167). He even quotes his neighbor, newspaper writer T. Cholmondeley (Chum) Frink, the “practical poet” and advertising writer: “So when Sam Satan makes you blue, good friend, that’s what I’d up and do, for in these States where’er you roam, you never leave your home sweet home” (p. 168). America is fast becoming a nation that is everywhere the same.

Yet the most insidious invasion of business into American life is by way of the language. Even before talking pictures, radio, and television, spoken and written communication in the United States was permeated with the lingo of advertisements. On our first day with Babbitt, Lewis allows us to read Babbitt’s own real estate copy:

SAY OLD MAN!

I just want to know can I do you a whaleuva favor? Honest! No kidding! I know you’re interested in getting a house, not merely a place where you hang up the old bonnet but a love-nest for the wife and kiddies—and maybe for the flivver out beyant . . . the spud garden. Say, did you ever stop to think that we’re here to save you trouble? That’s how we make a living—folks don’t pay us for our lovely beauty! (p. 34).

The overly familiar, conversational tone, totally contrived to lure the male reader into buying a house, is laughably obvious, as are the deceptively rosy descriptions of the properties for sale. Ironically, later that night, when Babbitt finds his son enthusiastically reading promotional materials for correspondence schools, he (for good reason) cautions, “‘But same time, Ted, you know how advertisers, I mean some advertisers, exaggerate’ ” (p. 77).

But Babbitt is a mere amateur in comparison with that dean of ad writers, Chum Frink, who impresses the crowd at the dinner party that George and Myra throw for their friends by reading ads he has written for Prince Albert Tobacco and the Zeeco motor car. And as noted earlier, Frink is more than just a copywriter; his rhyming prose “Poemulations” (one of which George quotes in his pro-standardization speech) are syndicated in sixty-seven newspapers. The one Frink composes just before leaving for the dinner party is typical and revealing:

I sat alone and groused and thunk, and scratched my head and sighed and wunk, and groaned, “There still are boobs, alack, who’d like the old-time gin-mill back; that den that makes a sage a loon, the vile and smelly old saloon!” I’ll never miss their poison booze, whilst I the bubbling spring can use, that leaves my head at merry morn as clear as any babe new-born! (p. 103).

Not only is the folksy versifying nothing short of awful, but it is, significantly, like all advertising copy, calculatedly meretricious. After all, a few hours after writing these pro-Prohibition lines, Frink is drinking cocktails with the Babbitts. (Later in the novel we watch him drunkenly stumble down the street late at night, decrying his own talents and mocking Babbitt.) Thus, business and its use of advertising has begun to corrupt the American language, making communication through words a medium primarily for lying. In speech and writing, the truth is replaced by standardized pieties that have been, at least among white, middle-class American males, universally accepted but rarely followed.

Babbitt and the Language of Hate

What Babbitt and his friends say and are willing to listen to make quite clear the limitations of their substitutes for genuine values. After George’s first triumph as an orator, he entertains at a men’s club event at his church “with Irish, Jewish, and Chinese dialect stories” (p. 171). In spite of their fervent patriotic boosterism, Babbitt and the other businessmen of Zenith are firm believers in their own freedom and their God-given right to make fun of anyone who is in any way different from themselves. The newspaper ad that draws Babbitt and his colleagues to a burlesque show implies just how bigoted its audience is: Featuring Jewish and Scottish comics, African-American tap dancers, and Italian strippers, the performance and its advertisement play to the lowest common denominator of Babbitt’s class. Any trace of ethnic or national origin other than white Anglo-Saxon Protestant instantly stereotypes the entertainers as “different” and thus inferior.

As he does with the language of advertising, Lewis demonstrates how the language of bigotry has permeated middle-American speech. Babbitt is aware that potential property buyers try to “jew you down on the asking-price.” One of the salesmen in the Pullman smoker with Babbitt and Paul Riesling recalls an uncooperative hotel desk clerk’s attitude with, “‘You’d ‘a’ thought I’d . . . asked him to work on Yom Kippur!’” (p. 128).