American civilization is flinging this challenge to American Realtors: Can the Realtor bring beauty and permanence into a civilization to which the pioneer bequeathed ugliness and impermanence?
Lewis Frank, National Association of Realtors, 1928Our past still lies ahead of us.
Lewis Mumford, 1935As befits a novel so broadly saluted over the years for its ability to chart the modern American landscape, Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt opens with a map:
The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings. The mist took pity on the fretted structures of earlier generations; the Post Office with its shingle-tortured mansard, the red brick minarets of hulking old houses, factories with stingy and sooted windows, wooden tenements colored like mud. The city was full of grotesqueries, but the clean towers were thrusting them from the business center, and on the farther hills were shining houses, homes – they seemed – for laughter and tranquility.Footnote 1
Within the capacious body of Babbitt scholarship, this inaugural tableau has achieved something of an iconic status. Conjuring the geography of American commercial modernity in all its material specificity, it has been ritually invoked throughout the decades as concrete proof of what one critic has famously called the novel's “sociological imagination.”Footnote 2 Indeed, a conception of the text as barely fictionalized ethnography came to stand as one of the great orthodoxies among early chroniclers of Lewis's career, lending force to a critical narrative that even today continues to script the author as the twentieth century's foremost “cartographer” of American business life.Footnote 3 The origins of this conceit can be traced back to the moments immediately following the 1922 release of Babbitt, when a wide array of professional book reviewers, academics, and public intellectuals first began to link Lewis's dissection of a crass, puerile, and materialistic white-collar culture to a conception of the novel as itself a kind of “found object,” an excavated remnant of the very era it aimed so vociferously to satirize. In the eyes of one such early commentator, for example, Babbitt offered readers a near perfect miniaturization of the modern built environment itself, reproducing the “typical American city” in precise detail, from “the granite-arched and nickel-plated splendor of sound business” to the “great hotels, cottage-colonies, boulevard systems, and up-to-date-offices.” For another, the novel seemed less the product of an individual writerly imagination than a “social document of a high order … a genuine museum piece.” Likewise, for a third, belief in the intrinsic artifactuality of Babbitt clarified what he regarded as Lewis's principal objective, to hold a “mirror up to middle-class life in America,” and thereby place readers in unmediated contact with “tangible facts of modern existence.”Footnote 4
In the following half-century, critics often defended and elaborated this view by observing that the date of the publication of Babbitt falls squarely within a period in American cultural history marked by a burgeoning popular interest in the field of cultural anthropology.Footnote 5 Taking this historical coincidence as their starting point, they routinely sought to make sense of Lewis's representational and polemical intentions by situating his white-collar critique within a contemporaneous and much more wide-ranging movement that endeavored to make modern American society into a fit subject for anthropological scrutiny. In referencing Babbitt's outsized enthusiasm for uncovering, cataloguing, and exhibiting the “facts” of contemporary American life, for example, scholars throughout these years rarely hesitated to observe that much the same impetus can be found within such exemplary 1920s works as Constance Rourke's Studies in American Humor and Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture. While underscoring the novel's seemingly unambiguous desire to expose the emptiness and sterility of modern business life, they just as often observed that a quite similar desire animated the work of such folklorists as B. A. Botkin and Howard Odum. As a result of such collective efforts, Babbitt had by mid-century largely cemented itself within the public imagination as a kind of literary and social-scientific hybrid, a text whose greatest novelistic contribution is to have trained a sociological eye upon that homegrown species H. L. Mencken had dubbed the American “booboisie.”
My point in recounting this chapter in the scholarly genealogy of Babbitt is not to assert that such parallels are misguided or entirely unwarranted. Indeed, to the extent that Lewis's portrait of white-collar life manifests a more culturally emblematic enthusiasm for micro- and macroscopic verisimilitude, there would seem ample justification for regarding it as a kindred text to its more overtly anthropologically minded contemporaries. Rather than discredit this affiliation, I want to argue instead that a large measure of its significance has been oddly overlooked. In fact, for all the effort expended over the years to affirm its ethnographic bona fides, no critical study has yet undertaken to connect Babbitt to the single issue which, more than any other, comprised the ethnography movement's signature tenet: history. As has repeatedly been noted, the anthropological enthusiasm of the 1920s was given impetus not merely by the emergence a new class of social-scientific professional; more pointedly, it was impelled by an increasingly pervasive public concern over how best to preserve vestiges of America's supposedly “vanishing” heritage.Footnote 6 Scouring a modern geography believed to be brimming with the tangible remnants of an indigenous cultural patrimony, those ethnographers, folklorists, journalists, and photographers of the period who undertook to document the minutiae of everyday life did so not only as a way to exercise their newfound professional authority, but also in order to (re)discover what Van Wyck Brooks had a generation before memorably termed “a usable past.” While analogies linking it to such anthropological efforts abound, Babbitt has nonetheless long been treated as if it were somehow exempt from this more fundamental preoccupation with pastness. For a novel long considered to be a touchstone of its times, such an omission is more than a little curious. What are we to make of this lacuna? Is it actually the case that, despite its apparent affinity with the ethnographic spirit of its era, the novel cares only about charting the emergence of the industrial–commercial “now”?
