Babbit (26 page)

  III

  Mr. Lucas Prout and Sound Business defeated Mr.
Seneca Doane and Class Rule, and Zenith was again saved. Babbitt
was offered several minor appointments to distribute among poor
relations, but he preferred advance information about the extension
of paved highways, and this a grateful administration gave to him.
Also, he was one of only nineteen speakers at the dinner with which
the Chamber of Commerce celebrated the victory of
righteousness.

  His reputation for oratory established, at the
dinner of the Zenith Real Estate Board he made the Annual Address.
The Advocate-Times reported this speech with unusual fullness:

  "One of the livest banquets that has recently been
pulled off occurred last night in the annual Get-Together Fest of
the Zenith Real Estate Board, held in the Venetian Ball Room of the
O'Hearn House. Mine host Gil O'Hearn had as usual done himself
proud and those assembled feasted on such an assemblage of plates
as could be rivaled nowhere west of New York, if there, and washed
down the plenteous feed with the cup which inspired but did not
inebriate in the shape of cider from the farm of Chandler Mott,
president of the board and who acted as witty and efficient
chairman.

  "As Mr. Mott was suffering from slight infection and
sore throat, G. F. Babbitt made the principal talk. Besides
outlining the progress of Torrensing real estate titles, Mr.
Babbitt spoke in part as follows:

  "'In rising to address you, with my impromptu speech
carefully tucked into my vest pocket, I am reminded of the story of
the two Irishmen, Mike and Pat, who were riding on the Pullman.
Both of them, I forgot to say, were sailors in the Navy. It seems
Mike had the lower berth and by and by he heard a terrible racket
from the upper, and when he yelled up to find out what the trouble
was, Pat answered, "Shure an' bedad an' how can I ever get a
night's sleep at all, at all? I been trying to get into this darned
little hammock ever since eight bells!"

  "'Now, gentlemen, standing up here before you, I
feel a good deal like Pat, and maybe after I've spieled along for a
while, I may feel so darn small that I'll be able to crawl into a
Pullman hammock with no trouble at all, at all!

  "'Gentlemen, it strikes me that each year at this
annual occasion when friend and foe get together and lay down the
battle-ax and let the waves of good-fellowship waft them up the
flowery slopes of amity, it behooves us, standing together eye to
eye and shoulder to shoulder as fellow-citizens of the best city in
the world, to consider where we are both as regards ourselves and
the common weal.

  "'It is true that even with our 361,000, or
practically 362,000, population, there are, by the last census,
almost a score of larger cities in the United States. But,
gentlemen, if by the next census we do not stand at least tenth,
then I'll be the first to request any knocker to remove my shirt
and to eat the same, with the compliments of G. F. Babbitt,
Esquire! It may be true that New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia
will continue to keep ahead of us in size. But aside from these
three cities, which are notoriously so overgrown that no decent
white man, nobody who loves his wife and kiddies and God's good
out-o'doors and likes to shake the hand of his neighbor in
greeting, would want to live in them - and let me tell you right
here and now, I wouldn't trade a high-class Zenith acreage
development for the whole length and breadth of Broadway or State
Street! - aside from these three, it's evident to any one with a
head for facts that Zenith is the finest example of American life
and prosperity to be found anywhere.

  "'I don't mean to say we're perfect. We've got a lot
to do in the way of extending the paving of motor boulevards, for,
believe me, it's the fellow with four to ten thousand a year, say,
and an automobile and a nice little family in a bungalow on the
edge of town, that makes the wheels of progress go round!

  "'That's the type of fellow that's ruling America
to-day; in fact, it's the ideal type to which the entire world must
tend, if there's to be a decent, well-balanced, Christian, go-ahead
future for this little old planet! Once in a while I just naturally
sit back and size up this Solid American Citizen, with a whale of a
lot of satisfaction.

