as the local ministers and doctors and teachers and newspapermen, were the agents in spreading knowledge and justice. It was they who showed the young men how to have their hair cut -- and to wash behind the ears and shave daily; they who encouraged villagers to rise from scandal and gossip to a perception of the Great World, of politics and sports, and some measure of art and science. ... Hence it was to the traveling men ... that Milt turned for suggestions as to how to perform the miracle of changing from an ambitious boy into what Claire would recognize as a charming man." (4) (PLAYING] p. 235 (Waking up after innocent overnighting at a mountain hut) Claire: "We're like two children that have been playing too long." p. 299 (Claire) "Can't we be just playmates a while yet?" (i.e. not start kissing). p. 367 (Milt asks Claire to marry him TOMORROW) Milt: "Claire, can't we be crazy once, while we're youngsters?" Claire: "Don't bombard me so! Let me think. One must be practical, even in craziness." p. 370 (Driving in car after they agree to marry) Milt: "Young tramp marrying lady of huge wealth -- " (Claire: "No, you don't! I've accepted you. Do you think I'm going to lose the one real playmate I've ever had? It was so lonely on the Boltwoods' brown stoop till Milt came along and whistled impertinently and made the solemn little girl in frills play marbles and --- Watch out for that turn! Heavens, how I have to look out after you? ... No -- do -- not -- kiss -- me -- on -- a -- turn!" (Claire feels sorry for Milt, growing up with Schoenstrom with people like Bill McGolwey for a childhood chum) "' I remember that for a long time you just had him to play with'" ... (5) [THE BIG CITY HAS MADE CLAIRE TOO BIG FOR MILT] p. 258 (of Seattle) "But Claire had suddenly become too big. In her were all these stores, these office buildings for clever lawyers and surgeons, these contemptuous trolley cars, these careless people in beautiful clothes. They were too much for him. ... And she belonged with them." (6) [ON HOW TO SAVE TIME IN COLLEGE] p. 271 Milt "had discovered that the best way to save time was to avoid the lazy friendships of college; the pipe-smoking, yawning, comfortable, rather heavy, altogether pleasant wondering about 'what'll we do next' which occupies at least four hours a day for the average man in college." IV, BIOGRAPHIC. Married to Grace Hegger in 1914, HSL and she traveled by Ford (self-converted camper) in the summer of 1916 from Sauk Centre to Seattle. Son Wells (named for H.G. Wells) was born in 1917. Grace wanted to settle down. But HSL reminded her of her promise that children would not slow down their adventuring and their travel. V. IMPACT. FREE AIR was serialized in Saturday Evening POST. Then revised and published as a book. VI. METHODS. A story based on his recent past: driving, adventuring, close attention to technical details of automobiles and travel. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-- (7) 1920 Main Street. [Click here for Mary Killough's outline and notes.] [Patrick's Summary is just below.] Mystical Carol Milford brings impossible dreams of perfection both to her marriage with a small town doctor, Will Kennicott, a dozen years her senior, as well as to her first few years living with him in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Her blitzkrieg attempts to reform the town all fail in the short run. Sexual and personal fulfillment also elude her. But a few experimental months working in Washington, DC convince her to return to her husband's small town Main Street even with its Village Virus. IV. BIOGRAPHIC. Grace Hegger Lewis visited Sauk Centre with HSL in the summer of 1916, before their drive to Seattle. She and others say that MAIN STREET is as Grace saw Sauk Centre. V. IMPACT. This was his first of several books for Harcourt-Brace publishing company. Prepublication issue of 15,000 copies. "It was the most sensational event in twentieth-century American publishing history." (Schorer 268). People in Sauk Centre raged against their portrayal (Schorer 270). Some critics panned it. Many writers praised it. F. Scott Fitzgerald loved it (Schorer 275). Warner Brothers made a money-losing movie (Schorer 405). VI. METHODS. More sociological than ever. Continuing narrative focus on the recent Past. ==-=-=-=-=-=-=-= (8) 1922 BABBITT. George F. Babbitt in April 1920 is a modestly successful husband, father, realtor, Presbyterian, Republican, Booster and Elk. A year or so later his life is temporarily in tatters as he strikes out for personal freedom. Babbitt simply falls apart, chases women, drinks too much Prohibition Era liquor and shows dangerous sympathy for labor unions and a radical local lawyer named Seneca Doane. Babbitt determines to break free and become accountable to no one. But his friends in the Boosters' Club, the Presbyterian Church, the Republican Party and other organizations make it clear that he must either return to being the old predictable, conformist George F. or he will find his business