One way to begin answering this question is to return to the passage with which both this essay and the novel itself begins: the depiction of the Zenith cityscape. Because it so clearly aims to showcase the monuments of American modernity, it might not be immediately apparent how such a passage could be limned for traces of what might be called a historical sensibility. Indeed, to the extent that the past impinges at all upon the “clean” and “thrusting” ascendancy of America's sunny industrial future here, it appears to do so only as so much detritus: the “junked” remains which the inexorable trajectory of modern development seems to leave inevitably and indifferently in its wake.Footnote 7 As tempting as it may be to take up this scene's implicit invitation to read the stubborn persistence of the city's derelict “grotesqueries” as evidence of the degraded, “pitiable” status to which commercial capitalism consigned its memorials to the past, however, we would do well to ponder a bit longer what exactly such persistence signifies here: what relationship between the “then” and the “now” this birds-eye view of the modern cityscape ultimately maps, and (even more pertinently) what ideological work pastness itself is being conscripted to perform. Viewed from this perspective, the opening scene does a good deal more than subject the past to the pitiless logic of commercial and technological obsolescence. Invoking these decaying traces as tangible evidence of commercial society's own (albeit derelict) origins, it does not so much record a seamless process of historical displacement as reveal how capitalist development can function as its own instrument for historical preservation and exhibition. Rather than map modernity's assault upon the past, this passage more accurately constructs for this regime a kind of necessary genealogy: one in which the “structures of earlier generations” come to instigate and legitimate the trajectory of its own ascendance. In other words, Babbitt begins with a depiction of a “derelict” past as a way to compel it to perform a more efficacious role: to provide the nation's new, forward-lurching order with the kind of temporal coherence and historical context that its own emergence would seem otherwise to render impossible. Neither erased nor forgotten, the markers of the “bygone” which this scene so visibly foregrounds occupy a critically visible place within the geography of capitalist development, materializing corporate culture's need to forge a place for the past within its own, otherwise depthless, physical landscape and cultural imaginary.
Obviously, such a reading suggests a far more complex and overlapping connection between past and present within the novel than has conventionally been estimated. Beyond this rather general point, however, I want to argue that the real significance of this introductory scene is that it encapsulates an inquiry into the vexed relationship between history and corporate–commercial development (what historian David Glassberg has called in another context “the place of the past”) that stands at the very center of the narrative.Footnote 8 Taking these opening lines as a kind of blueprint, I undertake in the following pages to show how Lewis's efforts to create an ethnographic record of modern business life ultimately encoded an even deeper investigation into the peculiar role industrial–commercial development played in shaping how white-collar Americans thought about, valued, and pursued traces of their putative “heritage.” One of my principal goals in mounting this investigation is to query a long-standing presumption within public memory studies that for years has construed the idea(l)s of historical recovery and the operations of commercial capitalism as fundamentally, if not inherently, incompatible.Footnote 9 Balefully derided for mass-producing and mass-marketing a commodified pastness, dismissed as tools for replacing authentic history with ersatz heritage, modern development practices have stood for critics as vivid confirmation of Americans' fundamental disconnection from their common and authentic history.Footnote 10 Undertaking to complicate this view, my essay shows instead how Babbitt can be read as a powerful counterexample to such logic: one that casts modernization less as an adversary than as an adjunct to prevailing modes of public recollection.
Given the tenor of this last claim, one might expect the following pages to unfold as an extended apologia for commercial capitalism itself, to offer an argument that rehabilitates this regime's maligned reputation by recasting its central development practices as legitimate instruments of historical recovery. To do so, however, would be to misperceive the contribution this essay seeks to make. In the final analysis, this examination aims neither to indict corporate–capitalist development for its assault upon history nor to lionize it as the means of a laudable historical reclamation. Eschewing this dichotomy as a kind of false choice, it instead uses Babbitt's investigation of business, brokering, and real estate as an occasion for positing an entirely different way of thinking about memory and modernity – one that shifts our focus from the question of historical authenticity to the dynamics of social or class legitimation. Rather than adjudicate between “true” and “false” conceptions of the past in Babbitt, this study works instead to excavate the almost entirely overlooked role that pastness itself plays in structuring this text's examination of white-collar mores. As my choice of terminology here suggests, this is an approach that treats the issue of history less as an explicit feature of Babbitt's business critique (that is, an aspect of white-collar life which the novel labors in any overt way to evaluate or pass judgment upon) than as an embedded subtext that has always invisibly underwritten it. Put differently, I focus on Lewis's dissection of white-collar life in order to unearth what might be called the historical unconscious of his narrative.
MAPPING THE BROKERIST IMAGINARY: BABBITT AND THE DREAMS OF WHITE-COLLAR HERITAGE
If such an argument has the potential to reframe how we think about memory, commercialism, and capitalist notions of progress, it also raises some basic questions about the novel itself whose answers are not immediately apparent. How does Babbitt credibly and coherently depict a penchant for pastness that, by the terms of its own presentation, seems to arise directly out of modernity's relentless pursuit of the “new”? By what maneuvers does it endeavor to reconcile such a seeming contradiction? Complicating matters even further is the fact that Lewis undertakes his investigation in ways that (as I have already suggested) appear at first to have very little to do with history. Presenting its eponymous protagonist George F. Babbitt – a “40-year old, plump, bespectacled, altogether self-satisfied leader of the business class” (23) – as an object lesson in the vapidity and emptiness of the nation's emergent organizational society, the novel seems initially to be far more concerned with anatomizing the mores of a newly ascendant white-collar elite than with excavating this cohort's supposed interest in recovering a viable “heritage.” In his anxious preoccupation with social status and rank, his enthusiastic embrace of Rotarian politics, and his unalloyed faith in the beneficence of commercial capitalism, Lewis's white-collar antihero seems designed primarily, if not exclusively, to embody the tenets of the nation's prevailing progress narrative. It is just such an intention that can be glimpsed, for example, in the novel's earliest descriptions of Babbitt – portrayals that repeatedly cast this figure as an exemplary modern whose self-conception and worldview neatly mirror the commandments of a regnant free-market mythology:
Just as [Babbitt] was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief and the senators who controlled the Republican Party decided in smoky little rooms in Washington what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality. These standard advertised wares – toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters – were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom. (98)
Itemizing the products of commercial society remains such a prominent rhetorical strategy in part because it reinforces a connection between “standardized” things and “standardized” selves that is central to the novel's parody of white-collar life. Pegging the achievement of Babbitt's citizenship to the enactment of commodity fetishism, the novel routinely shapes its initial characterization of this archetypal businessman around just such catalogues – not only because such an approach references the growing ubiquity of commercial standardization in modern American life, but also because it succeeds in making the object-world of commercial society into the signifiers of an essentially empty white-collar interiority. Erasing the distinction between church membership or political affiliation on the one hand and brand loyalty on the other, passages like this invoke the specter of commodification in order to highlight the ways in which a logic of commercial “substitution” structures prevailing notions of white-collar selfhood: a logic through which the “advertising symbol” comes to stand as the most apt expression for the businessman's supposedly intrinsic consciousness.Footnote 11
