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

If you’re reading this review, you’ve likely been there: college. Today, more then 8 million men are enrolled. Attendance is pervasive. A century ago, however, the college campus was transitioning from the reserve of the elite to the proving ground of the middle class. The term “college man” packed cultural punch, with much owed to the editors of Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s Weekly, Munsey’s Magazine, and Cosmopolitan. These magazines, Daniel Clark convincingly argues, were primary vehicles for promoting the new face of American masculinity—young, educated, and clean shaven. The book details how “college became part of the new formula for American success and middle-class identity in the dawning of the corporate age” (5).

Creating the College Man engages a range of scholarship from studies of turn-of-the-century masculinity to explorations of the cultural impact of Chandlerian corporations. While undoubtedly a cultural history, the book impressively integrates the history of the media, consumerism, masculinity, and the middle class. The book adds to the history of higher education, finding complements in enduring studies of collegiate culture by Paula Fass and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz and also in recent inquiries including Margaret Lowe’s Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1875–1930 and Nicholas Syrett’s excellent The Company He Keeps, a history of white fraternities. While these glimpse the interworking of campus life, Clark concentrates on the watchers, not the watched. In fact, there are few actual college men in the book.

Clark presents magazines as “cultural forums” that merged “discordant and incongruous strains of evolving American masculine ideals” and secured “advancement for native born white men (by) employing the language of democratic meritocracy” (17, 23). Staying admirably on subject, Clark details how magazines helped their “middle-class readership to connect developing notions of professional pride and expert status with modern, scientific college education” (187). In these turn-of-the-century publications, college and collegians were everywhere–in advertisements for Harvard Classics; in fictionalized accounts of football games such as Arthur Hobson Quinn’s “The Last Five Yards;” and in advice from educational leaders on how to pick a college for your “boy.” For Clark, magazines’ depictions of college established it as “an ideal location, an ideal experience, that allowed for multiple facets of an evolving masculinity to coexist seamlessly” (187). Collegians’ omnipresence in these magazines turned the tide of public opinion to transform college men from effete dilettantes to the cultural standard for American men.

In addition to the histories of higher education and masculinity, Clark contributes to the history of business in two important ways. First, he traces the cultural transformation of the self-educated clerk into the college-educated young executive—a change that occurred in the murky period around the turn-of-the-century when “many complex issues heralded the death knell of the traditional self-made man in business” (28). Second, Clark gets to how massive socioeconomic change shapes and is shaped by cultural trends. To Clark, the collegiate experience “facilitated new avenues for reasserting native-born, white male hegemony in an emerging corporate America” (24). Clark provides detailed insight into how magazines’ portrayal of college life reconfigured WASP standards to tout democracy yet remain beyond the grasp of immigrants, non-whites, and women.

Clark’s “big picture” arguments are complemented by his “real life” examples. Much to his credit, Clark demonstrates that actual people carefully crafted the image of the self-starting, well-rounded, athletic college man. A new species of magazine editors including George Lorimer (Saturday Evening Post), Frank Munsey (Munsey’s), John Brisben Walker (Cosmopolitan) and Norman Hapgood (Collier’s) consistently reminded its middle-class readership that college was a “viable rung on the ladder of success” and “a fit site to form an ideal middle-class manhood” (24). Clark gives just enough of the personalities behind these publications, without stepping into biography. Here, he makes a needed contribution...