Radway. Research Universities, Periodical Publication, And the Circulation of Professional Expertise - On the Significance Oif Middlebrow Authority (2004)

Research Universities, Periodical Publication, and the Circulation of Professional Expertise: Onthe Significance of Middlebrow AuthorityAuthor(s): Janice RadwaySource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Autumn 2004), pp. 203-228Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/427308 .

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Critical Inquiry 31 (Autumn 2004)

� 2004 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/04/3101-0012$10.00. All rights reserved.

203

This essay is a shortened and revised version of a much longer chapter on the history of

learned and literary culture in the United States from 1880 to 1915 in Carl Kaestle and Janice

Radway, Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–

1945, volume 4 of A History of the Book in America, ed. David Hall and Hugh Armory

(Worcester, Mass., forthcoming). I am grateful to David Hall, the American Antiquarian Society,

and Cambridge University Press for permission to publish this essay.

Research Universities, Periodical Publication,and the Circulation of Professional Expertise:On the Significance of Middlebrow Authority

Janice Radway

IntroductionIn 1936, well into the course of a literary career as a magazine and mid-

dlebrow professional, Henry Seidel Canby, editor of the Saturday Review of

Literature and chief judge at the Book-of-the-Month Club, published a

thoughtful memoir about academic life. Entitled Alma Mater: The Gothic

Age of the American College, his book attempted to take stock of how chang-

ing definitions of learning had altered American society. On the basis of his

experiences at Yale both as a student and then as a young professor, Canby

suggested that “there has never been anything quite like the American col-

lege of the turn of the twentieth century, never any institution more con-

fused in its purposes, more vital, more mixed in its ideals.” He claimed

furthermore that “just as the typical American of the nineties was a small-

town man, so the dominant American type of our thirties is college bred.”

Canby proposed, therefore, to assess the impact of the modern college, to

figure out “what it was, what it did to us, what powerful hands it laid upon

the United States of our generation.”1

In laying out his purpose, Canby cautioned that he was writing about

1. Henry Seidel Canby,Alma Mater: The Gothic Age of the American College (New York, 1936), p.

viii; hereafter abbreviatedAM.



204 Janice Radway / The Circulation of Professional Expertise

the American college, not “that larger organization of professional schools,

service bureaus, and organs of scholarship, called a university” (AM, p. xii).

Nevertheless, his account is thoroughly hauntedby thefigure of themodern

research university and the changing definition of learning it promoted. As

Canby acknowledged, the American college was a dramatically different in-

stitution in 1910 from what it had been as late as 1870 because the years

between witnessed “the triumph of applied science, the breakdown of ste-

reotyped religion, the defeat of the classics in American education, and the

dramatic appearance, full blown, ofAmerican confidence in ourownschol-

arship and our own literature” (AM, p. x). Although these developments

altered the American college irrevocably, their emergence was bound up

most intimately with the appearance of the American research university

in the years between 1870 and 1915. And though the history of the American

university is traditionally connected to the rise of the corporation inAmer-

ican business, to increasing specialization and bureaucratization, and to the

emergence of modern professionalism, it must also be connected to the

vastly changed print culture that developed during these years as well.

In fact, one might argue that the learned culture that emerged slowly in

the universities in the last decades of the nineteenth century was as much

a matter of changed reading and writing practices and altered networks for

the transmission and circulation of information as it was of shifting epis-

temologies, changed subject matter, and altered goals. Although traditional

bound books continued to play an important role in learned culture be-

tween 1880 and 1915, especially within the disciplines that would be de-

scribed as the humanities, increasingly, the highly specialized culture of

advanced learning that emerged in these yearswas furtheredby regularized,

repetitive, and predictable forms of journal publication as well as by new

forms of professional association. As a consequence, learning lost some of

its associations with the preservation and appreciation of settled tradition,

especially at the new research universities.

It was reconceived after a model that emerged in the sciences. Where

once science had been conceptualized as a process of inductive reasoning

Janice Radway is professor of literature and chair of the literature program

at Duke University. She is the author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy,

and Popular Literature (1984) and A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month

Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (1996). She is coeditor, with Carl

Kaestle, of the forthcoming Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and

Reading in the United States, 1880–1940, volume 4 of A History of the Book in

America.



Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004 205

2. On the history of the discipline of English, see RichardOhmann, English in America: A

Radical View of the Profession (New York, 1976);MichaelWarner, “Professionalizationand the

Rewards of Literature: 1875–1900,”Criticism 27 (Winter 1985): 1–28; Gerald Graff, Professing

Literature: An InstitutionalHistory (Chicago, 1987); and Kermit Vanderbilt,American Literature

and the Academy: The Roots, Growth, and Maturity of a Profession (Philadelphia, 1986).

from established principles, increasingly it was associated with empirical

investigation and conceptualized as a dynamic, evolutionary, and progres-

sive practice, one that was ever-changing and ever-advancing in its claim to

mastery. Distinct precincts of the world were scrutinized by a small group

of specialists reading and writing principally for each other.

This reconception of learning was so widespread and consequential that

it affected even the standardmethods for the teachingof the receivedliterary

and cultural tradition. As Henry Canby observed,

Now the scientific approach became fashionable. Scholars in literature

who called themselves scientific began to dominate the graduate schools

and extend their influence into the sacred precincts of the undergradu-

ate college. Applying the technique of scientific research to language,

they revealed an evolutionwith laws of its own the discovery of which

was a noble extension of knowledge. [AM, pp. 197–98]

As a consequence, philology and literary history moved to the center of

the emerging discipline of the modern languages, which began to supplant

the traditional classics curriculum. At first, professional literary scholars

preoccupied themselves with tracing the fine points of linguistic evolution

and with the particulars of literary source study. Later, adopting the pre-

dilection for the new and the paradigmatic habit of seeking conceptual

breakthroughs familiar to the sciences, the discipline involved itself in gen-

erating continually new literary interpretations andpromoting recent theo-

retical breakthroughs.2

This shift did not go unchallenged, however, as Canby’s own memoir

makes clear. Self-described generalists like Canby, who clustered in under-

graduate teaching colleges, championed an alternative model of learning

known as the liberal arts ideal. A modification of the older classical curric-

ulum, this course of study opposed both the rising dominance of the sci-

ences and the specialization associated with literary history and philology.

Liberal arts advocates sought to cultivate character and intellect rather than

the practicality and utility they associated with the sciences. They also

tended to oppose the sciences’ fetishism of the new. At the same time, they

set themselves in opposition to the development of a technical and highly

specialized body of knowledge about an isolated aesthetic realm shearedoff

from the rest of the world. Insisting on the moral and even political rele-




3. On the history of the Book-of-the-MonthClub, see Janice Radway,A Feeling for Books: The

Book-of-the-MonthClub, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997).

4. On the history of middlebrow culture and role of popularizationwithin it, see Joan Shelley

Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992), esp. chap. 5, “Merchant of

Light:Will Durant and the Vogue of the ‘Outline,’” pp. 210–65.

vance of the liberal arts to contemporary society, many humanities advo-

cates like Canby left the university in despair at the insularity of highly

technical literary study in order to take up the work of championing the

powers of culture and literature for educated general readers.

