1920s Overview
Cathedral Construction
This is the decade of Bowman and Hunt, and it is one of the most significant decades in the long history of English at the University of Pittsburgh. The 1920s mark the emergence of a modern English department, with a comprehensive curriculum (rather than a list of available courses) and a research faculty large enough to support it. The transformation begins in 1921 when John G. Bowman is appointed Chancellor.
By temperament and education, the new Chancellor was prepared to see the English department as central to the mission of a modern university. Bowman completed his BA and MA in English at the University of Iowa, where he was also active in the literary societies. He taught introductory courses in English (literature and composition), first at Iowa, as a graduate student, and then at Columbia. In 1917, he published a book of poems, “Happy All Day Through,” and, in 1926, “The World That Was,” a memoir of childhood through a series of short, lyric essays.
Bowman left Columbia in 1907 to serve as the Secretary of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In 1911, he returned to the University of Iowa to serve as its 9th (and youngest) President, a position he held until 1914, when he resigned after a confrontation with the Iowa Board of Education. In 1915 he became the Director of the American College of Physicians and Surgeons, and, in 1921, he was appointed the tenth Chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh, with the charge to build a great American university.
Chancellor John G. Bowman
It was Chancellor Bowman who imagined and then created the Cathedral of Learning. And he worked as aggressively to reform the institution. He closed departments, opposed the granting of tenure, demanded curriculum reform and, in the first year alone, he called for and received the resignations of 53 faculty members. In his first Chancellor’s report, he addressed the importance of writing in the undergraduate curriculum. By 1923, with the support of the Board of Trustees, he made the ability to write a “satisfactory page of English prose” a requirement for any student graduating from any School at the University of Pittsburgh.
And as part of this mission, Bowman recruited his Iowa colleague, Percival Hunt, to Chair the English department. Hunt had created and directed Iowa’s composition program (“Constructive Rhetoric”) from 1904 to 1919. He had also taught fiction in a program that was the precursor to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He was a fabled teacher and a much admired administrator. He joined the Pittsburgh department in 1921 at the rank of Professor; in 1922, he was appointed department Chair, replacing Lincoln Robinson Gibbs. Gibbs left a year later to join the faculty at the University of Miami.
In the next two years, Percival Hunt hired seven Assistant Professors; in the decade of the 20s, he hired a total of 14, a remarkable number considering past hiring practices, and this group included Ellen Mary Geyer, the first woman to hold a tenure track position in the English department. In 1924, Hunt hired Hoyt Hopewell Hudson at the rank of Professor.
Hudson had just received his PhD from the rhetoric program at Cornell, a program said to have revived the teaching of Classical Rhetoric across colleges and universities in the U.S. Although hired to help shape the department, Hudson didn’t last long. He left in 1927 to take a position as an Associate Professor at Princeton, where he went on to a distinguished career, including an appointment as Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory and Chair of the English department. Hudson ended his career at Stanford.
Percival Hunt would continue to chair Pitt’s English department for almost two decades, until 1941. He was certainly one of the most influential figures in the development of our programs in Composition, Writing and Literature. In 1936, the University awarded him an honorary doctoral degree.
In her history of the University, Agnes Lynch Starrett says,
For one who has been a student of Professor Hunt for fifteen years, to stop with merely a mention of his name is difficult. His standards for English composition, the basis of all teaching in the English department, are tradition among hundreds of men and women who have been his students through more than thirty years of teaching, at the University of Iowa and in Pittsburgh. Charmed hours in his Shakespeare and poetry classes are cherished by many, among the intangible abiding riches of the College.
Courses
The English department curriculum grew substantially in the 1920s, from around 20 courses in the opening of the decade to well over twice that number at the end. The growing tenure track faculty made this possible and made it possible to offer a curriculum that covered the areas of study (literature, writing, public speaking) and the periods of English and American literature that came to define the core of English studies both here in Pittsburgh and around the country.