What gives the invocation of such commodity logic its critical edge, however, is not only the way this tactic indicts the sterility of business culture, but also how it implicitly links the specter of “standardization” to notions of temporality. At first glance, this strategy seems to involve little more than rehashing clichés about the essential hollowness and depthlessness of modern commercial life – an approach that foregrounds the apparent absence of pastness in order to cast Babbitt and his cohorts as ever more exemplary moderns. Such a goal is evident, for example, within the novel's myriad early efforts to map the topographies of modern business life:
All about [Babbitt] the city was hustling, for hustling's sake. Men in motors were hustling to pass one another in the hustling traffic. Men were hustling to catch trolleys, with another trolley a minute behind, and to leap from the trolleys, to gallop across the sidewalk, to hurl themselves into buildings, into hustling express elevators. Men in dairy lunches were hustling to gulp down the food … Men in barber shops were snapping, “Jus' shave me once over. Gotta hustle.” (159–60)
More than a generic instance of commercial vernacular, “hustling” also operates here as a succinct temporal marker, a shorthand summarizing the businessman's relationship with time itself in terms that are at once both instrumental and adversarial. Casting the city's most visible monuments as little more than a two-dimensional stage upon which the dramas of transactional commerce get ceaselessly reenacted, these landscape portraits – what Babbitt himself extols elsewhere as “the extraordinary, growing, and sane standardization of stores, offices, streets, hotels, clothes, and newspapers throughout the United States” (192) – map a white-collar habitat from which all evidence of pastness seems to have been expunged, an arena whose aptness for this business cohort appears to derive precisely from its rootlessness.
This premise gets routinely amplified throughout the first half of the novel, perhaps nowhere more clearly than in Lewis's efforts to ironize the ethos of “pep” so central to models of white-collar commerce. Time and again, we are told, men like Babbitt “went profoundly into the science of business … whose title nobility was ‘Go-getter,’ and who devoted [themselves] … to the cosmic purpose of pure Selling” (146). Like “hustling,” “go-getting” remains so prominent a euphemism within the lexicon of business in part because it underscores so well the historical antipathy necessary to mark the businessman as a fit steward of industrial–commercial progress. In their fealty to the religion of “pure selling,” in their fundamental indifference to a world not circumscribed by the transactional relations of modern American commerce, Babbitt and his cohorts embrace a presentist form of “devotion” that (once again) appears to tether the businessman's legitimacy almost exclusively to modernity's unflagging pursuit of the “now.”
The most avid embodiment of such logic is, of course, Babbitt himself. “Babbitt spoke well and often,” we are told, “about the realtor's function as a seer of the future … a prophetic engineer clearing the way for inevitable changes” (44). As the novel repeatedly makes clear, such “changes” for Babbitt are registered nowhere more vividly than upon the geography of the built environment itself. Babbitt repeatedly extols and elaborates the broker's unique mission by imaginatively grounding it within a landscape from which all putative pastness has been voided. For Babbitt, it is the exclusively “forward-looking” nature of the built environment that most tangibly inscribes the trajectory of his own professional success – a connection which, in a speech before the Zenith Real Estate Board, he makes in especially strident tones:
Here's the specifications of the Standardized American Citizen! Here's the new generation of Americans: fellows with hair on their chests and smiles in their eyes and adding-machines in their offices … Our greatness, however, lies not alone in punchful prosperity but equally in that public spirit, that forward-looking idealism and brotherhood, which has marked Zenith ever since its foundation by the Fathers. We have a right, indeed we have a duty toward our fair city, to broadcast the facts about our magnificent new hotels and banks and the paintings and carved marble in their lobbies; and the Second National Tower, the second highest business building in any inland city in the entire country … unparalleled number of miles of paved streets, bathrooms, vacuum cleaners, and all the other signs of civilization. (193–94)
If we were to limit our investigation to such obviously parodic passages, it would be difficult not to see Babbitt as simply one more instance of this era's seemingly countless laments about the putative historylessness of commercial society. Indeed, in those moments where its impulse to simultaneously spatialize and temporalize its parody of business culture becomes particularly apparent, the novel resembles nothing so much as those pessimistic appraisals which issued regularly throughout this period from a variety of public intellectuals, urban critics and other self-styled theorists of the modern landscape. Typified by the work of such figures as Lewis Mumford, Benton MacKay, and Harold Stearns, this cadre gained renown throughout the 1920s and 1930s for their own, very Babbitt-like, attempts to anatomize a “developed” landscape which they regarded (in the words of one) as “a wilderness of monotonous, standardized, mechanized uniformity.”Footnote 12 The years surrounding the publication of Babbitt, in fact, are replete with studies that undertook to explicate what was frequently formulated as “the problem of industrial civilization”: a diagnosis which for countless such commentators cast industrial–commercial development itself as the principal symptom of America's increasing “emotional and aesthetic starvation.”Footnote 13 As did Lewis, these figures focussed the bulk of their attention on the built environment – in the words of Lewis Mumford, its “paved streets and sewers,” its “gas mains” and “office buildings,” its “hotels” and “department stores,” its “Rotary clubs” and “chambers of commerce” – that commercial modernity seemed inexorably ushering into existence. Mirroring his novel in their like-minded desire to read the “material growth and cultural impoverishment of the American city … as an index of the failures and costs of industrialization,” many such critics turned just to a specific vocabulary of pastness as a way to communicate their growing unease – figuring commercial development as a kind of historical declension, eventuating in the extinction of “tradition” and “heritage.” In the eyes of Van Wyck Brooks, for example, industrialization signaled nothing less than America's failure of “inheritance,” a failure to “seize and fertilize” national life “at its roots.” Sounding a similarly portentous note, Harold Stearns declaimed that, as a consequence of modern development, Americans “have no heritage or traditions to which to cling except those that have already withered in our hands and turned to dust.”Footnote 14
It is just as possible, however, to pursue these parallels too avidly. Despite the affinities connecting Lewis to this body of criticism, his chronicle of commercial life does a good deal more in the final analysis than simply reinforce prevailing conceits about the lamentably depthless character of the modern built landscape. Indeed, a closer inspection shows the past to be far from entirely forgotten or expunged, comprising instead a crucial, even constituent, element within those brokering practices most critical to commercial development itself. One need only return to Babbitt's aforementioned speech before his real-estate peers, for instance, to begin discerning how often Lewis's text puts the past into an even more complex dialectic with the forward-moving energies of modern commercialism. By the logic of this sermon's own boosterism, it is only because the redeveloped geography of “hotels,” “banks,” and office “towers” will speak to subsequent generations yet unborn, only because its “paved” tableaux will eventually stand as a kind of touchstone or memorial retrospectively referencing the achievements of twentieth-century business “civilization,” that it becomes such a serviceable template of modern progress. For the broker, in other words, the most modern features of the built landscape can speak the narratives of progress only because they possess at the same time a potent artifactual character. They compel such avid attention not merely because they preview a rosy future for commercial capitalism, but also because they serve to endow this new system with the raw materials out of which its “heritage” can be envisioned as well.
