Word: babbittism
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What Mr. Wallace does not recognize, however, is that in the very liberalism which is about to fall are contained the germs which are causing that fall; for liberalism, as Professor Babbitt has pointed out contains the same essential fallacy that characterizes the rest of Ronsseauistic ideas. Nationalism and it is almost synonymous with liberalism being Ronsseauistic and Romantic in its origins, is fundamentally contradictory; that is to say that the ideals contained in the nationalist conception are inevitably overwhelmed by the real, just as Rousseau after a long essay on the beauty of pure childhood announces that...
...studied with his usual his subject and its settings, from "Westward Ho! Hotel" of New York in the early 1900's to Myron's new modern inn in Connecticut, not forgetting even the Tourist Camp of 1933. It still retains that splendid and vivid connectivity of description which characterized "Babbitt," and he has had the good fortune or the wisdom to choose a subject which has proved, in the "Imperial Palace" and in "Grand Hotel" that it is perennially intriguing...
Scholar-Writer Bliss Perry retired almost three years ago and Humanist Irving Babbitt died last July, but Harvard still has giants in its English department. One of them is tiny, big-voiced John Livingston Lowes, 66, keen student of the Romantic Movement. He is perhaps the most brilliant U. S. example of the great scholar-teacher whom President Conant wants on his faculty. Another giant is snowy-bearded George Lyman Kittredge, 73, bon vivant, Chaucer and Shakespeare authority, prime link between Harvard's past & present...
...author he would probably say John Dos Passes. If the same question were put to a Swede, the first name off his tongue would doubtless be that Nobel Prizeman Sinclair Lewis. But such a loyal Swede would have in mind Author Lewis' earlier, better books (Main Street, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry). With such a second-rate novel as Work of Art following hard on the heels of his mediocre Ann Vickers (TIME, Jan. 30, 1933), readers of any nationality can see with half an eye that Sinclair Lewis is slipping. What skimpy satire there is in Work...
Fannie Hurst would have choired the paean with more gusto. Horatio Alger would have awarded his hero a more thoroughgoing financial success. But not even Zenith's Chamber of Commerce could have done a more wholehearted job of boosting than this onetime Babbitt-baiter has done...