Word: babbittism
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...kind of Babbitt, but without old George F.'s fundamental decency and guilelessness. The U.S. has become quite fond of the Babbitt who read Edgar Guest, but a pseudo-sophisticated Babbitt who reads The New Yorker is almost unforgivable...
...like Babbitt, this figure should become a word in the English language, a Wayde will denote a man whose tragedy is lack of roots, whose sin is trying to be something...
...literary world of the '203 and '303, the most comical character on the U.S. scene was the hale & hearty joiner who slapped his fellow businessmen on the back at service-club luncheons and addressed total strangers as "Tom," "Dick" or "Harry." Sinclair Lewis called him "Babbitt," H. L. Mencken called him "boob," and many another writer dismissed him simply as "a Rotarian...
...even though the stars do not always stay in their courses, Author Hawley's story is kept surprisingly well in line by Scenarist Ernest Lehman and Producer John Houseman. The movie follows the novel's basic notions: that Babbitt is not really so dead as Sinclair Lewis buried him; that commerce can be a vital and fascinating form of human activity; that businessmen are not villains and boobs (as they were in the "progressive" literature of the '205 and '305) or necessarily resigned commuters (as they usually are in the works of J. P. Marquand...
Transforming Minds. In 1944 Pusey went back to Appleton as president of Lawrence College. By that time he had come to the conclusion that a whole dimension was missing from U.S. education. Like his old Professor Irving Babbitt, he felt that "too many modern teachers commit the error of teaching students to see the evils and shortcomings of society without at the same time pointing out the evils that exist in them [selves]." The purpose of liberal education was not merely to impart knowledge; it was also to "transform personality by transforming minds ... But they [cannot be] transformed ... by materials...