Word: babbittism
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...adopts toward the Communist Party and for its sympathetic portrait of the type of U. S. businessman Lewis has previously satirized. The story revolves around the rebellion of Frederick William Cornplow, a plump, prosperous, middle-aged automobile dealer of Sachem Falls, N. Y., who is a dead ringer for Babbitt...
...unlike Babbitt, Fred Cornplow is harassed by two extraordinarily rude, extravagant, self-centred children who almost drive him crazy and then try to lock him in a sanitarium so he can recover the mental balance they have destroyed. Son Howard is a handsome, stupid, unprincipled college boy who is always borrowing money, wrecking his father's cars, and trying to lie his way out. Daughter Sara is a handsome, ill-natured poseur who becomes a Communist, falls in love with an agitator, overdraws her allowance of $1,000 a year and spends most of her time making poisonous remarks...
...First National Bank in an Ohio or Illinois city. There are not many of these new bourgeois buildings yet in Red Moscow, but they bear out in unmistakably bourgeois architecture the fact that J. Stalin & Co.- although favoring the World Revolution of the World Proletariat abroad-are becoming almost Babbitt Bolsheviks at home in the Soviet Union...
That Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin have never seen cause to suppress Boris Godunov, Eugene Onegin or even excessively bourgeois Madame Butterfly goes far to explain how Soviet Russia is now managing to like supercapitalistic Mr. & Mrs. Davies and support quietly a growing bureaucracy of Babbitt Bolsheviks...
Granting that Harvard is designed mainly to give a budding young intellectual or Babbitt an education, and granting furthermore that it probably does it in a pretty good way (we have no complaints anyway), the story that Harvard is impossible for someone who wants to take a crack at anything more than studies is erroneous...