1900s Overview
Faculty and students at the 1909 graduation ceremony.
The Chancellor’s report of 1900 laments the overshadowing of the “Collegiate Department” by Engineering and by the other professional departments within the University. And he laments the city’s general abandonment of the arts and culture. “Unfortunately the whole drift and trend of thought in Pittsburgh, until within recent years, has been pervaded by a spirit of hopelessness, so far as the promotion of genuine culture is concerned.” He recommends more funding and attention be given to the study of literature and the arts. A generation of readers, he remarks, has been created by the Carnegie libraries, and the university must do its best to meet this generation’s needs.
Through the next several years, the Chancellor’s reports echo this call for more resources—repeatedly talking about the necessity of increasing faculty in the collegiate ranks and library holdings. The library, for instance, lacked complete collections of standard authors’ works. By 1908, however—the year, incidentally, that the institution became the University of Pittsburgh—the Chancellor saw fit to report that “English is rapidly coming to its rightful place as a subject of first importance.” In 1906, the course offerings had increased, allowing, among other things, engineers to take courses geared to their needs and schedules, but also offering a substantially expanded curriculum for majors and for all students in the collegiate curriculum. In 1907, students could elect a major area of study (although the word “major” was not used), including English.
In 1893, the university first announced the availability of post-graduate degrees, including a PhD in English Language and Literature. The first students in this program, Thomas Blaisdell and George Gerwig, received their degrees in 1904. Most of the graduate students in English were teachers in the area schools. To meet their schedules, beginning in 1906 courses were offered on evenings and Saturdays.
By 1908, there were two professors giving their full attention to the English department, Alexander Stuart Hunter, who had joined the faculty in 1895, and Alexander Wellington Crawford, who joined the faculty in 1907 as an Instructor and who was promoted to Professor in 1908. They were assisted by a single assistant or instructor. As class size increased, there was a call for a third professorship. Again, the Chancellor’s report suggests that English was “rapidly coming to its rightful place as a subject of first importance.” In 1909, the English department began to work in cooperation with the School of Education to develop courses on the teaching of literature and composition.
Courses
From the 1907 Yearbook
For the first few years of this decade, topics of study are listed by year.
Freshman Year- Rhetoric; Critical Study of Longfellow and Whittier; Critical Study of Bryant, Irving, and Hawthorne.
Sophomore Year- Rhetoric- Essays and Orations; Critical Study of Goldsmith and Scott; Critical Study of Tennyson and Macauley; History of the English Language.
Junior Year- Practical Studies in English Prose Writers; Lectures and critical studies in Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden.
Senior Year- Lectures and critical studies in Pope, Gray, Burns, and Wordsworth; Lectures and critical studies in Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats; Studies and readings in Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and Robert Browning.
In 1904, the university went from 4 terms per year to 2, and the curriculum was revised to provide required introductory courses and advanced electives. Students in the College could elect a major area of study, including an English major (although the word “major” was not yet used). With an increase in enrollments in the university, and with the system of electives, the number of courses offered by the English department increased.
The heading to the course list says:
The courses in English are arranged to acquaint the student with both the form and content of the English language. The earlier courses are intended to train the student in affective use of the English language, both written and spoken, and to give him knowledge of its historical forms. The latter courses aim to give a knowledge of the thought and life presented in both English and American literature. Lectures are given, but stress is laid on the direct study of the best authors. Essays and other written work are required in all courses.
Required Courses:
Rhetoric and Composition. Two semesters, 3 hours. Weekly themes and frequent class exercises, with practice in correction and criticism. Textbook: Baldwin’s College Manual of Rhetoric, with collateral reading from the best modern prose writers.
Public Speaking. Two semesters, 1 hour.
Advanced Composition. Second semester, 2 hours. Required of students in Civil Engineering.
American Literature. First Semester, 2 hours. Textbook: Higginson and Boynton’s History of American Literature.
History of English Literature. Second semester, 2 hours. Textbook: Moody and Lovett’s History of English Literature. Required of students in the College.
English Literature to the Age of Milton. Second semester, 2 hours. A study of English non-dramatic literature to the Puritan period, with brief readings of minor authors and a careful study of Chaucer, Spenser and Milton. Required of students in the College.
Electives:
Development of English Prose. First semester, 3 hours. From the Elizabethan to the Victorian age.
