Babbitt: The American Dream by Sinclair Lewis

What was America like one hundred years ago in the 1920’s?

My Mom and Dad were both born in Dallas, Texas, in 1924, around the time of Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis’ satirical novel of a successful businessman who lives a comfortable suburban life in Zenith with his wife and children in the American Midwest.  Of course, this is just a few years before the Great Depression, which is the lens of which I mostly heard my parents describe their childhood. In Babbitt, Lewis gives his readers a sharp critique of American capitalism and ultimate hollowness of the so called “American Dream”.

For this blog, I will be referencing Babbitt, the first of my Summer 2025 Reading List, by Sinclair Lewis and the Essay “Echoes from Zenith: Reactions of American Businessmen to Babbitt”, by Thomas S. Hines.

The American Way of Life in the 1920’s

According to Hines, the economy in America was booming in the 1920’s. The U.S. came out of WWI as a world power, cities great fast, and the suburbs began to expand due to production of thousands of new cars and improved roads. Consumerism exploded as new homeowners purchased radios, washing machines, furniture, and the “must have” appliances to modernize kitchens. As with any change, however, there was also a cultural clash between tradition and modernity (Hines, Echoes, 123).

At this time, businessmen were cultural heroes as the idea of the “self-made man” chasing the American Dream was idolized. Men wore suits, carried briefcases, and worked in real estate, sales, finance, or manufacturing in order to own a new car, live in a suburban home, and join civic clubs such as the Rotary or Masons, which showed success (123).

“To George Babbitt, as to most prosperous citizens of Zenith, his motor car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism. The office was his pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion ashore”(Babbitt, 24).

So, what was the life of a housewife, or possibly my grandmothers at this time? Most middle-class housewives typically didn’t work outside the home as life revolved around child-rearing, cooking, cleaning, and maintaining the social appearance of the family. Even though women had gained the right to vote in 1920, their roles remained mostly domestic. The father was the breadwinner, the mother was the homemaker, and each family had 2-4 children.

“In Floral Heights and the other prosperous sections of Zenith, there were many women who had nothing to do…They had a few servants, worked perhaps two hours a day, and the rest of the time they ate chocolates, went to motion-pictures, went window-shopping, read magazines, and thought timorously of the lovers who never appeared (Babbitt, 122).

I am picturing in my mind one of my favorite American neighborhoods to visit– Oak Park, Illinois, which is populated by many of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style houses built at this time with strong horizontal lines, wooden built-in furniture in geometric figures, tiffany glass, and front porch swings! (I highly recommend the Wright tour of homes!)

Hines states that setting and the type of character that Lewis had created in his protagonist, George Babbitt, reflected 1920’s America and specifically the business community in which “Babbitt” became synonymous with the term “American Businessman” according to the Business History Review, The President and Fellows of Harvard College, Summer 1967.

Lewis especially relished his preliminary research into the various aspects of American life that he planned to portray in Babbitt. He drew detailed maps of “Zenith,” the imaginary city in which George Babbitt would live, and intricate plans of Babbitt’s house and all its furnishings. He also pored over current issues of the American Magazine and the Saturday Evening Post, popular periodicals that he thought his character would have read and admired. Finally, he studied with great care the “pompous pamphlets” of American real estate dealers, of which profession his protagonist was to be a member (125).

Okay, George Babbitt! You are living the American Dream in a Utopian world of Zenith and your life is perfect, right? Of course not.

On the surface, George Babbitt is a successful, respectable businessman who lives a comfortable suburban life with his wife and children. But underneath, he feels restless and dissatisfied with the emptiness of his conformist, materialistic lifestyle. Hines states that in Babbitt, Lewis had recorded the “visible image of Zenith…the noise, the hustle, the glare…the spiritual stagnancy, the dimness and confusion”.

Babbitt, Lewis believed, was a symbol of a man whose life was “speed without aim, matter without form, activity without desire”(Echoes, 126). Babbitt lived a life, essentially of fear; fear of his business, which gives him prosperity without wealth; of his home that gives him order without comfort (the bathroom is always messy); and domestic affections that do not “warm his soul”. Lewis stated that “the future historian of American civilization will turn to it with infinite profit, with mingled amusement, astonishment, and pity”(Echoes, 126).

American Society in the 1920’s

Many businessmen in the 1920’s joined civic clubs such as the Chamber of Commerce, Rotary, and Masons, deciding to “go on and be a Babbitt”(Echoes, 128). When Mr. Sinclair Lewis came along with this handy label, these businessmen began reading Babbitt feeling that “at the end, they might see a great esthetic light”. The leaders of the American Revolution, according to Hines, and the framers of the Constitution were Babbitts! George Washington was definitely the “Babbitt-type”(128)! Edward N. Mines, a Detroit businessman, confessed that he was
a “thirty-third degree all-around champion Babbitt,” that he was for “a newer and better civilization through industry…It was the Babbitts, he maintained, who had made possible the “institutions which advance the wisdom of mankind,” and it was the Babbitts who provided jobs for the graduates of the schools. The Babbitts, he concluded, “have always won, and they always will”(129, 130).

