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

Prologue

prologue Panning for Gold Lexington is a living community bound together by memories, some of them bitter, but all remindful of a great history. . . . It is a proud, aristocratic city of Southern ancestry, life, and charm. —Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration, Lexington and the Bluegrass Country, 1938 This is an account of turn-of-the-century southern intellectual life flourishing in a local and regional social environment of considerable turmoil, violence, and change. More specifically, it is the story of an evolving intersection of community and collegiate life in a small city in the upper South, a story of extracurricular activities that played a vital role not only in the intellectual lives of the undergraduates but also in the middle- and upper-class white community as a whole. Why tell this story at all? Why try to unearth and examine this interplay of town and gown cultural aspirations in Lexington , Kentucky, from the period following Reconstruction to the nation’s entry into the First World War? The answer lies in the importance of region, locale, and campus-community interaction to the study of American intellectual history. To begin with, academia has sometimes construed southern intellectual life as an oxymoron—a misguided view that, until recently, has helped ensure that southern intellectual history would be neglected. Along with the need to rectify this neglect by further exploration of the historical life of the mind in the South, there is the need to pay more attention to specific locales and thus inform a larger context. Or, as one historian put it, “local history is a prism through which to view the history of the United States.” In addition, American higher education and American society as a whole achieved modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries together, interacting with and affecting each other in the process. Historian Thomas Bender has argued that, historically, American intellectual life flourished within a “mix of urban cultural institutions. Only later would one of these institutions, the college converted into the university, 2  Taking the Town achieve hegemony in intellectual life and transform the urban-based world of learning into university scholarship.” Against the backdrop of this historic transformation in American intellectual life and American higher education , a case study of a previously neglected intersection between student and community intellectual life in the Bluegrass city seemed a promising way to contribute to local history as well as to the historiography of American education. This book is the result.1 Community Setting and Cultural Change The social and cultural landscape of Lexington, Kentucky, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is revisited here through public records, primarily the local press, and through the private and public lives of two Lexingtonians: Joseph Marion Tanner and Margaret Wickliffe Preston . In their own time and in their own way, both Tanner and Preston were civically active and demonstrated a vibrant interest in, and concern for, the life of the mind. From the pages of the local press and from the lives of these two residents, Lexington emerges as a city enveloped by the regional forces characteristic of the New South in the years following Reconstruction and as a late-nineteenth-century Victorian city evolving into an increasingly progressive one before the United States’ military entry into the First World War. Enjoying a wealth of popular culture, or what one historian has called “cheap amusement,” Lexington was also a community rich in so-called high culture, supporting a vibrant “locality-based” intellectual life outside, though not entirely divorced from, its college campuses. In short, in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, this small upper South city was awash in a kaleidoscopic array of the mainstream social and intellectual forces prevalent in the region and the nation at the time.2 Lexington’s turn-of-the-century cultural landscape served as both context and audience for two distinct collegiate student organizations: literary societies and dramatic clubs. These organizations manifested themselves vigorously at two Lexington institutions: Kentucky University, known as Transylvania University before 1865 and after 1908, and State College, known today as the University of Kentucky. These extracurricular groups’ higher aspirations included self-improvement and refinement and devotion to the life of the intellect as exercised through the arts of expression, be it be- Prologue  3 hind the lectern or on the stage. Although much of the literature addressing the literary societies has...