History of the English Language. Second semester, 3 hours. Textbook: Lounsbury’s History of the English Language, with readings from Middle English writers.
Advanced Public Speaking and Writing. Two semesters, 1 hour.
The Drama and Shakespeare. First semester, 3 hours.
The Development of the English Novel. Second semester, 3 hours
The Classical Period. First semester, 3 hours. A Study of Dryden and Pope and their contemporaries, in connection with the life and thought of the 18th century.
The Revival of Romanticism. Second semester, 3 hours. Thomas, Collins, Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns.
Chaucer and Middle English. First semester, 2 hours. During the early part of the course a study will be made of the English language. The remainder of the semester will be devoted to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
Spenser and Milton. Second semester, 2 hours. Shorter poems will be given some consideration, but the chief study will be Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book I, and Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.
Elizabethan Dramatists. First semester, 3 hours. Except Shakespeare. Typical dramas of Marlowe, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Webster.
The Essay and Criticism. Second semester, 3 hours. The development of the essay from the seventeenth century, with the especial reference to the history of critical opinion, followed by a systematic study of Literary Criticism.
Early 19th Century Literature. First semester, 3 hours. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Scott and Byron.
Victorian Literature. Second semester, 3 hours. The more recent poets, especially Tennyson and Browning, with an estimate of the value and significance of their works.
Classical Literature in English. First and Second semesters, 3 hours.
Courses Required for the English major:
The Drama and Shakespeare
The Development of the English Novel
Early 19th Century Literature
Victorian Literature
Faculty
Alexander Stewart Hunter, Professor of English and Ethics, and Lecturer in International Law. After 1909, Hunter appears in the catalogue as a “Special Lecturer in English literature.” In the 1908 Yearbook, The Owl, where students provided antic captions for the faculty page (see the image for Crawford, below), the students attached this description to Hunter’s photo:
“Uncle Alick,” Ph.D., LL.D. and do not forget it. Nice man, for often there is a smile behind that upturned mustache (which, by the way, is his and therefore at his disposal and not yours). Looks like the Kaiser when he is fixed up and like Mark Twain when he’s mussed (fixed down). If you can give “that calf illustration of mine. It’s a good one,” or an exact quotation from the book, he is delighted. His Ph.D. was gotten on his “knowledge of the American boy,” and that LL.D. was given for laying down the law to the young ladies, genus-American, species—W.U.P., “The young ladies must cease their conversation.” Makes the eagle scream on all possible occasions. At ease on state occasions—and all others.
Alexander Wellington Crawford (1866-1933), Professor of English (and sponsor of the Dramatic Club), was born in Ontario, Canada. He took at BA from the University of Toronto and a PhD from Cornell (1902), where he worked with Hiram Corson, who had published one of the first critical studies of Shakespeare in the U.S., an Introduction to the Study of Shakespeare(1899). Crawford taught at Ursinus and Beaver Colleges in Pennyslvania from 1902-1906 before coming to the Western University in 1907. In 1909, he left to take a position as the Chair of the English department at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, where taught for the remainder of his long career. Crawford edited a teaching edition of Julius Caesar (1918) and published articles on Shakespeare, Tennyson and Browning. He was a pioneer in the teaching of Canadian literature. He was the author of Hamlet, An Ideal Prince and other Essays on Shakespearean Interpretation (1916), The Philosophy of F.H. Jacobi (1905), Germany’s Moral Downfall (1919) and The Genius of Keats (1932).
Allan Davis, Assistant in English and Instructor in Public Speaking
Peter Harden Eley, Instructor in English
Students
Oratory and Debate, and the Literary Society are all under the guidance of the English Department. Professor Crawford reported to Chancellor McCormick that: “The various activities under the supervision of the Literary Society have an average attendance of about 25 with often an attendance of 35. The debate club, recently formed, meets at Noon hour and is attracting the attention of a goodly number of students.”
