Business and the middle class
After the social instability and sharp economic depression that followed World War I, many Americans in the 1920s saw business and city growth as foundations for stability. The civic boosters and self-made men of the middle-class represented particularly American depictions of success, at a time when the promotion of the American identity was crucial in the face of rising fears of Communism.[10] At the same time, growing Midwestern cities, usually associated with mass production and the emergence of a consumer society, were also seen as emblems of American progress. George F. Babbitt, the novel's main character, was described by the 1930 Nobel Prize committee as "the ideal of an American popular hero of the middle-class. The relativity of business morals as well as private rules of conduct is for him an accepted article of faith, and without hesitation he considers it God's purpose that man should work, increase his income, and enjoy modern improvements."[11]
To his publisher, Lewis wrote: “[George Babbitt] is all of us Americans at 46, prosperous, but worried, wanting — passionately — to seize something more than motor cars and a house before it's too late.”[12] About the novel, Lewis said: “This is the story of the ruler of America” wherein the “tired American Businessman” wielded socioeconomic power not through his exceptionality but rather through militant conformity. Lewis portrayed the American businessman as a man deeply dissatisfied with and privately aware of his shortcomings; he is “the most grievous victim of his own militant dullness” who secretly longed for freedom and romance.[13] Readers who praised the psychological realism of the portrait admitted to regularly encountering Babbitts in real life but also could relate to some of the character's anxieties about conformity and personal fulfillment. Published two years after Lewis's previous novel (Main Street, 1920), the story of George F. Babbitt was much anticipated because each novel presented a portrait of American society wherein “the principal character is brought into conflict with the accepted order of things, sufficiently to illustrate its ruthlessness.”[14]
Social change
Although many other popular novelists writing at the time of Babbitt's publication depict the "Roaring Twenties" as an era of social change and disillusionment with material culture, modern scholars argue that Lewis was not himself a member of the "lost generation" of younger writers like Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Instead, he was influenced by the Progressive Era; and changes in the American identity that accompanied the country's rapid urbanization, technological growth, industrialization, and the closing of the frontier.[15] Although the Progressive Era had built a protective barrier around the upstanding American businessman, one literary scholar wrote that "Lewis was fortunate enough to come on the scene just as the emperor's clothes were disappearing."[16] Lewis has been compared to many authors, writing before and after the publication of Babbitt, who made similar criticisms of the middle class. Although it was published in 1899, long before Babbitt, Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class, which critiqued consumer culture and social competition at the turn of the 20th century, is an oft-cited point of comparison.[17] Written decades later, in 1950, David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd has also been compared to Lewis's writings.[18]
