Classical Antiquity and the Politics of America: From George Washington to George W. Bush

Chapter 5. The Rise of Populism, the Decline of Classical Education, and the Seventeenth Amendment

69 The Rise of Populism, the Decline of Classical Education, and the Seventeenth Amendment The rapid economic and social changes that transformed the United States in the half century following the Civil War spawned demands for greater public participation in government and for greater government oversight of business and society. These demands united southern and western farmers angered over railroad monopolies that controlled the transportation of their produce, immigrant laborers upset over working conditions in northern factories, women who found themselves excluded from political decision making, small businessmen brought to ruin by insecure banks, and social reformers disenchanted with the poverty and despair in which many Americans lived. The solutions called for by these groups often shared an underlying concept of populism, a term that can be used to encompass ideas from both the Populist political movement of the 1890s and the Progressive movement of the 1910s.1 Several amendments to the United States Constitution grew out of this populist fervor: the Sixteenth Amendment (ratified in 1913), which legalized federal income tax; the Eighteenth Amendment (ratified in 1919), which established Prohibition; the Nineteenth Amendment (ratified in 1920), which provided universal women’s suffrage; and the focus of this sMichael Meckler Chapter 5 Meckler.ClassicalAntiquity 5/25/06 12:07 PM Page 69 70 The Rise of Populism, the Decline of Classical Education essay, the Seventeenth Amendment (ratified in 1913), which established the direct election of United States senators. The rise in populist politics occurred as the traditional education in Greek and Latin came increasingly under criticism and marginalization. The young men of modest means who fought the Civil War and settled the West resented the social distinction classical education seemed to bestow upon their wealthier coevals from the East Coast. The increasing disparity between rich and poor in the second half of the nineteenth century tainted the perception of why the ancients were studied. Classical education was increasingly viewed as a luxury of the well-to-do, a luxury employed primarily to demarcate the leisure class. The farmer and the laborer had no need or desire for such an education.2 Social critics were not the only ones to dismiss the study of classical antiquity in late nineteenth-century America. Business leaders also deemed it irrelevant to the demands of an increasingly scientific and industrial age, and they failed to see any connection between the classics and a successful career. Many of those who amassed fortunes from steel, railroads, and oil enjoyed only the slightest contact with the ancient Greeks and Romans in what little formal education they received. These tycoons viewed their ascent in business and society as stemming solely from experience in employment and native talent. Andrew Carnegie, whose formal education ended at the age of twelve, argued against the usefulness of the traditional course of study in colleges and universities, writing in the New York Tribune in 1890, “The prizetakers [in American business] have too many years the start of the [college] graduate; they have entered for the race invariably in their teens—in the most valuable of all the years for learning anything—from fourteen to twenty; while the college student has been learning a little about the barbarous and petty squabbles of a far-distant past, or trying to master languages which are dead, such knowledge as seems adapted for life on another planet.”3 New areas of study seemed more appropriate for America’s youth, especially in the applied and social sciences. Engineering and psychology were gaining respect as academic disciplines in their own right. Advances in the natural and physical sciences expanded the amount of study necessary for competence in these fields. Academic disciplines were also becoming professionalized, and a plethora of specialized learned societies appeared, including the American Chemical Society (founded in 1876), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (1880), the Modern Language Association (1883), the American Historical Association (1884), the Geological Society of America (1889), the American Psychological Association (1892), the American Mathematical Society (1894), and the American Physical Society (1899). With academic professionalization came the establishment of separate canons of knowledge specific to each Meckler.ClassicalAntiquity 5/25/06 12:07 PM Page 70 Michael Meckler 71 discipline. This growth in fields of study appropriate to college education made it less tenable for colleges to maintain that all students take a required set of courses in classical studies.4 Moreover, the increasing engagement of the United States in...