Read as a meditation on “heritage,” in fact, Babbitt's speech offers an especially telling clue about the ultimate purpose to which the novel puts its temporal investigation. In the final analysis, what impels Lewis's examination of the past is a desire to explicate the modern businessman's overdetermined and fraught search for “roots.” From residential suburban neighborhoods to downtown financial districts, from offices and boardrooms to social clubs and vacation “get aways,” the novel presents a taxonomy of white-collar (social, recreational, professional) space whose built dimensions seem designed to endow these stewards of commercial modernity with an aura of historicity they otherwise lack entirely. Take, for example, the novel's initial, seemingly parodic, description of the Zenith Athletic Club, the preeminent site within the novel of white-collar recreational fraternity and social intercourse:
The entrance lobby of the Athletic Club was Gothic, the washroom Roman Imperial, the lounge Spanish Mission, and the reading-room in Chinese Chippendale, but the gem of the club was the dining room, the masterpiece of Ferdinand Reitman, Zenith's busiest architect. It was lofty and half-timbered with Tudor leaded casements, an oriel, a somewhat musicianless musicians gallery, and tapestries believed to illustrate the granting of the Magna Carta. The open beams had been hand-adzed at Jake Offut's car-body works, the hinges were of hand-wrought iron, the wainscot studded with hand-made wooden pegs, and at one end of the room was a heraldic and hooded stone fireplace which the club's advertising-pamphlet asserted to be not only larger than any of the European castles but of a draught incomparably more scientific. It was also much cleaner, as no fire had ever been built in it. (540)
It would be easy to read the mélange of pseudo-historical styles so ironically evoked here as confirmation of what one critic has called American culture's “historicidal” tendency: its inveterate, seemingly intrinsic, hostility to idea(l)s of the past.Footnote 15 Simultaneously evoking and satirizing how absurdly artificial and ultimately fruitless the search for one's “true” origins becomes when pursued within a landscape so thoroughly reshaped by the practices of modern development, it would appear only to confirm our worst suspicions about the oblivion to which all forms of so-called “authentic” history get consigned under corporate capitalism. Such a reading makes sense, however, only when we forget that Babbitt trains its gaze less upon commercial modernity per se than upon the particular mores of the modern American businessman. When understood less as a generic attack upon commercialism and more as the portrait of a specifically white-collar habitat, its jarring juxtaposition of “stone fireplaces” and “advertising-pamphlets” begins to tell a different story. From this perspective, what we see within such catalogues is not some cautionary tale regarding the mass reproducibility of bogus history, but rather a diagnostic effort to delineate the contours of an emergent, white-collar historical consciousness – one intended to render the idea(l) of “heritage” somehow compatible with the practices and position of the modern businessman.