Although middlebrow cultural organs like the Saturday Review and the

Book-of-the-Month Club initially preoccupied themselves withmarketing

literature and poetry to a broad general audience, increasingly the health

of these enterprises depended on their ability to capitalize on widespread

general interest in the forms of professional expertise and knowledge pro-

duction that emerged in the 1880s and then flourished in the early decades

of the twentieth century. Increasingly, middlebrow intellectuals wrote, ad-

vocated, and marketed handbooks, encyclopedias, and guidebooks to this

new knowledge even as they publicized popularized versions of technical

information that had beendevelopedfirstwithinhighly specializedjournals

written for professional knowledge producers. Despite the reliance of an

organization like the Book-of-the-Month Club on an older Arnoldian lan-

guage of the universal, the unchanging, and the best, it was in fact organized

tomaximize sales by promoting periodicity and the cachetof thenew;hence

it offered “the best book of the month.”3 Interest in the timely was a con-

stitutive principle not only of the club but also of othermiddlebrowcultural

organs like the Literary Guild, the Reader’s Digest, and the radio show In-

formation Please which then naturally became cultural popularizers.4What

they sold to their educated general readers in the form of summaries and

handbooks was the assurance that they could keep up with the bewildering

pace of evolving knowledge about the modern world.

In the context of this volume on the arts of transmission, I think it is

worth underscoring the fact that Canby’s Alma Mater exposes the complex

connections among several cultural and historical developments: the rise

of the research university in the United States, the emergence of new prac-

tices of professionalized knowledge production and transmission, changes

in the disciplines, and the growth of a popularly oriented periodical culture

from which emerged a distinct new cultural configuration known as the

middlebrow.WhileAlma Mater is most centrally the work of amiddlebrow

literary authority, a generalist who believed in the value of literature and the

humanities as a form of critical knowledge about the world, it was also the

work of a man who was able to make a successful living precisely because




5. The literature on professionalization is vast and impossible to survey here. The sources with

the most relevance for the subjects under discussion in this essay include Burton J. Bledstein,The

Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America

(New York, 1976);Magali Sarfatti Larson,The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis

(Berkeley, 1977); and Samuel Haber,The Quest for Authority and Honor in the American

Professions, 1750–1900 (Chicago, 1991).

6. On this struggle, see Janice Radway, “The Scandal of theMiddlebrow: The Book-of-the-

Month Club, Class Fracture, and Cultural Authority,” South Atlantic Quarterly 89 (Fall 1990): 703–

36. See alsoWarner, “Professionalizationand the Rewards of Literature,” esp. pp. 7–20.

a developing body of educated readers eagerly sought familiarity with ex-

citing forms of new knowledge about the world. Canby and others like him

made their middlebrow living by consolidating a powerful new circuit of

production and circulation that, though distinct fromprofessionalizedand

specialized academic circuits of transmission, was significantly related to

them. As we shall soon see, this dependence worked to the advantage of

some of the disciplines and the professionals who worked within them

because middlebrow organs circulated news of their work and helped to

legitimate them by increasing their professional prestige. In effect, middle-

brow culture augmented and extended what had been begun by key por-

tions of the newspaper and magazine industries; they helped to create and

strengthen markets for professional expertise. In effect, they proved a criti-

cal component in the emergence of what Burton Bledstein and others have

called a “culture of professionalism.”5

But a productive symbiosis between middlebrow culture and profes-

sionalized, academic, literary culture could not be easily established, how-

ever, in part because middlebrow authorities like Canby actively competed

with others laboring within the changing literary field. Most middlebrow

arbiters disapproved of the philologists and literary historians as well as

those seeking to create a new literary avant-garde because they could see no

use, commercial or otherwise, for the literary products such efforts gen-

erated. Use was important to middlebrow authorities because, as literary

entrepreneurs, their work depended on the viability of marketing appeals

that could explain to potential consumers how theymight benefit from the

purchase of books, magazines, or other cultural materials. What ensued,

once middlebrow authorities began to elaborate their own arguments for

the use-value of culture, was a struggle over the authority to pronounce on

the role of literature in the world.6

In the countervailing efforts of academics and the literary avant-garde

to distance themselves from middlebrow arbiters like Canby, such entre-

preneurs were characterized as little more than literary businessmen. Sig-

nificantly, in differentiating themselves from themiddlebrowwillingness to

court the denizens of Main Street, academics and modernist writers es-




7. I have adapted the phrase “the ecology of knowledge production” fromCharles Rosenberg,

“Toward an Ecology of Knowledge Production:On Discipline, Context, andHistory,” in The

Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860–1920, ed. AlexandraOleson and John Voss

(Baltimore, 1979), pp. 440–55. Rosenberg uses the phrase to capture something of the dynamic

complexity andmultiplicity of relationships among the institutions, disciplines, practitioners, and

knowledge forms that emerged in the years between 1880 andWorldWar I. He is especially acute

about the need to remember that inasmuch as larger economic and cultural developments affected

the nature of knowledge production in this period, so, too, did the nature of the knowledge

produced differentially exert its own impact on the institutions and individuals generating it. The

Voss/Oleson volume as a whole is still one of the best on the early history of the research university

in the United States and the role of the modern disciplines within it.

8. In addition to the aforementionedOleson/Voss volume, there is another indispensable guide

to the early history of the university in the United States. Notable for its sweep as well as for its

attention both to dominant trends and important exceptions, is Laurence R. Veysey,The

Emergence of the American University (Chicago, 1965). For a less historical andmore

organizationally focused account, see Edward Shils, The Order of Learning: Essays on the

ContemporaryUniversity (New Brunswick,N.J., 1997). Other useful sources on the early history of

the American university include Julie A. Reuben,The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual

Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago, 1996); Roger Geiger,To Advance

Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900–1940 (New York, 1986); Roger L.

chewed the circuits of transmission associatedwithmiddlebrowcultureand

opted instead for the small, specialized circuits of the scholarly journal and

the little magazine. These publicationsmay have helped to construct a kind

of social, technological, and ideological outside to the dominant culture

from which both groups could advance their own versions of cultural cri-

tique. But, at the same time, these academics andwriters were isolated from

an educated general audience that might have been persuaded of its need

to rely on their cultural authority rather thanon that ofmiddlebrowarbiters

like Canby. Lacking a large audience and market for the specialized dis-

course they continued to produce, literary professionals of both the aca-

demic and avant-garde varieties were vulnerable to being shunted aside

within both the university context and the larger culture not only by the

discourse and public intellectuals associatedwith the sciences and the social

sciences but also, eventually, by newer cultural producers working with

transmission technologies even broader in scope than print—technologies

like radio, film, television, and digital communication. What I would like

to do now is to provide a schematicmap of this larger ecology of knowledge

production and transmission in order to show how the structural role

played by magazine and middlebrow culture in the culture of profession-

alism that emerged between 1880 and 1945 can help to illuminate part of

what troubles English and the humanities today.7

Universities and the Growth of ResearchMuch has been written about the development of the researchuniversity

in the United States. The literature is vast in part because somany different

factors can be highlighted as the critical determining agent.8 The influence




Williams,The Origins of Federal Support for Higher Education: George W. Atherton and the Land-

Grant College Movement (University Park, Pa., 1991); and PaulWestmeyer,An Analytical History of

American Higher Education (1985; Springfield, Ill., 1997).

9. On the evolution of American colleges during this period, see The American College in the

Nineteenth Century, ed. Geiger (Nashville, 2000). See also Thomas Le Duc, Piety and Intellect at

Amherst College, 1865–1912 (New York, 1946).

of the German model of higher education figures centrally in most narra-

tives. Others focus on the outmoded nature of the traditional college cur-

riculum, on the growing success of science and its ability to meet the needs

ofAmerican business andmanufacturing, on the riseof technicallyoriented

and utilitarian forms of knowledge, on the impact of specialization, andon

the development of modern professionalism itself. In fact, all of these de-

velopments contributed to the emergence of the American research uni-

versity and helped to change the culture of learning in the United States.

