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

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Bird S. Coler, “The Man Who Can’t Go to College,” Saturday Evening Post, 29 June 1901, p. 8. 2. See for instance Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: Harper Perennial, 2000). 3. Richard Weiss, The American Myth of Success: From Horatio Alger to Norman Vincent Peale (New York and London: Basic Books, 1969), 9. 4. Irvin G. Wyllie, The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1954), 95–96. 5. U.S. Bureau of the Census (1961), Historical Statistics of the United States, 10 and 210–11, quoted in David K. Brown, Degrees of Control: A Sociology of Educational Expansion and Occupational Credentialism (New York: Columbia University Teachers College Press, 1995), 76. 6. Wyllie, Self-Made Man in America, 35 and 100–103. The quote is from Wyllie (35), but Wyllie drew from nineteenth-century advice literature such as Edwin T. Freedley, A Practical Treatise on Business (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo and Co., 1854). Wyllie notes many examples of practical men of affairs dismissing the college man as useless. Judy Hilkey found the very same dismissals of the college man into the twentieth century . Judy Hilkey, Character Is Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 108–10. 7. Noted in Mark McKenzie, “Expectations of College Life Before 1940,” American Educational History Journal 27 (2000): 88–92. 8. The progression by decade from 1870 is: 1870, 52,286 or 1.6%; 1880, 115,817 or 2.72%; 1890, 156,756 or 3.04%; 1900, 237,592 or 4.01%; 1910, 355,213 or 5.1%; 1920, 597,880 or 8.2%; and 1930, 1.1 million or 12.95%. Digest of Education Statistics, 1977–78, 85 and 94; and Historical Statistics of the United States, Series H, 751–56, compiled in W. Bruce Leslie, “Toward a History of the American Upper Middle Class, 1870–1940” (paper presented at the Cambridge University American History Seminar, 1994), 13. 9. F. W. Tausig and C. S. Joslyn, American Business Leaders: A Study in Origins and Social Stratification (New York: Macmillan, 1932), 55 and 184. Mabel Newcomer found in industry (in 1900) that 34 percent had some college, 24 percent college degrees, and 5 percent engineering degrees. By 1925 these percentages had increased to 49 percent for those with some college, 39 percent with college degrees, and 10 percent with engineering 191 degrees. Mabel Newcomer, The Big Business Executive: The Factors That Made Him, 1900– 1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 73. 10. My definition of cultural capital comes from Pierre Bourdieu. Cultural capital encompasses forms of knowledge and cultural norms (skills and understandings) corresponding to the dominant culture. In contrast social capital consists of the connections and networks (family, friends, acquaintances) that form the group identifications of a person. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research of the Sociology of Education, ed. J. G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 241–58. 11. David Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1977); Burton Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1976); Roger L. Geiger, To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Clyde Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of Higher Education, 1894–1928 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Pamela Walker Laird, Pull: Networking and Success since Benjamin Franklin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). One work that takes a functionalist stance but not in a traditional sense is Brown, Degrees of Control. Christopher Newfield, Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University , 1880–1980 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 12. Business historians touching on the increased hiring of college graduates include Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); Quentin Schultze, “‘An Honorable Place’: The Quest for Professional Advertising Education,” Business History Review 56 (Spring 1982): 16–32; and Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 13. For the onset of educational credentials in medicine and law due in part to the influx of immigrant practitioners, see particularly Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982); and...