Word: babbittical
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...during the three years Cabot spent as an undergraduate. George Pierce Baker, George Lyman Kittredge, and Bliss Perry taught English Literature; Frederick Merk, Samuel Eliot Morison, and Frederick Jackson Turner interpreted History; Ralph Barton Perry taught philosophy; James Bryant Conant was then an assistant professor of Chemistry, and Irving Babbitt instructed students in the subtleties of French Literature. The last subject caught the interest of Cabot, who had spent three years in French schools before entering Middle-sex and spoke French as fluently as English. He majored in Romance Languages and Literatures, then the third most popular field of concentration...
Long Lists. But if Linus Pauling's list of scientific honors is as long as his arm, so is the list of way-out political organizations he has supported. Pauling is a signer and, with all the zeal of a highbrowed Babbitt, a joiner. He will put his name on most anything presented to him with even a faint humanitarian argument. Many of the outfits he has endorsed were merely odd. But some were undeniably Communist fronts, and they have got him in trouble...
...Marshall S. Lachner, 46, resigned as president and chief executive officer of B. T. Babbitt, Inc, a leading maker of household cleaning products. He switched from beer to Babbitt 30 months ago. after squabbling forced him out of Pabst. "We have no pride." he announced. "We'll do anything that's legal to make a profit.'' He ran gimmicky promotions, even gave away subway tokens for Bab-O coupons. For a while Babbitt cleaned up. earned 42? per share in 1958 (v. $1.15 per share loss the year before), but last year it was back...
Harvard's chair honors more: an anti-sentimentalist philosopher whose national fame rose and fell in a few brief years (circa 1930). In that essentially sentimental era, Babbitt's "new humanism" so riled both liberals and conservatives that nobody really listened. What Babbitt proposed, in his prickly prose (Democracy and Leadership, On Being Creative and Other Essays'), was an end to the gathering tyranny of abstract causes. He despised any assumption that the "only significant struggle between good and evil is not in the individual but in society." The struggle, said he, lay in the will...
Liberals blasted Babbitt's disdain for the class struggle, conservatives his acerb attitude toward religious enthusiasm. Anglican Poet Eliot suggested that he was "trying to build a Catholic platform out of Protestant planks." He was a man perhaps defined only by his enemies. In the end, if he could not say himself precisely what he was trying to say, he did once quote a bit of doggerel that seemed...