fading to nothing. Babbitt then sees the light, hauls himself up and is welcomed back to normalcy as husband, father, businessman, Republican and Booster. In token of atonement offered and accepted, one of his fraternal admirers, while on a trip to Catawba, George's birthplace, discovered the truth about Babbitt's middle initial. The 'F' stood for FOLLANSBEE (the name of the Babbitt family doctor). The once lapsed Babbitt was re-baptized with good natured male humor back to the spot back where he belonged. ^^^^^^^^^ COMMENT: While transforming himself back to what American businessmen were intended to be, George F. Babbitt left posterity a name synonymous with dull mediocrity, caution and conformity. The novel has a pretty clear structure as follows: I. A day in the life of George F. Babbitt (Ch. 1 - 7) II. The Babbits give dinner for twelve (Ch. 8-9) III. A quarrel at the Paul Rieslings' (Ch. 10.1) IV. A three week trip to Maine (Ch. 10.2 - 12) IV. The high water mark of the "old" Babbitt (Ch. 14 - 21) including his great oration to the Realtors' Association V. Babbitt's struggle for freedom. Decline of his prestige. (Ch. 22 - 33) VI. Babbitt subsides back to normalcy. (Ch. 34) -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- III.READINGS. (Using 2003 Dover Thrift Edition, ISBN 0-486-43167-3 (pbk.) --(A) (Babbitt as real estate man, p. 33f) "Babbitt's virtues as a real-estate broker -- as the servant of society in the department of finding homes ... --were steadiness and diligence. He was conventionally honest, he kept his records of buyers and sellers complete, he had experience with leases and titles and an excellent memory for prices. His shoulders were broad enough, his voice deep enough, his relish of hearty humor strong enough, to establish him as one of the ruling caste of Good Fellows. ... He serenely believed that the one purpose of the real-estate business was to make money for George F. Babbitt. True, it was a good advertisement at Boosters' Club lunches, and all the varieties of Annual Banquets to which Good Fellows were invited, to speak sonorously of Unselfish Public Service, the Broker's Obligation to Keep Inviolate the Trust of His Clients, and a thing called Ethics, whose nature was confusing but if you had it you were a High-class Realtor and if you hadn't you were a shyster, a piker, and a fly-by-night. These virtues awakened Confidence, and enabled you to handle Bigger Propositions. But they didn't imply that you were to be impractical and refuse to take twice the value of a house if a buyer was such an idiot that he didn't jew you down on the asking-price. "Babbitt spoke well -- and often -- at these orgies of commercial righteousness about the 'realtor's function as a seer of the future development of the community, and as a prophetic engineer clearing the pathway for inevitable changes' -- which meant that a real-estate broker could make money by guessing which way the town would grow. This guessing he called Vision." --(B) (George Babbitt's offered this advice to his teen age son -- who doesn't believe in going to college, but does love correspondence school work, p. 65) "these correspondence-courses might prove to be one of the most important American inventions. "Trouble with a lot of folks is: they're so blame material; they don't see the spiritual and mental side of American supremacy; they think that inventions like the telophone and the aeroplane and wireless -- no, that was a Wop invention, but anyway: they think these mechanical improvements are all that we stand for; whereas to a real thinker, he sees that spiritual and, uh, dominating movements like efficiency, and Rotarianism and Prohibition, and Democracy are what compose our deepest and truest wealth." --(C) [Atmospheric of Babbitt's great speech to the state real estate board, p. 126 ff] "The pastor of the First Christian Church of Monarch ... informed God that the real-estate men were here now." (127) [Of Babbitt after his great oration] "They shouted 'That's the stuff!' ... He had in fifteen minutes changed from a minor delegate to a personage almost as well known as that diplomat of business, Cecil Rountree." --(D) [Babbitt's remarks to the Zenith Real Estate board, 139ff] " ... believe me, it's the fellow with four to ten thousand a year, say, and an automobile and a nice little family in a bungalow on the edge of town, that makes the wheels of progress go round! "That's the type of fellow that's ruling America to-day; in fact, it's the ideal type to which the entire world must tend, it there's to be a decent, well-balanced, Christian, go-ahead future for this little old planet! ... "In no country in the world will you find so many reproductions of the Old Masters and of well-known paintings on parlor walls as in these United States. No country has anything like our number of phonographs, with not only dance records and comic but also the best operas, such as Verdi, rendered by the world's highest-paid singers. ... "I want to stand up here as a representative