19

Intellectual and Cultural Trends

in the Late Nineteenth Century

Intellectual and Cultural Trends

in the Late Nineteenth Century

CONTENTS

■In painter Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic(1875), Professor Samuel Gross’s

team of surgeons cuts through flesh to repair bone, an examination of the

bare essentials of life devoid of sentiment or moralism. The foremost

intellectuals of the age regarded life in much the same way.

Source: Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (1844–1916). The Gross Clinic. 1875. Oil on Canvas.

Jefferson College, Philadelphia, PA, USA. Bridgeman Art Library.

511

of hand and, lacking satisfactory protective equipment,

many football players sustained serious injuries; each

year, some were killed.

In 1892, William Rainey Harper, president of the

University of Chicago, defended the high cost of win-

ning football. “If the world can afford to sacrifice lives

for commercial gain”—a reference to the victims of

industrial accidents—“it can more easily afford to

make similar sacrifices on the altar of vigorous and

unsullied manhood.” In 1896 Massachusetts Senator

Henry Cabot Lodge told Harvard students that “the

injuries incurred on the playing-field are part of the

price which the English-speaking race has paid for

being world-conquerors.”

The rise of football in the 1890s symbolized a pro-

found transformation in cultural and intellectual life.

The religious sensibilities and gentlemanly precepts of

an earlier age were yielding to a tougher, “more

manly” mind-set. Life was a struggle, Darwin had pro-

claimed, in which the fittest prevailed and the losers

vanished. In this “competition” for survival, power

trounced sentiment. Ideas were valuable not because

they espoused truths or evinced beauty, but because

they left an imprint on the world. Art and literature

functioned not to transcend life or prettify it but to lay

bare its grim reality. This stern ethos unsettled many

but also invigorated those who yearned to confront the

world as it was. ■

■Colleges and Universities

■Revolution in the Social

Sciences

■Progressive Education

■Law and History

■Realism in Literature

■Mark Twain

■William Dean Howells

■Henry James

■Realism in Art

■The Pragmatic Approach

■The Knowledge Revolution

■American Lives:

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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