Creating the College Man: American Mass Magazines and Middle-Class Manhood, 1890-1915 (review)

Creating the College Man explores the historical roots of college as the preferred path for advancement of middle-class White men and the eventual expansion of access to higher education. At the end of the industrial age, the most influential success narrative was of native-born White men ascending the ranks of business and industry through sweat and perseverance. Meanwhile, college men were deemed unfit for such success as they were widely believed to live undisciplined personal lives, engaged in studying classical bodies of knowledge inapplicable to the corporate and industrial world.

Drawing on news, features, and advertising, Daniel A. Clark explains how mass magazines changed the narrative of the self-made man to promote college as the preferred place in which aspiring middle-class young men could prepare for corporate leadership.

Clark's study unfolds over five engaging chapters. Middle-class White men are both the focus of his book and the largest group of prospective college students of his period of study, so he devotes most of his text to explicating the challenges they confronted. Each chapter concludes with an exploration of how women and immigrants from eastern and southern Europe and Asia were involved in and affected by the changes occurring.

The introduction provides a roadmap for the themes Clark develops and sets the book in historical and cultural context between the end of the industrial age and start of modern corporatization. Clark also outlines his methodology here. He documented each article, editorial, or advertisement that focused on college or mentioned a college-related theme appearing in every issue of the great U.S. popular magazines Saturday Evening Post, Munsey's, Cosmopolitan, and Collier's Weekly published between 1893 and 1915.

Chapter 1 focuses on "The Crisis of the Clerks" and describes a workforce in flux. "No longer could a man learn the business firsthand by doing the mountain of monotonous tasks required in the huge modern office surrounded by legions of clerks now using typewriters . . . nor did the clerk sit at the elbow of the business master learning the practical secrets of success" (p. 27). Ballooning numbers of clerks doing the same work made distinguishing oneself through hard work alone difficult.

Further threatening the primacy of middle-class White men in these jobs were the hiring of women and the arrival of immigrant men "hungry for work and advancement" (p. 27). Given these discouraging, emasculating circumstances, mass magazines suggested that clerks get ahead through correspondence courses or technical training. For a time, they reinforced the notion that college produced only "dandies" educated in dead languages; but Clark argues that the shift occurred gradually when the lack of advancement opportunities for middle-class White male clerks was confronted by the growing need for a scientifically educated workforce to manage increasingly complex business and industrial operations.

Chapter 2 describes how college curricular reforms "masculinized" the liberal arts to meet industry needs for scientifically trained workers and to serve self-made manhood. According to Clark, magazines that once actively questioned the utility of college began printing news articles and editorials describing the new college curriculum of science, social studies, and modern humanities (recent literature, history, and modern languages). Reports of curriculum reforms signaled to magazines' mostly male readership that college had become an acceptable and even preferred road to opportunity. By focusing on White men, Clark concludes, magazine writers and editors established subtle "cultural parameters" (p. 70) defining college and the new college curriculum as inappropriate for women and newly arriving immigrants.

In Chapter 3, "Athletes and Frats, Romance and Rowdies," Clark presents mass magazines' coverage of the benefits of extra-curricular activities to college men. Magazine covers, short stories, and whole issues illustrated how college football and other sports requiring individual courage and teamwork developed manliness. Articles and features highlighted fraternities and eating clubs, detailing the virtues of male...