Zenith

Zenith is the setting of this American Dream with its own official City Song written by Chum Frink:

Good old Zenith,

Our kin and kith,

Wherever we may be,

Hats in the ring,

We blithely sing

Of thy Prosperity.

However, Rev. Mr. Mike Monday had this to say of Zenith:

“There’s a lot of smart college professors and tea-guzzling slobs in this burg…there’s a gang of woolly-whiskered book-lice that think they know more than the Almighty God, and prefer a lot of Hun science and smutty German criticism [this is pre WWII Nazi regime!] to the straight and simple Word of God”(98).

And George Babbitt had this to say of his beloved Zenith:

“What’s the matter with Zenith? She’s all right! What’s the best town in the U.S.A? Zeeeeeen-ith”(161)! He continues, “I don’t mean to say we’re perfect, but Zenith is the finest example of American life and prosperity to be found anywhere.

Our Ideal Citizen doesn’t waste a lot of time day-dreaming or going to sassiety teas or kicking about things that are none of his business. He mows the lawn, tells his kiddies a story after dinner or takes the family to the movies, or plays a fist full of bridge, or reads the evening paper, or sits and visits with friends about the topics of the day”.

Here are the specifications of the Standardized American Citizen, according to Babbitt: fellows with hair on their chests and smiles in their eyes and adding machines in their offices. He is a real He-man, the fellow with Zip and Bang. Here in Zenith is the home for the manly men and womanly women and bright kids (183, 184).

But low, all is not perfect in Zenith, after all. Babbitt calls attention to a “problem” that the citizens of Zenith must face this coming year: “the long-haired liberals, radicals, non-partisan, intelligentsia, and God only knows the other trick names”(187). These problem citizens can be found in irresponsible teachers and professors, the worst of this gang, who are the “snakes to be scotched”. Yikes, run for the hills!

How will they save their sons and daughters from these cracks sitting around chewing the rag about their Rights and Wrongs? Babbitt’s solution is to raise up their children to be “God-fearing, hustling, successful, two-fisted Regular guys who belong to some church with pep and piety, who belong to the Boosters or Rotarians, or Kiwanis, Elks, or Knights of Columbus” (188). Seems easy enough! Babbitt was a ‘joiner’ according to the narrator; behind the gold and scarlet banner of his public achievements was the dun background of office-routine and these committees and lodges “stimulated him like brandy”(204).

In addition, George went to Sunday School in order “to serve my fellow men, to honor my brother as myself, and to make life happier for one and all”. He believed that if one was a Good Man, he would go to a place called Heaven; but if he was a Bad Man, he would be punished (if he murdered, committed burglary, used cocaine, or had mistresses, according to Babbitt).

The Crisis or Turning Point

As in most fiction novels, there comes a time for crisis or a turning point. In Babbitt, this comes when George’s close friend Paul Riesling shoots his bitter, controlling wife Zilla, when he reaches a breaking point. Zilla survives the shooting, but Paul goes to prison. This event shocks George deeply and he begins to question everything about his life: his job, his marriage, and his values. Hines sees this as a symbol of the collapse of the American Dream (Echoes, 221).

George soon hits a crisis of faith: “What did he want? Wealth? Social position? Travel? Servants? Yes, but only incidentally. ‘I give it up,’ he sighed (Babbitt, 273).” George acts out in rebellion where he begins to question his beliefs, flirts with becoming politically liberal, pulls away from his social circles that he once held so dear, begins a romantic affair, and tries to escape his routine that has dictated his life thus far.

Fortunately, this rebellion does not last long as George finds his life very hollow. This comes in good time as his wife Myra falls seriously ill and George returns to her side. George also makes amends with his son, Ted, as he gives him his blessing in marriage. He says to Ted,

“Now, don’t repeat this to your Mother, but practically, I’ve never done a single thing I’ve wanted to in my whole life. I don’t know’s I’ve ever wanted to do anything. I suppose that’s just the way I was brought up. Don’t you be like me (Babbitt, 401)”

“The world is yours!”

Works Cited

Sinclair Lewis. Babbitt. Harcourt, Brace and Company. 1922.

Thomas S. Hines, Jr. Echoes from ‘Zenith:’ Reactions of American Businessmen to Babbitt. The Business History Review, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Summer, 1967), pp. 123-140 https://doi.org/10.2307/3112563•https://www.jstor.org/stable/3112563