His morning was not sharply marked into divisions. Interwoven with
correspondence and
advertisement-writing were a thousand nervous details: calls from
clerks who were incessantly and hopefully seeking five furnished
rooms and bath at sixty dollars a month; advice to Mat Penniman on getting money out of tenants who had no money.
Babbitt's virtues as a real-estate broker--as the servant of
society in the
department of finding homes for families and shops for distributors of food--were
steadiness and
diligence. He was conventionally honest, he kept his records of buyers and sellers complete, he had experience with
leases and titles and an excellent memory for prices. His shoulders were broad enough,
his voice deep enough, his relish of hearty humor strong enough, to establish him as one of the ruling
caste of Good Fellows. Yet his eventual importance to mankind was perhaps lessened by his large and
complacent ignorance of all
architecture save the types of houses turned out by speculative builders; all
landscape gardening save the use of curving roads, grass, and six ordinary shrubs; and all the commonest axioms of
economics. He serenely believed that the one purpose of the real-estate business was to make money for George F. Babbitt. True, it was a good advertisement at Boosters' Club lunches, and all
the varieties of Annual Banquets to which Good Fellows were invited, to speak sonorously of Unselfish Public Service, the Broker's Obligation to Keep Inviolate the Trust of His Clients, and a thing called
Ethics, whose nature
was confusing but if you had it you were a High-class
Realtor and if you hadn't you were a
shyster, a
piker, and a
fly-by-night. These virtues awakened
Confidence, and enabled you to handle Bigger Propositions. But they didn't imply that you were to be impractical and refuse to take twice the value of a
house if a buyer was such an idiot that he didn't jew you down on the asking-price.
Babbitt spoke well--and often--at these
orgies of commercial
righteousness about the "realtor's function as a seer of the future development of the community, and as a prophetic
engineer clearing the pathway for inevitable
changes"--which meant that a real-estate broker could make money by guessing which way the town would grow. This guessing he called
Vision.
In an address at the Boosters' Club he had admitted, "It is at once the
duty and the
privilege of the realtor to know everything about his own
city and its environs. Where a
surgeon is a
specialist on every vein and mysterious cell of the human body, and the engineer upon
electricity in all its phases, or every bolt of some great
bridge majestically arching o'er a mighty flood, the
realtor must know his city,
inch by inch, and all its faults and virtues."
Though he did know the market-price, inch by inch, of certain districts of
Zenith, he did not know whether the
police force was too large or too small, or whether it was in alliance with
gambling and
prostitution. He knew the means of fire-proofing buildings and the relation of insurance-rates to fire-proofing, but he did not know how many
firemen there were in the city, how they were trained and paid, or how complete their apparatus. He sang
eloquently the advantages of proximity of school-buildings to rentable homes, but he did not know--he did not know that it was worth while to know--whether the city schoolrooms were properly heated, lighted, ventilated, furnished; he did not know how the
teachers were chosen; and though he chanted "One of the boasts of Zenith is that we pay our teachers adequately," that was because he
had read the statement in the Advocate-Times. Himself, he could not have given the average salary of teachers in Zenith or anywhere else.
He had heard it said that "conditions" in the
County Jail and the Zenith City
Prison were not very "
scientific;" he had, with indignation at the criticism of Zenith, skimmed through a report in which the notorious pessimist Seneca Doane, the radical lawyer, asserted that to throw boys and young girls into a
bull-pen crammed with men suffering from
syphilis,
delirium tremens, and
insanity was not the perfect way of educating them. He had controverted the report by growling, "Folks that think a jail ought to be a bloomin' Hotel Thornleigh make me sick. If people don't like a jail, let 'em behave 'emselves
and keep out of it. Besides, these reform cranks always exaggerate." That was the beginning and quite completely the end of his investigations into Zenith's
charities and corrections; and as to the "vice districts" he brightly expressed it, "Those are things that no decent man monkeys with. Besides, smatter fact, I'll tell you confidentially: it's a protection to our daughters
and to decent women to have a district where tough nuts can
raise cain. Keeps 'em away from our own homes."