Together, they slowly transformed localized, avocational circles of learning

into a highly differentiated business of professional knowledgeproduction.

Prior to the CivilWar, the vastmajority of colleges in theU.S.were small,

denominationally organized institutions seeking to cultivate mental disci-

pline in a population of elite youngmen preparing for professional training

in divinity, law, or medicine.9 After the war, efforts to reform the colleges

multiplied as critics of the traditional curriculum attempted to adapt it to

a rapidly changing world. Spurred on by the sense that new forms of train-

ing would be necessary in a world transformed by the market revolution,

factories, railroads, and augmented communication networks, the colleges

also altered their curricula because they realized that new forms of knowl-

edge were rapidly being generated within the natural sciences. Some, like

Harvard and Yale, actually created scientific colleges.Others expandedtheir

faculties and adopted the elective system pioneered at Harvard. Eventually,

the colleges were joined by innovative institutions with new purposes, dif-

ferent organization and funding structures, and an altered relationship to

learning.Where the college focused almost exclusively on the cultivationof

mental discipline and character in undergraduates by familiarizing them

with the known—whether in literature, moral philosophy, or natural sci-

ence—universities, land grant agricultural schools, and technical research

institutes focused at least in part on the generation and communication of

new knowledge. Faculty time, as a consequence, was increasingly devoted

to the business of research and the reading and writing that supported it.

Research faculties had always taught. But now they began to apportion

their time differently. Hired by institutions recently created to foster basic

research or to provide technical and utilitarian support for local popula-

tions, new faculties gradually focused their activities in laboratories and li-




10. See Oleson and Voss, introduction to The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America,

pp. vii–xxi.

11. See, for instance, Geiger,To Advance Knowledge, p. 8.

12. On the history of land grant colleges, seeWilliams,The Origins of Federal Support for Higher

Education;Coy F. Cross II, Justin Smith Morrill: Father of the Land-Grant College (East Lansing,

Mich., 1999); and Geiger, “The Rise and Fall of Useful Knowledge: Higher Education for Science,

Agriculture, and theMechanic Arts, 1850–1875,” in The American College in the Nineteenth

Century, pp. 153–68.

13. See Oleson and Voss, introduction, p. xiii.

braries and sought to generate new knowledge in their particular areas of

expertise. Although they also sought to communicate evolving knowledge

to their students, they defined their primary academic relationshipsas those

with their specialist peers. Because they sought regular association with re-

searchers engaged in similar projects, they formulatedover timeanewsocial

and communication infrastructure that became essential to university life.

Disciplines, departments, professional associations and societies, as well as

specialized journals and university presses all were installed as critical com-

ponents of learned culture during these years.10

It is common to associate the development of this changed culture of

learning with the development of research universities in particular. Thus,

the 1876 founding of the JohnsHopkinsUniversity looms large innarratives

that also credit the creative leadership of Daniel Coit Gilman in adapting

the German model of university training in the advanced sciences to the

American context.11 Indeed, the example Hopkins set in the last quarter of

the nineteenth century was an inspiration to many who sought to reorient

American higher education around the graduate training of research spe-

cialists, especially in the rapidly advancing sciences of chemistry, physics,

biology, and mathematics. It was at Hopkins, for instance, that a close and

consequential relationship among scientific research, graduate training,

and new forms of association and publication would most significantly be

forged. Still, other institutions that developed both before and after Hop-

kins also had a long-term impact on the reorganization and reorientation

of higher education in the U.S. Chief among these were the land grant col-

leges and universities that developed predominantly in the Midwest in the

years following the passage of the 1862Morrill Act.12 Additionally,however,

technical schools and research programs and institutes sponsored by the

federal government—such as those at the U.S. Department of Agriculture,

the Geological Survey, and the Bureau of American Ethnology—as well as

by philanthropic foundations and industrial enterprises all began to exert

pressure on older conceptions of learning.13

Land grant colleges and universities, for example, were noted early on

for promulgating the assumption that learning should have utilitarianpur-




14. See Geiger,To Advance Knowledge, p. 5.

15. See, especially, Veysey’s extended discussion in The Emergence of the American University,

chap. 2, “Utility,” pp. 57–120. See alsoMerle Curti,The University of Wisconsin: A History

(Madison,Wis., 1949).

16. On the transformationof the conception of learning, see Shils, The Order of Learning, esp.

chaps. 1 and 2, pp. 1–70.

17. See HughHawkins, “University Identity: The Teaching and Research Functions,” in The

Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, pp. 285–312.

18. Quoted in ibid., p. 289.

pose. Spurred on by the Morrill Act’s requirement that institutional recip-

ients of federal funds offer agricultural and mechanical education to the

people of their states, these institutions focused on agricultural research,

sought to provide advice on legislative programs, and pioneered the crea-

tion of extension courses to foster ongoing education.14 Although therewas

a substantial measure of disagreement in land grant institutions over what

counted as a more utilitarian and democratic education, most of them

aimed to broaden the typical college’s offerings and to root themmore res-

olutely in the so-called realities of everyday life.15 They also began to admit

women. Although many of these institutions continued to train under-

graduates in the liberal arts, they also innovated by linking vocational train-

ing in agriculture and engineering with research in the basic sciences.

Cornell University, led by Andrew D. White, the University of Michigan,

headed by James B. Angell, and the University of Wisconsin, headed by

Charles Kendall Adams and Charles Van Hise, were pioneers in training a

democratically selected population for a range of practical and politically

oriented vocations.

These changing approaches to education reconfigured older understand-

ings of learning as the mastery and profession of a stable body of generally

accepted truths, canons, and traditions. Instead, learning was reconceived as

the command of a highly specialized body of constantly evolving knowledge

about a particular fraction of the world through the mastery of a specialized

set of techniques for apprehending it.16 At both researchuniversities and land

grant institutions where the latter definition of learningwas encouraged, the

pedagogical function of faculties, while never eliminated entirely, gradually

began to take second place to the growing importance of the research func-

tion. This shift even took place within the humanities, where most of the

resistance to the evolutionary model of knowledge production was con-

centrated. Still, some humanities scholars like the LatinistWilliamGardner

Hale enthusiastically acquiesced in the new dispensation.17 As Hale once

commented, “It is the minds that have advanced beyond what they have

received from others that have brought us to the point where we are. It is

the discoverers, in far greater measure than to the transmitters, that the

world is under obligation.”18




19. In addition to Rubin on the subject of popularization and its importance to the “general

reader,” see Radway,A Feeling for Books, esp. pp. 88–94, 101–14, and 235–60.

Hale accurately diagnosed a shift in the relative weights accorded re-

search and pedagogy within the university around the turn of the century.

However, by opposing research to transmission and by simply valuing the

former over the latter, he missed the significance of a critical structural re-

lationship between research and more mediated processes of transmission

that intensified within the culture of learning at this time. Althoughmany

research professors placed less emphasis on face-to-face teaching than had

their predecessors or did those employed in undergraduate colleges where

the liberal arts held sway, they did not give up their involvement in the busi-

ness of transmitting information entirely. In fact, as the business of con-

ducting original research began to gain more andmore prominence and to

grow both more specialized and more complex within the fraternity of the

learned, it became ever more important to communicate with peers about

commonpursuits. At the same time, as research communitiesandacademic

disciplines specialized and professionalized, it also became critical to dis-

seminate information about research findings to the lay population from

whom financial support and a client base in the form of students had to be

drawn. Increasingly, both practiceswere conducted through themediations

of a rapidly differentiating print culture. Researchers communicated with

each other through specialized journals. They communicated with the

broader public through popularized accounts of their research inmagazine

articles, in trade books designed for the educated, general reader, and

through an ever-multiplying number of handbooks, guidebooks, and en-

cyclopedias that codified this new knowledge.19 Before one can understand

fully why this intensified symbiosis between the generation, communica-

tion, and transmission of knowledge developed at this time, it is necessary

to understand something more about the altered social context within

which the new colleges and universities turned their attention to research.

