American College and University: A History

12. Dawning of a New Era

IX Dawning of a New Era One day in 1867 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote into hisjournal an observation that anticipated how thoroughly higher education in the years after the Civil War would differ from the era of the colleges. "The treatises that are written on University reform may be acute or not," suggested Emerson, "but their chief value to the observer is the showing that a cleavage is occurring in the hitherto granite of the past and a new era is nearly arrived."1 The new era, which was about to dawn, would pass the old-time college by or perhaps convert it into a precious preserve of gentility or into a defiant outpost of denominationalism. In any case, it would never be the same again. The opportunities for redefinition that lay before the American college in the years after the Civil War were large. Not only did the long record of frustrated reform continue to make its challenge, but new institutions and new approaches now seemed to announce in the clearest of voices that the time had come when the old-time colleges would have to de1 Quoted in Walter P. Rogers: Andrew D. White and the Modern University (Ithaca, 1942), p. 4. THE AMERICAN COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 242 cide whether they would be instruments of the past or of the future, and how they would meet the now imperative needs of an expanding industrial nation and of a developing national power. For the Civil War in many ways clarified the dimensions and the prospects of the American experiment. It swept away the pretensions of the southern plantation aristocracy and all the dreams that had sustained it. And if the Civil War destroyed the southern version of an agrarian way, it likewise hastened the day when the sway of the independent yeoman farmer would come to art end. The Civil War cemented the East and the great Middle West into a formidable alliance of resources—natural, human, industrial, financial. The shape of things to come was etched in the war-built factory towns of New England, in an ever expanding network of railroads, in the new fortunes and the gingerbread houses built on the hills overlooking the towns. The Civil War conquered space. It freed thousands of Americans from a village orientation. It suggested remarkable opportunities in markets created by railroads , in needs created by an expanding population. The Civil War, also, as Lincoln had intended, proved the flexibility and the durability of popular government: it proved that in the severest kind of testing democratic government could summon the will, the intelligence, and the power to prevail. It put an end to any effective efforts to deny the supremacy of the people. In the person of Lincoln it found the ultimate answer to the questions that had separated Hamilton and Jefferson and agitated the enemies of Andrew Jackson: Would popular government work? Could it be trusted? And the Civil War likewise put an end to any doubts as to whether the United States would survive; it finished off any suspicions or lingering hopes on the part of hostile Europeans that the United States would eventually be broken into pieces, a patchwork of weak and servile republics. The prospect of American national power which the Civil War projected was acknowledged in the diplomatic victories that the American 243 Dawning of a New Era minister, Charles Francis Adams, achieved over the British Foreign Office during the war. It was forecast in the oil refineries of Cleveland, the iron furnaces of Pittsburgh, in the great rail center and stockyards of Chicago. It was underwritten by the most remarkable combination of human ambition and natural resources that the world had ever known. In a world remade by the Civil War the American college found that it could not avoid the questions that it had for so long evaded. In his inaugural address at the University of Michigan in 1871 James B. Angell noted: "The public mind is now in a plastic, impressionable state, and every vigorous college, nay, every capable worker, may help to shape its decisions upon education."a The extent of this plastic, impressionable state—largely supported by a sense that in every way a new era was upon the United States—was responsible for inspiring what became probably the most widely known aphorism in the history of American education. To a professor's complaint at an alumni banquet...