English majors were directed toward concentrations in teaching, writing, literature and language that drew from courses in the following areas:
Composition and Writing: There was a two-semester required first-year composition course. In addition, the department offered a preliminary course (“Composition Review”) and advanced courses: “Advanced Composition,” “Special English Composition” (for “advanced students,” including teachers and English Majors who had not taken English 1), and “Expository Writing” (“practice in the personal and formal essay, with wide reading”). In most composition courses, students were writing literary essays and the term “creative” was not reserved for fiction and poetry. The department continued to support a course in Short Story Writing, and this became a regular offering for Percival Hunt. In addition, there were courses in “Advanced Short Story” and in “Description and Narration” (for students “interested in the artistic side of writing”). Although courses in the writing of poetry had been taught in earlier decades, we did not find poetry courses in the catalogs of the 20s. The literature curriculum featured courses on the essay as genre—for example, a two-semester course on “Two Great Essayists” (Bacon and Ruskin). There were also pedagogy courses for future teachers.
Public Speaking: The department offered courses in “Public Speaking,” “Argument and Debate,” “Special Debate” (for students who had debating practice in high school), “Reading” and “Advanced Reading” (oral interpretation), and “Play Production.” The literature curriculum also featured courses in recent English and American drama. It appears that there was a core of junior faculty and graduate students interested in drama and active in dramatic productions on campus and in the city, including John Regis Toomey, George Crouch, and Ford Curtis.
Literature: There was a required sophomore literature course, “English Literature” (Chaucer to Kipling). The course description noted that “The work of the student is commonly presented in writing. No student succeeds in this course who cannot express his ideas clearly and correctly.” There were advanced surveys of English and American literature. There were multiple sections of courses on Shakespeare. There were courses in genre (novel, drama, poetry, essay) drawing upon both English and American traditions. There was a course in Old English, in Chaucer and Middle English, in the Renaissance (both dramatic and non-dramatic literature, taught by Hoyt Hopewell Hudson), in the 18th century, and in the British Romantic poets. The 19th century was represented primarily through genre or author courses. There was a course in “Contemporary American Literature,” with a focus on the novel. There was a course in Literary Criticism and in the History of the Language. There was a “special topics” course for supervised, independent study.
Faculty
Lincoln Robinson Gibbs: Professor and Chair. Gibbs left in 1922 to take a position at the University of Miami.
Percival Hunt (1878-1968) received his BA and MA at the University of Iowa, where he spent five years as an Instructor (1902-1907). At Iowa, he was appointed assistant professor in 1907 and Associate Professor in 1916. He served two years as Acting Head of the Department, 1917-1919. He built a brilliant reputation as a teacher. Hunt organized and directed the freshman composition program, “Constructive Rhetoric,” from 1904 to 1919. He taught Freshman Composition, Shakespeare and, beginning in 1903, a very popular course in Short Story Writing. With this course, Hunt was part of the emergence of creative writing as a school subject and part of the project that would become the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Creative writing courses had been part of the Pittsburgh curriculum since 1912.
When John G. Bowman became the 10th Chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh, he quickly moved to recruit Hunt, his former colleague, to join the Pittsburgh faculty and to chair the English department. Faculty members at Iowa were concerned and lobbied the administration to meet any offer Pittsburgh might make. The administration turned down this request. saying that although Hunt had a reputation as a great teacher, he had not published anything of particular significance.
Hunt chaired the English department for 19 years, from 1922 to 1941, and this was a period of unprecedented growth, growth in both size and reputation. During this time, Hunt taught courses in composition, creative writing and literature and he directed graduate student dissertations. He was known for his courses on Shakespeare and the English Renaissance. He inspired a generation of Composition teachers, many of whom went on to very significant careers. And he made Creative Writing (fiction and the literary essay) central to the identity of the department and the College. After stepping down as chair, Hunt became a Professor-at-Large, a position he held until his retirement in 1948. He continued his engagement with the department, its faculty and students, until his death in 1968.
During his time at Pitt, Hunt published very little, but was known for his “Outline of Composition,” a document which defined the program at Pitt and had some national recognition. With his colleagues, W. Don Harrison and Frederick P. Mayer, he presented a “Brief Course in the Contemporary Novel” as a series of 10 lectures broadcast through KDKA (1924). Hunt took pride in saying that his teaching did not allow him the time to write books. After he retired, he published four: Samuel Pepys in the Diary (Pittsburgh UP, 1958), Fifteenth Century England (Pittsburgh UP, 1962) and The Gift of the Unicorn: Essays on Writing (Pittsburgh UP, 1965) and To What Green Altar (privately published, 1969). Hunt died in 1968.