Incorporation, Information, and “Brain Workers”In the years after the Civil War, a potent combination of factors signifi-

cantly altered the nature of work and employment for a large segment of

the American population. This in turn contributed to the need for differ-

ently trained workers and thus to a notably enlarged populationof students

who sought new formsof education fornewkindsofwork.Ultimately, these

interlocking developments increasedAmerican society’s dependenceonthe

rapid development, transmission, and circulation of information and thus




20. See Oleson and Voss, introduction, p. xi. On the financing of the new universities, see also

Geiger,To Advance Knowledge, pp. 39–57.

21. Oleson and Voss, introduction, p. xii.

22. See ibid.23. See Alan Trachtenberg,The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age

(New York, 1982).

the need for a transformed infrastructure capable of accomplishingall three

tasks.

In addressing the question of why research institutions, land grant uni-

versities, and technical institutes all emerged within a thirty- or forty-year

period, it is as important to consider external financial andsocialconditions

as it is to address internal organizational and intellectual developments.

Both sets of forces contributed to the transformationofeducationalpractice

in these years and both thereby helped to alter the way knowledge was gen-

erated, discussed, and transmitted to immediate and more distant popu-

lations alike. To begin with, these institutions were made possible by the

availability of a large concentration of surplus capital that could be invested

in higher education.20 Although a significant portion of this capital came

from the hands of a new social elite involved inmanufacturing andbusiness

rather than in mercantile or real estate transactions, some of it also came

from state legislatures and alumni. Additionally, as Alexandra Oleson and

John Voss have pointed out, “It was the students who came to colleges and

universities in expanding numbers who formed the principal economic

base of American science and scholarship.”21 Indeed the number of Amer-

ican undergraduates rose from about 52,300 in 1870 to 156,800 in 1890,

237,600 in 1900, and 597,900 in 1920.22

Larger numbers of students enrolled in colleges and universities in part

because they could. That is to say, their families could financially afford to

spare them from the responsibility of contributing to family upkeep. But

they also enrolled in increasing numbers because it appeared to them and

to their families that a university or college education was an investment in

the future. Where once higher education led only to the ministry, law, or

medicine for the children of the social elite, by the 1880s it was clear that it

could prepare a more diverse population for careers in business or in any

number of the new technical and specialized professions that emerged at

this time.

This was the case in large part because the transformation of American

culture by the complex phenomenon Alan Trachtenberg has called “incor-

poration” created an increased demand for individualswho couldproduce,

organize, and circulate information, act as managers of processes and peo-

ple, and generally foster integration amongandwithinAmericanbusinesses

and institutions.23 Significantly, the period during which the research uni-




24. Alfred Chandler,The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business

(Cambridge,Mass., 1977), p. 1.

25. Ibid., p. 7.26. On the subject of the relationship between laborers,managers, and capitalists, see Harry

Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New

York, 1974). On the rise of “brain workers” and their status as a new class, see Barbara and John

Eherenreich, “The Professional-ManagerialClass,” in Between Labor and Capital, ed. PatWalker

(Boston, 1979), pp. 5–45. See also Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the

Turn of the Century (London, 1996) and Politics of Knowledge: The Commercialization of the

University, the Professions, and Print Culture (Middletown, Conn., 2003).

versity emerged was also the period in which the modern corporation be-

came the dominant organizational form within business and industry.

Described by Alfred Chandler as a “modern multiunit enterprise,” the

modern corporation entailed the internalization and administrative coor-

dination of business units that could theoretically have operated indepen-

dently.24 However, by integrating them into a single overarching enterprise,

significant economies of speed and scale could be achieved.

Chandler’s enumeration of how those economies were achieved isworth

quoting here because it gives a good sense of why these developments re-

quired different kinds of workers with new kinds of education and new

abilities to work efficiently with information.

By routinizing the transactions between units, the costs of these trans-

actions were lowered. By linking the administration of producing units

with buying and distributing units, costs for information onmarkets

and sources of supply were reduced. Of much greater significance, the

internalization of many units permitted the flow of goods from one unit

to another to be administratively coordinated.More effective schedul-

ing of flows achieved a more intensive use of facilities and personnel

employed in the processes of production and distribution and so in-

creased productivity and reduced costs. In addition, administrative co-

ordination provided a more certain cash flow andmore rapid payment

for services rendered.25

In other words, when corporations acted to integrate organizations,pro-

cesses, and people, they increased their need for capable managers and si-

multaneously found it necessary to generate and circulate vast quantities of

information to facilitate control and coordination. Where once a business

owner performed all sorts of functions himself in a small, often family-run

business, in the new, more extended corporation he found it necessary to

employ managers, technicians, and specially trained individuals to coor-

dinate diverse activities.26 Described at the time as “brain workers,” these

individuals depended upon complex computational and literacy skills as




27. See James Beniger,The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the

Information Society (Cambridge,Mass., 1986).

28. Ibid., p. 7.29. For a magisterial account of the relationship among these various factors and the emergence

of a national print culture, see Ohmann, Selling Culture, esp. chap. 2, “The Origins of Mass

Culture,” pp. 11–30.

well as on the social skills required to work with large numbers of people.

Indeed, as James Beniger has pointed out, the managerial revolution in

American business documented by Chandler was itself accompanied by an

equally consequential social and cultural revolution in thewaybusinessprac-

tices were integrated and coordinated.27 “Before this time,” Beniger notes,

“control of government andmarkets haddependedonpersonal relationships

and face-to-face interactions; now control came to be reestablishedbymeans

of bureaucratic organization, the new infrastructures of transportation and

telecommunications, and system-wide communicationvia thenewmassme-

dia.”28 The control revolution, as Beniger terms it, united efforts to amassand

manage different forms of information with an equally important push to

circulate that information both quickly and extensively.

During the post–Civil War period, machines as well as corporations had

become far more complex. As a consequence, they both depended on the

circulation of large quantities of data to keep them running. Faster, more

sophisticated machines depended on the careful calibration and prepro-

cessing of materials to be fed into the system as well as upon the use of

complex feedback devices to track the results. Similarly, corporations re-

quired trainedworkers, specialized accountingpractices, professionalman-

agers, “scientificmanagement” techniques, and statistical quality control to

oversee the integration of far-flung units and subunits. The vastly aug-

mented industrial output that resulted from these innovations then de-

manded parallel control of distribution processes. The new, vertically

integrated corporations learned to utilize the national railroad and tele-

graph systems and an expanding U.S. postal system tomanage distribution

more efficiently. More effective distribution, of course, then demanded

equally effective efforts to control consumption. As a consequence, awhole

new retail system developed that depended asmuch on complex devices for

tracking inventory as on the publishing of information about available

goods. The latter, like virtually all of the control schemesmentioned above,

depended at least in part on the auxiliary circulation of words andnumbers

at ever-faster rates. All of it, then, was dependent upon the perfection of the

power-drive, multiple rotary printing press, a highly complexmachine that

was itself essential to that which emerged as a consequence, a differentiated

yet nationally oriented print culture.29




30. Bledstein,The Culture of Professionalism, esp. chap. 2, “Space andWords,” p. 78.

31. See ibid., p. 47.32. See John Y. Cole, “Storehouses andWorkshops: American Libraries and the Uses of

Knowledge,” in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, p. 367.

