Father & Son

For 28 years, the U.S. has had a high old time sneering at George Babbitt--the bumptious bandersnatch businessman cartooned into being by Sinclair Lewis. He was the all-American philistine of the '20s. The '30s and '40s tried to kill him with scorn. But he was a tough old party, and now, it appears, he has a son & heir following firmly in his daddy's footsteps. In the current Harvard Alumni Bulletin, Poet-Historian Peter Viereck introduces "Gaylord" Babbitt,* old George's son.

Poet Viereck first noticed how common the new Babbittry had become when he returned to teach history at Harvard after World War II. "Philistinism," he realized, "had acquired a new content, a new set of conditioned reflexes. It was still mongering cliches, but the cliches had changed . . . The main activity of the new-style Philistine has become the facile game of philistine-baiting . . ."

Whistler v. Picasso. "Perhaps," says Viereck, "every 20 years, the eternal Babbitt dons a new name and a new mask." Old George Babbitt would speak smugly of "boosting and flag-waving and hating slackers and reds, and hating such longhair stuff as culture." Young Gaylord just as smugly pretends to revel in art and culture, thinks "nothing more wonderful than defying middle-class conventions." And his wife "can't stand those barbaric middle-class businessmen . . .

"Where Babbitt Senior would have used a lithograph of Whistler's Mother to cover up that hole in the wallpaper, Babbitt Junior would, of course, use a Picasso." Where the older Babbitt hashed over baseball and real-estate prices at his Booster Club luncheons, the new Babbitt talks knowingly (" 'knowing' is the word") about The New Yorker, sex and existentialism in an "adequate little French restaurant in the East Fifties." Where the old Babbitt merely hated art, the new Babbitt "hugs it to death."

Indeed, says Poet Viereck, "the essence of all Babbittry, senior or junior, is stereotypes . . . You can always spot [the new Babbitt] by the phrases he uses, by his enlightened, forward-looking attitude toward everything, in life or art or politics; and even more by his awareness of how enlightened and forward-looking he is and by the satisfaction that such awareness gives him . . ." But "nobody laughs at Babbitt Junior's ideas. That's because they're always so liberal and avant-garde."

Two Plus Two. "The resulting situation is not funny," says Viereck. "It is a serious, perhaps tragic, problem. Society is in a bad way when people say two and two are five because it sounds more daring than to say two and two are four. Society is in a bad way when too many people reject every ancient truth and tradition in ethics and politics and art because thereby they can show off better at cocktail parties. Civilization is an infinitely fragile bundle of accumulated habits and restraints. The necessary conservative function of any generation is not just to enjoy itself but to pass on this bundle in good condition to the next generation . . ."

Poet Viereck thinks that U.S. educators can best discharge their responsibilities to future generations by swinging away from "the short-sighted cult of utilitarian studies" and back towards the humanities with their "reverence for integrity, not because it's fashionable but because it's true." Such a reverence "would work a moral revolution deeper and more helpful than all the shallow artistic and political and economic revolts of our panting apostles of progress. It would be a moral revolution against that inner smirk which prefers cleverness to wisdom."

Says Viereck: "We don't need a 'century of the common man'; we have it already, "and it has only produced the commonest man, the impersonal and irresponsible and uprooted massman . . . The century of the common man means a century of sterile and tyrannic philistinism, whether it be a philistinism of right or of left, of Colonel Blimp or of Comrade Blimp. A century that returns to the humanist ideal of the individual man must hold equally aloof from George Babbitt and Gaylord Babbitt."

* Not to be confused with Harvard's late, famed humanist, Irving Babbitt.

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