⁰⁰¹ Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (New York: Bantam, 1998), 1. Further page references are in parentheses in the text.

⁰⁰² Stephen S. Conroy, “Sinclair Lewis's Sociological Imagination,” in Harold Bloom, ed., Sinclair Lewis (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 31. For other examples of this kind of thinking see Glen A. Love, Babbitt: An American Life (New York: Twayne, 1993); David C. Pugh, “Baedekers, Babbittry, and Baudelaire,” in Martin Bucco, ed., Critical Essays on Sinclair Lewis (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986); Mark Schorer, ed., Sinclair Lewis: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962).

⁰⁰³ To be sure, some of the more recent scholarship has begun to reconceive this critical orthodoxy, perhaps most notably in the work of Christopher Wilson and Catherine Jurca. Seeking to revise the conception of Lewis as a “diagnostic debunker” of white-collar life, a primarily “journalistic, ‘externalizing’, and even documentarian novelist of middle-class manners,” Wilson reads Babbitt instead as an extended attempt by Lewis to mediate and manage the “confluence” of “literary and commercial” idioms that characterized not only the early twentieth-century marketplace of letters, but more specifically Lewis's own early career in the book-publishing and mass-advertising fields. The result of such a biographical reading, according to Wilson, is to see Babbitt in terms beyond what “its apparently documentary surfaces” would suggest – surfaces that are “not simply by-products of field work or ‘scientific observation … [but that are rather] thick cultural descriptions layered with the thinner tissues of Lewis's own white-collar apprenticeship” (210). For Wilson, Lewis's prose does more than depict the dynamics of white-collar life; instead, it embeds and enacts a deeper logic of white-collar selfhood, collapsing in the process the distance conventionally believed to obtain between author/ethnographer and documentary subject. In many ways, my essay build upon this insight, seeking to understand the novel less as an effort simply to comment upon the ways corporate–commercial culture produces notions of history, and more as a site upon which a new cultural logic – what I call managerial memory – gets enacted. For Jurca, Lewis's novel is an entry in long list of twentieth-century “suburban novels,” all of which in one way or another register the “white-collar suburbanite's” conflicted relationship with place. See Edmund Wilson, “Portrait of a Sage,” New Republic, 1 March 1929, 31; Catherine Jurca, White Diaspora: the Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), chapter 2.

⁰⁰⁴ Ludwig Lewisohn, “Review of Babbitt,” Nation, 22 Sept. 1922, 284–86, 284; Robert Littel, “Babbitt,” New Republic, 1 Oct. 1922, 152; Lewis Mumford, “The America of Sinclair Lewis,” in Mark Schorer, ed., Sinclair Lewis: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 159. Countless other early reviews hew to the same critical line, saluting Babbitt in one way or another as the era's canniest and most damning “portrait” of the nation's new organizational society. In some cases, this kind of thinking stretched to encompass the novel's protagonist, the eponymous George F. Babbitt, confirming his status as more social scientific archetype than individual character – in the words of one reviewer, the “standardized child of that standardized city.” Rebecca West, “Babbitt,” New Statesman, 21 Oct. 1922, 12.

⁰⁰⁵ A number of critics and historians trace the genesis for such “folk” interest back to a shift in the ways that academics, social scientists and other intellectuals came during these years to define the idea of “culture” itself: a shift away from older, Arnoldian conceptions (e.g. the best that has been thought or said) to more explicitly anthropological models defining it (in the words of Warren Susman) “in terms of patterns of behavior and belief, values and life-styles, symbols and meanings” (154). Susman goes on to link this shift to the emergence of a more self-conscious and rationalized orientation among Americans more generally – what he calls the “general discovery of the idea [of culture] itself, the sense of awareness of what it means to be a culture, or the search to become a kind of culture.” Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 125. For other discussions of this shift to more anthropological conceptions of culture, see Robert Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).

⁰⁰⁶ See, for example, Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory (New York: Knopf, 1991), chapter 7; Michael Wallace, Mickey Mouse History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), chapter 2.