As to industrial conditions, however, Babbitt had thought a great deal, and his opinions may be coordinated as follows:
"A good
labor union is of value because it keeps out
radical unions, which would destroy property. No one ought to be forced to belong to a union,
however. All labor
agitators who try to force men to join a union should be hanged. In fact, just between ourselves, there oughtn't to be any unions
allowed at all; and as it's the best way of fighting the unions, every business man ought to belong to an employers'-association and to the
Chamber of Commerce. In union there is strength. So any selfish hog who doesn't join
the Chamber of Commerce ought to be forced to."
In nothing--as the expert on whose advice families moved to new neighborhoods to live there for a generation--was Babbitt more splendidly innocent than in the science of
sanitation. He did not know a
malaria-bearing
mosquito from a
bat; he knew nothing about tests of drinking water; and in the matters of
plumbing and
sewage he was as unlearned as he was
voluble. He often referred to the excellence of the bathrooms in the houses he sold. He was fond of explaining why it was that no
European ever bathed. Some one had told him,
when he was twenty-two, that all
cesspools were unhealthy, and he still denounced them. If a client impertinently wanted him to sell a house which had a cesspool, Babbitt always spoke about it--before accepting the house and selling it.
When he laid out the Glen Oriole acreage
development, when he ironed woodland and dipping meadow into a glenless, orioleless, sunburnt flat prickly with small boards displaying the names of imaginary streets, he righteously put in a complete sewage-system. It made him feel superior; it enabled him to sneer privily at the Martin Lumsen development, Avonlea, which had a cesspool; and it provided a chorus for the full-page advertisements in which he announced the
beauty,
convenience, cheapness, and
supererogatory healthfulness of Glen
Oriole. The only flaw was that the Glen Oriole sewers had insufficient outlet, so that waste remained in them, not very agreeably, while the Avonlea cesspool was a Waring
septic tank.
The whole of the Glen Oriole project was a suggestion that Babbitt, though he really did hate men recognized as
swindlers, was not too unreasonably honest.
Operators and buyers prefer that brokers should not be in competition with them as operators and buyers themselves, but attend to their clients' interests only. It was supposed that the Babbitt-Thompson Company were merely
agents for Glen Oriole, serving the real owner, Jake Offutt, but the fact was that Babbitt and Thompson owned sixty-two per cent. of the Glen, the president and purchasing agent of the Zenith Street Traction Company owned
twenty-eight per cent., and Jake Offutt (a gang-
politician, a small manufacturer, a tobacco-chewing old
farceur who enjoyed dirty politics,
business diplomacy, and cheating at
poker) had only ten per cent., which Babbitt and the Traction officials had given to him for "fixing"
health inspectors and
fire inspectors and a member of the
State Transportation
Commission.
But Babbitt was virtuous. He advocated, though he did not practise, the
prohibition of
alcohol; he praised, though he did not obey, the laws against motor-speeding; he paid his debts; he contributed to the
church, the
Red
Cross, and the
Y. M. C. A.; he followed the custom of his clan and cheated only as it was sanctified by precedent; and he never descended to trickery--though, as he explained to Paul Riesling:
"Course I don't mean to say that every ad I write is literally true or that I always believe everything I say when I give some buyer a good strong selling-spiel. You see--you see it's like this: In the first place, maybe the
owner of the
property exaggerated when he put it into my hands, and it certainly isn't my place to go proving my principal a liar! And then most folks are so darn crooked themselves that they expect a fellow to do a little
lying, so if I was fool enough to never whoop the ante I'd get the credit for lying anyway! In self-defense I got to toot my own horn, like a
lawyer defending a
client--his bounden duty, ain't it, to bring out the poor dub's
good points? Why, the
Judge himself would bawl out a lawyer that didn't, even if they both knew the guy was guilty! But even so, I don't pad out the truth
like Cecil Rountree or Thayer or the rest of these realtors. Fact, I think a fellow that's willing to deliberately up and
profit by lying ought to be
shot!"
Babbitt's value to his clients was rarely better shown than this morning, in the conference at eleven-thirty between himself, Conrad Lyte, and Archibald Purdy.
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