Word: babbittism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1920-1929
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...country can be reaped for every dollar sown in providing better living and traveling quarters for our President and for his Ambassadors in foreign lands. As matters stand, foreigners visit Washington and then go home to tell their countrymen that our President lives like what Sinclair Lewis calls a "babbitt." I have heard "babbitt" picked up and used in this connection by foreigners several times. Do we want that to continue? HERBERT MILTON MAXWELL...
...writers, but have profound respect for a Vanderbilt. Europe has copied our worst things- the ugly stupidity of our iron civilization. She is sacrificing her originality to wear clothes like an inhabitant of the gopher prairies, to make Unter den Linden look like Main Street and elect a Babbitt Mayor of the Rue de la Paix. The English language is revered over here as Latin was in the Middle Ages. . . . America must not grow too proud. After all, we are a great country, but not a great people. And everything was there to make America a great country...
Once Truth is left behind, the section on Beauty rises somewhat in tone and approaches the level on which one expects to find observations on the other fellow's habits of mind. None except the most stodgy Babbitt can do aught but cry "Hear, hear" to an accusation that "the films are the literature of America". So it must seem to one who is convinced that "America has no indigenous literature" and no writers of genius save four, E. A. Poe, Walt Whitman, Hermann Melville, and Mark Twain. The only other Americans mentioned are a few whose "goodness consists mainly...
...with a poignancy, which even the Nirvana of Coolidgism has failed to allay. And in tracing the fading of the golden day into the gilded dusk, Lewis Mumford is voicing a discontent with the present idols, to which the pens of such widely different types of writers as Professor Babbitt, H. L. Mencken, and Sinclair Lewis have previously given form. Few critics however, have seen so penetratingly beneath the surface of the contemporary scene, as Mr. Mumford has done in this book, or woven the multifold threads of the country's history into a more harmonious pattern...
...Harvard CRIMSON rushed editorially to the defense of Mr. George F. Babbitt recently, working on the basis that attack is the best defense. For Mr. Babbitt's detractors, the CRIMSON points out, are most uniform indeed in their criticism and in their theories of aesthetics. "Is not the craze of standardization revealed in this very attitude? These intelligentsia have their own conception of what constitutes culture, and they are dissatisfied because all Americans are not standardized on that particular pattern...