The Transformation of American Scholarship, 1875-1917

JUDGED by the direction which their writings take, scholars as a group are the greatest extroverts in modem society. The manager of a great corporation studies the organizational charts and the flow sheets of his own particular firm and may even hire a historian to tell him about its past. The citizen of a Middletown cannot escape some introspective probing of the inner structure of his own community, once the scholars have laid it bare for all the world to stare at. But who dissects the structure of scholarship itself or of the professional world vwithin which the scholar works? Not the average scholar. He can generalize rather more subtly and objectively about how Papuans are initiated into manhood than about how the young scholar among us finds his way into a professional career. He can describe more accurately the functioning of the prytany in Athenian government than the role of the academic senate in the running of his own university. We historians are committed to the view that historical understanding of a particular institution has value for the solution of its current problems, but, as one distinguished member of the profession recently put it, "What university or college history department is able to give a new instructor a useful history of the department, [or of] the undergraduate or graduate school in which it is located, to help him orient himself to his work?"' No insuperable difficulties bar the way to an understanding of these matters. The organized structure of intellectual life is just as susceptible of analysis and historical treatment as is the organization of economic or political life, and a knowledge of the institutional pattern of scholarship and scientific research is fully as important for solving problems connected with the advancement of knowledge as is an understanding of the economic system for solving problems connected with the effective production and distribution of goods. The reciprocal relationship between scholars, librarians, and booksellers is a relationship that arises within the framework of organized scholarly activity in America today. This paper is designed to show what that framework is and how it came to be. Intellectual life, considered as an organized social activity, embraces, of course, much more than the advancement of knowledge. It includes the transmission of already acquired knowledge, a major function, obviously, of schools and undergraduate colleges. It indudes the diffusion of information and opinion to a wide adult public through newspapers, periodicals, the radio, and the other agencies which we are coming to speak of as "mass communications." It includes the creation and diffusion of works of the imagination: of poetry and fiction, of music and the fine arts. In all these things the library and the book trade play a significant part, and the scholar and the scientist have not only an interest but also a measure of responsibility. 1 Elmer Ellis, "The Profession of Historian," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXXVIII (June, 1951), 6.