  "'Our Ideal Citizen - I picture him first and
foremost as being busier than a bird-dog, not wasting a lot of good
time in day-dreaming or going to sassiety teas or kicking about
things that are none of his business, but putting the zip into some
store or profession or art. At night he lights up a good cigar, and
climbs into the little old 'bus, and maybe cusses the carburetor,
and shoots out home. He mows the lawn, or sneaks in some practice
putting, and then he's ready for dinner. After dinner he tells the
kiddies a story, or takes the family to the movies, or plays a few
fists of bridge, or reads the evening paper, and a chapter or two
of some good lively Western novel if he has a taste for literature,
and maybe the folks next-door drop in and they sit and visit about
their friends and the topics of the day. Then he goes happily to
bed, his conscience clear, having contributed his mite to the
prosperity of the city and to his own bank-account.

  "'In politics and religion this Sane Citizen is the
canniest man on earth; and in the arts he invariably has a natural
taste which makes him pick out the best, every time. In no country
in the world will you find so many reproductions of the Old Masters
and of well-known paintings on parlor walls as in these United
States. No country has anything like our number of phonographs,
with not only dance records and comic but also the best operas,
such as Verdi, rendered by the world's highest-paid singers.

  "'In other countries, art and literature are left to
a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and
spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter
is indistinguishable from any other decent business man; and I, for
one, am only too glad that the man who has the rare skill to season
his message with interesting reading matter and who shows both
purpose and pep in handling his literary wares has a chance to drag
down his fifty thousand bucks a year, to mingle with the biggest
executives on terms of perfect equality, and to show as big a house
and as swell a car as any Captain of Industry! But, mind you, it's
the appreciation of the Regular Guy who I have been depicting which
has made this possible, and you got to hand as much credit to him
as to the authors themselves.

  "'Finally, but most important, our Standardized
Citizen, even if he is a bachelor, is a lover of the Little Ones, a
supporter of the hearthstone which is the basic foundation of our
civilization, first, last, and all the time, and the thing that
most distinguishes us from the decayed nations of Europe.

  "'I have never yet toured Europe - and as a matter
of fact, I don't know that I care to such an awful lot, as long as
there's our own mighty cities and mountains to be seen - but, the
way I figure it out, there must be a good many of our own sort of
folks abroad. Indeed, one of the most enthusiastic Rotarians I ever
met boosted the tenets of one-hundred-per-cent pep in a burr that
smacked o' bonny Scutlond and all ye bonny braes o' Bobby Burns.
But same time, one thing that distinguishes us from our good
brothers, the hustlers over there, is that they're willing to take
a lot off the snobs and journalists and politicians, while the
modern American business man knows how to talk right up for
himself, knows how to make it good and plenty clear that he intends
to run the works. He doesn't have to call in some highbrow
hired-man when it's necessary for him to answer the crooked critics
of the sane and efficient life. He's not dumb, like the
old-fashioned merchant. He's got a vocabulary and a punch.

  "'With all modesty, I want to stand up here as a
representative business man and gently whisper, "Here's our kind of
folks! Here's the specifications of the Standardized American
Citizen! Here's the new generation of Americans: fellows with hair
on their chests and smiles in their eyes and adding-machines in
their offices. We're not doing any boasting, but we like ourselves
first-rate, and if you don't like us, look out - better get under
cover before the cyclone hits town!"

  "'So! In my clumsy way I have tried to sketch the
Real He-man, the fellow with Zip and Bang. And it's because Zenith
has so large a proportion of such men that it's the most stable,
the greatest of our cities. New York also has its thousands of Real
Folks, but New York is cursed with unnumbered foreigners. So are
Chicago and San Francisco. Oh, we have a golden roster of cities -
Detroit and Cleveland with their renowned factories, Cincinnati
with its great machine-tool and soap products, Pittsburg and
Birmingham with their steel, Kansas City and Minneapolis and Omaha
that open their bountiful gates on the bosom of the ocean-like
wheatlands, and countless other magnificent sister-cities, for, by
the last census, there were no less than sixty-eight glorious
American burgs with a population of over one hundred thousand! And
all these cities stand together for power and purity, and against
foreign ideas and communism - Atlanta with Hartford, Rochester with
Denver, Milwaukee with Indianapolis, Los Angeles with Scranton,
Portland, Maine, with Portland, Oregon. A good live wire from
Baltimore or Seattle or Duluth is the twin-brother of every like
fellow booster from Buffalo or Akron, Fort Worth or Oskaloosa!