33. Veysey,The Emergence of the American University, p. 113.

34. See Geiger,To Advance Knowledge, p. 14.

In the years between 1870 and 1920, in fact, a highly variegated print cul-

ture generated the “riot ofwords”describedbyBledstein.30Dailynewspaper

circulation multiplied by seven times between 1870 and 1900. During the

same period, the number of post offices tripled while the sale of ordinary

postage stamps increased by a factor of eight.31 Between 1880 and 1910, the

number of new titles published in the United States increased sixfold from

about two thousand books a year to thirteen thousand.32 This was made

possible by a significant increase in the number of publishing firms as well

as by the growth of literacy of the general population. Indeed it was this

more broadly literate population that devoured theperiodical literaturethat

increased fivefold between 1865 and 1885. And, as RichardOhmannhasdoc-

umented in Selling Culture, that literature was essential to the elaboration

of the new retail infrastructure and the advertising industry that facilitated

its efficient functioning.

Even this highly compressed version of a complex history should dem-

onstrate almost immediately that nearly everyone who would labor in the

control sectors of the economywould require sophisticated literacy andnu-

meracy skills. At the same time, they also needed more focused educations

to enable their work in the increasingly specialized spaces, sites, and regions

of an ever-more differentiated yet integrated society. It thus should be clear

why the elective system first imagined at Harvard looked so sensible to the

officers of innovative colleges anduniversities around the country.The free-

dom of choice and specialization that it promoted among students would

enable those institutions to prepare their students for a range of different

careers. At the same time, newuniversity and collegepresidentsadditionally

advocated increased vocational and technical courses of study for those stu-

dents in order to prepare them for emerging lines of work as specialized

“experts” of one sort or another. Little wonder that a college educationsoon

looked like a guarantor of future employment for the children of the ex-

panding middle classes. Indeed, as Laurence Veysey has pointed out, “Such

untraditional disciplines as pedagogy, domestic science, business admin-

istration, sanitary science, physical education, and various kinds of engi-

neering were all becoming firmly established at a number of leading

universities by the turn of the century.”33 Roger Geiger has noted as well

that the applied sciences and engineering expandedmost rapidlyduring the

eighties and nineties and tended to attract the newer kind of college student

interested primarily in professional preparation.34




35. See Oleson and Voss, introduction, p. xv, and Veysey, “The Plural OrganizedWorlds of the

Humanities, in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, pp. 51–106.

36. See, for instance, Veysey’s extended discussion in chap. 3, “Research,” in The Emergence of

the American University, pp. 121–79. I have drawn heavily on his discussion here.

The drift toward the dominance of the sciences, both natural and social,

was so marked, in fact, that those professing the older arts of literature,

language, history, and philosophy increasingly defended their work under

the rubric of the humanities and began to coordinate their efforts in order

to seek financial support from college presidents and university adminis-

trations.35 However, the very fact that the humanists had to operate in this

way in order to secure university resources only further testifies to the fact

that by the 1890s the research university and the new scientific orientation

it encouraged hadmounted a strong bid to dominateAmericanhigher edu-

cation.

Professional Knowledge Production and the Creationof the ExpertThe sciences and the social sciences emergedaspowerful forces at this time

not simply because they held out the promise of creating new technologies

and methods for addressing the problems and potentials of a rapidly incor-

porating society. They also pioneered the adoption of organizational forms

that institutionalized the intellectual specialization that had become thehall-

mark of the scientific enterprise. In fact, as the sciences marked themselves

off fromeachother theoretically andmethodologically, thosewithspecialized

competencies increasingly moved to organize their efforts more effectively

through the creationof autonomousdepartments,professionalsocieties,spe-

cialized journals, and particular forms of credentialing. In effect, through the

process of disciplining their own work and that of the specialists they sought

to train, they began to organize knowledge production in newways. Theuni-

versity, in turn, itself began to take on the character of a complex corporation

with semiautonomous departments whose coordination had to bemanaged

at any number of different levels, whether administratively, financially, or

pedagogically.

Historians disagree about what constituted professionalization in the

sciences and in academia more generally. Nor do they agree about the pre-

cise causes of the phenomenon. Still, it is clear that it had everything to do

with specialization, with the growing emphasis on laboratory research, and

with the creation of a communications infrastructure that enabled thepub-

lication, circulation, and discussion of research results not only among

peers but within a larger society called upon to finance such research, to

support it with students, and to understand its value.36 As the various dis-




37. Hawkins,Pioneer: A History of the Johns Hopkins University, 1874–1889 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1960),

p. 74; hereafter abbreviated P. See Geiger, To Advance Knowledge, p. 31. On the relationship

between the university, the developing sciences, and journal publication, see also Shils, “The

Order of Learning in the United States From 1865 to 1920: The Ascendency of the Universities,”

The Order of Learning, pp. 1–38, esp. 15–19.

38. Daniel Kevles, “The Physics,Mathematics, and Chemistry Communities: A Comparative

Analysis,” in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, p. 140.

ciplines professionalized, they sought and obtained the kind of autonomy

that would enable them to control the credentialing of new members. At

the same time, that autonomy could never isolate the discipline and its av-

atars from the larger population that was required to recognize its special

legitimacy and to turn to it for professional advice, assistance, and treat-

ment. As a consequence, it became necessary to find ways to foster rela-

tionships with nonspecialists as well.

Again, it is common to associate the emergenceof theneworganizational

forms with the founding of Hopkins. In his detailed history of the insti-

tution, Hugh Hawkins has pointed out that the scholars assembled in Bal-

timore byGilmanmoved quickly to consolidate disciplinaryautonomyand

to assume vanguardpositions in their respectivedisciplines.Oneof theways

they sought to do both was through the establishment of scholarly journals.

Hawkins claims with good cause that “Hopkins was the cradle of the schol-

arly journal in America.”37 Indeed five of the six original departments at

Hopkins organized specialized journalswithin a fewyears of theuniversity’s

founding. They did so, in part, because there were few regularly appearing

journals available to them in the United States for the publication of their

research results. As Daniel Kevles has pointed out, although “a count of

research papers appearing in the 1870s indicates that about thirty chemists,

twenty physicists, and probably still fewer mathematicians pursued and

published research with any regularity” in the U.S., that small number still

had to resort to journals published abroad to make their work known.38

This seemed an inadequate solution to ambitiousmenwhowereattempting

not only to establish their own individual reputations but alsoweremaking

claims about the excellence and legitimacy of thenewAmerican institutions

that employed them. Indeed, the faculty atHopkins quickly recognized that

if they were to make claims not only about the excellence of their own re-

search but also about the stature of their institution and the American re-

search community more generally, they would need reliable means to

convey their activities and findings to their scholarly peers.

