George Babbitt, Delegate

Conventions are as American as HELLO MY NAME IS badges, loud sports coats, straw hats, brass bands and George F. Babbitt, the Middle American Everyman of his era whose adventures at an annual gathering of realtors filled a trenchant chapter of Sinclair Lewis' satirical 1922 novel Babbitt:

They met at the Union Station for the midnight train to Monarch. All of them . . . displayed celluloid buttons the size of dollars and lettered, "We zoom for Zenith." The official delegates were magnificent with silver and magenta ribbons.

The meetings of the convention were held in the ballroom of the Allen House. In an anteroom was the office of the chairman of the executive committee. He was the busiest man in the convention; he was so busy that he got nothing done whatever.

The real convention consisted of men muttering in hotel bedrooms or in groups amid the badge-spotted crowd in the hotel lobby, but there was a show of public meetings. The first of them opened with a welcome by the mayor of Monarch. The pastor of the First Christian Church of Monarch, a large man with a long damp frontal lock, informed God that the real-estate men were here now.

The delegations were presenting the claims of their several cities to the next year's conventions . . . In the midst of these more diffident invitations, the golden doors of the ballroom opened with a blatting of trumpets, and a circus parade rolled in. It was composed of the Zenith brokers, dressed as cowpunchers, bareback riders, Japanese jugglers . . . As a clown, beating a bass drum, extraordinarily happy and noisy, was Babbitt.

Their coats were off, their vests open, their faces red, their voices emphatic. They were finishing a bottle of corrosive bootlegged whisky and imploring the bellboy, "Say, son, can you get us some more of this embalming fluid?" They were smoking large cigars and dropping ashes and stubs on the carpet. With windy guffaws they were telling stories. They were, in fact, males in a happy state of nature.

He returned to Zenith, his desire for rebellion was partly satisfied. He had retrograded to a shamefaced contentment. He was irritable. He did not smile when W.A. Rogers complained, "'Ow, what a head! I certainly do feel like the wrath of God this morning. Say! I know what was the trouble! Somebody went and put alcohol in my booze last night."

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