At his retirement, students and colleagues prepared a festschrift in his honor: If By Your Art: Testament to Percival Hunt. In his Preface, John Bowman wrote:
Percival Hunt is tall and slender and straight. A strong wind, it seems, might blow him away. He is a solitary man who, one of his colleagues told me, commutes to work from another star….The man is the best teacher of English I have known.
What is Percival’s secret of teaching?...In his class you must be you; simply, honestly, gladly be you. Tomorrow you will be a more satisfactory person to yourself. No one can tell you how to change in such a way. But you may begin by being now honestly what you are: a bright or dull person, a selfish talkative sham, or a seeker of loveliness in human personality and in the outdoor world. When you write a theme or a paper, you are to make it an expression of yourself. Also you are to keep you mind open and sensitive. In this way you may find more of heaven in these days than you suspected was in them.
Hoyt Hopewell Hudson (1893-1944) was born in Norfolk, Nebraska, the son of an itinerant preacher. He took his BA from Huron College, South Dakota, in 1911, his MA from the University of Denver in 1913, and then taught high school in Idaho, Minnesota and Ohio. In 1916-17 he took graduate courses at the University of Chicago. In 1920, he went to Cornell to work with Everett Lee Hunt, whom he had met earlier at Huron College. Hudson completed his PhD in 1923 and taught at Swarthmore College from 1923-1925, when Percival Hunt recruited him for position as Professor in the English department at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1927, Hudson left Pittsburgh for a position as Associate Professor at Princeton, where he later became Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory and Chair of the English department. In 1942, he accepted a position at Stanford as Professor of English Literature. He served as editor of the Quarterly Journal of Speech (1933-35). He was the author of various textbooks on public speaking and literature, including Poetry of the English Renaissance. He edited scholarly editions of Thomas Moffat’s Nobilis and Erasmus’ Praise of Folly. His best known work of scholarship is the unfinished and posthumously published The Epigram in the English Renaissance (Princeton UP, 1947).
John Kemerer Miller: Promoted to Associate Professor in 1924.
Wayland Maxfield Parrish (BA, Ohio Wesleyan, 1908; MA, Cornell, 1922; Ph.D., Cornell, 1929) joined the University of Pittsburgh faculty in 1923 as an Assistant Professor of Public Speaking, part of the Division of Public Speaking within the English department. In 1926, Parrish was given a leave to work on his PhD at Cornell. In 1927, the alumni magazine reported his memorable reading from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol on a radio broadcast from the University of Pittsburgh’s studio at KDKA. In 1929, Parrish was promoted to Associate Professor. Parrish was influential in recruiting Hoyt Hopewell Hudson (see above). Parrish and Hudson remained friends after Hudson’s move to Princeton.
Herbert August Wichelns
Herbert August Wichelns (1894-1973), like Parrish, was trained in rhetoric in the fabled program at Cornell. Wichelns received his PhD from Cornell in 1922, and joined the Pittsburgh faculty in 1923 as an Assistant Professor of Public Speaking. He taught for two years (through Spring 1925), when he returned to join the faculty at Cornell, where he eventually served as Chair of the Department of Speech and Drama (1940-48). While in Pittsburgh, he prepared his landmark 1925 essay, “The Literary Criticism of Oratory,” an essay which established his position as a founding figure in rhetorical criticism. In 1937, Wichelns served as the President of the National Association of Teachers of Speech. The National Communication Association provides an annual James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address.
Walter Lawrence Myers: Assistant Professor, 1923, promoted to Associate in 1924, promoted to Professor at the end of the decade. Myers moved quickly through the ranks, with a promotion to Full Professor after the departure of Hoyt Hopewell Hudson. Myers (BA, Iowa, 1908; MA, Iowa, 1912; PhD, Chicago, 1924) was one of several with Iowa connections (like Ellen Mary Geyer and John Kemerer Miller) who were recruited by Percival Hunt as he worked to build a department. Myers was the author of The Later Realism: A Study of Character in the British Novel (Chicago, 1927). He also published a Handbook for Graduate Students in English: A Guide to Candidates for the Degree of Master of Arts (1934).
