His wife returns, and George, pretending he has a business meeting in New York, flees again to the masculine domain in Maine, where, as he goes on hunting parties, he decides to pursue Tanis.

On the train back from Maine, Babbitt meets Zenith’s leftist lawyer, the pro-labor Seneca Doane. Their conversation leads Babbitt to question his own Republican Party beliefs. Now, back in Zenith, he finds the men at the Athletic Club treating him differently as he, perhaps for the first time, speaks his mind on well-worn topics and current issues. His relationship with Tanis, which involves him in heavy drinking and a crowd of unconventional women and questionable men, helps to destroy many of the social ties he once carefully cultivated. Urged by his former cronies to join the Good Citizens’ League, a vigilante-like organization claiming to support decency in Zenith, Babbitt bravely declines. Even as his refusal brings criticism from family and friends, he stubbornly sticks to his position.

Yet Babbitt repents his philandering and rebelliousness after his wife suddenly becomes ill with appendicitis, and he fears she might die. Babbitt joins the Good Citizens’ League, gives up Tanis (or rather makes sure she gives up him), and returns to the fold. Once more secure in his place in the world, he looks to his son, Ted, who has dropped out of college and unceremoniously eloped with Eunice Littlefield, the libertine girl next door. Feeling his own life has all but ended, George F. Babbitt places his hopes in the next generation.

Inside Babbitt

Although many of the events that occur in Babbitt seem minuscule, the texture of the book and the nature and quality of its detail make the fiction rich in satire. Perhaps Lewis’s most noticeable target for ridicule is American business and the way urban life has become increasingly shaped by commercialization. From his first instant of consciousness (when he is woken by someone cranking a Ford), Babbitt’s world is filled with brand names, a few of them still familiar: B.V.D., Lilidol, Western Union, Waring, Bevo, Buick, Pierce Arrow, Packard, Standard Oil, Victrola, Ingersoll, Prince Albert Tobacco, and Pullman. Lewis, through such usage, is not succumbing to what we today call “product placement”; he is merely reporting how brand names and the products or services they define have invaded the personal lives of Americans.

Similarly, George’s home is inhabited by objects that define the Babbitts as up-to-date and prosperous people, including

an altogether royal bathroom of porcelain and glazed tile and metal as sleek as silver. The towel-rack was a rod of clear glass set in nickel. The tub was long enough for a Prussian Guard, and above the set bowl was a sensational exhibit of tooth-brush holder, shaving-brush holder, soap-dish, sponge-dish, and medicine-cabinet, so glittering and so ingenious that they resembled an electrical instrument-board (p. 6).

The other rooms are furnished according to advice from “Cheerful Modern Houses for Medium Incomes,” in good, expensive, utilitarian style, and are completely devoid of taste. Lewis offers an explanation of how the car one drives reflects one’s status: “A family’s motor indicated its social rank as precisely as the grades of the peerage determined the rank of an English family” (p. 68). From the family record player to their choice of toothpaste, the Babbitts are what they own. Yet at moments readers may suspect the very opposite, that the Babbitts and others like them don’t own their possessions; rather, their possessions, to some degree, own them.

Lewis makes clear that this self-defining consumerism is hardly limited to just one family. The houses in Zenith’s affluent suburbs resemble each other, both inside and out, and so do the families—all of them as consumerist as the Babbitts—who live within them. Indeed, as the book progresses, people in Zenith argue in favor of the industrial virtue of standardization. While standardization in manufacturing may be beneficial in the long run, it may also lead to something more sinister; late at night, while Babbitt sleeps, Zenith’s socialist histologist, world-famous Dr. Kurt Yavitch, tells liberal lawyer Seneca Doane,

“What I fight in Zenith is standardization of thought, and, of course, the traditions of competition. The real villains of the piece are the clean, kind, industrious Family Men who use every known brand of trickery and cruelty to insure the prosperity of their cubs. The worst thing about these fellows is that they’re so good and, in their work at least, so intelligent. You can’t hate them properly, and yet their standardized minds are the enemy” (p. 92).

Not only does Yavitch describe Babbitt and his cronies, but he touches on a concept close to Babbitt’s heart. In his address to the Zenith Real Estate Board, Babbitt heaps praises upon “‘the Standardized American Citizen’ ” (p. 166) and sees standardization as a key justification for American superiority: “‘The extraordinary, growing, and sane standardization of stores, offices, streets, hotels, clothes, and newspapers throughout the United States shows how strong and enduring a type is ours’ ” (p.