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  • Whither Tycoon Medievalism? A Response to Kathleen Davis
  • Sharon Irish (bio)

Kathleen Davis’s essay ponders an odd line-up of names on the south wall of Bucknell University’s original Carnegie Library (c. 1905) in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Charlemagne, Alfred, Washington, Lincoln, and then McKinley. King Alfred, the ninth-century leader of the West Saxons, and his slightly earlier Frankish counterpart, Charlemagne, are linked in this line-up to three US presidents, Washington, Lincoln, and McKinley. The inscription of two medieval names (Charlemagne and Alfred) on the exterior of a modest library prompts Davis to examine the “relationship between the medievalist historicism attested in the genealogy on Bucknell’s Carnegie Building and the processes by which [Andrew] Carnegie, among others, institutionalized philanthropy and thereby established an impersonal, self-perpetuating mechanism for redistributing economic capital into symbolic capital at a crucial moment in the history of US labor relations.”

As a gloss on Davis’s text, this response starts with the building itself and ends with some thoughts about tycoon medievalism and symbolic capital. The library at Bucknell was apparently designed in 1904, and probably built the following year: a perspective showing a symmetrical brick structure with a central pavilion and classical detailing was published in the American Architect and Building News in late 1904 (“Library” 112). Although Davis indicates that the architects, William S. Ackerman and William E. Partridge, may have helped select the names for the inscriptions, the published sketch shows no evidence of any such intentions. The choices were no doubt finalized after construction [End Page 801] began. Carnegie only supplied the funds for the building in this phase of his “wholesale” library program, so it was unlikely that he influenced the details of the design. Stylistically, the library is not a medieval revival building and, although its inscriptions include names from the medieval era, the building forms do little to help us interpret those. “According to this early American historiography, Charlemagne and Alfred were the forebears of Washington and Lincoln, who carried out the destiny of the freedom-loving race,” Davis writes.

Davis asserts that the medievalism in evidence at Bucknell was a bolster to industrial interests, with a lineage from Frankish and Saxon rulers to McKinley confirming an implicit governmental approval of the likes of Carnegie. In contrast, for critics like Lewis Mumford in the early twentieth century, medievalism, or Romanticism in general, served as a foil to industry (Kaufman and Irish xxxix). Clearly, medievalism has been varied if not contradictory since its inception, from eighteenth-century associationism to architectural revivals founded on moral rectitude, from romantic imaginings to political ideologies such as Anglo-Saxonism.

Early-twentieth-century Anglo-Saxonism was thus one variety of medievalism, asserting the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon people and their institutions, which were understood to be models of good government, commercial prosperity, and piety. Davis notes that Anglo-Saxonism thrived at the beginning of the twentieth century when Bucknell administrators built the modest brick and stone library. Further, she links Anglo-Saxonism to Carnegie, who viewed his “millionaire’s wealth [as] a sign of his superiority, and that he ha[d] a moral responsibility to administer this wealth on behalf of the poor according to his best judgment.” At Bucknell, medievalism seemed to provide a metaphorical link from imperial to industrial might.

President McKinley (unlike Carnegie) was an imperialist, although he reluctantly launched a war with Spain in his first term. He wanted Hawai‘i early on, and the Spanish-American War enabled him to take possession of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and, to an extent, Cuba. My hunch is that his name appears on the library mostly because he was assassinated three years prior to its construction, and the Bucknell administrators felt moved to mark that event. However, Davis convincingly makes a case for McKinley’s support of Carnegie’s business interests.

Carnegie’s corporate industries thrived under McKinley’s protectionist policies. After selling off Carnegie Steel, he dedicated himself to scholarly pursuits and philanthropy right around the time that McKinley succumbed to gangrene after being shot by an anarchist in 1901. Davis conjectures that the Bucknell building [End Page 802] “may . . . tell us about the merger of medievalism...

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