Ph.D.s Conferred
1904
Thomas Charles Blaisdell-Composition Rhetoric
George William Gerwig-(no title available)
1908
Edward Charles Parker-(no title available)
1909
Wallace Lee Bonham-The Harmony of the Ethical with the Dramatic Purpose in Shakespeare’s Great Tragedies
Thomas Charles Blaisdell (1867–1948) received his Bachelor’s degree from Syracuse University. After receiving his doctorate, he published a textbook (most likely drawn from his dissertation), Steps in English: Composition-Rhetoric (1906) and a book for teachers,English in the Grades: Suggestions for Teachers (1905). In 1930 he published another volume entitled Ways to Teach English. As Peggy O’Brien notes in her 1995 article “’And Gladly Teach’: Books, Articles, and a Bibliography on the Teaching of Shakespeare,” Blaisdell was among the early twentieth century advocates for the close-reading of Shakespeare and the “physicalization” of his work through reading aloud, class-room acting exercises, and a ‘stage-centered’ pedagogical approach. Blaisdell served as a Professor of the Teaching of English at the State Teachers College in Slippery Rock, as Professor of English at Michigan Agricultural College (1906-1912), President of Alma College (1912-1915), and as Dean of the School of Liberal Arts, Penn State.
George William Gerwig (1867-1950) received his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Nebraska and began his post-doctorate career serving as an Extension Lecturer at the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh, as well as teaching courses such as “The Art of the Short Story” in the Saturday/evening course program at the University of Pittsburgh. Gerwig was an educator, an insurance salesman, and the first secretary of the centralized Pittsburgh Board of Education. He served as a member of the board of the Henry Clay Frick Education Commission. Gerwig was the author of several books, including The Art of the Short Story, Schools with a Perfect Score: Democracy's Hope and Safeguard, and a series on schooling and moral education,Guideposts to Character. He also published eight pamphlet-length volumes in a series on Shakespeare’s female characters. Gerwig knew Willa Cather from his time in Nebraska, and he is thought to be at least partly responsible for her move to Pittsburgh to teach English at Allegheny High School.
Undergraduates
Percy Earle Burtt attended the Western Theological Seminary, completed his term of duty with the Navy during World War One, and went on to serve as minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Sharon, Pennsylvania.
Arthur Wallace Calhoun became a scholar and professor whose subject was worker’s education and American labor. He completed his MA at the University of Wisconsin and his PhD at Clark University, in 1969. He taught at a variety of colleges and universities, including the University of Kentucky, the Rand School of Social Science, Grove City College (PA), Erskine College and the Brookwood Labor College. A pacifist and social radical, he rarely stayed at any position for more than a few years. His written works include Social History of the American Family, The Worker Looks at Government, The Social Universe, Social Regeneration, and The Cultural Concept of Christianity. His papers are held at the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University.
Walter LeRoy Copeland, who won the Senior Oratorical Prize in 1903, studied law and eventually became a director at the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation. At his death in 1959, he left the University of Pittsburgh some $1 million earmarked for the Department of Neurological Surgery, which continues to fund research to this day.
Charles Rohrer Crow, who won the Freshman Literature Prize in 1902, was the father of Charles Rohrer Crow, Jr., who was hired into the department as an Assistant Professor in 1947. Charles Crow Jr. will be much featured in this history.
Robinson Jeffers
Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) was born in Old Allegheny on Pittsburgh’s north shore. His father, a Presbyterian minister, was a professor at the Western Theological Seminary, and his parents took an active interest in their son’s education, teaching him languages, including Greek, and providing extensive opportunities for travel in Europe. In 1902, when Robinson was 15, he was enrolled for a year as a sophomore in the Western University of Pennsylvania. The following year, when the family moved to California, he transferred to Occidental College. Jeffers went on to a substantial career as a poet. He is known primarily for his narrative or epic poems, written in long Whitman-like lines and celebrating the landscape of California’s coast and forests. Jeffers is considered to be an important figure in American modernism. More recently, his work has been recovered as a form of eco-criticism, articulating a philosophy of “inhumanism.” His translation of Medea was performed in New York in 1947 with Dame Judith Anderson in the title role. His collected work was published by Stanford University Press (Vol 1, 1988; Vol 2, 1989).
William Hart Lacey served as the Associate Editor and Editor in Chief of the Courant, the student magazine. He was chosen to give the Salutatory Address at the 1904 graduation ceremony. He completed his degree in Law at the University of Pittsburgh.
Riley Salathian Lethwick, who won a Freshman Literature Prize in 1908, went on to a career as a composer and lyricist. One of these compositions, “The Mail Train Blues,” was recorded by Sippie Wallace and Louis Armstrong.