George Carver (1888-1949) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1916, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Miami University in Oxford Ohio, and in 1941, St. Vincent’s College awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree. Carver taught at Pennsylvania State College (1916-18) before entering the Army in World War I, during which he served in the infantry. After the war, he taught at University of Iowa (1919-24) before joining the faculty of Pitt’s English Department in 1924 as a Lecturer. He was promoted to Assistant Professor in 1927. He remained at the University until his death in 1949. Carver was active in campus organizations, including the Polygon Club, the Junta, Sons of the American Revolution, The Midland, Phi Beta Kappa, and Phi Kappa Sigma. Carver also founded the Pittsburgh Chapter of the Priory Scholars. He published 15 books, including several textbooks and essay collections:
Writing and Rewriting (1923) – with William Shipman Maulsby and Thomas A. Knott
Minimum Essentials of Correct Writing (1924) – with Millington Farwell Carpenter, William Shipman Maulsby, and Thomas A Knott
Points of Style: A Minimum of Correctness in Writing English Prose (1928)
The Catholic Tradition in English Literature (1926) – Editor
Representative Catholic Essays (1926) – Editor with Ellen Geyer
Periodical Essays of the 18th Century (1930) – Editor
The Stream of English Literature (1930) – Editor with M. Eleanore, and Katherine Bregy
Elements of English Composition: A Handbook with Tests and Worksheets (1932)
Paragraph Design (1932) – with Frederick Phillip Mayer
Index to Sentence Essentials (1938)
Communicating Experience (1941)
Not With Eyes Only (1948)
Alms for Oblivion (1948)
Ellen Mary Geyer
Ellen Mary Geyer (1880-1953) received her BPhil and MA degrees at the University of Iowa. She taught as an Instructor at the University of Iowa (1906-1919) and then as an Assistant Professor at Montana State University. She joined the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh as an Assistant Professor of English in 1924, a position she held until 1949. She co-authored two textbooks, Enjoying English (1944) with Don Marion Wolf and Communicating Experience (1941) with her colleague George Carver. With Carver, she was the editor of Representative Catholic Essays (1926). With Alfred P. James, she published A Series of Five Radio Talks on Christmases Long Ago, talks first broadcast from the University of Pittsburgh Studio at KDKA, 1928.
Joseph Patrick Blickenderfer: Assistant Professor (1924-28), Associate Professor (1928-1929). Blickenderfer left the university in 1929 to take a position as Full Professor at the University of Oklahoma, where, in 1937, he founded the School of Letters (now the School of Classics and Letters). The purpose of the new program, he said, was to “cure the mental indigestion produced by the cafeteria style of education.” In 1947, he became Dean of Oklahoma’s University College.
Harold William Schoenberger (BA, Muhlenberg College; PhD, University of Pennsyvlania) was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1924, with a specialty in American literature. In 1929 Schoenberger was promoted to the rank of Professor.
Frederick Philip Mayer earned his BA (1923) and MA (1924) at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1929, he was promoted from Lecturer to Assistant Professor. In 1928 Mayer published an essay in the Pittsburgh Record (the University alumni magazine) titled "On Living in Pittsburgh."
John Valente: Assistant Professor
Jonathan Leo Zerbe: Assistant Professor
Charles Arnold: Assistant Professor (Journalism)
Elmer James Bailey: Assistant Professor (1921-1922)
John T. Frederick: Assistant Professor (hired in 1922)
William Don Harrison: Assistant Professor (hired in 1923)
Roger L. Serge: Assistant Professor (hired in 1923)
Guy Shepard Greene: Assistant Professor (hired in 1927)
Putnam Jones: Assistant Professor (hired in 1927)
Marvin T. Herrick: Assistant Professor (hired in 1927)
Benjamin T. McClure: Lecturer (1926); promoted to Assistant Professor in 1927
Ralph H. Ware: Assistant Professor (hired in 1928)
E.E. Ericson: Assistant Professor (hired in 1928)
George Leslie Stout: Lecturer (hired in 1925). Stout was on our campus for only a year. He was hired to prepare illustrations to help promote the Cathedral of Learning. He also taught a course in Freshman Composition. After leaving Pittsburgh to study art history at Harvard, he became one of the founding fathers of art conservation at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum during the 1930s and 40s, and he was one of the U.S. Army’s “Monuments Men” during WWII. (Stout’s character was played by George Clooney in the 2014 movie of the same name.) Note: We are grateful to the art historian Seth Adam Hindin for pointing us in this direction.
