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Labor strife comes to Zenith, as telephone workers go out on strike. Violence is threatened; the national guard is called out. Businessmen who in private life are plump Athletic Club jokesters waddle around with guns. Hysteria mounts--and Babbitt chooses this time to be publicly liberal, to make his rebellion an open one.
NOTE: LABOR STRIFE IN 1920S AMERICA Once again Babbitt mirrors the America of the early 1920s. It was an era of great labor unrest and, among conservative businessmen, great worry. Were labor unions getting too powerful? Were they linked to Communism? These fears were strong enough to divide many cities into warring camps.
At first Babbitt agrees with his Athletic Club friends that labor agitators should be shot. But when he reads a pamphlet alleging that workers don\'t earn enough money to feed themselves, he\'s troubled. He attends church, hoping to find an answer, but hears the Reverend Drew deliver an attack on unions that is as vicious as it is illogical. (Again, Lewis shows how religion in Zenith is used to keep the poor in their place.)
\"Oh, rot,\" Babbitt says of Drew\'s sermon. At last he sees the reverend for the smooth-talking hypocrite he is. Chum Frink, sitting nearby, looks at Babbitt doubtfully--and you begin to see that Babbitt\'s rebellion will not go unnoticed, or unopposed.
The following Tuesday, Babbitt, driving from his office, sees a crowd of strikers. At first he reacts as he would have in his old, conservative days: he hates the strikers for being poor, says they wouldn\'t be common workmen if they had any \"pep.\" He admires the way the National Guard breaks up the march. But when he sees Seneca Doane and a distinguished professor marching, too, he\'s forced to admit that perhaps the workers have the same right to the street as anyone else.
At lunch, Babbitt is silent, disturbed. Then, when the officious Captain Drum of the National Guard says he wishes he\'d been able to use violence against the crowd, Babbitt does something he\'s never done before: he takes a public, political stand against his friends. Their reaction is immediate and frightening. Professor Pumphrey angrily accuses him of defending hoodlums. Vergil Gunch, even more ominously, stares at Babbitt like a silent judge. Babbitt backs down, but his apology doesn\'t seem to satisfy anyone. As he leaves the club, he overhears Chum Frink telling of Babbitt\'s attack on the Reverend Drew. Later, when Babbitt stands listening to Beecher Ingram, he sees Gunch spying on him.
Babbitt\'s new views aren\'t popular at home either. Mrs. Babbitt, astonished at his defense of the strikers, assumes he is joking. His wife doesn\'t understand the new man he\'s become, Babbitt realizes. But he doesn\'t really understand himself either. He feels the forces of conformity, led by Vergil Gunch, massing to attack.
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