In fact, only a few months after the university was officially founded,

Gilman encouraged and extended financial support to a group of mathe-

maticians led by J. J. Sylvester in their efforts to form the American Journal




39. Quoted in John Tebbell,A History of Book Publishing in the United States, 4 vols. (New York,

1975), 2:536.

of Pure andAppliedMathematics. Thefirst issue of the journalwaspublished

under university auspices in 1878. Although this did not mean that a full-

fledged university press had been established in Baltimore—in fact, the title

Johns Hopkins University Press wouldn’t be used officially until 1891—it

did mean that Gilman and the Hopkins trustees at least recognized that it

was in the interest of the institution to subsidize the cost of disseminating

research results (see P, pp. 74–75, 107–12). Even as Sylvester was organizing

this mathematical journal, Ira Remsen of the chemistry department sought

to create a parallel journal in his own field that would enable him and his

laboratory colleagues to publish their earliest research findings (see P, p.

75). His stated rationale for the journal demonstrates clearly that the de-

veloping research culture at Hopkins valorized the creation of new knowl-

edge. Concomitantly, it sought to use the apparatus of print to establish

American claims to scientific expertise and authorship aswell as to transmit

the knowledge thereby produced to an international community of peers.

Remsen explained to Gilman that a university-supported journal shouldbe

organized for two reasons:

1st. That we may be recognized as soon as possible as belonging to the

working Chemists of the country; 2nd. That the results of our labors may

be insured to us or, in other words, to establish our priority.

In Germany, France and England there are journals intended for

such preliminary publications, and articles sent to them are sure to ap-

pear promptly. [P, pp. 75–76]

Remsen hoped that the creation of a regularly publishing journal would

establish his laboratory’s claim to innovation and origination and assist in

the consolidation of a specifically national scientific community thatmight

compete with then dominant European scientists. Gilman supportedRem-

sen as he had Sylvester, and soon thereafter a “flood of scholarly journals”

and monograph series began to issue from Baltimore (P, p. 112). Gilman

reported with satisfaction to the trustees:

Publication has been encouraged—so far as possible through channels

already established—butwhen necessary through agencies of our own.

We have not instituted a university press, but we havemade arrange-

ment for the systematic printing of mathematical, chemical, biological,

and philological papers.We have hoped in this way to extend the use-

fulness of this foundation far beyond the company of those whomwe

constantly instruct.39




40. See Geiger,To Advance Knowledge, pp. 32–33.

41. See ibid., pp. 32–35.42. See Kevles, “Physics,Mathematics, and Chemistry Communities,” pp. 152–53.

43. On the relationship between speed, periodicity, andmass culture, see Ohmann, Selling

Culture, pp. 11–30. For the way this new constellation affected cultural productionmore generally

andmiddlebrow culturemore specifically, see Radway,A Feeling for Books, pp. 168–76.

Mediated dissemination, in Gilman’s view, because it was more extensive,

was equally as important as the dissemination of knowledge that occurred

in the classroom.

Because there is as yet no comprehensive history of the scholarly journal

in the United States, it is difficult to generalize about its development, or-

ganization, or funding. Many of the journals sponsored by national schol-

arly associations were funded by subscription fees and subsidized by an

association’s membership dues. But the impulse to create venues for the

research findings of the growing cadre of university-based researchers led

also to the enthusiastic founding of department-based journals at anumber

of leading universities throughout the eighties and nineties whose sole pur-

pose was to publicize the results of local faculty research. In the years be-

tween 1880 and 1906, Hopkins sponsored six such journals, Chicago funded

twelve, the University of California created four, Columbia six, Cornell five,

and Harvard sponsored eight.40 Most of these department-based journals

disappeared relatively quickly because few departments generated enough

research on their own to keep them going. By the second decade of the new

century, then, scholarly publication tended to be split between journals

sponsored by national associations and subdisciplinary organs arising from

interuniversity communities of specialists.41 In the field of chemistry, for

instance, the original,more catholic journalswere joined laterby the Journal

of Physical Chemistry, the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and the Journal of

Industrial and Engineering Chemistry.42

It seems clear that by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century

the activities of an increasingly prominent segment of the fraternity of the

learned were intricately bound up with an elaborate print and publication

infrastructure that emphasized the regular, periodic publication of new re-

search results. In some ways, developments in the learned world paralleled

those in the culture at large, whichwitnessed the explosion of popularmag-

azines and newspapers during this same period. In emphasizing speed and

timeliness of reporting, these developments helped to transform the very

idea of learning and culture from themastery of a limited collection of uni-

versal truths to an understanding of it as an evolving, ever-improvingbody

of information and knowledge about the realworld.43 In addition, thismove

toward periodical publication constituted a significant challenge to thepre-




44. See P, p. 119.

45. AlbertMutomakes this argument in his history of the University of California Press. As

evidence, he cites the comments of both Charles Eliot andWoodrowWilson on the occasion of

the twenty-fifth anniversary of Hopkins. In tribute to Daniel Coit Gilman,Wilson observed, “You

were the first to create and organize in America a university in which the discovery and

dissemination of new truths were conceded a rank superior to mere instruction, and in which the

efficiency and value of research as an educational instrument were exemplified in the training of

many investigators” (quoted in Albert Muto,The University of California Press: The Early Years,

1893–1953 [Berkeley, 1993], pp. 5–6).

46. See Tebbel,A History of Book Publishing, 2:537. On the history of the University of Chicago,

see Richard Storr,Harper’s University: The Beginnings: A History of the University of Chicago

(Chicago, 1966).

47. See Tebbel,History of Book Publishing, 2:536.

eminence of the boundbook as the principal technology for theproduction,

dissemination, and circulation of information in American society. Haw-

kins notes for instance that though it possessed a remarkable collection of

periodicals in its early years (one thousand serials by 1889), the library at

Hopkins had only one-tenth of the books claimed by Harvard.44 Inasmuch

as the period from 1880 to 1925 or somight be deemed the high-watermark

of book culture in the United States, so too must it be seen as the period in

which significant challenges to the book developed. Though these chal-

lenges would multiply with the appearance of new broadcast technologies

like radio, film, and television, I think it fair to suggest that the process

gathered steam behind the expansion of a highly differentiated periodical

culture that ran the gamut from the American Journal of Pure and Applied

Mathematics to Philatelic Monthly to Munsey’s and Cosmopolitan.

This is not to say, of course, that bookpublicationwasoutmodedentirely

in the academic world any more than it was in the culture at large. Bound

books still carried a significant amount of prestige, and many researchers

sought to present their work in the extended format made possible by the

traditional codex format. In fact, the very years that saw the rise of the schol-

arly association and periodicals also saw the development of the first uni-

versity presses in the United States. Although Andrew White and Cornell

University are usually credited with the creation of the first such press in

America, Hopkins was again more influential in fostering the belief among

university administrators that the status of their institutionswasdependent

on publicizing the research results of their faculties.45 Indeed it is significant

that when theUniversity of Chicagowas organized in 1893 a universitypress

was incorporated as one of the fourmajor divisions of the institution.Pres-

ident William Rainey Harper ranked publication the equal of research and

teaching at the new university.46

In addition to Cornell, Hopkins, and Chicago, Pennsylvania, Notre

Dame, Sewanee, Howard, Columbia, Northwestern, NorthCarolina, Stan-

ford, Princeton, Yale, andHarvard all organized university presses by 1919.47




48. SeeMuto,University of California Press, p. 43.

49. See Robert Frederick Lane, “The Place of the AmericanUniversity Press in Publishing” (Ph.

D. thesis, University of Chicago, 1939); cited in Tebbell,A History of Book Publishing in the United

States, 2:535.