Instructors
There were 10-15 Instructors on the teaching roster in each year of the 20s. There was substantial turnover, so I won’t list them all. Those who taught for a long term or who are notable for other reasons are:
Alexander Cooper
Ford Elmore Curtis
Raymond Floyd Howe
Charles Bedell Monroe
Mary Martha Purdy
Harvey Russell Salt
Agnes Lynch Starrett
Students
Bertram L. Woodruff
Bertram L. Woodruff (BA 1929; MA 1930) completed his PhD at Harvard. He taught as a member of the English department at Johnson C. Smith University, Charlotte, N.C., where he directed the debating club, and then at West Virginia State College. In 1940, he was the President of the College Language Association. Woodruff served on the editorial board of the Quarterly Review of Higher Education Among Negroes. He published on Keats and on African American Poetry. See, for example, “The Poetic Philosophy of Countee Cullen” in Phylon.
Agnes Lynch Starrett graduated with a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1920; she earned her Master’s Degree in English in June of 1925. From 1925 to 1959, Starrett served as a faculty member in the English department. Chancellor Bowman commissioned her to write a history of the university in celebration of its 150th anniversary, Through 150 Years: The History of the University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh UP, 1937). Starrett served as the first full-time Director of the University of Pittsburgh Press, 1954-1964.
Edwin L. Peterson: Edwin (Pete) Peterson was a protégé of Percival Hunt. He received his BA and MA in English at the University of Pittsburgh (1926, 1928). From 1926 to 1935, he taught lower division literature and writing courses as an Instructor in the English department. In 1935 he was promoted to Assistant Professor, and he went on to a long and influential career in English at Pitt.
From 1923 to 1930, Peterson was publishing regularly in both pulp and mainstream magazines. He published a series of one page short stories for Brief Stories written while he was an undergraduate:
“Hedges,” July 1923
“Question,” September 1923
“Groping,” February 1923
“The Purple Ship,” January 1924
“Paganism,” February 1924
“Kin,” February 1925, reprinted in The America Short Story, January 1930
He published a short, essay length, fictionalized account of the life of the late Victorian poet, “Francis Thompson: A Picture Biography,” in Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring, 1928. And he published a poem in a late Victorian style, “Songs for my Soul,” in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (December 1930, 138-139).
Mary Martha Purdy took her BA and MA at the University of Michigan (in 1915 and 1921). She received her PhD in English from the University of Pittsburgh with a dissertation on Elizabethan Literary Treatments of the Proposed Marriages of Queen Elizabeth. She taught as an Assistant Professor of Education at Wittenberg College in Ohio. She left Wittenberg for Westminster College in New Wilmington, PA, where she served as Professor and Chair of the English department. She contributed an essay to If By Your Art: Testament to Percival Hunt, “Political Propaganda in Ballad and Masque.”
Stanley Burnshaw (1906-2005) received his BA from the University of Pittsburgh in 1925. After graduation, and after he had begun to publish poetry in small presses, he took a job as a copy writer for the Blaw-Knox Steel Corporation in Blawnox, PA, to save money for travel in Europe, where he studied and wrote about the French poet, André Spire. Burnshaw is perhaps best known for his book, The Seamless Web (1970), a study of poetry, language, perception and knowledge. He is also the author of the critical study, The Poem Itself (1960), a biography, Robert Frost Himself (1986), and several volumes of poetry. Burnshaw made his living as an editor, publisher and translator, most notably translating poetry in Hebrew. He was a drama critic and book reviewer for The New Masses. Throughout his career he wrote on and championed leftist causes. In the 1930s, he became the editor-in-chief for the Cordon Company in New York, but then started his own firm, the Dryden Press, which merged with Holt, Rinehart and Winston in the late 1950s. He had a famous dust-up with Wallace Stevens after publishing a negative review of Stevens in The New Masses. For a later account of this, see: “Wallace Stevens and the Statue” (Sewanee Review, 1961). The Stanley Burnshaw Reader (1989) provides a selection of his poetry, translation, criticism and nonfiction.
