Word: babbittism
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...Class of 1926 went through college during the Coolidge boom, when the Yard was also booming with such great names as Charles Townsend Copeland, George Lyman Kittredge, Bliss Perry and Irving Babbitt. But only a handful of the 745 have become headliners (among them: Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, This Week Editor William Ichabod Nichols), and far more have made the Social Register (23%) than Who's Who in America (8%). After 25 years, the average Harvardman, '26, has become a happy, prosperous gentleman with a goodly share of virtues and some surprising vices...
Your Jan. 22 appraisal of Sinclair Lewis as "not a great writer, nor even a very good one" may be confirmed by posterity, but it still seems to me that the author of Main Street, Babbitt and Arrowsmith was something more than a mere clever mimic and pamphleteer...
...dare you compare lovable, honest, confused, right-minded George F. Babbitt and the sanctimonious hypocrite Elmer Gantry? No knave, Babbitt. Once his conscience is awakened, he tries to fight the restrictions of his society, but of course he loses. I am all for Sinclair Lewis. Along with Remain Rolland and maybe a couple of others, he showed that in the 20th Century it is still possible to understand the foibles of humanity and yet have a warm love for people...
...seems to me that Lewis' portrayal of the "semi-civilized barbarian" does not justify the term "period piece" in these days, when the only faith we have is in materialism -only we have gone Babbitt one better and put our hopes in militaristic materialism. Possibly a re-examination of the Babbitts which Sinclair Lewis portrayed so well will teach us to put our faith in something better during...
Condemnable Monopoly. Rotary could take in its stride the lampooning it got in Babbitt from the late novelist Sinclair Lewis (see p. 36), but the Vatican's blow was something else. Puzzled Rotarians in the U.S.Catholic as well as Protestantreacted with a stunned and unanimous "Why?" Some remembered a campaign against Rotary waged in 1928-29 by Rome's potent Jesuit magazine, Civiltà Cattolica. In many countries, the magazine charged, Rotary was altogether too friendly with the Masons, and was dangerously prone to the error of treating all religions as of equal value...