⁰⁰⁷ Presenting an environment that looks to be uniquely inhospitable to ideas and ideals of the bygone, this passage seems at first to exemplify what urban historian Robert Fogelson has deemed this era's typical attitude toward urban skylines in general and skyscrapers in particular, an ahistorical attitude toward the built landscape, one which views them as templates for “a young and assertive nation with its best years ahead,” symbolizing modern America's “disdain for tradition [and] willingness to experiment.” Robert Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

⁰⁰⁸ David Glassberg, A Sense of Place: The Place of the Past in American Life (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).

⁰⁰⁹ In addition to Kammen; and John Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: Rise and Decline of the American Man-Made Landscape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); see Dean MacCannell, Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976); Wallace.

⁰¹⁰ Wallace, 2. Not surprisingly, the denigration of historical tourism has often gone hand in hand with the celebration of cultural ethnography and the work of folklorists – reflected in those critics who have sought to construe historical restoration efforts as another instance of the anticapitalist ethos believed to have fueled so much of the era's cultural, intellectual, and political life. See, for instance, essays in Burt Feintuch, ed., Conservation of Culture (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1988).

⁰¹¹ Much the same strategy can be glimpsed, for example, in the oft-cited passage mapping Babbitt's suburban bedroom, a description that seeks to configure this putatively private space as the site of an overdetermined commodity spectacle: “The room displayed a modest and pleasant color-scheme, after one of the best standard designs of the decorator who ‘did the interiors’ for most of the speculative-builders' houses in Zenith. The walls were gray, the woodwork white, the rug a serene blue; and very much like mahogany was the furniture … the plain twin beds, between them a small table holding a standard electric bedside lamp, a glass for water, and a standard bedside book with colored illustrations … It was a masterpiece among bedrooms, right out of Cheerful Modern Houses for Medium Incomes. Only it had nothing to do with the Babbitts, nor with anyone else. If people had ever lived and loved here, read thrillers at midnight and lain in beautiful indolence on a Sunday morning, there were no signs of it. It had the air of being a very good room in a very good hotel” (14–15). Stocked with accoutrements mass-produced by the engines of a burgeoning consumer society, these anonymous living spaces warrant such detailed scrutiny in the novel not merely because they reveal the outsized place the commodity occupied in white-collar life, but (once again) also because they disclose how such “standardized” exteriors come to comprise the true “interior” of white-collar existence as well.

⁰¹² Benton Mackay, quoted in Dorman, 143.

⁰¹³ Harold Stearns, Preface, Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans (New York: Harcourt, 1922), vii.

⁰¹⁴ Van Wyck Brooks, “The Culture of Industrialism,” rpt in Claire Sprague, ed., Van Wyck Brooks: The Early Years (New York: Harper, 1968), 54; Stearns, vii.

⁰¹⁵ Wallace, 3.

⁰¹⁶ See especially Barbara, and Ehrenreich, John, “The Professional-Managerial Class,” Radical America, 11 (March–April 1977), 6–31Google Scholar.

⁰¹⁷ Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month-Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 251.

⁰¹⁸ Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

⁰¹⁹ Jeffrey M. Hornstein, A Nation of Realtors: A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

⁰²⁰ By the mid-1920s, in fact, such efforts had resulted in such advancements as the creation of a national organization to oversee and systematize real-estate practices (the National Real Estate Board or NAREB); the institution of a single, nation-wide set of licensing procedures for those entering the field; the passage of legislation codifying restrictions around the zoning and marketing of land; and the copyrighting of a new term for the profession altogether: “realtor.” In many respects, what this professionalization devoted itself to was an effort to place the “realtor” on a par within the public imagination with urban theorists like Mumford and Stearns – experts whose work was understood and legitimated as reform-minded.

⁰²¹ For Babbitt, the return to one's roots evokes nothing more vividly than the feeling of being a “regular man,” a fantasy that on closer inspection does not so much reiterate as invert the core boosterist ideal of being a “Regular Guy”: an invocation that appropriates the PMC ideal of “regularness” (i.e. deployed to highlight the transparency, normativity, and authority of white-collar life) and vigorously historicizes it, thereby refiguring the broker himself (i.e. the quintessentially middling, nowhere, depthless figure) as an emblem of “primitivity.”

⁰²² Jurca, White Diaspora, 8.