What Even Is Leadership? Part Two
The university as national social club
Welcome to Making History, a newsletter about how historians make history. Also sometimes a newsletter, as in this series on the origins of “leadership,” that doesn’t so much go behind the scenes of history-making as it offers a preview of some of the latest arguments and findings in the field. For part one in the series, go here. And to subscribe, go here. It’s free!
The origins and meaning of “leadership” may be easier to see in comparison with the early days of higher education in the United States. In the nineteenth century, educators aimed to turn their young male students from boys into men by endowing them with the chief masculine virtue of the era: not leadership but character. Reliability was the acme of good business, and a reliable business partner, as the metaphor went, should be as unchanging as the characters of the alphabet. To this end, college faculty punished brilliance and rewarded demonstrations of competence. Hence the era’s chief pedagogical technique: repetitive drill in Latin and Greek grammar, meant to instill a kind of moral grid into the mind. Mere intellect, lacking discipline, was a danger to effective character formation.
Early administrators sought to educate the upper-classes but gave little thought to producing leaders as such. The colonial-era colleges ranked their students by the prestige of their families, not any specific capacity for leadership. Even after student rank came to depend on grades and behavior, administrators saw their role as providing those already destined for “higher stations” with “enlightened and comprehensive views.” At most, the early colleges offered “leadership in the pursuits of learning.” Leadership was a quality of institutions, not persons; colleges were centers for the education of the children of the elite or the instruction of “natural leaders rising from the mass,” not the systematic creation of leadership as such.
As the decades wore on, the social and political ambitions of college administrators grew. To see the how this manifested requires a brief excursus into the political and economic history of the nineteenth century. Between the 1870s and the 1900s, the United States experienced what historians have recently called a "second great divergence.” After Europe left behind the rest of the world economically with the industrial revolution, the United States became the first country to escape the “resource curse” of primary product exporters and leave behind its peers like Argentina and Australia, Brazil and Chile. While these countries stagnated, with the dominant forces in agriculture and mining stifling local industry and overthrowing governments to preserve their prerogatives, the United States raised tariffs to protect local industry, despite the protests of export producers. It was this protectionist policy, combined with a vast internal market, that allowed the United States to become the largest manufacturer in the world.
Instead of exceptional American virtue, however, it was exceptional American political decentralization, which prevented commodity exporters from achieving oligarchic centralization, that made possible this dramatic departure. Instead of exceptional American laissez-faire, it was also exceptional American regulation at the subnational level that made the nineteenth century United States the paradigm for later, highly regulated attempts attempts to escape the resource trap in countries like Taiwan, South Korea, and, most recently, China. In short, the chief saviors of American capitalism were the US states.
Even as enormous manufacturers emerged in the late nineteenth century, the continued power of state-level regulation preserved an extraordinary number and variety of local producers. The result was the long-term survival of mid-size, family-based capitalism across the United States, a crucial countervailing political force as the largest manufacturers attempted to achieve their own kind of oligarchy. This was the origin of the thousands of small factories scattered, until the offshoring waves of the 1980s and 1990s, across the small-town upper Midwest.
To keep the new American economic superpower from spinning apart, decentralization required some kind of centralizing force. In part, the federal government played this role: federal power was crucial to territorial expansion and the subjugation of working-class and non-white populations, not to mention the defeat of an oligarchic, commodity exporting Slavocracy in the South. But American elites, in keeping with longstanding preferences for seemingly bottom-up rather than top-down power, typically articulated their own relations through private associations and private institutions. Much more than the centralized, top-down state-building projects launched in other polities worldwide in the late nineteenth century, the diversified, relatively local political economy that made possible the US rise to global economic power relied for its organization on independent civil society organizations.
No institution was more crucial in the relationship between the local and the national than the university. “Nor has the nation become more homogeneous on the material side alone,” reflected one political scientist (and future Harvard president) after detailing the spread of railroads and manufacturing firms, “for the intellectual and moral bonds have been drawn closer also, and in this the universities have had no small share.”
At institutions like Harvard, ambitions to expand the geographic provenance of the student body — supposedly a project first taken on by the Ivy League in the 1910s and 1920s as a cover for the Jewish quota — were by no means unknown in the nineteenth century. George Washington’s dream of a national university was defeated decade after decade by anxieties about centralized federal power. Instead, college administrators sought to raise the status of their institutions, and contribute to US imperial ambitions, by attracting a student body from every state and territory. Even in the early and mid-nineteenth century, Harvard and Yale greatly expanded the proportion of students enrolling from both moderate and long distances. If the Skull and Bones secret society might be taken as an example, Yale’s true ambitions were far greater: from 1840 to 1870 the organization deliberately enrolled equal numbers of students from the nation’s four largest regions, New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the South, and the West.
As with other social domains, this push to nationalization intensified after the Civil War. Harvard began offering its entrance examination nationally in the 1870s, with sites ranging from Cincinnati to San Francisco. This rapprochement was partly a story about north–south white reconciliation. Amid the Civil War one defeated southern officer informed a Boston Brahmin travel companion that he had just sent his son to Yale to ensure he would lose “any provincial notions” and learn that “there is no Kentucky, no Virginia, no Massachusetts, but one great country.” Rather than attend a southern institution, one student was reported to have remarked, he had chosen Harvard because he didn't want to be merely a “southern man,” he wanted to be a “national man.” Harvard’s president declared in 1899 that he wanted to draw students from and place alumni in “the whole country,” and the national reach of Ivy League alumni clubs made this ambition more than a dream; in the 1900s, Harvard and Yale competed to embrace the title of “national university.” By then between 20 and 30 percent of their student bodies were drawn from beyond the northeast.
For universities, accordingly, the anxiety was “the danger of provincialism” — in Harvard's case being “too exclusively New England” — while the ambition was to create “national unity” by taking students from “all parts of the land” and “helping to form a national type of manhood.” It was “downright provincial” not to have a national view, Woodrow Wilson explained, and it was precisely such an “imaginative conception,” a national perspective, that “the university is meant to give to men.” Perhaps the primary contribution the university made to this national perspective was a particular conception of leadership.