  "'But it's here in Zenith, the home for manly men
and womanly women and bright kids, that you find the largest
proportion of these Regular Guys, and that's what sets it in a
class by itself; that's why Zenith will be remembered in history as
having set the pace for a civilization that shall endure when the
old time-killing ways are gone forever and the day of earnest
efficient endeavor shall have dawned all round the world!

  "'Some time I hope folks will quit handing all the
credit to a lot of moth-eaten, mildewed, out-of-date, old, European
dumps, and give proper credit to the famous Zenith spirit, that
clean fighting determination to win Success that has made the
little old Zip City celebrated in every land and clime, wherever
condensed milk and pasteboard cartons are known! Believe me, the
world has fallen too long for these worn-out countries that aren't
producing anything but bootblacks and scenery and booze, that
haven't got one bathroom per hundred people, and that don't know a
loose-leaf ledger from a slip-cover; and it's just about time for
some Zenithite to get his back up and holler for a show-down!

  "'I tell you, Zenith and her sister-cities are
producing a new type of civilization. There are many resemblances
between Zenith and these other burgs, and I'm darn glad of it! The
extraordinary, growing, and sane standardization of stores,
offices, streets, hotels, clothes, and newspapers throughout the
United States shows how strong and enduring a type is ours.

  "'I always like to remember a piece that Chum Frink
wrote for the newspapers about his lecture-tours. It is doubtless
familiar to many of you, but if you will permit me, I'll take a
chance and read it. It's one of the classic poems, like "If" by
Kipling, or Ella Wheeler Wilcox's "The Man Worth While"; and I
always carry this clipping of it in my note-book:

  "When I am out upon the road, a poet with a pedler's
load I mostly sing a hearty song, and take a chew and hike along,
a-handing out my samples fine of Cheero Brand of sweet sunshine,
and peddling optimistic pokes and stable lines of japes and jokes
to Lyceums and other folks, to Rotarys, Kiwanis' Clubs, and feel I
ain't like other dubs. And then old Major Silas Satan, a brainy
cuss who's always waitin', he gives his tail a lively quirk, and
gets in quick his dirty work. He fills me up with mullygrubs; my
hair the backward way he rubs; he makes me lonelier than a hound,
on Sunday when the folks ain't round. And then b' gosh, I would
prefer to never be a lecturer, a-ridin' round in classy cars and
smoking fifty-cent cigars, and never more I want to roam; I simply
want to be back home, a-eatin' flap jacks, hash, and ham, with
folks who savvy whom I am!

  "But when I get that lonely spell, I simply seek the
best hotel, no matter in what town I be - St. Paul, Toledo, or
K.C., in Washington, Schenectady, in Louisville or Albany. And at
that inn it hits my dome that I again am right at home. If I should
stand a lengthy spell in front of that first-class hotel, that to
the drummers loves to cater, across from some big film theayter; if
I should look around and buzz, and wonder in what town I was, I
swear that I could never tell! For all the crowd would be so swell,
in just the same fine sort of jeans they wear at home, and all the
queens with spiffy bonnets on their beans, and all the fellows
standing round a-talkin' always, I'll be bound, the same good jolly
kind of guff, 'bout autos, politics and stuff and baseball players
of renown that Nice Guys talk in my home town!

  "Then when I entered that hotel, I'd look around and
say, "Well, well!" For there would be the same news-stand, same
magazines and candies grand, same smokes of famous standard brand,
I'd find at home, I'll tell! And when I saw the jolly bunch come
waltzing in for eats at lunch, and squaring up in natty duds to
platters large of French Fried spuds, why then I'd stand right up
and bawl, "I've never left my home at all!" And all replete I'd sit
me down beside some guy in derby brown upon a lobby chair of plush,
and murmur to him in a rush, "Hello, Bill, tell me, good old scout,
how is your stock a-holdin' out?" Then we'd be off, two solid pals,
a-chatterin' like giddy gals of flivvers, weather, home, and wives,
lodge-brothers then for all our lives! So when Sam Satan makes you
blue, good friend, that's what I'd up and do, for in these States
where'er you roam, you never leave your home sweet home."