It is this strategy that can be glimpsed in the novel's many scenes which figure the site of brokerist interaction as unsettlingly liminal and timeless locales. With striking regularity, the moments where Babbitt most powerfully experiences a sense of kinship with his business peers take place within “nowhere” settings (hotel rooms, restaurants, office building lobbies, and train cars) that activate rather than resolve anxieties about the businessman's connection to the past. An especially telling example of this can be found in a scene where Babbitt is travelling by train with his friend, the disgruntled and dissatisfied “roofing salesman” Paul Riesling, to a vacation spot in Maine. Striking up a conversation in the dining car with “tribe” of “fellow jaw-benders” (other salesmen, brokers, businessmen), Babbitt quickly comes to feel an uncanny sense of being “at home” as the train rushes headlong through the night:
They were on the New York express … [t]hey were free, in a man's world, in the smoking compartment of the Pullman. Outside the car window was a glaze of darkness stippled with the gold of infrequent mysterious lights. Babbitt was immensely conscious, in the sway and authoritative clatter of the train of going on, of going on … (142)
[then] [t]hey were entering a city. On the outskirts they passed a steel-mill which flared in scarlet and orange flame that licked at the cadaverous stacks, at the iron-sheathed walls and sullen converters. “My Lord, look at that – beautiful!” said Paul. “You bet it's beautiful, friend. That's the Shelling-Horton Steel Plant, and they tell me old John Shelling made a good three million bones out of munitions during the war!” the man in the velour hat said reverently. “I didn't mean – I mean it's lovely the way the light pulls that picturesque yard, all littered with junk, right out of the darkness.” (147)
As it first unfolds, this scene seems to register the ways that the sine qua non of white-collar existence, placelessness, can actually confer upon the businessman an intensified sense of his own status. “Going on and on,” the train's incessant forward movement casts this locale as privileged precisely because it is so liminal. Only when he is riding within the transitory nowhere of the “Pullman” car, this passage informs us, does Babbitt feel truly “free.” As it proceeds, however, this scene becomes more and more concerned with the ways the connection between temporal and spatial liminality on the one hand and white-collar authority on the other can just as easily be decoupled – the ultimate effect of which is less to reinforce some sense of kinship among this brokering cadre than to establish a stark and destabilizing difference between the ad hoc homeliness of the train compartment and the “dark,” “mysterious” landscape that lies immediately outside its windows. Nor is this difference, despite the misunderstanding over this landscape's “picturesque” qualities, merely an aesthetic one. What puts Paul in such a momentarily awkward and adversarial relation to his putative peer has ultimately less to do with any sublimity he discerns within this industrial geography than it does with the ways the scene figures this tableau as “junked” – that is, as a terrain dotted with vestiges of a vanishing past. What most formatively differentiates these two perspectives, in other words, is not so much issues of “taste” as questions of history: whether the built environment is best viewed as a template of commercial profitability and progress or as a map inscribed with the traces of the nation's obsolete remains. Whereas those surrounding Paul exemplify the businessman's typically instrumentalist orientation toward time – repeatedly consulting, for example, a “time table” to see whether the train remains “on schedule” – Paul's aestheticizing gaze maps a different kind of temporal relationship, one constituted more out of a desire to commune with the past than to exercise dominion over it. From this perspective, the scene can be understood not only as depicting the condition of white-collar rootlessness, but as staging a response to it as well. Significantly, while Paul savors and meditates upon his yearning for something that seems unreachable, his counterparts quickly pull down the window shades – in order, as this scene concludes, to “shut themselves in from the uncomfortable strangeness of the night” (149). Like Babbitt's “standardized” bedroom, these transitory, depthless sites give rise to uncertainties about one's “roots,” even as they reaffirm the kind of fraternity he and his kind so urgently seek.
Moments like this warrant extended scrutiny not only because they so vividly register the ambivalence Paul and Babbitt both feel regarding their putative rootedness, but also because they remind us how inextricably bound to this era's larger drama of white-collar legitimation such doubts about pastness were. As numerous scholars have noted, the ascendance of a new managerial elite in twentieth-century American life was accompanied by pronounced uncertainties over how best to understand both the meaning and the mission of white-collar work – uncertainties that in many ways revolved centrally around the question of history.Footnote 16 Indeed, for all the social and economic clout that accrued from their rise within the nation's increasingly hierarchized organizational society, members of this new cadre were fraught with pronounced uncertainties that their newly sanctioned position was historically depthless. Credentialed in newly founded professional schools, staffing the offices of corporate, governmental, and educational bureaucracies, they undertook, in the words of Janice Radway, to make those on the margins “think, behave, and desire in ways congruent with monopoly capital.”Footnote 17 Poised somewhere in between the corporate–bureaucratic agencies they served and the general public they addressed, members of this class inhabited an ambiguous, middling position within the new corporate–commercial order that was at once crucial to its operations and yet also unsettlingly indeterminate.
White-collar uncertainties over place were perhaps most urgently exacerbated by what historian Stuart Blumin has called the “doctrine of social atomism” that lay at the heart of the professional–managerial class ethos.Footnote 18 Emphasizing the white-collar professional's fundamental detachment from familial, regional, religious, ethnic, and especially historical affiliations, this ideal predicated identity less on one's connection to a particular geographical region or cultural heritage than on one's membership within one of the nation's emerging corporate or bureaucratic agencies. While such understandings accorded with a conception of the white-collar subject as an objective, disinterested professional, they also threatened to void white-collar selfhood itself of any connection to the past. Possessing aspirations to a viable “heritage” but lacking the requisite resources (both material and social) that traditionally guaranteed it, white-collar workers faced the paradoxical task of forging a historical identity that could simultaneously sanction their work as mediators of the capitalist “now.”
Nowhere were such doubts about place and pastness more urgently felt than in the real-estate business. As Jeffrey Hornstein has written, the decades of the early twentieth century marked a point of severe crisis for this fraction of the white-collar class – in large measure because, more explicitly than any other segment of this professional cohort, they were tasked with shepherding the emergence of a new and suppposedly “depthless” built environment.Footnote 19 For the brokers and speculators who comprised the vanguard of this industry, questions about the putative historicity of the modern landscape they were creating loomed increasingly larger, as this cadre labored harder and harder to consolidate itself into a coherent and respectable profession. Whatever parochial differences among them may have obtained, these figures were nonetheless linked by a common desire to dispel the prevailing view of real-estate development itself as little more than a blunt instrument for erasing all traces of the individual, the local, and the communal from the land. More than anything else, what this desire hinged upon was an effort to recast development as public-spirited enterprise: one not dictated by the abstract laws of the commercial marketplace but rather guided by a reformist impulse to preserve peoples’ intrinsic connection to their own traditions and “ways of life.” Not surprisingly, this effort placed many real-estate people in highly ambivalent relation to those market forces which (their protestations notwithstanding) still shaped the character and mission of their own careers.Footnote 20 To figure the realtor as “a civic-minded professional putting expertise in the service of mankind” (52), many discovered, meant having to disavow the animating principle of private property – a belief in the alienability of all land, its capacity to be freely detached and marketed as a commodity – that, for better or worse, continued to define the nature and purpose of their work.