Robert L. Vann (1879-1940) entered the Western University of Pennsylvania as a scholarship student in 1903, graduating in 1906. He was a member of the Philomathean Society and served as editor of the student magazine, the Courant. He received 2nd prize in the Senior Oratorical Contest for a speech, “The Heavy Belgian Hand: Wrath that Makes for Praise,” on Belgian rule in the Congo. (Thomas Blaisdell was one of the judges.) Vann graduated from the WUP Law School in 1909 and opened a law practice, serving as one of only five African American lawyers in Pittsburgh. In 1910, he became editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, a position he held until his death in 1940. Under his leadership, the Pittsburgh Courier became one of the most influential and most widely read black newspapers in the United States.
1900s Prizes
The Sophomore Literature Prize
With a new Chancellor in office, the Chancellor’s literature prize was reconstructed as a Sophomore Literature Prize and a Freshman Literature Prize. The awards went to the most outstanding students in literature courses and the awards were determined by a committee consisting of the Chancellor, the Professor of English, and a third party chosen by the two.
1901 Carlos David Norton
1902 John Coleman, William Hart Lacey
1903 Paul Coleman
1904 Arthur Wallace Calhoun
1905 William Cathcart Arthur, Thomas Alan Miller
1906 Percy Earle Burtt
1907 Clarence Achilles Reece
1908 Margaret Geraldine Kelly
1909 Gertrude Marie Munroe
The Freshman Literature Prize
1901 William Hart Lacey
1902 Charles Rohrer Crow
1903 William Charles Reuter, Edwin Kuhn Price
1904 William Cathcart Arthur
1905 Percy Earle Burtt
1906 Clarence Achilles Reece
1907 Carl Eugene Davis
1908 Frederick Clarence Gillespie, Riley Salathian Lethwick
1909 Ned Lewis Estabrook
Senior Oratorical Prize
1903 Walter LeRoy Copeland
Chancellor’s Oratorical Prize
1904 John Coleman
1906 Oliver Henry Fulton, Robert Lee Vann
1907 Edwin Robert Wiese, Sidney Isaac Kornhauser
1908 George Salter Coleman, Harriet Elizabeth Kelly
Footnotes
Graduating Seniors, 1908
Actual Reading, Revised Conclusions
The English curriculum was revised in 1905, after the University went from 4 terms a year to 2. Perhaps because they were written in a hurry, or perhaps because the door was open to a new, more direct style, the course descriptions in 1905 are more colloquial than usual—or more frank. They don’t rely on the usual catalog-speak. For example, for a course on the Development of the English Novel, the course description says:
Lectures are given on the development of the novel and the actual reading of selected books of fiction is required.
This phrase is repeated for the Shakespeare course (“the actual reading of many of Shakespeare’s plays is required”) and for the course on the English essayists (“the actual reading and critical study of seventeenth and eighteenth century essays is required”). It disappears after 1905.
There is also a lovely formulation for students of how to best make use of textbooks and lectures over the course of a semester. This is from the course description for a required first-year Rhetoric course: “This subject is taught inductively and by lectures, in which conclusions are revised and corrected.”
Other notes
1. The image above represents the last class to graduate from the Western University of Pennsylvania. In Spring 1909, students for the first time received their degrees from the University of Pittsburgh.
2. The caption next to the image of Alexander Wellington Crawford reads:
His common or garden name is Shakespeare, and he looks the part. Believes that the future of the race depends on the morality of English literature and the efforts of Professor Corson, of Cornell. Advance agent for Ben Greet and darling of all the women’s clubs. As Shakespeare said, “Have I told you about Mrs. Crawford and I when we were in Europe?” In two brief years he has revolutionized the English department and greatly increased the number of courses in that branch.
3. For more on George Gerwig and Willa Cather, see Peter M. Sullivan, “The Gerwig House,”Western Pennsylvania History, Summer 2003, 20-26.
Student Writing
In the decade of the 1900s, students continued to regularly publish essays, stories and poems in the Western University Courant. Most likely these compositions were prepared as part of course work. If not, they remain products of an education in the literary and rhetorical arts at the Western University of Pennyslvania. Below are some examples:
"Thaddeus Stevens, a Pennsylvania Statesman," by John Coleman
"The City in History," by William Hart Lacey
"The Use of a College Education," by Alexander Black
“The Political Optimism of the American People”
"Nescius Aurae Fallacis," by J. Garfield Houston.
"Such is Woman," by A. A.