1910s Overview
Student Army Training Corps, May 1918, in front of State Hall
The second decade of the 20th century was a period of growth in the English department. The faculty grew in size, including a substantial addition of non-professorial faculty (Instructors). Alexander Stuart Hunter continued to serve as a “Special Lecturer” in English literature. He is clearly an important figure in the department and on campus, serving on key committees in the College. But the identity of the department was shaped by Lincoln Robinson Gibbs, who joined the faculty as English department chair in 1910. He led the department through a decade that included the hiring of three Assistant Professors, two in English and one in Public Speaking, and the first woman to join the English department faculty roster, Sarah Agnes Neeld, who taught as in Instructor from 1918-1920. In 1915, the programs of study in the College, including English, began to be called “majors.”
Toward the end of the decade, the faculty roster includes a list of colleagues who are on leave to serve the war effort. In 1918, the University of Pittsburgh Campus became a home to the Student Army Training Corps, an early version of ROTC. Faculty members of draft age were asked to serve as teachers, and this conscripted faculty included John K. Miller, an Assistant Professor of English, and Edwin B. Burgum and Jonathan L. Zerbe, both Instructors of English. During the war years, fewer English courses were added to the curriculum and the number of electives was reduced. But the curriculum added courses designed to celebrate a distinctively American (rather than European) literary heritage.
Over the full scope of the decade, however, the list of course offerings continued to grow, continuing a pattern begun in the 1900s. According to the Chancellor’s report for 1912, approximately 700 students took English courses for the year. In 1919, it was reported that 1300 students received instruction in English.
Creative Writing entered the English curriculum for the first time in 1910, when George Gerwig (a Lecturer in the Extension Division and a recent Pitt PhD) taught an extension course in “The Art of the Short Story.” In 1912, this became “Materials and Methods of Fiction.” In 1914, Professor Gibbs, the department chair, taught a course in “Short Story Writing” and this became a standard offering. Journalism also entered the curriculum, although by way of the School of Economics. At the beginning of the decade, and apparently with the approval (if not the urging) of Chancellor McCormick, the School of Economics began to announce a course to provide training in business journalism.
By 1912, an Instructor had been hired (Thomas Reynolds Williams) for the newly formed Department of Journalism in the School of Economics and a broad training in journalism was provided for a growing contingent of students. Most of the courses were taught by journalists in the city. In 1914, Charles Arnold was to direct the Journalism department through the remainder of the decade, to serve as faculty adviser for Student Publications (including the new student newspaper, The Pitt Weekly), and to become the Director of Publicity for the University. Arnold also taught sections of English Composition. This course, for all instructors, began to feature regular exercises focusing on “selections from current issues of the Atlantic Monthly.”
The MA program in the English department was established during this decade, with about one MA student graduating each year. There were no PhD graduates. By 1913, the Graduate School at the College had become an independent administrative unit. Courses offered to graduate students in the English department included Old English; Elizabethan Drama; Victorian Literature; Revolutionary Period of English Literature (the Romantics); History of the English Novel; Pre-Shakespearean Drama; Ruskin; Carlyle; Emerson; Shakespeare; Chaucer; and Literary Criticism.
Newly added undergraduate courses included National Ideals in American Literature; American Literature since 1870; Colonial Literature (American); The Eighteenth Century; Contemporary Dramatists; Recent English Poets; George Meredith and the Comic Spirit; Literary Criticism; The Art of Theatre; Drama as Pedagogical Dynamic and The Pedagogy of English—the last two courses reflecting the department’s commitment to working in cooperation with the School of Education.
Courses
Undergraduate Courses
Various surveys of English and American Literature, and:
Argumentation and Debating
Browning
Chaucer and Middle English
Colonial Literature
Contemporary Dramatists
Emerson
English Composition
Literary Criticism
Lyric Poetry – A study of the principles of vocal interpretation and practice in the reading of some of the great lyrics of English and American literature.
National Ideals in American Literature
Recent Dramatists
Representative English Writers – A study of representative poets and novelists from Pope to the present time.
Resume of English Literature – A review study of literature, designed to emphasize some of the leading principles of appreciation, and to summarize impressions of a few great authors…
Short Story Writing – A study of the principles of story writing; analysis of masterpieces of the short story form, practice in original composition and criticism.
