As well as being a classic middle American, Babbitt was also a typical ‘middlebrow,’ a 1920s term coined to describe the culture espoused by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). However, it applied a fortiori in America, where a whole raft of new media helped to create a new culture in the 1920s in which Babbitt and his booster friends could feel at home.
At this end of the century the electronic media – television in particular, but also radio – are generally regarded as more powerful than print media, with a much bigger audience. In the 1920s it was different. The principles of radio had been known since 1873, when James Clerk Maxwell, a Scot, and Heinrich Hertz, from Germany, carried out the first experiments. Guglielmo Marconi founded the first wireless telegraph company in 1900, and Reginald Fessenden delivered the first ‘broadcast’ (a new word) in 1906 from Pittsburgh. Radio didn’t make real news, however, until 1912, when its use brought ships to the aid of the sinking Titanic. All belligerents in World War I had made widespread use of radio, as propaganda, and afterwards the medium seemed ready to take America by storm – radio seemed the natural vehicle to draw the vast country together. David Sarnoff, head of RCA, envisaged a future in which America might have a broadcasting system where profit was not the only criterion of excellence, in effect a public service system that would educate as well as entertain. Unfortunately, the business of America was business. The early 1920s saw a ‘radio boom’ in the United States, so much so that by 1924 there were no fewer than 1,105 stations. Many were tiny, and over half failed, with the result that radio in America was never very ambitious for itself; it was dominated from the start by advertising and the interests of advertisers. Indeed, at one time there were not enough wavelengths to go round, producing ‘chaos in the ether.’17
As a consequence of this, new print media set the agenda for two generations, until the arrival of television. An added reason, in America at least, was a rapid expansion in education following World War I. By 1922, for example, the number of students enrolled on American campuses was almost double what it had been in 1918.18 Sooner or later that change was bound to be reflected in a demand for new forms of media. Radio apart, four new entities appeared to meet that demand. These were Reader’s Digest, Time, the Book-of-the-Month Club, and the New Yorker.
If war hadn’t occurred, and infantry sergeant DeWitt Wallace had not been hit by shrapnel during the Meuse-Argonne offensive, he might never have had the ‘leisure’ to put into effect the idea he had been brooding upon for a new kind of magazine.19 Wallace had gradually become convinced that most people were too busy to read everything that came their way. Too much was being published, and even important articles were often too wordy and could easily be reduced. So while he was convalescing in hospital in France, he started to clip articles from the many magazines that were sent through from the home front. After he was discharged and returned home to Saint Paul, Minnesota, he spent a few more months developing his idea, winnowing his cuttings down to thirty-one articles he thought had some long-term merit, and which he edited drastically. He had the articles set in a common typeface and laid out as a magazine, which he called Reader’s Digest. He ordered a printing of 200 copies and sent them to a dozen or so New York publishers. Everyone said no.20
Wallace’s battles to get Reader’s Digest on a sound footing after its launch in 1922 make a fine American adventure story, with a happy ending, as do Briton Hadden’s and Henry Luce’s efforts with Time, which, though launched in March 1912, did not produce a profit until 1928. The Book-of-the-Month-Club, founded by the Canadian Harry Scherman in April 1926, had much the same uneven start, with the first books, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, T. S. Stribling’s Teeftallow, and The Heart of Emerson’s Journals, edited by Bliss Perry, being returned ‘by the cartload.’21 But Wallace’s instincts had been right: the explosion of education in America after World War I changed the intellectual appetite of Americans, although not always in a direction universally approved. Those arguments were especially fierce in regard to the Book-of-the-Month Club, in particular the fact that a committee was deciding what people should read, which, it was said, threatened to ‘standardise’ the way Americans thought.22 ‘Standardisation’ was worrying to many people in those days in many walks of life, mainly as a result of the ‘Fordisation’ of industry following the invention of the moving assembly line in 1913. Sinclair Lewis had raised the issue in Babbitt and would do so again in 1926, when he turned down the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Arrowsmith, believing it was absurd to identify any book as ‘the best.’ What most people objected to was the mix of books offered by the Book-of-the-Month Club; they claimed that this produced a new way of thinking, chopping and changing between serious ‘high culture’ and works that were ‘mere entertainment.’ This debate produced a new concept and a new word, used in the mid-1920s for the first time: middlebrow. The establishment of a professoriate in the early decades of the century also played a role here, as did the expansion of the universities, before and after World War I, which helped highlight the distinction between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow.’ In the mid- and late 1920s, American magazines in particular kept returning to discussions about middlebrow taste and the damage it was or wasn’t doing to young minds.
Sinclair Lewis might decry the very idea of trying to identify ‘the best,’ but he was unable to stop the influence of his books on others. And he earned perhaps a more enduring accolade than the Pulitzer Prize from academics – sociologists – who, in the mid-1920s, found the phenomenon of Babbitt so fascinating that they decided to study for themselves a middle-size town in middle America.
Robert and Helen Lynd decided to study an ordinary American town, to describe in full sociological and anthropological detail what life consisted of. As Clark Wissler of the American Museum of Natural History put it in his foreword to their book, Middletowm, ‘To most people, anthropology is a mass of curious information about savages, and this is so far true, in that anthropology deals with the less civilised.’ Was that irony – or just cheek?23 The fieldwork for the study, financed by the Institute of Social and Religious Research, was completed in 1925, some members of the team living in ‘Middletown’ for eighteen months, others for five. The aim was to select a ‘typical’ town in the Midwest, but with certain specific aspects so that the process of social change could be looked at. A town of about 30,000 was chosen (there being 143 towns between 25,000 and 50,000, according to the U.S. Census). The town chosen was homogeneous, with only a small black population – the Lynds thought it would be easier to study cultural change if it was not complicated by racial change. They also specified that the town have a contemporary industrial culture and a substantial artistic life, but they did not want a college town with a transient student population. Finally, Middletown should have a temperate climate. (The authors attached particular importance to this, quoting in a footnote on the very first page of the book a remark of J. Russell Smith in his North America: ‘No man on whom the snow does not fall ever amounts to a tinker’s damn’)24 It later became known that the city they chose was Muncie, Indiana, sixty miles northeast of Indianapolis.