In the two decades following the start of the Civil War, two signal events bolstered the classical tradition in America.
In July of 1862, the US Congress (without any southern states voting) passed the Morrill Act as an expression of the general and scientific press’s growing displeasure with the classics-based curriculum of the elite institutions and as a means of sponsoring agricultural and technical instruction. The Act provided for the founding on Federal land of state colleges devoted to teaching ‘‘agriculture and the mechanic arts... without excluding other scientific and classical studies.’’ Classical study was thus ensured at the more than 70 land-grant institutions established by the Morrill Act in states north (MIT), south (Auburn), east (Cornell), and west (Wisconsin, California).
The second signal event for classics was the establishment in 1876 of the Johns Hopkins University, the first true American university on the German model. The first appointment to the faculty was Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, the nation’s greatest classics scholar. He began the professionalization of undergraduate teaching and encouraged the development of doctoral programs in classics by establishing the first graduate seminary, directing some 65 dissertations, creating the nation’s first quarterly classics journal, and setting a level of instruction and scholarship matched by that of his eloquence in defense of classical studies and his native South.
As the investigation and interpretation of the classical world became more and more the province of specialized scientists like Gildersleeve, no one of whom could comprehend all the new knowledge of antiquity brought to light by highly trained archaeologists and philologists, amateurs and those without the advantage of a university education sought in the popular aspects ofthe classical world an expression of private cultivation and public cultural identity that would equal the popular classicism of imperial Europe.
The identification of classical study with a higher culture in the popular mind was manifest in the development of great private collections of antiquities, the endowment of museums and university archaeological digs, and the establishment of American schools in Athens and Rome (Winterer 2002). The chief manifestation of this trend was a production of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus at Harvard in 1881. The play followed the model of the successful production of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon the year before at Balliol College, Oxford. The American production was performed for over a week to over six thousand people (who were given English translations), including Longfellow, Emerson, Henry James, and Henry Adams, who thought his Harvard classical education was incomplete except for ‘‘two or three Greek plays’’ (Adams 1999: 55). The performance of ancient plays in the original took place not only at Harvard (where the tradition was continued notably in 1906, 1933, 1939, and 1956), but in numerous schools, especially Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, where Professor Mabel Whiteside oversaw most of the 41 productions performed from 1909 to 1954. Greek drama was a continuing if not seminal influence on American drama as early as William Vaughn Moody, The Fire Bringer (Prometheus, 1904), culminating in Eugene O’Neill’s ‘‘Desire Under the Elms’’ (Hippolytus myth, 1924) and ‘‘Mourning Becomes Electra’’ (1931), along with notable translations like Witter Bynner’s Iphigenia in Tauris (1922), Robinson Jeffers’ Medea (1946), and Robert Loweh’s ‘‘Oresteia of Aeschylus’’ (1978). Broadway musicals from Rodgers and Hart’s ‘‘The Boys from Syracuse’’ (1938) to Gelbart-Shevelove-Sondheim’s ‘‘A Funny
Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum’’ (1962) continued the lighter side of ancient theater. American filmmakers have created versions of these shows, but in general films have tended to view the Romans merely as anti-Christians and the Greeks hardly at all (Solomon 2001).
Only two years after the Harvard Oedipus, Charles Francis Adams Jr. gave an important Phi Beta Kappa lecture entitled ‘‘A College Fetich,’’ in which he held that Greek produced too little in the way of good effects for the amount of effort it took to learn and that modern students could easily find more rewarding courses of study. Five years after the Oedipus, in 1886, Harvard, following a trend begun by lesser institutions, abolished the Greek requirement for admission; Yale soon did the same, abolishing Latin as well in 1933.
At the dawn of the twentieth century at least half of all high-school students took Latin, but in 1916 Abraham Flexner proposed eliminating Greek and Latin because their only excuse for being in the curriculum was that they had always been there. Flexner’s challenge was met by Andrew Fleming West, president of Cornell, who enlisted ex-presidents, industry titans, and intellectual heavyweights to render their opinions in a volume called Value of the Classics (1917). In 1924 a study by the American Classical League called The Classical Investigation encouraged students to study Latin not simply to learn grammar, but also to sip the delights of Latin literature. Through World War II, while the American university remained the privilege of the elite, classical studies remained a prominent fixture; it was only after the war that the opening of universities to greater numbers of students from across the social spectrum allowed the wishes of Franklin and Rush to come to fruition.
World History
