Word: babbittism
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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...
From Harvard last week came a muffled echo of Irving Babbitt, a scholar so querulously out of tune with his time (1865-1933) that something must have been wrong with the time. The news was a new Harvard chair, the Irving Babbitt Professorship of Comparative Literature, to be occupied by one of Babbitt's last Harvard students, Critic Harry Levin, 47 (James Joyce: A Critical Introduction). It was an honor proposed by another former Babbitt student. Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey. Countless other students, 'from Poet T. S. Eliot to Pundit Walter Lippmann, would doubtless second...
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...