Socially Mapping the 1920s Midwest

In both Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt (1922) and the sociological study by Robert and Helen Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (1929), an attempt is made to systematically document and map the practice of everyday life in a representative American town. For the Lynds, this meant choosing the midwest as "the common denominator" of the US, a city with a population between 25,000 and 50,000, one in which there were more than one industry, and a city in which "social problems" would not overshadow the study's findings (race is carefully elided throughout the book). For Lewis, this meant constructing a fictional city Zenith in the fictional state of Winnemac, a state which would be "more typical than any state in the Union" (Lewis's own maps of which are included throughout this post--more info on them below).

"Middletown" was revealed later to be Muncie, Indiana--most famously by photographer Margaret Bourke-White who was sent by Life Magazine to document the town in May 1937. Muncie underwent a "gas boom" when a massive natural gas reserve was found in the area in 1886, ballooning the town to a population of tens of thousands and attracting outside capital to this thriving "gasopolis." Due to severe misuse and waste--it was thought cheaper to keep gas valves in the house open and burning than to waste a match relighting the flame--the field was all but depleted by 1890. The Middletown study takes place in the wake of this unevenly distributed and underdeveloped industrialization of the formerly agricultural town.

Characterizing Muncie's current state of labor and production in 1925, they write:

“If the working class in Middletown does not make the material necessities of its everyday life, the activities of the business class appear at many points even more remote. As the population has forsaken the less vicarious life of the farm or village and as industrial tools have become increasingly elaborated, there has been a noticeable swelling in the number and complexity of the institutional rituals by which the specialized products of the individual worker are converted into the biological and social essentials of living. It is by carrying on these institutional rituals that the business group gets its living.” (44)

Paradoxically, this "increasing elaboration" of the technics of everyday life is coupled with an "increasing standardization of leisure-time pursuits." Perhaps the most significant change found in the Lynds' study can be attributed to the triad of automobiles, movies, and radio, which together spawned a "cluster of habits that have grown up overnight." They write: “Indeed, at no point is one brought up more sharply against the impossibility of studying Middletown as a self-contained, self-starting community than when one watches these space-binding leisure-time inventions imported from without—automobile, motion picture, and radio—reshaping the city.” Here, the case study of social anthropology seems to come up against its limits when the "underlying groundwork of folk-play and folk-talk" is integrated into a web of cultural production and technological innovation that necessarily extends the boundaries of this town beyond its traditional patterns.

Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt on the other hand provides us with a very different type of perspective on the networks and systems organizing a representative midwestern town. George F. Babbitt--perhaps a reference to the frequently worn out automobile babbitt metal, a soft alloy "used for bearings connecting the piston rods to the crankshaft"--is the quintessential middle man. Breaking with the precedence of American businessmen novels that gave us portraits of tycoons, leaders of the masses--Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Norris's The Pit(1903), Dreiser's The Financier (1912)--Babbitt is little more than middle management in a small real estate development company owned by his father-in-law, spending his non-working hours at booster club meetings and indulging in flights of heroic fancy while parking his car in tight spots: "It was a virile adventure masterfully executed" (28).

But Babbitt, as a real estate developer and booster has a particular kind of vantage point on his city of Zenith:

Babbitt spoke well--and often--at these orgies of commercial righteousness about the 'realtor's function as a seer of the future development of the community, and as a prophetic engineer clearing the pathway for inevitable changes'--which meant that a real-estate broker could make money by guessing which way the town would grow. This guessing he called Vision. In an address at the Boosters' Club he had admitted, 'It is at once the duty and the privilege of the realtor to know everything about his own city and its environs. Where a surgeon is a specialist on every vein and mysterious cell of the human body, and the engineer upon electricity in all its phases, or every bolt of some great bridge majestically arching o'er a mighty flood, the realtor must know his city, inch by inch, and all its faults and virtues.' (38)

Despite Babbitt's rhetorical flourishes--he is a great devotee of "the poetry of industrialism" (meaning tobacco ads)--his understanding of the city is absolutely one dimensional.

