Taking the Town: Collegiate and Community Culture in the Bluegrass, 1880-1917

Epilogue: Postwar Lexington--So Long, Gilded Age

epilogue Postwar Lexington— So Long, Gilded Age But blessed are they that mourn, for verily there is more joy in the death of one literary society than in the existence of ninety and nine who are about to die. —Crimson Rambler 6, no. 4 (17 October 1919) “What do you men want here?” asked Governor Morrow. “We came to see if you would not give us that nigger,” they replied. —Lexington Leader, 5 February 1920 On the Campus: The Literary Societies “Killed and Buried” Lexington’s collegiate literary societies, like those everywhere, ultimately lost the struggle to retain relevance and student loyalty, and in so doing, their fate was sealed. In the years immediately following World War I the literary societies in Lexington had declined to the point that—if not already defunct —they were small, obscure clubs lost in a sea of campus organizations. This situation was not without its mourners, however. At Transylvania University , near the end of the spring semester in 1919, the student weekly newspaper the Crimson Rambler, lamenting the serious lack of student interest in and patronage of the campus literary societies, published a melancholy editorial entitled “What’s the Matter with the Literary Society?” in which the writer pleaded for renewed student support. Five months later, in October 1919, the few remaining, discouraged members of Transylvania’s once-prominent Cecropian Literary Society announced that, “in view of the changed situation in college life,” the society was being “killed and buried.” They held an “appropriate service” for the organization in Morrison Chapel a few days later, thereby publicly and formally disbanding and mourning the fifty-four-year-old organization that had, according to one student cor- 276  Taking the Town respondent, “outlived its usefulness.” At the ceremony held in Morrison Chapel, the minister eulogizing Cecropia seemed to comment on the general state of literary societies at that time: “But blessed are they that mourn, for verily there is more joy in the death of one literary society than in the existence of ninety and nine who are about to die.” The following month, Transylvania’s male Periclean and female Ossolian societies merged to form a coed Periclean Society in the hope that “a keener interest will be aroused in the meetings.” Thus, at Transylvania, where there had been six active literary societies in 1900, by 1920 there was only one small, struggling literary society among twenty-eight extracurricular organizations (not including athletic teams) featured in the school’s yearbook. Moreover, this process of demise seemed to be occurring at educational institutions throughout the region. In February 1920, under the headline “Another School Kills Literary Societies,” the Crimson Rambler noted that “the days of the old literary societies are gone at the Kentucky Military Institute. . . . In place of the literary societies they have put up . . . new, up-to-date clubs. . . . [For instance,] the Dramatic Club will try to develop theatrical talent.”1 Across town at the University of Kentucky (the name adopted by statute in 1916), four of the traditional literary societies, the Patterson, Union, Philosophian, and Horace Mann (as well as a society in the law school, the Henry Clay Law Society), were still functioning during the 1919–1920 school year, but here too, the student press reveals a tale of severe decline. In its second issue of the new school year, the student newspaper the Kentucky Kernel, offering no special status to the societies, simply lumped them in with other student “clubs” in an article urging freshmen to join in the extracurriculum. Thus, at the University of Kentucky the literary society, far from being the predominant, high-status student organization it had been in the 1890s and at the century’s turn, was by 1919 just one more club in a crowded field of extracurricular attractions. And worse, it was no longer even a popular attraction. When the Kernel announced that both the Kentucky intercollegiate oratorical contest and the first annual Southern Interstate Oratorical League contest would be held in the university’s chapel in March, it also printed an editorial acknowledging the lack of interest on campus in oratory and oratorical contests. The editorial complained that the students gave their support and admiration to the athlete but not to the orator, even though both trained hard for their respective events, and Epilogue  277 it concluded with a question for the student body: “So is it fair to give hearty support to...