Perhaps not unexpectedly, it is this same dilemma – how to simultaneously acknowledge and ameliorate the broker's enmeshment within the commercial marketplace – that Babbitt most often connects to its own investigation of history. Like the brokers and speculators of this era that they were intended to exemplify, Babbitt and his peers consistently strive to articulate a vision of their own professionalism that disaffiliates brokering itself from the most abstract and instrumentalist facets of the mass marketplace. In their case, however, this attempt to distance oneself from the commercial takes on a somewhat different form, expressing itself less as a desire to historicize the built environment than as a yearning for reconnection to their own lost “roots.” Indeed, it is not going too far to claim that historicizing the dilemma of brokerist professionalism stands as one of the novel's chief objectives. More than any other document of its era, in fact, Lewis's narrative registers how doubts about the broker's professional legitimacy and concerns over his putative historicity can powerfully overlap, cannily apprehending the degree to which the realtor's unfolding search for an extra-commercial rationale intersected with and intensified seemingly intractable doubts about the viability of a specifically white-collar heritage.
The novel, for example, is rife with moments that seek to limn the brokerist imaginary, surveying an interior landscape of white-collar disaffection and doubt which it then goes on to link to concerns about the past. Those moments where Babbitt seems to be most hauntingly plagued with doubts about the purpose and value of brokering seem almost always to be those where his sense of dislocation from his “roots” is also most pronounced. No scenes better capture this than Babbitt's own repeated fantasies about the “fairy girl,” an idealized and nostalgic image summoned into his imagination always at moments when Babbitt feels least fulfilled by the prospect of his own success:
He seemed prosperous, extremely married and unromantic; and altogether unromantic appeared this sleeping-porch, which looked on one sizable elm, two respectable grass-plots, a cement driveway, and a corrugated iron garage. Yet Babbitt was again dreaming of the fairy child … For years the fairy girl had come to him. Where others saw but Georgie Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth. She waited for him, in the darkness beyond the mysterious groves. When at last he could slip away from the crowded house he darted to her. His wife, his clamoring friends, sought to follow, but he escaped, the girl fleet beside him, and they crouched together on a shadowy hillside. (2–3)
Crucially, the “fairy girl” instigates more than a longing for a generic escape; like the terminology the novel subsequently uses to describe real-estate “speculation,” this term is offered here primarily as a temporal marker. Instigating within Babbitt an overdetermined fantasy of regression, one that predicates brokerist legitimacy on regaining a lost “gallant youth,” the “fairy girl” begins to reveal how often in the novel white-collar uncertainty articulates itself through a specific idiom of the bygone. Equally noteworthy is the fact that what impels Babbitt's reverie here is the spectacle of development itself: a tableau of “grass-plots” and “cement driveway” that casts Babbitt's sense of his own mission and place into even greater doubt. Indeed, these “fairy girl” scenes are in many ways best understood as mapping a rival landscape to the modern built environment, one which not only opposes but also imaginatively undoes the progress myths which these commercial geographies so tangibly inscribe. Whereas the past circulates within this environment as a discrete object to be managed and manipulated by savvy brokers, in this alternative evocation it emerges as something radically antithetical – and thus dangerously destabilizing – to brokerist authority altogether.
We might pursue the implications of this discrepancy by revisiting the scene on the train, in which Babbitt and Paul are wending their way not to their offices or their social club, but to yet another rival landscape: a vacation spot in Maine, a destination which Babbitt repeatedly imagines as an escape from his professional routine. To a great extent, the novel evokes Maine in terms that seem to parallel almost the dreamscape summoned into being by the “fairy girl,” a terrain imagined as a counterpoint to the routinized world of white-collar work, that both externalizes and seems to fulfill the broker's subterranean yearnings for a return to his “gallant” roots:
A raft had floated down the lake; between the logs and the shore, the water was transparent, thin-looking, flashing with minnows … The thick sunlight was lavish on the bright water, on the rim of the gold-green balsam boughs, the silver birches and tropic ferns, and across the lake it burned on the sturdy shoulders of the mountain. Over everything there was a holy peace. Silent [Babbitt and Paul] loafed on the edge of the wharf, swinging their legs above the water. The immense tenderness of the place sank into Babbitt, and he murmured, “I'd like to just sit here – the rest of my life – and whittle – and sit. And never hear a typewriter. Or Stan Graff fussing on the phone” … He patted Paul's shoulder. “How does that strike you, old snoozer?” “Oh, it's darn good, Georgie. There's something sort of eternal about it.” For once, Babbitt understood him. (152–53)
As a site at once both anti- and precommercial, Maine seems to present Babbitt with an ideal opportunity for reconnecting to his lost roots. “This is getting back home, eh?,” he remarks to Paul shortly after arriving, a comment that underscores how tangibly he experiences his escape from the business world in temporal terms, as a kind of regression. A pastoral setting that offers a refuge from the rationalized strictures of white-collar routine, the only place where feels truly liberated from the “nervous loquacity and opinionation” of his conventional life, this locale stands as the one site in the novel where the instrumentalism and supervisorial acumen so central to the broker's management of time appears to be definitively short-circuited. It might at first seem curious that Babbitt would embrace rather than lament this diminution in his own authority. Yet, as these scenes make clear, he feels such palpable excitement because the perks and practices of brokerist life have come to entail for him the unsettling loss of something far more valuable: historical rootedness. The wild primordiality of this locale comprises its principle virtue precisely because it holds forth the promise of recovering his “primitive and heroic” nature (303).Footnote 21 Its supposedly undeveloped vistas offer such a welcome respite, in other words, because they measure such a drastic distance from a market-driven world that has drained the broker's life of all temporal depth.