businessman and gently whisper, 'Here's our kind of folks! Here's the specifications of the Standardized American Citizen! Here's the new generation of Americans: fellows with hair on their chests and smiles in their eyes, and adding machines in their offices. .. we like ourselves first-rate, and if you don't like us, look out ... "I have tried to sketch the Real He-man, the fellow with Zip and Bang. ... A good live wire from Baltimore or Seattle or Duluth is the twin-brother of every like fellow booster from Buffalo or Akron, Fort Worth of Oskaloosa! ... Zenith will be remembered in history as having set the pace for a civilization that shall endure when the old time-killing ways are gone forever and the day of earnest efficient endeavor shall have dawned all round the world! ... "Zenith and her sister-cities are producing a new type of civilization. The extraordinary, growing, and sane standardization of stores, offices, streets, hotels, clothes, and newspapers throughout the United States shows how strong and enduring a type is ours." --(D) [Babbitt's clubs, p. 155ff] "His clubs and associations were food comfortable to his spirit. "Of a decent man in Zenith it was required that he should belong to one, preferably two or three, of the in numerous 'lodges' and prosperity-boosting lunch clubs; to the Rotarians, the Kiwanis, or the Boosters; to the Odd fellows, Moose, Masons, Red Men, Woodmen, Owls, Eagles, Maccabees, Knights of Pythias, Knights of Columbus, and other secret orders characterized by a high degree of heartiness, sound morals, and reverence for the Constitution. There were four reasons for joining these orders: It was the thing to do. It was good for business, since lodge-brothers frequently became customers. It gave to Americans unable to become Geheimraete or Commendatori such unctuous honorifics as High Worthy Recording Scribe and Grand Hoogow to add to the commonplace distinctions of Colonel, Judge, and Professor. And it permitted the swaddled American husband to stay away from home for one evening a week. The lodge was his piazza, his pavement cafe. He could shoot pool and talk man-talk and be obscene and valiant." "Babbitt was what he called a 'joiner' for all these reasons." --(E) [Babbitt's Boosters Club, 198 ff] "The International Organization of Boosters 'Clubs has become a world-force for optimism, manly pleasantry, and good business. Chapters are to be found now in thirty chapters. Nine hundred and twenty of the thousand chapters, however, are in the United States. None is more ardent than the Zenith Boosters' Club. ... "There was a fine of ten cents for calling a Fellow Booster by anything but his nickname at a lunch, and as Babbitt jovially checked his hat the air was radiant with shouts of 'Hello, Chef' and "How're you Shorty!' and 'Top o' the mornin', Mac!' "And at each place, to-day, there was a present; a card printed in artistic red and black: SERVICE AND BOOSTERISM Service finds its finest opportunity and development only in its broadest and deepest application and the consideration of its perpetual action upon reaction. I believe the highest type of Service, like the most pro- gressive tenets of ethics, senses unceasingly and is motived by active adherence and loyalty to that which is the essential principle of Boosterism -- Good Citizenship in all its factors and aspects. DAD PETERSEN. Compliments of Dadbury Petersen Advertising Corp. 'Ads, not Fads, at Dad's'" --(E) [After Babbitt's fall from favor, 287ff] "Gray fear loomed always by him now. ... Daily he fancied slights. He noted that he was not asked to speak at the annual Chamber of Commerce dinner. ... Orville Jones gave a large poker party and he was not invited. ... He was afraid to go to lunch at the Athletic Club, and afraid not to go. ... Everywhere he heard the rustling whispers. ... Interminably he wondered what They were saying of him. ... "Through all his fear ran defiance. He felt stubborn. ... "He could not stand the strain. Before long he admitted that he would like to flee back to the security of conformity, provided there was a decent and creditable way to return. But, stubbornly, he would not be forced back; hew would not, he swore, 'eat dirt.'" ... "The independence seeped out of him and he walked the streets alone, afraid of men's cynical eyes and the incessant hiss of whispering." =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- IV, BIOGRAPHIC. In 1918 Lewis moved to St. Paul and then to Minneapolis. His first play HOBOHEMIA was produced in Greenwich Village. In 1921-1922 he traveled in style to Europe and lectured there. V. IMPACT. Another money-losing movie by Warner Brothers (Schorer 405) 80,500 prepublication issue. 200,000 before Christmas. America's image to a world with everyone owing America money. VI. METHODS. Influenced consciously by Mencken. Much more irony and satire than before. A Type (the American businessman) is individualized. =-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=---=-=- 10/08/2005 revisited 11/19/2005 |