50. See ibid.

Most were relatively small operations designed to emphasize the more ab-

stract publication function than the profit-making business of printing for

paying readers. In fact, distribution was largely carried out through gift and

exchange, a practice that helped to augment the collections at many uni-

versity libraries but did not disperse copies of the books much beyond the

scholarly community itself.48 The early university presses tended to issue

monographs, specialized studies, and series of scholarly books that could

never have been published by the trade. The University of California Press,

for instance, had twenty-three differentmonograph seriesby 1913, including

series in geology, botany, zoology, entomology, archaeology, andethnology,

as well as classical, Semitic, and modern philology.

Despite this kind of variety, however, even in the period 1918 to 1937 uni-

versity press output still constituted a very small portion of the books pub-

lished in the U.S. Robert Frederick Lane reported in the first real study of

university presses ever that total title production of all university presses

during this period amounted to only 5,382 titles at a time when the yearly

output of the trade hovered around the 9,000 titlemark.49 Despite the small

number of actual titles published, however, university presses did signifi-

cantly increase the percentage of nonfiction titles they published in com-

parison with the trade during this period. Where once they had published

only 2 percent of all nonfiction titles, by 1937 theywere publishing 10percent

of nonfiction titles.50 Clearly, the increase reflects the growth of the knowl-

edge-producing class itself. Still, both the small sales numbers associated

with those titles and the fact that 90 percent of all nonfiction continued to

be published by the commercial trade suggests that the reading population

capable of making sense of such specialized and technical matter remained

small.

These figures are emblematic of amore general situation that challenged

the new, professionalized, knowledge-producing classes as well as themore

pragmatically oriented “experts” they trained in their classrooms, libraries,

and laboratories.Without reliablemeans to generate awareness of and sup-

port for their activities, they could not easily insure their ownfinancial sup-

port. More to the point, if they wrote for and communicated onlywith each

other, they would fail to secure their standing as experts, that is, as individ-

uals with a special competency that enabled them to direct, advise, teach,

and control others. While the professionalizing disciplines could internally




51. Bledstein,The Culture of Professionalism, p. 90.

52. On the various practices that constituted the aura of professionalism, see ibid., pp. 92–104.

credential and thereby authorize their students, they could not legitimate

themselves or their claims to special statuswithout the consent of those they

aimed to inform, lead, and serve. As Bledstein has observed:

Laymen were neither prepared to comprehend themystery of the tasks

which professionals performed, nor . . . were they equipped to pass

judgment upon special skills and technical competence. Hence, the cul-

ture of professionalism required amateurs to “trust” in the integrity of

trained persons, to respect themoral authority of those whose claim to

power lay in the sphere of the sacred and the charismatic. Professionals

controlled themagic circle of scientific knowledgewhich only the few,

specialized by training and indoctrination,were privileged to enter, but

which all in the name of nature’s universalitywere obligated to appreci-

ate.51

The story of the growth in prestige of the various new “sciences” and the

concomitant rise to prominence of the professional expert is a complexone

that cannot be told in any detail here. Suffice it to say, however, that if a

culture of professionalism were to be established, it was necessary, first, to

surround all forms of scientific knowledge with a distinct aura. Then, itwas

necessary to produce the requisite forms of trust and obligation. Univer-

sities and the disciplines they harbored evolved a whole range of practices

that functioned to do both. Technical language and specialized jargon

played an important role in constituting the insularity of professionalism.

Similarly, formal credentialing practices like comprehensive examinations,

dissertations, medical boards, and the bar examination did much to create

the sense that professors, doctors, and lawyers had stepped beyond their

peers in their mastery of the difficult and the arcane. In addition, the nu-

merous ceremonial occasions, awards, prizes, and titles that emerged in ac-

ademic life during the period 1880–1915 further augmented the sense that

academic life and the business of knowledge productionwere investedwith

high drama and consequence.52 The fact that academic and professional

forms were widely imitated throughout the culture, giving way to the crea-

tion of business, cooking, and secretarial colleges, to name only a few, sug-

gests that these efforts were largely successful.

Though it is clear that universities, disciplines, andprofessionsdidmuch

to establish their own special stature and status, I don’t think they would

have succeeded so thoroughly without the supporting role played by a bur-

geoning print culture, itself buffeted by pressures to specialize and profes-




53. Stansell Christine,American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New

Century (New York, 2000), p. 74.

54. See ChristopherWilson,The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era

(Athens, Ga., 1985) and Ohmann, Selling Culture.

55. On the connection between these newmagazines and the professional-managerial class, see

Ohmann, Selling Culture, pp. 118–74.

sionalize. As I have already indicated, it seems to me that a crucial role was

also played by the large literature of popularization that developed amidst

the “explosion of language” issuing from U.S. printing presses in the years

after 1880.53 Indeed, college presidents, educators, engineers, chemists, bi-

ologists, psychologists, economists, anthropologists, and sociologists were

all called upon repeatedly as specialists and experts by the periodicals of the

era, especially the new-style magazines like McClure’s and Munsey’s.

First developed in the 1880s and 1890s and reaching their heyday during

the Progressive era, these magazines were significantly different from the

older, more literary monthlies like the Century, Harper’s, and the Atlantic

Monthly, all of which were associated with the traditional elites of Boston

andNew York.54 As ChristopherWilson and RichardOhmannhave shown,

the new magazines differed from their predecessors in organization, fund-

ing structure, and audience orientation. Designed principally as money-

makers, thesemagazines were underwritten by the advertising revenue they

solicited extensively. That revenue enabled their owners to offer them to

subscribers at a nominal fee, thereby exponentially expanding their audi-

ence base.More significantly, however, that revenue effectively transformed

the very nature of the magazine business from a textually oriented literary

business to one involved in leveraging print content to gather an audience

together in order to deliver its attention to the advertisers who made the

whole thing possible. What this meant, as Ohmann has argued so vigor-

ously, is that these magazines actually invented a new product—the audi-

ence’s attention—and thus were absolutely crucial to the development of a

nationally oriented consumer culture. They were also significantly involved

in the business of class consolidation as a result. The class they helped to

constitute was the professional-managerial class itself, that group of brain

workers who trained in the new colleges and universities, labored with

words and numbers in offices rather than on farms or in manufacturing

plants, and who moved to the new suburbs. It was this group, and all who

aspired tomembership within it, who struggled to keep pacewith the grow-

ing complexities of modern life andwork by seeking to overcome their own

narrow specialization by consuming the latest information about theworld

offered through key agencies of the flourishing print culture.55

The new-style, mass market magazines and the large city dailies whose




56. Neil Harris, “The Lamp of Learning: Popular Lights and Shadows,” in The Organization of

Knowledge in Modern America, p. 435.

numbers were also exploding during this period were among the first cul-

tural institutions to establish themselves as indispensable guides to thecom-

plexities and pace of modern life as well as to the arcana of specialized

knowledge production. Instantiating the modern pace both in their own

relentless periodicity and in their emphasis on the news opened channels

of communication with regular audiences that had to be filled with con-

stantly changing content. This led to an eclectic mix of information about

modern life, self-help advice, and celebrity gossip, as both Wilson and

Ohmann have shown, but it also led to a complex synergy between these

newprint forms and the emerging experts and specialistswho, for theirown

reasons, hoped for access to a broad general population. Because the new

magazines emphasized the agentive editor and the practice of commission-

ing pieces on topics generated in the editorial office, they had to give up

reliance on submissions thatmight trickle in fromamateurs andunknowns.