From the outset, however, there is ample evidence to suggest this search for a redemptive “heritage” is too rife with contradictions to be ultimately sustainable. Babbitt's own strenuous efforts to envision it as a premodern pastoral notwithstanding, Maine never quite succeeds in living up to its billing as a locus of white-collar roots. Even as he evokes this “wilderness” as an anticapitalist idyll, the narrative works steadily in the opposite direction, repeatedly casting his pursuit of precommercial “origins” as a journey which only the latest commercial advancements have made possible. From ironic descriptions of the “brand-new khaki outfit” he buys for his trip to the repeated references to this vacation spot's hotels, tourist shops, and guides-for-hire, the site of the white-collar subject's “homecoming” reveals the mass marketplace to be less the benighted counterpoint to than the very basis of those “folk” origins Babbitt so urgently seeks. His dreams of a primordial return to his roots, for example, derive from the most “standardized” fare of the modern culture industry:
If he could but take up a backwoods claim … work hard with his hands, be free and noisy in a flannel shirt, and never come back to this dull decency. Or, like a trapper in a Northern Canada movie, plunge through the forest, make camp in the Rockies, a grim and wordless caveman! Why not? He could do it … Lord, how I'd like to do it! Moccasins – six gun – frontier town – gamblers – sleep under the stars – be a regular man. (303–4)
Nowhere does this paradox get more extensively elaborated than in Babbitt's second visit to Maine – a “return” trip that, more than any other moment in the novel, throws into confusion both the point and the purpose behind the white-collar dream of coming “home.” In Babbitt's strained attempts to bond with his “nature” guide (the aptly named Joe Paradise), for instance, we see again the kind of circular logic through which the white-collar subject seeks to gain contact with his heritage. As he does with the landscape itself, Babbitt at first strives to fashion Joe into an idealized emblem of anticommercialism: a vehicle capable of transporting the businessman back into rejuvenating contact with the past. Tramping through the woods with his guide, Babbitt, we learn, feels
dwarfed and dumb and a little awed … [an] insignificance that freed him from the pomposities of being Mr. George F. Babbitt of Zenith; saddened and freed in his heart … [Joe is] one of those woodsmen; too wise to go yelping and talking your arm off like a cityman. But get him back in the mountains, out on the trail – ! That's real living! (305–6)
Such attempts to venture “out on the trail,” to forge a passage to terrain somehow unmarked by the “city-fied” falsifications of modern life, however, invariably founder in the face of Joe's own oft-stated sympathy for and interest in commercial life itself. In fact, where Babbitt sees Joe as the repository of a precious (and, he hopes, ultimately transferable) “vernacular-ness,” Joe sees Babbitt in the opposite terms: as an emissary from the very business world he hopes someday to join. “Joe,” Babbitt asks,
“what would you do if you had a lot of money? Would you stick to guiding, or would you make a claim 'way back in the woods and be independent of the people?” For the first time Joe brightened. He chewed his cud a second, and bubbled, “I've often thought of that! If I had the money, I'd go down to Tinker's Falls and open a swell shoe store.” (308)
Numerous critics over the years have focussed on this scene, by and large reading its ironic exchange between businessman and woodsman as a crucial turning point: the moment where Babbitt's Maine-induced fantasies become thoroughly disenchanted, where the logic of primordial regression they so clearly stage doubles back upon itself. And to be sure, there are any number of ways the novel seems to support this view. While Babbitt hopes this interaction will transform him into the kind of folk figure he believes he is addressing, it is quite clear that we see something more like the opposite unfold. This exchange does not “return” him to a world disconnected from transactionalism and commerce; instead it discloses how formatively this quintessentially modern terrain has always comprised his true home. Less straightforward, however, is the conclusion that has so often followed from these observations, namely that this scene exposes how ineffectual, indeed fraudulent, Babbitt's search for his lost “roots” was always fated to be. Does it really make sense to read this moment as a failed attempt at escape? Is it actually the case that, his apparently fondest wishes notwithstanding, this moment reveals Babbitt to be trapped within a mass marketplace whose commercial boundaries he wants nothing more fervently than to evade? What are the implications of embracing a reading of this scene that relies so heavily upon the notion of white-collar victimhood?
In her own recent investigation into white-collar subjectivity, critic Catherine Jurca offers perhaps the best starting point for formulating an answer. In this work (which includes an extended discussion of Babbitt), Jurca compellingly argues that – far more than assertions of professional expertise or managerial efficiency – confessions of “victimization” are what stand at the center of white-collar authority. A practice that gets gathered under the rubric “middle-class self pity,” such confessions form a motif which she sees operating within early and mid-century narratives about white-collar life. While it aims to reimagine the “material advantages” of white-collar life as “artifacts of spiritual and cultural oppression,”Footnote 22 this pattern of abjection, Jurca argues, functions in the end as an effective legitimation strategy – verifying in its very act of disavowal the incontrovertible fact of white-collar (material, cultural, professional) power. Jurca's argument is especially pertinent to a discussion about Babbitt and Maine because it points to the ways the deflation of brokerist fantasy here can be read as something other than a challenge to white-collar privilege. Indeed, it is striking how quickly Babbitt's “self pity” gives ways to something far more buoyant and hopeful. Given how urgently he has labored to figure Maine as an antimodern heritage site, one might expect his conversation with Joe Paradise to more thoroughly discourage within Babbitt any further thoughts about his roots. Yet this is not at all what happens. Joe's response elicits from Babbitt no clear-eyed refusal to any more indulge in nostalgic reverie. Instead, it occasions a different, but equally intense, new fantasy, one that embraces the modern business world, that accepts its landscape as the site and source of his own intrinsic origins:
Babbitt sat on the stump, facing the dark pond, slapping mosquitoes. Save the snoring guide, there was no other human being within ten miles. He was lonelier than he had ever been in his life. Then he was in Zenith. He was worrying as to whether Miss McGoun wasn't paying too much for carbon paper. He was at once resenting and missing the persistent teasing of the Roughneck's Table … He was wondering whether, after the summer's maturity of being a garageman, Ted [his son] would “get busy” in the university … “Gee, I can't seem to get away from thinking about these folks!” Thus it came to him merely to run away was folly, because he could never run away from himself. (308–9)
It is here that we see how entirely, if also how stealthily, convictions of white-collar victimhood can transmute themselves into expressions of white-collar confidence. Babbitt's disenchantment does not lead him to brood on the impossibility of escaping the clutches of the commercial realm; rather, it elicits an empowering acknowledgment that such escape was never really the point. While at first it evokes feelings of isolation, alienation and “loneliness,” this discovery confers upon him in the end an even more pronounced sense of his own relevance, centrality and legitimacy. To put the case differently: conclusions about the failed nature of Babbitt's search for roots make sense only when we read his thoughts about “returning” to Zenith as themselves an unambiguous “turn” away from the past – and toward something figured exclusively as a depthless terrain of the “now.” As the novel repeatedly makes evident elsewhere, however, traces of the bygone are never entirely evacuated – either from the geography of commercial modernity or from the inner landscape of the broker's own fraught imagination. Easy conclusions about the temporal two-dimensionality of Babbitt's life become especially difficult to sustain, in other words, because the novel itself has repeatedly shown us how to see his sentimental recollections about office and family life as part of a much more pervasive strategy of white-collar legitimation. Indeed, by evoking the most contemporary features of Zenith life within the form of a flashback, the novel signals how thoroughly commingled past and present have always been for Babbitt. Understood in these terms, Lewis's persistent efforts to collapse the distance/difference between an indigenous past (i.e. Joe or Maine) and a commercial present do not prove his intent to indict white-collar life for its pastlessness; rather, they reflect his desire to represent pastness itself as a constituent feature of modernization, to posit “heritage” as less a casualty than a consequence of development.
