Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century by Peter Watson

It’s Culture, in theaters and art galleries and so on, that brings thousands of visitors…. [So] I call on you brothers towhoop 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 more strongly,
boosterism
came into widespread use to describe an ad-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 ofexcellence, 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