Muckraking the Playing Field: Emerging PMC Class Consciousness

The expression “to shape up” first came into common parlance at the end of the nineteenth century. See [auDonald J. Mrozek, “Sport in American Life: From National Health to Personal Fulfillment, 1890–1940,” in Fitness in American Culture. Ed. Kathryn Grover (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989).Google Scholar

See Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).Google Scholar

Seely also discusses this topic in Bruce Seely, “Research, Engineering, and Science in American Engineering Colleges: 1900–1960.” Technology and Cultur 34.2 (Apr. 1993) 344–386.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Other institutions, of course, were turning out future PMC-types, including newly-created graduate institutions such as Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the University of Chicago, established in 1890 by John D. Rockefeller and the American Baptist Education Society, as well as the aforementioned separate professional schools of Yale and Harvard. The University of Chicago received something of a private “land grant” from department store magnate Marshall Field. See University of Chicago website, <http://www-news.uchicago.edu>. At the University of Chicago specifically, Joel Pfister notes that “between the early 1890s and 1930, almost two-thirds of the recipients of bachelor degrees from the University of Chicago took up professional occupations.” See Joel Pfister, Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995) 276Google Scholar

Martin Sklar, The United States as a Developing Country: Studies in U.S. History in the Progressive Era and the 1920s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 172.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Prolific playwright Owen Davis also contributed a popular college sports drama to the same period, At Yale (1906). Strictly speaking, this was not a Broadway production; Davis’s rah-rah comedy-drama played at the “popular theaters” around the country for a year, stopping in New York City in October 1907. The play, probably quite deliberately, echoes Brown of Harvard’s rowing competition, and was readily adaptable to localization by other college productions—for example, a 1912 University of Georgia production was called, appropriately enough, At Georgia. There are additional connections to the other college plays under consideration: Davis’s hero, Dick Seely, is a poor “outsider” who has risen to gain the respect of his Yale teammates, and he is also falsely accused of sullying a girl’s honor. The New York Dramatic Mirror liked Davis’s effort enough to note that while “its story is a close copy of Brown of Harvard... in some portions it is superior to that play” (“Reviews of New Plays” 3). See Owen Davis, At Yale (New York: Samuel French, 1906)Google Scholar

References to Strongheart are from William de Mille, Strongheart (New York: Samuel French, 1909).Google Scholar

de Mille, in fact, initially planned to make his hero a Negro and not an American Indian. See Montrose Moses, The American Dramatist (1925, rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964) 331.Google Scholar

See Brewer, on O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh: “Whites perceive him [Joe] as a good Black because his desire for the privileges of Whiteness makes him useful in controlling other Blacks” (author’s emphasis): Mary F. Brewer, Staging Whiteness (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005) 71.Google Scholar

Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1492–Present (New York: Harper Collins, 2003) 323.Google Scholar

References to the play taken from Charles Klein, The Lion and the Mouse (New York: Samuel French, 1916).Google Scholar

Klein most likely borrowed the “Octopus” analogy from Frank Norris’s The Octopus: A Story of California. Norris’s 1901 story of wheat farmers and their struggles against the railroads (the titular “Octopus”) was the first part of Norris’s intended “epic of the wheat”—three novels that were to denounce capitalistic greed by tracing the path of wheat from farming to exportation. Norris only finished the second novel, The Pit: A Story of Chicago, before dying of a ruptured appendix. Ida Tarbell’s description of John D. Rockefeller in The History of Standard Oil (always “Mr. Rockefeller” when she does not include his full name) is rather less emotionally heated than that of Klein’s dramatized counterpart. Tarbell tends to emphasize the cold, patient, and laconic qualities of Rockefeller—in one vignette, she recounts him idly rocking in a rocking chair while sizing up potential adversaries in the room (104-105). In the following passage, Tarbell describes a typical Rockefeller business maneuver: The Empire had gone systematically to work to develop markets for the output of its own and of the independent refineries. Mr. Rockefeller’s business was to prevent any such development. He was well equipped for the task by his system of “predatory competition,” for in spite of the fact that Mr. Rockefeller claimed that underselling to drive a rival from a market was one of the evils he was called to cure, he did not hesitate to employ it himself. Indeed, he had long used his freedom to sell at any price he wished for the sake of driving a competitor out of the market with calculation and infinite patience. Other refiners burst into the market and undersold for a day; but when Mr. Rockefeller began to undersell, he kept it up day in and day out, week in and week out, month in and month out, until there was literally nothing left of his competitor. (187) See Ida M. Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company (New York: McClure, Phillips and Co., 1904).Google Scholar