Zoning the Past: Brokers, Babbitts, and the Memory Work of Commercial Real Estate

Abstract

From the moment of its publication in 1922, Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt was widely hailed as a text that harnessed the tactics of literary realism to the ambitions of social science. Over the years, in fact, critics have consistently linked Lewis's dissection of a crass, puerile, and materialistic white-collar culture to a conception of the novel as barely fictionalized ethnography – a conceit that has scripted the author as the twentieth century's foremost “cartographer” of American business life. Taking this fact as its starting point, this essay shows how Lewis's efforts to create an ethnographic record of modern business life ultimately encoded an even deeper commentary on the peculiar role that industrial–commercial development played in shaping the ways white-collar Americans thought about, valued, and pursued traces of their putative “heritage.” Rather than simply depict industrial–commercial society's destruction of the past, I argue, Babbitt instead labored to create a necessary genealogy for this regime: one that provided the nation's new, forward-lurching order with the kind of temporal coherence and historical context that its own ascendance seemed most directly to expunge. In making such an argument, this essay seeks to query a long-standing presumption within public memory studies that for years has construed the idea(l)s of historical recovery and the operations of commercial capitalism as fundamentally, if not inherently, incompatible. Balefully derided for mass-producing and mass-marketing a commodified pastness, dismissed as tools for replacing authentic history with ersatz heritage, modern development practices have stood for the vast majority of critics as proof of Americans' fundamental disconnection from their common and authentic history. Seeking to complicate this view, this essay shows instead how Babbitt can be read as a powerful counterexample to such logic – one that casts modernization less as an adversary than as an adjunct to prevailing modes of public recollection.