Spenser and Milton
Teaching of English in the Junior High School
The Drama and Shakespeare
The French Revolution and English Literature
The History of the Novel
The Pedagogy of English
The Pedagogy of Preparatory School Literature – A study of the aims, methods, and educational values of the secondary school course in English Literature, with reading and analysis representative selections from the list of college entrance requirements.
The Revolutionary Period
The Technique of the Drama
Graduate Courses
Carlyle
Chaucer and Middle English
Elizabethan Drama
Emerson
George Meredith and the Comic Spirit
History of the English Novel
History of the Theatre
Literary Criticism
Old English
Pre-Shakespearian Drama
Recent English Poets
Revolutionary Period of English Literature (Romantics)
Ruskin
Shakespeare
The Eighteenth Century
The Principles of Literary Criticism – A study of the criteria of literary excellence. For the Fall Term, a consideration of the general principles of imaginative literature, its function in society and education, its nature, its elements, etc: for the Winter term, a review of the most important theories of criticism, from Aristotle to the present time; for the Spring Term, a study of the major types of literature, and an application of the principles to contemporary writers.
The Technique of the Drama
Victorian Literature
The following is the opening page of the English department offerings in the 1914 Course Catalogue. The full list is available through Documenting Pitt.
Faculty
University of Pittsburgh Faculty, around 1910
Alexander Stewart Hunter continued in his role as “Special Lecturer in English literature” until he left the university in 1918.
Lincoln Robinson Gibbs (1868-1943) received his BA from Wesleyan and his MA from Harvard. He joined the University of Pittsburgh as a Professor of English in 1910, where, according to Agnes Lynch Starrett, he was “a worthy member of a line of scholarly gentlemen.” He edited and prepared the introduction for the Standard English Classics edition of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1898) and then two subsequent collections from the work of Coleridge (1916) and Browning (1927). Gibbs developed a course on short story-writing where students studied the construction of published stories; the course was offered for the first time in 1914. Gibbs also supervised the University’s Literary Club. Gibbs served as head of the English Department from 1910 – 1922 when he left Pittsburgh to teach at the University of Miami and, later, Antioch College. Gibbs’ students included Hervey Allen, the novelist and author of Anthony Adverse; Kenneth Gould, editor of Scholastic Magazine; Frederick P. Mayer, who would later serve as Chair of the University of Pittsburgh English department; and W.K. Leonard, poet and critic.
John Kamerer Miller: Assistant Professor of English
Frank Hardy Lane: Assistant Professor of Public Speaking
John Valente: Assistant Professor of English
Instructors
For the first time, there is an extended list of non-professorial faculty, instructors (mostly), most of whom are on the faculty roster for only a year or two.
George Mahaffey Patterson Baird (1887-1970), Instructor in English, grew up in Avalon, Pennsylvania. He attended the University of Pittsburgh between the years 1905 and 1909, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree. During his college years he was especially involved in the campus publications. He joined the faculty in 1916. Baird wrote the lyrics to the University of Pittsburgh Alma Mater. He was also involved with the Scottish Room Committee and suggested the name Panthers for the football team. In 1917, he went on leave to join the Army. After the war, he began a career with Pittsburgh’s Department of City Planning. When he retired in 1961, he had risen to the position of senior research analyst. Baird also wrote and produced several one-act plays, the most well-known of which is perhaps Mirage (first performed in 1916 by the Pitt Players). He was the author of The Book of Words of the Pageant and Masque of Freedom, a pantomime performed in Forbes Field, October 31-November 12th, 1916, with words spoken by concealed readers or sung by a chorus. The pageant celebrated the spirit of freedom as expressed by Pittsburgh’s first settlers. In 1916, Baird also published two children’s plays, “Morality Interludes for Children,” in The Ladies Home Journal.
Louis Franklin Snow served as an Instructor in English and Public Speaking in 1913 and 1914, in 1914 he also served as the University Librarian. Louis F. Snow graduated from Brown University in 1887 and earned a Master of Arts at Harvard in 1890. In 1892 he became the first dean of the Women’s College at Brown University, a position he resigned in 1900 to attend Columbia University, where he received his PhD. He taught at a variety of institutions before joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh. After leaving Pittsburgh, Brown served as chair of the English Department and librarian, University of the Philippines, 1914-1918. In 1921, he was appointed Professor of English at the University of Chattanooga, where he remained until his retirement in 1931.