It provedmuchmore efficient to turn to expertswho alreadyhad familiarity

with some aspect of modern life and to ask them to summarize their par-

ticular forms of expertise for a generally educated thoughneither classically

nor technically trained audience. Thus, while university professors increas-

ingly served on government boards and commissions and testified before

legislative committees, so too did they offer expert advice to the public

throughmagazines and newspapers on subjects as diverse as “child rearing,

decoration, sports, civic improvements,military preparedness, foreignpol-

icy, food preparation, health, morals, and religion.”56

In offering their more broadly basedmiddle-class audiencesmuchmore

nonfiction, including popularized science, interviews with experts, spe-

cialists, and celebrities, self-help articles, and muckraking investigations of

pressing social issues, these magazines and newspapers functioned symbi-

otically with the apparatus of scholarly knowledge production. They im-

plied by their practices that knowledge was evolving, that the new was

always better than the old, and that the expert was more authoritative than

either the amateur dabbler or the generalist. Translatingmaterial originally

created for highly specialized audiences, the magazines run by FrankMun-

sey, S. S. McClure, George Lorimer, and Edward Bok did much to enhance

the credibility of the expert and the prestige of the various new “sciences”

by creating public trust in their ability to make sense of a fast-changing,

bewildering, modern world. They were essential, then, to the establishment

of the client base necessary to the practice of the professional expert.

A further development of and negotiation with this new culture of the




expert, what became known as middlebrow culture was created when the

periodicity and marketing strategies associated with the magazines was al-

lied to new forms of educational and literary expertise and ironically

grounded upon an older, Arnoldian understanding of culture as a spiritual

guide and source of moral instruction. Moving to capitalize on the bewil-

derment many felt in the face of the explosion of print and knowledge pro-

duction, book publishing entrepreneurs sought tomarket aids, handbooks,

and schemes for ordering, cataloging, controlling, and even countering the

new. They did so by relying on literary experts in the worlds of education

and print who were asked to lend their names and authority to cultural

materials to be sold as ways to counteract modern anxiety about constant

change. As early as 1909, for example, P. F. Collier & Sons relied on the

names of Charles Eliot and Harvard to sell a set of classics, which they sug-

gestedwould groundweightlessmoderns in the ballast of traditionandpro-

vide them with all that an educated man needed to know. They were

imitated by many in subsequent years, including Charles and Albert Boni

who teamed up with advertising man Harry Scherman to sell cheap sets of

classics by mail, initially bymarketingminiature Shakespeare plays in a box

of candy.

Then, in 1926, in a scheme that effectively consolidated this newmiddle-

brow formation, Scherman created the Book-of-the-MonthClub (BOMC)

with the intention of selling hundreds of thousands of books to a stable

group of magazine-like subscribers by billing his offerings as the “best”

books published each month. In order to better echo the Arnoldian lan-

guage of the best, that is, of the timeless and the universal rather than the

ephemeral and the new, Scherman based his operation on the choices of a

panel of literary experts. He used their previously established legitimacy in

academia, in journalism, and in the world of belles lettres to testify to their

ability to select the best book published each month for “general” readers

who had neither the technical competence to know what the best might be

in any number of different fields nor the time to winnow through the vast

output of titles issuing from a growing number of publishing houses. Thus

he both countered the threat of the ever changing and the new and adopted

it as the basic mechanism of his operation.

WhatHenryCanby andhis colleagues,DorothyCanfieldFisher,William

AllenWhite,HeywoodBroun, andChristopherMorleyofferedBOMCsub-

scribers was a diverse, ever-changing mix of serious but not avant-garde

literary fiction; biographies and autobiographies of the usual historical fig-

ures and statesmen, but also of scientists likeMarieCurie andLouisPasteur;

popular history and science; and awelter of outlines, summaries, andguide-

books to the new knowledge. Over the years, the BOMC has been famous

for sending out Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Philosophy, William




Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. By

issuing books like these alongside quite conventional, story-driven novels

with some literary pretensions, the BOMC simultaneously authorized the

regime of the scientific expert and challenged the legitimacy of university-

based academics to define what ought to count as specifically literary ex-

pertise. In effect, though the club operated to justify the hegemony of the

expert more generally, it created competition within the literary field by

challenging the authority of academic English departments to determine

what it meant to know literature or to make proper use of it.

Disputing the philologists’ interest in linguistic origins and source study

as well as literary professors’ eventual championing of the aesthetics of a

modernist literature of bourgeois critique, the middlebrow Book-of-the-

Month Club offered its clientele several things. First, it offered them a view

of books as literary material broadly conceived. That is to say, novels and

poetry were not cordoned off as something particularly special or worthy

of a different form of attention. Rather, both were construed, much like

biography and popular history, as reading matter, that is, as a tool for pro-

viding both entertainment and instruction, both escape andmoral enlight-

enment. Second, it offered its clientele expert knowledge in the form of

advice about what books might best live up to that view of literarymaterial

as ameans to certain functional ends. Finally, in selling thebooks thatwould

deliver the required reading experience, the club offered its subscribers the

promise that they, too, could master the modern world and all its new in-

formation.

Scherman’s operation became so famous in the decades after 1926 that

countless marketing schemes offered consumers a range of commodities-

of-the-month from religious and socialist books to fruit, flowers, and art-

works. Similarly, his panel of expert judges was widely imitated, as was his

even more famous negative option reply card—in which subscribers re-

sponded only to a monthly solicitation if they didn’t want that month’s

selection.Onemight suggest, then, given this sort of evidence, that theclub’s

influence was a function of its marketing success. Though this would cer-

tainly be correct, it would ignore the fact that the club was also surprisingly

successful because it managed to persuade a large population of educated

general readers that it offered them something they needed, that is, the ex-

pert advice of learned literary specialists who could help themnegotiate the

world of books in order to gain access to the highly valuable “information”

they contained. Thus they opened a reliable channel of communicationbe-

tween themselves and a reading audience willing not only to rely on that

advice but also on the books they recommended, most of which shared a

certain ideological specificity.

There is neither space nor necessity for detailing that ideological for-




mation here. Rather, I simply want to suggest in closing that it was this

structural relationship with a broad general audience that university-based

English professors and their other humanist colleagues failed to establish.

Though they could certainly credential their own students, codify their

methodological specificities, and couch their research in a technical lan-

guage quite distinct from the language of everyday book conversations, in

their efforts to distinguish themselves from their middlebrow competitors

they disdained everything associated with the Babbittry of themiddlebrow.

Thus they scorned the cultural earnestness of book club subscribers and

their belief that the literary should be both comprehensible and useful. At

the same time, they increasingly defined the literary in opposition to the

commercial, thereby marking print and broadcast circuits with large au-

diences as illegitimate and off-limits. As a consequence, they failed tomake

a larger case in the public sphere for the usefulness of their expertise just as

they failed to specify exactly what sort of product they offered to those they

would advise, counsel, and shape. Small wonder, then, that the Englishpro-

fessor increasingly came to stand in for the fusty academic squirreled away

in his ivory tower, writing away amidst his books and the dust.While some

would argue, justifiably I think, that the distance thereby gained from the

dominant culture enabled the discipline to function as a source of cultural

critique, it seems to me that the recent proletarianization of English and

other humanities departments by reliance on adjuncts and graduate stu-

dents, the proliferation of writing across the university programs, and the

shrinkage of department budgets and faculty lines suggest that the faith in

humanistic expertise is now at a critically low ebb. Unless humanities fac-

ulties and specialists learn to address a broad, general audience and tomake

a case for the knowledge they offer, they will be replaced by departments of

communication and media studies that already offer specialized and tech-

nical knowledge of cultural and knowledge production and transmission.



Radway. Research Universities, Periodical Publication, And the Circulation of Professional Expertise - On the Significance Oif Middlebrow Authority (2004)

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