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

Introduction: Piggy Goes to Harvard: Mass Magazines, Masculinity, and College Education for the Corporate Middle Class

Introduction Piggy Goes to Harvard: Mass Magazines, Masculinity, and College Education for the Corporate Middle Class During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many businessmen proudly echoed Andrew Carnegie’s well-known denunciation that “a college education unfits rather than fits men to affairs.”1 What a difference a century makes. While Carnegie would change his tune, such a sentiment as his could hardly be conceivable today. College and university bumper stickers have become notorious markers of presumed social status. Access to college education is a major political, economic, and social concern, swirling with issues of gender equity and racial and class preference. The U.S. News and World Report’s annual college ratings issue has emerged as a much anticipated media event. With the skyrocketing costs of higher education has come renewed focus on improving access and evaluating quality in higher education. And for the last several years educational and social researchers have lamented a decline in male college enrollments and graduation rates (especially acute for African Americans) as a part of a broader “crisis of masculinity” in modern America.2 All of these contemporary concerns assume the central importance of college education in conceptions of power in America. 3 But how did a college education become so vital to our notions of advancement ? We Americans tend to forget what a fundamental shift in thinking the integration of college within our popular cultural assumptions of success and authority represented. Might not our present debates about the purpose and place of college education (what value it adds) be advanced by a deeper understanding of the genesis of the American embrace of college education almost a century ago? What originally made a college education so attractive, particularly to American men, who overwhelmingly had few historic connections to formal education or credentialing and who were in fact part of the broad American public largely regarded as anti-intellectual in the nineteenth century? We have neglected to understand how current concerns encompassing American higher education (and even masculinity) may be tied intimately to cultural reconstructions of college arising at the very beginning of the modern era— vitally connected to reformulations of power and identity for white, middleclass men in America during the turn of the last century. Native-born, white American men at that time confronted a set of issues not dissimilar to today— a shifting economy, the threat of massive immigration, and the challenge of women rising in the workplace and in politics. This book began, then, with a very simple but inadequately understood question: What informed the modern demand for college education in America ? This scholarly quest led me back to find the metaphorical first of the firstgeneration collegians of the modern period in order to understand what forces shaped the popular acceptance of college in American life during that critical formative era. To ponder the growing importance of college education in American society during that time is, in reality, to explore how Americans reformulated dominant notions of male authority and power (interlaced with shifts in conceptions of gender, race, and business success) as they adjusted to the creation of a corporate and consumer-oriented world. One thing Carnegie’s statement should remind us of is just how different concepts of success and manhood were within the dominant ideology of nineteenth-century America. The dominant ideal of success in the nineteenth century—the autonomous, self-made man—was based around an economic world of small farmers and businessmen, as one scholar has termed it, “traditional entrepreneurial individualism .”3 Any kind of formal education beyond the three Rs had a very limited, even dubious place in manly notions of success. The vast majority of the eminent businessmen listed in a Who’s Who of Americans in 1900 (84) noted no education beyond the high school years.4 In 1900 American institutions of higher education enrolled only 4 percent of all college-age youth, women included.5 Success literature of the nineteenth century rarely mentioned education, 4 Introduction E emphasizing instead the necessity of character and self-discipline instilled by simple hard work. And well into the twentieth century such literature, in fact, assigned the college graduate a place alongside the eccentric genius, figures dismissed as lazy and undisciplined—men “who sought a conspicuous place, short work, and large rewards.” Colleges crippled the faculties required for business success—will, diligence, persistence, health, and discipline. College had ruined more men than...