Sarah Agnes Scutter (b. 1880) graduated from Wesleyan University in 1904. She taught high school in New Jersey from 1905-1908. In June 1908, she married the Reverend George Avery Neeld, who took a position as a pastor at the Oakland Methodist Church in Pittsburgh (Forbes and Bouquet). The church was a Wesley Foundation Church and served as a religious center for the students at the University of Pittsburgh. Sarah Neeld was the first woman to teach English in the English department at Pitt. She taught for a brief period, from 1918 to 1920, when Rev. Neeld was appointed as Director and first Professor at the newly organized Ohio School of Religion, part of the Ohio State University. Sarah Neeld did graduate work at Ohio State from 1920-1921. We did not find evidence that she joined the faculty.
Other Instructors included:
Elvertus Franklin Biddle, Instructor in Public Speaking
Carl Frederick Ohliger, Instructor in English
Vincent Holland Ogburn, Fellow in English
Arthur Edward Fish, Instructor in Public Speaking
Mark Clement Hoffman, Instructor in English
Charles Fletcher Lewis, Instructor in English
Louis Jay Heath, Instructor in English
Charles Morris Cristler, Instructor in English
Edwin Graham Bothwell, Instructor
Allan Davis, Instructor in Techniques of Drama
Rufus William McCulloch, Instructor in English
John McClung Brownlee, Instructor in English
Edwin Berry Burgum, Instructor in English
Lois Broudy, Instructor in English
Lebbeus Heinz Frantz, Instructor in English
Jonathan Leo Zerbe, Instructor in English
Students
William Hervey Allen
William Hervey Allen (1889-1949) graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1915. He served as a Lieutenant in the 28th (Keystone) Division of the U.S. Army in World War I and was wounded in battle. He published a book of poems, Wampus and Old Gold in the Yale Series of Younger poets (1921). His second book, Toward the Flame (1926), was a memoir of his experiences during the war.
Hervey Allen is best known, however, for the historical novel Anthony Adverse (1933) which followed its hero across Europe, Africa, and the Americas during the Napoleonic era. It was a substantial success and established Allen as a leading popular novelist. Allen then began a series of five novels taking colonial Western Pennsylvania as their subject and background. He completed three: The Forest and the Fort (1943), Bedford Village (1944) and Toward the Morning (1948). A fourth, The City in the Dawn, was published posthumously in 1950. Allan wrote a biography of Edgar Allan Poe and he co-edited the Rivers of America series with Carl Carmer. He taught at the Porter Military Academy in Charleston, South Carolina, and at Columbia and Vassar. In a letter to Chancellor McCormick in 1920, Hervey Allen said, “I owe much to the good Doctor Gibbs.”
Kenneth Miller Gould was a longtime editor of Scholastic magazine and the author of several books, including Windows on the World and They Got the Blame: The Story of Scapegoats in History.
Elmer Bernard Kenyon became the head of Carnegie Institute of Technology’s Drama department. He also served as the publicity agent for Helen Hayes, Dame Judith Anderson and Tallulah Bankhead. The Kenyon family papers are held by the University of Pittsburgh library system. The Kenyon family operated the Kenyon Theatre, the first “high class” vaudeville theatre on Pittsburgh’s Northside. They later opened the Kenyon Opera House, also known as the Pitt Theatre, in downtown Pittsburgh.
Marie McSwigan
Marie McSwigan. After graduation (1919), McSwigan worked as a journalist for the Pittsburgh Press and then for the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegram. Later, she worked as a publicist for Kennywood and the Carnegie Institute Department of Fine Arts. She returned to the University of Pittsburgh in 1941 as Director of News Services and Director of Publications. McSwigan was also a successful children’s book author. Her books for children include The Weather House People (1940), Snow Treasure (1942), Five on a Merry-Go-Round (1944), Hi Barney (1946), Juan of Manila (1947), Our Town has a Circus (1949), Binnie Latches On (1950), The News is Good (1952), Three’s a Crowd (1953), All Aboard for Freedom (1954), and Small Miracle at Lourdes (1958). McSwigan also authored two biographies for adult audiences: Sky Hooks, The Autobiography of John Kane as Told to Marie McSwigan (1938) and Athlete of Christ (1959), on St. Nicholas of Flue, Switzerland’s patron saint. (John Kane was a self-taught Pittsburgh artist; his paintings are part of the Carnegie Museum permanent collection.)
