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

1. The Crisis of the Clerks: Magazines, Masculine Success, and the Ideal Businessman in Transition

1 The Crisis of the Clerks Magazines, Masculine Success, and the Ideal Businessman in Transition Keenly aware that times were changing, the new middle-class periodicals that arose around the turn of the century seemed particularly interested in addressing the question of opportunities for young men entering the business world or “the world of affairs” as it was often called. Alongside the issue of whether the modern “trusts” multiplied or hindered these opportunities recurred the question of whether your boy should go to college . On this topic most writers would have agreed with Herbert Vreeland in “the Young Man’s Opportunity in the New Business Order” when he opined that “no man can get too much education . . . but the absence of an educational equipment at the start is no barrier to success.”1 In fact, a loud and substantial minority proclaimed college a clear hindrance to business success. One contributor to the Post lectured in reassuring terms about the handicap of the college man at twenty-two rubbing elbows with the “common school man,” who started in the office at fifteen. The college man, this writer predicted, would come “face to face with the realization that he is not so gifted . . . that much of his time at college has been wasted in acquiring useless learning; that the dead languages which he has taken so much pains to acquire are not of the slightest help to him in buying, selling, or in the making of common records.”2 26 Each of the industry-leading, new middle-class magazines, Munsey’s, Cosmopolitan , Collier’s, and especially the Saturday Evening Post, stalwartly upheld the self-made businessman as their quintessential American man. Opportunities abounded for men imbued with that ideal Victorian virtue of character. If young men worked diligently, persevered through hardships, and possessed an iron will and courage, they could educate themselves through their work as craftsmen or clerks and, thus, rise to own their shop or business. Articles and fiction in these periodicals endlessly championed such ideal figures. But times were indeed changing. By the end of the first decade, even the Post, the greatest promoter of traditional self-made manhood, admitted a problem . In 1909 the Post ran a series covering a “crisis” for the clerk, the stereotypical aspiring businessman of the nineteenth century.3 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. No longer did such work experience foster and nurture the growth of Victorian values and character, nor did the clerk sit at the elbow of the business master learning the practical secrets of success. And now women had infiltrated the office, assuming the secretarial and office positions that had traditionally served as training-ground and stepping-stones for aspiring businessmen. Finally, and most alarming, hordes of new immigrant men arrived yearly, hungry for work and advancement, adding a new dimension to the competition to get ahead. In the space of a decade, story headlines in the Post went from advice to aspiring clerks, “The Clerk Who Saves,” to lamentations, “The Clerk Who Isn’t Young.”4 Ironically, by 1910 an alternative avenue for molding ideal business men had emerged—the college—with magazines as a principal vehicle celebrating this new route to business success. Before we can understand how these magazines refashioned the image of college to meet this crisis of business masculinity, we need to grasp not only the pressures on traditional models of business success but also the alternative ideals crafted to cope with the corporate transformation prior to the full acceptance of college as an ideal place to cultivate businessmen. College as an accepted rung on the ladder of American success eventually would occur owing to the way that college, as a single formative experience, could interweave several attributes increasingly deemed essential to advancement—an acquaintance with science, the breadth of liberal culture, and a brush with the so-called manly athletics. While all of these motives served as links between college, business success, and masculinity, in fact college was not a necessary component for any of them. Modern scientific training, the polish of genteel culture, the fortitude and toughness bred by sports, all of these could be acquired outside the The Crisis of the Clerks 27 E ivied walls and, thus, without the many negative stereotypes attached to college...