1Learning to Be Civic: Higher Education and Student Life, 1890-1940Prepared for Panel on Educating Leaders: Higher Education and Civic Elites, 1870-1970,Annual Meeting of the Social Science History AssociationChicago, IL, November 2001Peter Dobkin HallHauser Center for Nonprofit OrganizationsJohn F. Kennedy School of GovernmentHarvard UniversityAll studies of American civic life identify the years between the 1890 and 1940 asthe high tide of civic engagement – the period in which voluntary associations andother formal organizations, for-profit and nonprofit, proliferated rapidly, in whichcitizens participated in unprecedented numbers (Skocpol 1999; Putnam 2000; Putnam &Gamm 1999; Hall 1999).A variety of forces and collective experiences have been offered to explain thisphenomenon: the unifying and paradoxically civilized impact of war; efforts toovercome the atomizing effects of immigration, urbanization, and industrialization; theenactment of laws facilitating corporate and associational activity; efforts by religiousand economic conservative activists to privatize religion and culture.While all of these factors undoubtedly played significant roles in teachingAmericans how to pool and collectively govern private resources for public purposes,none have addressed either the extent to which civic values and skills were selectivelydistributed, or – the concern of this essay – how these competencies were imparted. Ofthe major recent studies of civic engagement, only Verba, Schlozman & Brady’s Voiceand Equality offered any insight into the venues in which Americans acquired civiccompetency – highlighting not only the general role of religion, but the fact that somereligious communities were far more effective than others in doing so.The selective distribution of civic competencies and preferences is evident inthese incontrovertible facts:• the concentration of corporations – proprietary and eleemosynary – in the Northeastand upper Midwest, evident from the beginning of the nineteenth century andpersisting through the first half of the twentieth (Hall 1982, 2000; Bowen 1994);2• the preference of states in the South and West for the provision of public goodsthrough government rather than private corporations, especially evident in the fieldof higher education;• the continuing significance of education and income as predictors of organizationalparticipation and civic engagement (Warner & Lunt, 1941; Verba, Schlozman &Brady, 1994).The legal capacity to form associations and to pool resources has been available to allAmericans. But it appears that the willingness of citizens to exercise this capacity hasdepended on where they were located geographically, on their wealth and education,and on their religious inclinations. Even if citizens were inclined to associational action,they often lacked the knowledge of how to organize and conduct the deliberativeprocesses that lie at the heart of the associational process. It was exactly such ignorancethat led Henry M. Robert (1837-1923) to write his famous Rules of Order. As an armyofficer, Robert was assigned to posts in Washington State, California, Massachusetts,and Wisconsin. Everywhere he went – except Massachusetts – he found “virtualparliamentary anarchy” (Robert’s Rules 2000). First published in 1876, Robert’s manualof procedure became an essential text for Americans as, in the closing decades of thenineteenth century, they were swept up in a tidal wave of association building.At the conclusion of Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam points to the “social capitaldeficit – crime waves, degradation in the cities, inadequate education, a widening gapbetween rich and poor, and what one contemporary called as ‘Saturnalia’ of politicalcorruption” resulting from “Industrial Revolution, urbanization, and massive waves ofimmigration,” which transformed American communities at the end of the nineteenthcentury (368). “A quickening sense of crisis, coupled with inspired grassroots andnational leadership,” Putnam argues, “produced an extraordinary burst of socialinventiveness and political reform,” recreating community institutions that wouldendure through most of the next century.There seems no reason to doubt that massive civic reeducation of Americansoccurred between 1890 and 1930 – though there is considerable room for debate abouthow this happened, whose interests it served, and by whom it was initiated. Warnerand Lunt’s study of associational life in “Yankee City” (Newburyport, Massachusetts)in the 1930s suggests not only that associational participation varied significantly byincome, education, and religious affiliation, but also that not all associations were3equally civic: that Roman Catholics and conservative Protestants, for example, were farmore likely to participate in associations that served only their own co-religionists thanin ones that were more broadly inclusive. By the same token, liberal Protestants andJews were not only far more likely to participate in inclusive civic organizations, but toorganize their economic enterprises as corporations and to capitalize them from publicrather than private sources.The point of this paper is not to caricature civil society as an elite scheme. It is,rather, to investigate one of the ways in which civic values and competencies wereimparted to a group of particular importance in a society where educated expertise wasbecoming increasingly central to every aspect of economic, political, and culturalactivity: the graduates of two elite universities – Harvard and Yale -- which, during theperiod under study, proclaimed themselves to be national institutions. There is somemerit to these claims – although, as this paper will suggest, the term “national” meantrather different things to each.Harvard, Yale, and Two Ethics of National LeadershipIn his Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858), Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes hadcelebrated Boston as the “hub of the solar system” – as a place that could “drain a largewatershed of intellect, and will not itself be drained”(1957, 119-20). This notion ofnational leadership based on the capacity of a city to draw to itself the promising youngauthors, rising lawyers, large capitalists, and prettiest girls of other cities is peculiarlymetropolitan and elitist: suggesting that national leadership consisted of preeminencerather than pervasiveness.This conception was echoed by Thomas Wentworth