Though he did know the market-price, inch by inch, of certain districts of Zenith, he did not know whether the police force was too large or too small, or whether it was in alliance with gambling and prostitution. He knew the means of fire-proofing buildings and the relation of insurance-rates to fire-proofing, but he did not know how many firemen there were in the city, how they were trained and paid, or how complete their apparatus. He sang eloquently the advantages of proximity of school-buildings to rentable homes, but he did not know--he did not know that it was worth while to know--whether the city schoolrooms were properly heated, lighted, ventilated, furnished.

This is not just to say that Babbitt merely understands prices and ratios and abstract figures of the housing market; Lewis is pointing out here that there are thousands of other kinds of relations that make up this city, relations that Babbitt not only doesn't have access to, but that he wouldn't know how to understand in the first place. This is what makes him ultimately a sympathetic character--though Babbitt is unhappy with his life, he cannot even begin to understand what change would mean or entail. Babbitt understands the monetization of spatial relations, but in no way has access to detail or depth, let alone any sense of an outside. And, as Robert and Helen Lynd's study shows, any "outside" available to this representative small town may have been by that point paved over by a wave of "leisure-time inventions imported from without" to the point of total homogeneity.

One wants to say that Lewis's painstakingly drawn maps of Zenith and its surroundings are themselves an expressive act of Babbittry, a visualization of his understanding of the city. But the degree of his planning for the novel just doesn't bear this out. In a sociological research trip on part with the Lynds, Lewis traveled through the Midwest for eight weeks in preparation for his novel, transcribing his notes by topic in a large ring binder that serves as the index for an entire fictional world (the binder is now preserved at Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale). It contains countless pages of character biographies, a genealogy of the Babbitt family, the courses George would have taken in college (put together by consulting the 1888-89 University of Michigan course catalog), sketches of Babbitt's clothing, and lengthy back stories of minor characters who have little more than a single walk-on role in the novel. The binder also contains a "Locutions" section, a catalogue of expressions Lewis jotted down during his travels which would make their way into the novel. Some of my favorites: "all these free classes and flipflop and doodads;" "they say I'm a roughneck and a never-wuzzer;" "horse feathers!" "Yuh, I'm just as much agin the cranks and blatherskites an labor unions and so on as you are!"

The "Babbitt Maps," separated from Lewis's main research binder along with his wife in a divorce, were found in a Syracuse University archive (The Dorothy Thompson Papers). They consist of 13 holograph maps on separate leaves in Lewis's own hand, each of which was found slipped inside the dust jacket of an oversize edition of H.G. Wells's Outline of History. A fourteenth map, "Blocks Most Familiar to Babbitt", was sketched on the inside of the dust jacket itself (below).

Further maps show the interior of Babbitt's office and home, and even the arrangement of furniture in each room. Winnemac (and Zenith) would serve Lewis as the fictional setting forArrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), Dodsworth (1929), and the minor novels The Man Who Knew Coolidge (1928) and Gideon Planish (1943). Details are built into these 1921(?) maps that show Lewis had planned several elements of this narrative world that wouldn't be fully developed until several novels later.

The degree to which this narrative world has been fleshed out is breathtaking, and one wonders if anything comparable had been attempted before outside of genre fiction. But the--what can we call it?--verisimilitude aspired to here seems wholly out of sync with a work of satire, the mode Lewis is most widely remembered for. I wouldn't say that Babbitt is a completely successful novel, and the existence of these maps only compounds this sense when one sees the scale at which Lewis was thinking. Lewis apparently intended George Babbitt to be less of a caricature, but he ended up cutting much of the material that would have shown introspection in the character. As James Hutchisson writes, "Instead, Lewis focused on the city, drawing it as the embodiment of machinery and consumerism and showing its deleterious effect on Babbitt." But on the other hand, maybe we can better understand Babbitt not as a character being subsumed by systems of modern consumerism, but an earnest desire to portray what it is like to attempt to think from within them. In this sense, the distance between the encyclopedic planning and the actual novel is less one attributable to Hemingway's iceberg theory of fictional composition than one of distance between drafts. The novel Babbitt constitutes the character George F. Babbitt's cognitive horizon as he navigates the totality of relations Lewis himself attempted to map.