Pouring Babbitt

When Our Expectations Meet Reality, We have a Choice

It’s interesting how prosaic details of our lives get put together and make one of those quiet entrances that you don’t notice immediately, then a moment later are very aware of. Like the first warm day of spring you notice sandals, and some days later how a skirt sways in the wind or dark hair falls across the forehead. Then a week later she stands near a corner of a crowded room; What is her name, you wonder.

But I’m 62 now and there are no crowded rooms where I live. When I return from the library my wife asks “was there anyone in town,” meaning “did you see even a single other human being?” The answer is almost always “just the librarian.”

But there are still those times when little details of my life come together and at a sentient moment I take notice. This happened to me recently when I read an essay by Walter Kirn, American novelist and essayist: Revolutionary Rut The Preachy Misery of the Enlightened Class.

Kirn’s essay takes a look at our current class of elites and how they have been depicted in American literature and wonders “one is amazed it can still bear to exist, let alone take its own existence seriously, let alone expect that all America – and all the world, in fact -- should take it as seriously as it takes itself.”

It’s certainly true that this class has been the subject of a lot of artistic hand wringing. The writer looks over the social landscape and sees disappointment, confusion, boredom and fantasy in every nook and cranny of their society, amongst the new appliances, the well kept streets and towns. This is rich earth to work; it has all the elements to bear delicious fruit, and good book sales! C’mon, a nice home in a safe neighborhood with food in the refrigerator, while hearts and souls grapple with all manner of human pathos! It’s too good to pass up, like another trip to the brunch buffet.

I also just recently watched a video by Keith Rucker, a man who restores vintage machinery from the turn of the century, the 19th century that is, and came to know the invention of an Englishman name Isaac Babbitt.

As Rucker explains in the video below, there was a challenge in early machinery - manufacturing had not yet advanced to precision ball bearings, they would come later. The idea of ball bearings existed but large industrial bearings would not arrive until the 1930’s. In the meantime someone had to come up with a way to allow a shaft to spin while being held in place. That inventor’s name was Isaac Babbitt. His idea was to cast two pieces of steel that could be assembled together around a shaft. A machinist finishes the assembly by pouring in molten tin and lead around the shaft; this is the babbitt. The molten metal conforms to the shaft and the casting, and once greased, it allows the shaft to spin with less friction and heat. As industry moved from iron to steel, babbitt bearings were enormously important. If you have 20 minutes, and if you have ever wondered what a machinist does for a living behind the dented, dirty doors of his shop, it’s a fascinating video:

Removing the old babbitt in preparation for a new pour

Novelist Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, once lived in Cincinnati, the young nation’s capital of machine tools, where he did his research for his highly acclaimed novel, Babbitt. Well, that’s an odd thing, isn’t it? Why would you name your main character after an industrial material? (By the way, it’s funny that as I write this the Substack dictionary does not recognize lower case babbitt. It recognizes the uppercase novel Babbitt but the invention is lost to history!)

Babbitt, if you haven’t watched the video, is metal, melted down and poured into a pre-made assembly where it’s prevented from flowing out, and thereby it conforms to the shaft and the assembly. All of this is done to allow the shaft to turn at high rpm and the resulting heat to dissipate. It’s an incredible invention really.

So babbitt you see is the perfect metaphor for the American middle class, a group only too happy to conform to its predetermined life; a group that melts its soul in order to conform; and once poured into the mold, it cannot escape; its soul then hardens and dissipates all the heat of life as the shaft of the American economy turns relentlessly.

You can imagine Lewis’s eyes bugging out of their sockets as he witnessed babbitt being poured for the first time. Here was the perfect encapsulation of American middle class life! All of Lewis’s frustrations and humiliations, his embarrassments and failures in his own middles class life find a perfect metaphor! Once he had his main character Babbitt, the rest of the novel must have written itself. The following about the novel is from wikipedia:

To his publisher, Lewis wrote: “[George Babbitt] is all of us Americans at 46, prosperous, but worried, wanting — passionately — to seize something more than motor cars and a house before it's too late.” About the novel, Lewis said: “This is the story of the ruler of America” wherein the “tired American Businessman” wielded socioeconomic power not through his exceptionality but rather through militant conformity. Lewis portrayed the American businessman as a man deeply dissatisfied with and privately aware of his shortcomings; he is “the most grievous victim of his own militant dullness” who secretly longed for freedom and romance. Readers who praised the psychological realism of the portrait admitted to regularly encountering Babbitts in real life but also could relate to some of the character's anxieties about conformity and personal fulfillment. Published two years after Lewis's previous novel (Main Street, 1920), the story of George F. Babbitt was much anticipated because each novel presented a portrait of American society wherein “the principal character is brought into conflict with the accepted order of things, sufficiently to illustrate its ruthlessness.”

It is hard to understand how someone comes to view their fellow man so harshly. Remember that this is shortly after WWI that Lewis’s ideas begin to take shape. The country just lost over 117,000 young men and 200,000 other casualties in the war. There had also been a flu epidemic in 2018/19 that took another 675,000 (.5% of the population). Surrounded by tragedy Lewis decides that the machine shop owner is a soulless conformist, a “militant conformist,” dull and lifeless who obsesses about romance!

I shouldn’t pour all of my disgust on Lewis. Across the pond in London, American expatriate T.S. Elliot, son of St. Louis Missouri, writes The Wasteland, a pedantic rant about modern life that most English teachers would drop into a Top Ten best poems of all time. Not a single word about the War, the loss, the grief, or the suffering from either writer, nor from so many others of their ilk over the decades, who manage to always swing their little hammer and hit the same nail - the American middle class and its entitled, despondent inhabitants .

You can hardly blame the writers, they have to eat, too; but it’s the middle class readers who buy their books, and are always hungry for another portrayal of meaningless middle class lives, the more bitter and resentful the better, that leaves one scratching his head. What exactly is the psychology here?

Kirn is correct, in my view, that from the first decades of the 20th Century to today, there has been an obsession among our writers and artists that the American middle class is a dark orifice out of which nothing of value flows. And he’s also correct that the same middle class, or at least a certain element of it, is obsessed with the characterization of its meaninglessness. But why? It’s not an easy web to untangle but I’ll give a spirited attempt.

Middle class American life is broad and deep. It’s not just the businessman, with a lunch stain on his tie, who owns the machine shop, but the machinists, the clerks in the office and the truck drivers. It’s the people who build our hospitals, schools and homes, pave our roads, build our energy systems and repair them when the wind chill is -20F. It’s plumbers and electricians and the guys who maintain the databases and run the cables, and the people who raise your food. Those people.

Those people are a dirty and sweaty and intimidating lot. They have skills and some know how to work with tools; they have experience and unselfconscious personalities. And they have kids, sometimes many kids. Lewis and his readers, in Kirn’s words, “believe they are interesting people, or potentially interesting people, and that their town, their country, and the whole system have stunted their souls and starved their intellects.” And of course the system, the oppressor, is Those People.

Imagine what you could learn in an afternoon with Keith Rucker, the machinist, about the history of manufacturing, of industry and how thousands of small inventions by men like Isaac Babbitt made the modern world possible. Fascinating.

Or imagine the world without all of those inventions. Even worse, imagine an afternoon with Sinclair Lewis or T.S. Elliot. Honestly, I would rather stab myself.

Now an afternoon with Earnest Hemingway, that would be interesting and a helluva lot of fun. There would be good food and drink, maybe some fishing or hunting. I spent an afternoon with Jaime Harrison and her Dad Jim Harrison once. Yeah, that was a lot of fun.

Status is a funny thing. In a society as complex as ours there seems to be an infinite number of status hierarchies. It’s evidently true that many get caught up in status, and most of us probably at some point in time at least toy with our status. We want a certain outcome so we purchase the look, the bits and pieces we think make status real. Soon most of us realize it’s nonsense and not worth the effort. There are simply too many possibilities, too many fascinating opportunities in this life to get caught up in the shallows where the weeds are thick. As our expectations become more realistic and fruitful, our desire for status evaporates.

But some continue to chase the status thing, whatever they think that is. Let them read Babbitt, I say. And to the young I say walk across the room and with a smile tell her your name and ask for hers.