Word: babbittism
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...Cave." Bluff Ohioan Bab bitt seemed a mart out of his time. Causes were bursting all about him, and the only kind of conscience that seemed fashion able was the social kind. Rolling a pencil between his hands, Babbitt spoke of the "inner obeisance" that man must have "to something higher than his ordinary self." He despised the new ethics that was based entirely on the assumption that the only "significant struggle between good and evil is not in the individual but in society." In one sense, Irving Babbitt almost blasted Nathan Pusey's academic career. His broad humanism...
...these classes one finds, also, a resist ance to any discussion that roams beyond the literal confines of the subject. In teaching general anthropology, the teacher can feel that he is losing some of the class if he refers to Babbitt or to Shakespeare, or speaks of the urban modernism of Rome as shown in Horace's Satires. (A good part of the class will never have heard of Horace.) . . . There is a definite resistance to erudition as such . . . [The teacher] tends to narrow his presentation . . . He cannot assume that he and the class have any common points...
...from Tokyo to Copenhagen. When O'Neill first upped periscope on the U.S. scene, he joined that literary wolfpack which, as one critic put it, was staging "an ill-will tour of the American mind." H. L. Mencken was lustily swatting the "boo-boisie." Sinclair Lewis was baiting Babbitt. O'Neill tried to go deeper than both, and he both succeeded and failed. Few of his characters are as simple as Babbitt; but none, in all likelihood, will be remembered as long...
...Neill's own version of George F. Babbitt is William A. Brown. He appeared for the first time in The Great God Brown (on the stage of the Greenwich Village Theater in 1926), an outwardly happy businessman ("the visionless demigod of our new materialistic myth-a Success"). His antagonist is an artistic soul both envied and victimized by Brown. The artistic soul cries out: "Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am L. afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh...
...George Babbitt could never have talked that way. In fact, he would scarcely have understood what was the matter with Brown, anyway. In almost all his plays, O'Neill tried to dramatize the cause of Brown's despair. Brown's trouble, as O'Neill saw it, was "the sickness of today." The symptoms: love had given way to possessiveness; a sense of "belonging" had been crushed by the Machine Age; faith had become atrophied; the "old God was dead" and a new one was not in sight. With such a view...