Clara Schnurer (BA class of 1925) studied for a year at Columbia, then taught at the Ohio State University and Eastern Kentucky State Teachers College. She received her PhD from our department in 1930 with a dissertation on “Mrs. Gaskell’s Fiction."
Genevieve McSwigan (BA class of 1921) became a staff writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Hamilton Porter, a graduate student, published an essay, "Books for Winter Nights," in the 1929 Pittsburgh Record (the university's alumni magazine).
John Regis Toomey
John Regis Toomey (BA class of 1921) became a well-recognized television and movie actor. He appeared in over 180 films, including “The Big Sleep” (1946, Howard Hawks) and “You’re In the Army Now” (1941, Lewis Seiler). In the latter, Toomey and Jane Wyman are said to have had the longest screen kiss on record--3 minutes and 5 seconds.
Frank D. Curtin graduated magna cum laude with a BA in English in 1927. He earned his MA at Pitt and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He returned to the University of Pittsburgh as a lecturer from 1929 to 1938, when he joined the faculty at Cornell. In 1942, he moved to join the faculty in English at St. Lawrence College, where he served as department chair until his retirement. Curtin wrote a number of scholarly papers, some for Nineteenth Century Studies, and he contributed a chapter to If By Your Art, the tribute to Percival Hunt. Curtin was also founder and chairman of the Steinman Festival of the Arts at St. Lawrence.
Eleazer Lecky (BA class of ‘23) completed an MA at Harvard (1924) and a PhD at Cornell (1938) and served as a Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
William N. Robson (1906-1995) entered the University of Pittsburgh as a freshman in the Fall of 1923. He took freshman English with Agnes Lynch Starrett and courses with George Carver. After two years, he left the university to work as a reporter for the Pittsburgh Post. He later completed his degree at Yale. After graduating from Yale, Robson went to Hollywood to pursue a career and he sold a screenplay to Paramount Pictures based, he said, on work he did with George Carver at Pitt. This became the 1933 film Private Jones, starring Lee Tracey. In 1936, Robson moved to New York to write and direct radio dramas for CBS, including Archibald MacLeish’s radio play, “Air Raid.” In 1943, he won two Peabody awards, one for the dramatic series, Man Behind the Gun and another for the documentary, Open Letter on Race Hatred. In the 1950s, Robson was blacklisted as a communist sympathizer.
Annette Nosoff (BA 1927) went on to act extensively in Pittsburgh theater, including for the Civic Playhouse. She appeared as Gladys Cady in The Beggar on Horseback, as a soubrette in Around the World in Eighty Days, and in a number of performances sponsored by the Young Men and Women’s Hebrew Association.
Frederick Enos Woltman (1905-1970) graduated with a BA in English in 1927. He began his career in journalism at the New York Telegram, where he worked as an investigative reporter. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for a series of articles exposing communist “infiltration” into education, labor unions, organized religion and government. His books include The McCarthy Balance Sheet and The Shocking Story of the Amerasia Case.
