William S. Smith, Democracy and Imperialism: Irving Babbitt and Warlike Democracies

Excerpt

For a brief spell during the late 1920s and early 1930s, New Humanism, an informal movement of literary and social criticism, appeared to be on the minds of all educated Americans. By this time, Irving Babbitt (1865–1933), a professor of French and comparative literature at Harvard University and the intellectual progenitor of the movement, had become a figure of great controversy, as countless journals and newspapers in the US devoted column space to attacking or defending his ideas. Heralded intellectuals took part in the heated contretemps surrounding New Humanism; Edmund Wilson, Lewis Mumford, Allen Tate, G. K. Chesterton, and H. L. Mencken, for example, were among the heavyweights who provided assessments of Babbitt and his followers. The debate over New Humanism reached such a fever pitch that on May 9, 1930, Babbitt appeared before a packed audience at Carnegie Hall in New York City, to debate his views with the American critics Carl Van Doren and Henry Seidel Canby. When Humanism and America, a collective manifesto of sorts written by fifteen New Humanists, ¹ appeared in print during the same year, The Boston Globe reported that its publication “has precipitated such a din and such a frantic tumult of name calling as nothing else in the recent chronicles of Time and Western Man.” ² …