Babbittry

Fitzgerald, with his eye largely averted from the Babbittry, subtly inclines our attention to a more complex and more substantial system of stratification.

Robert McLaughlin sees in the novel Lewis's understanding of the white/black opposition as rooted in "the societal power it supports" (8): "Lewis makes clear that money and power are what is really at stake in the White Supremacy racket" (14).Jennifer Delton has argued that the novel is less about racial boundaries per se than about how race issues bear on Lewis's usual primary target of middle class banality; she suggests that "for Lewis whiteness was Babbittry," and so the novel's main concern "was not so much black people attaining their civil rights, ...

Some emphasize the civil rights revolution of the 1960s; others the bulldozer revolution of the 1950s; still others the Chamber of Commerce Babbittry of the 1920s; and some the New South crusade of the 1880s.