Elizabeth Gertrude Levin Stern
Elizabeth Gertrude Levin Stern (1889-1954) was born in Poland. Her family emigrated to Pittsburgh in 1892, where he father served as a rabbi. She took her BA from the University of Pittsburgh in 1911. She had a successful career as a social worker and journalist, writing for the Philadelphia Public Leader, the New York Times, the New York Evening World, and the Philadelphia Sunday Record. She is the author of My Mother and I (1917), one of the first books to bring attention to the experience of immigrant families. This was followed by a partly autobiographical novel (written under the pen name “Leah Morton”), I Am a Woman—and a Jew (1926). Later in her career, Stern also published biographies of business-woman Margaret McAvoy Scott, inventor Josiah White, and The Women Behind Gandhi.
Robert Hasley Wettach
Robert Hasley Wettach joined the Law faculty at the University of North Carolina in 1921. He served as Dean of the Law School from 1941-1949. An expert in labor law, he was an examiner on the Textile Law Relations Board in 1934-35 and a panel member of the War Labor Board in 1943-45. Wettach served as Assistant Attorney General for the state of North Carolina. Van Hecke-Wettach Hall at UNC carries his name.
PhD Students and Dissertations
Wallace Lee Bonham, “The Harmony of the Ethical with the Dramatic Purpose in Shakespeare’s Great Tragedies”
Karl William Traugott Jentsch, “Shakespeare’s Attitude Toward the Church”
Prizes
The university continues to offer a Sophomore Prize in English literature, but after 1912 the winners are no longer announced in the College Catalog.
The Sophomore Literature Prize
1910 Nellie Donaldson McBride
1911 Robert Hasley Wettach
1912 Helen Jeannette Heazlett
The Freshman Literature Prize
1910 Elmer Bernard Kenyon
1911 Horace Ralph Allison
1912 Kenneth Miller Gould
Footnotes
Journalism: When Chancellor McCormick and the School of Economics began to explore journalism as a course of study, there were (it was said) three obstacles:
Journalism was a poorly paid profession,
Additional journalists would only lower salaries,
Most journalists believe that “you cannot be taught how to be a newspaper man, but that you must get in the newspaper office to learn it.”
This was the argument presented by Thomas Reynolds Williams, who was hired to prepare the courses and to promote connections with local journalists and local dailies (as reported in Chancellor McCormick’s 1911 Chancellor’s Report). Williams argued on behalf of the importance of academic training, however, and concluded that
The men who go out with a solid education and with broad perspective, and who are capable of doing things in a way that no one else can, are the men, after all, that the newspapers most need.
Another argument on behalf of a journalism program can be found in the transcript of a lecture, most likely presented at one of the early instances of the annual Journalism Conference on campus. The speaker said:
We have suddenly seen that the newspapers and press of the country, speaking to all its millions daily at once, might become, instead of the wise director of public opinions, the vast sounding board from which echo words which stir strife and passion, and awake the struggle of class against class. I have the honor to be at the head of the school in which are given courses in journalism. Courses in this training have just been opened in the University of Pittsburgh by one of my colleagues in journalism. I trust that such courses may be the beginning of a wide education in this, to a republic ruled by opinion, perhaps most important of all callings. I trust, I say, that by the creation of such schools it will come about that journalists may look out upon the face of society knowing its laws, teaching its masses through all the years, and so teaching them that these masses cannot be deluded by the sophism of the hour, and that the newspapers themselves cannot be made, as the journalism of this country recently has been, the mere sounding board from which echo words of clamor and strife. This can only come if universities like yours of Pittsburgh continue the work which has been begun in your evening classes, by a wide appeal to those engaged in the work of the journalist.
The principle on which the school to which I have the honor to belong is organized is that it is more important for a journalist to know something than for him to write something.
Unfortunately, we have not been able to confirm the identity of the speaker or his university or the source of the document that contains the transcript of this speech. Most likely this was a lecture at the 1912 Conference on “The Modern Newspaper” held at the University of Pittsburgh, and the speaker is either a Professor Harrington of Ohio State University or Professor Talcott Williams, Director of the Pulitzer School of Journalism, Columbia University.
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In 1910, there were six graduate students in the English department. Enrollment for the University in 1914-5 was 3,695.
Hervey Allen’s novel, Anthony Adverse, was made in to a Warner Bros film in 1936, starring Fredric March and Olivia de Havilland.