Green’s Dictionary of Slang

(US) a self-opinionated, self-satisfied small-town bourgeois, with all the prejudices of such a figure; thus Babbitry n.

1922–24		O.O. McIntyre White Light Nights 3: The capricious cuties who live by their ability to find the ‘live one’ do not angle for visiting Babbitts.
1923		O.O. McIntyre New York Day by Day 9 May [synd. col.] The visiting Babbitts smoke their 50 cent cigars and perhaps toss a sly wink at merry chorines.
1926		O.O. McIntyre New York Day by Day 28 Feb. [synd. col.] There has grown up in America a derisive attitude to the civic booster. Babbitry they call it.
1935		(con. 1920s) J.T. Farrell Judgement Day in Studs Lonigan (1936) 624: My pater’s a babbitt.
1940		D. Maurer Big Con 106: A Babbitt who has cleared half a million in real-estate development.
1951		(con. c.1926) S. Longstreet Pedlocks (1971) 301: The man had become what the middle-class intellectual with his button-down, soft, shirt collar from Brooks Brothers called ‘a Babbitt’.
1959		V. Packard Status Seekers 44: Bohemia is a state of mind inhabited by those who, whether or not they are creative or particularly intellectual, like to stand on the margins and scoff at the babbitts .
1977		J. Skvorecky Engineer of Human Souls (trans. 1994) 527: The bar is lined with drunken Canadians, a black man with a freckled girl, some drunken Babbitt in a Shriner’s fez.
1989		H. Rawson Dict. of Invective (1991) 14: Famous fictitious ones, e.g. [...] Alibi Ike, babbit, goody two-shoes, pander, and Peeping Tom.
1993		I.L. Allen City in Sl. (1995) 43: Much of his [i.e. Sinclair Lewis’s] fictional placenames and personal names (e.g., Babbitt) entered slang in the 1920s as popular labels of their types.