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

by Daniel A. Clark

How did a college education become so vital to American notions of professional and personal advancement? Reared on the ideal of the self-made man, American men had long rejected the need for college. But in the early twentieth century this ideal began to change as white men born in the U.S. faced a barrage of new challenges, among them a stultifying bureaucracy and growing competition in the workplace from an influx of immigrants and women. At this point a college education appealed to young men as an attractive avenue to success in a dawning corporate age. Accessible at first almost exclusively to middle-class white males, college funneled these aspiring elites toward a more comfortable and certain future in a revamped construction of the American dream.
    In Creating the College Man Daniel A. Clark argues that the dominant mass media of the era—popular magazines such as Cosmopolitan and the Saturday Evening Post —played an integral role in shaping the immediate and long-term goals of this select group of men. In editorials, articles, fiction, and advertising, magazines depicted the college man as simultaneously cultured and scientific, genteel and athletic, polished and tough. Such depictions underscored the college experience in powerful and attractive ways that neatly united the incongruous strains of American manhood and linked a college education to corporate success.

Genres: History

256 pages, Paperback

First published May 25, 2010

Reviews

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well researched and compelling study of how college life intersected and was interpreted, repackaged, and “sold,” so to speak, to the American public as being masculine and good for business. Beginning in the first chapter with Andrew Carnegie’s quote that “... a college education unfits rather than fits men to affairs,” the book then shows how enrollment benefitted from the use of cultural means such as films, such as Harold Lloyd’s starring turn in The Freshmen in the 1920s, but then does a much deeper dive, as the subtitle implies, on how magazines such as Collier’s Weekly, Cosmopolitan, Munsey’s, and Saturday Evening Post helped proliferate the concept of the college as an element of increasing necessity to the middle class male population.

The book is excellent, but leans on business more than any other field - Normal Schools, which seemingly proliferated at this same time, get little notice, so there seems to be a slight skewing toward the field of business as the American middle class ideal - which is fair given this structure. Nonetheless, I kept asking where this would cross over with studies such as Ogren’s The American State Normal School. Still, the idea of how Americans began to consume the idea of college life is well worth the focus this book grants, so I would recommend it to anyone pondering popular culture, marketing, or higher education histories or the intersection thereof.