Alfred McClung Lee (1906-1992) earned his BA in English in 1927 and worked as a reporter for Pittsburgh newspapers. In 1931, he received his MA in English at the University of Pittsburgh with a thesis on "Trends in Commercial Entertainment in Pittsburgh Newspapers: 1790-1860." Elizabeth Riley Briant (1908-1999), received her BA in English in 1929. Alfred Lee and Elizabeth Briant were married after her graduation and worked together as sociologists, authors and activists throughout their lives. Elizabeth Riley Briant Lee completed her MA with a thesis on “Personnel Aspects of Social Work in Pittsburgh," which surveyed the needs and accomplishments of the new profession of social work, and she was instrumental in the establishment of a social work department at the University of Pittsburgh.Alfred Lee completed his Ph.D. in sociology at Yale University in 1933. His doctoral thesis was later published as The Daily Newspaper in America: The Evolution of a Social Instrument. Elizabeth Lee completed her PhD in sociology at Yale in 1938, with a dissertation titled, "Eminent Women: A Cultural Study.” Alfred Lee taught sociology at the University of Kansas, Wayne State University, NYU, and Brooklyn College. Both Alfred and Elizabeth Lee were active in professional and political organizations, including the American Sociological Association, the NAACP and the ACLU. Together, they published The Fine Art of Propaganda; a Study of Father Coughlin's Speeches (1939), Social Problems in America: a Source Book (1949) and Marriage and the Family (1961). Alfred published a long list of books and textbooks, including Readings in Sociology, 1951; How to Understand Propaganda, 1952; Fraternities without Brotherhood: a Study of Prejudice on the American Campus, 1955; Multivalent Man, 1966; Toward a Humanist Sociology, 1973; Sociology for Whom, 1978; Terrorism in Northern Ireland, 1983; and Sociology for People: Toward a Caring Profession, 1988.
Sister Mary Fides Shepperson received her BA from Duquesne University in 1911, where she was the first woman graduate. After teaching high school in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, she completed her PhD in English in 1923, with a dissertation on A Comparative Study of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Herbert Spencer. She became Professor of History at Mount Mercy College (Pittsburgh). She was the author of Cloister Chords (1922), Seventeen Crises in World History (1933), and The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi in Silhouettes (1939).
Student Writing
Beginning in the Spring, 1922, and after the demise of the Pittsburgh Review, students in the English department began to publish a magazine/newsletter called The Quill. According to the announcement in the first issue, “a very slight but very insistent request has been made for some opportunity for original student writing at Pitt.” The Quill was designed to meet that need.
Footnotes
The Liberal Club Affair
On April 18, 1929, the Liberal Club, a student organization chaired by a sophomore, William Albertson, requested a room to hold a meeting where members could discuss a “pressing issue.” Permission was granted. On April 18th, the placards announcing the meeting indicated that its purpose was to demand the unconditional release of Tom Mooney and Warren K. Billings, who had been tried and sentenced to life imprisonment for allegedly throwing a bomb into a patriotic parade in 1916. The trial and sentence had been a focus of controversy for many years. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette referred to the case as “one of the worst miscarriages of justice in the United States.”
When the university administration realized the purpose of the meeting, they withdrew permission for the room. Albertson, without telling his faculty advisor that permission had been withdrawn, went ahead with the meeting and engaged as a speaker Harry Elmore Barnes, a historian and a member of the “Free Mooney-Billings” national committee. When the group arrived at Alumni Hall, they were forbidden entry. They moved to the steps of Thaw Hall for an open meeting, and again they were forced to move along. With a crowd, now, of about 100, they held the meeting in the parking lot of the Concordia Club. By this time the event had attracted the press. Articles and editorials appeared in local and national newspapers.
The Chancellor then forbade the Liberal Club from holding meetings on campus. The club defied the ban and Chancellor Bowman, with the approval of the Board of Trustees, had Albertson and two other students expelled from the university.
Twenty six members of the faculty signed a petition asking the Chancellor to call a faculty meeting to explain his actions. He refused. Nine of the 26 were recently hired Assistant Professors in the English department: Ralph H. Ware, E.E. Ericson, Putnam Jones, Marvin Herrick, H. W. Schoenberger, Joseph Blickensberger, Benjamin McClure, Guy Greene and W. M. Parrish. A later report in the university archives indicates that careers of those faculty members who signed the petition were not adversely affected. The case was investigated by the AAUP, who issued a report, “Academic Freedom at the University of Pittsburgh.” The Liberal Club affair, seen as a serious assault on academic freedom, continued to haunt the Bowman administration well into the 1930s.
As for William Albertson, he
was active for a time in the trade union movement in New York City and then returned to Pittsburgh to become organizational secretary for the [Communist] Party in the Pittsburgh district. He was tried and convicted in federal court in 1953 under the Smith Act of “conspiring to teach and advocate the duty or necessity” of the overthrow of the government by violent means. That convicton was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1956.
Robert C. Alperts, Pitt: The Story of the University of Pittsburgh, 1787-1987