To advance such an argument is, in a sense, to double back on ourselves: to return the essay once again to the depiction of the modern landscape with which this discussion first began. Like this inaugural scene, the novel overall dedicates itself to showing how fantasies of regression and acts of speculation must ultimately be viewed as two sides of the same brokerist coin. Motivated by a common managerial logic – one that links dreams of “escape” to practices of development – both activities model a way of thinking about history that goes beyond the simple binary (that is, the one dividing the intrinsic or “real” past from its commercialized other) that has so often organized our most normative assumptions about memory and modernity. Thoroughly eliding the difference between looking forward and looking backward, Babbitt presents us with a landscape in which the residual traces of the bygone only serve more firmly to root the modern subject in the terra firma of industrial–commercial development. While the future-oriented drive of development undeniably engenders intense longings for a connection to a “real” past, it also (as we have seen) simultaneously creates the conditions through which such yearnings can be resolved. Embedding within the modern geography precisely those sites within which white-collar Americans can imagine a “return” to their own roots, this operation compensates for its own effects, salving an ontological crisis – a crisis of origins – it is most responsible for exacerbating.
To be sure, any model that makes history into an adjunct or template of modernization, that effectively conscripts the past into serving as a kind of surrogate for corporate–commercial development, raises some fundamental questions: about the scope and meaning of public remembrance, the dynamics of historical representation and recovery, the politics of inclusion and exclusion. To tether notions of history to the practices and protocols of a discrete managerial cohort, after all, is not simply to tailor the past along corporate–bureaucratic lines; it also to draw very particular boundaries (social, racial, and gender) around who is and is not allowed to claim the past as their own. From this perspective, the most pertinent questions raised by an investigation into managerial memory would seem to revolve less around the issue of historical authenticity than around historical ownership. Whose history does this model ultimately purport to tell? And whose, conversely, does it displace or overlook? If temporality itself can be made subject to the rationalizing strictures of white-collar managerialism, is it really that far-fetched to wonder whether such a routinized and abstracted model of history – one that simultaneously explains and impels the ascent of corporate capitalism itself – has the potential to crowd out all those stories of the past whose features are less congruent with the imperatives of this new order? For support of this hypothesis, we need only recall the uses to which marginal or vernacular history – whether it be the “junked” flotsam dotting the Zenith landscape or the preindustrial pastoral of Maine – appears to get put in Babbitt. As we saw, managerial memory unfolds in large part as a process of temporal and cultural recycling, in which the tangible, material remains of bygone eras are taken up and reimagined as the grounds of a specifically white-collar heritage. Mining the sites of a pre- or anticapitalist past in order to expropriate their imagined qualities of intrinsicness, treating history itself no differently than any other industrial raw material, it is an operation that seems at first glance to offer a classic example of capitalist cooptation.
Before too quickly acceding to this view, however, we would do well to recall that the model of memory presented in Babbitt is also a deeply ambivalent one. As the novel makes evident at virtually every turn, this is not a template that sutures pastness to the practices of commercial–capitalist development in any simple or seamless way. Its principal utility, lest we forget, resides in its capacity to organize and articulate white-collar fears: about the loss of history, about one's fractured relationship with heritage, about the elusiveness and arbitrariness of origins themselves. For all its apparent usefulness, in other words, managerial memory is an operation that regularly, almost inevitably, seems to fall short of its hegemonic promise – a fact that makes questions about its purpose and place more opaque than they first appear. When all is said and done, how are we to understand a search whose very yearning for “roots” animates the very ontological doubts it is supposed to resolve?
It is precisely this paradox, in fact, that gives us a way to recuperate the idea of marginal or minoritized history. Because managerial memory unfolds so unsteadily, because it remains so thoroughly steeped in anxiety and uncertainty, the possibility of an alternative past could be said to live on within Babbitt – if only as the dissonance or gap between what the self-doubting broker pursues and what he actually achieves. Indeed, when we take stock of how many different traces of the pre- or anticapitalist past this narrative actually preserves, we begin to appreciate the extent to which an alternative history really does endure here – a history that modern development can neither fully expunge nor entirely absorb. Persisting in their stubborn visibility, these locales constitute the sites of an ineradicable capitalist residue, repositories of backwardness whose very obsolescence registers their resistance to corporate–commercial progress. Perhaps this, more than any other, is the message the novel's opening scene – that emblematic Zenith cityscape – is ultimately designed to convey, namely that to gaze upon a tableau of development is always to engage in a kind of double vision, one in which the traces of an unassimilable bygone remain as intractably and “grotesquely” present as the monuments of modernity themselves. Perhaps in the end, it is more accurate to see the past performing a complicated dual role in Babbitt: underwriting corporate–commercial development while simultaneously reminding us what remains anterior and alterior to it.
