Modern Mind

the trial a contest of Darwin versus the Bible, Darrow’s technique was to tie his adversary in knots, aided by eminent scientists and theologians who had arrived in Dayton determined to see that Bryan did not have his fundamentalist way. At one point, when Bryan insisted on testifying as an expert in biblical science, he proved unwilling or unable to answer questions about the age of the earth or of well-known archaeological sites. He defended himself by saying, ‘I do not think about things I do not think about.’ Darrow replied drily, ‘Do you think about things you do think about?’ In fact, Bryan won the case, but on a technicality. The judge kept the focus of the trial not on whether Darwin was right or wrong but on whether or not Scopes had taught evolution. And since Scopes admitted what he had done, the result was a foregone conclusion. He was given a fine of $100, which was then successfully appealed because the judge rather than the jury had set the fine. But that technicality apart, Bryan lost heavily. He was humiliated and mocked in the press, not just in America but around the world. He died five days after the trial ended. 7
    religion, however, explained only part of the reaction to the Scopes trial. In his
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
, Richard Hofstadter argues that particularly in the American South and Midwest, people used the Christianity/evolution struggle as a cipher for revolting against modernity. The rigid defence of Prohibition, then in force, was another side to this. Hofstadter quotes with some sympathy Hiram W. Evans, the imperial wizard of the KuKlux Klan, who, he says, summed up the major issue of the time ‘as a struggle between “the great mass of Americans of the old pioneer stock” and the “intellectually mongrelised Liberals.”’ ‘We are a movement,’ Evans wrote, ‘of the plain people, very weak in the matter of culture, intellectual support, and trained leadership. We are demanding, and we expect to win, a return of power into the hands of the everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualised, but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanised, average citizen of the old stock…. This is undoubtedly a weakness. It lays us open to the charge of being “hicks” and “rubes” and “drivers of second-hand Fords.” We admit it.’ 8 The words of the Klan wizard highlight the atmosphere in America at the time, so different from that in Europe, where in London and Paris modernism was flourishing.
    America had ended the war transformed: she alone was stronger, unravaged. The prevailing American mood was still pragmatic, practical, independent of the great isms of the Old World. ‘This is essentially a business country,’ said Warren Harding in 1920, and he was echoed by Calvin Coolidge’s even more famous words, uttered in 1922: ‘The business of America is business.’ All these different strands – anti-intellectualism, business, the suspicion of Europe, or at least her peoples – were brilliantly brought together in the novels of Sinclair Lewis, the best of which,
Babbitt,
appeared in that remarkable year, 1922.
    It would be hard to imagine a character more different from Dedalus, or Tiresias, or Jacob or Swann, than George F. Babbitt. A realtor from Zenith, Ohio, a medium-size town in the American Midwest, Babbitt is hardworking, prosperous, and well liked by his fellow citizens. But Babbitt’s success and popularity are just the beginning of his problems. Lewis was a fierce critic of the materialistic, acquisitive society that Oswald Spengler, R. H. Tawney, and T. S. Eliot so loathed. Eliot and Joyce had stressed the force of ancient myth as a way to approach the modern world, but as the twenties passed, Lewis dissected a number of modern American myths. Babbitt, like the ‘heroes’ of Lewis’s other books, is, although he doesn’t know it, a victim.
    Born in 1885, Harry Sinclair Lewis was raised in the small Minnesota town of Sauk Center, which, he was to say later, was ‘narrow-minded and socially provincial.’ One of Lewis’s central points in his books was that small-town America was nowhere near as friendly or as agreeable as popular mythology professed. For Lewis, small-town Americans were suspicious of anyone who did not share their views, or was different. 9 Lewis’s own growing up was aided and eased by his stepmother, who came from Chicago – although not the most sophisticated place at the time, at least not a small