On September 9, 1904, Max and Marianne Weber left Niagara Falls by train for Chicago, where they remained for eight days, with Ernst Troeltsch and Paul Hensel following a day later. They had accommodations in the new Auditorium Building on Michigan Avenue, the early contribution to a modern American style of building by the German-born Dankmar Adler and his partner, Louis Sullivan, completed in 1889 and today the home of Roosevelt University. The stop at the German immigrant community in North Tonawanda, New York, had been the first objective prior to arriving in St. Louis, Missouri, for the Congress of Arts and Science. The second and very different major objective in keeping with Max Weber’s fascination with urban life was the week in Chicago, an opportunity for him to satisfy his curiosity about the American cities. He was not disappointed by the city James Bryce characterized as “perhaps the most typically American place in America” and Carl Sandburg in his well-known tribute “Chicago”:
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders.
Weber had said he wanted to travel to America to see its cities, and he saw nearly all the major urban centers east of the Mississippi River. But Chicago would have had a special appeal. His father had stopped there in 1883 with Bryce, Carl Schurz, and Henry Villard, staying in the Palmer House. He had set aside his own plans for visiting the city’s Columbian Exposition a decade later. By 1904 Chicago had grown to become the world’s fifth largest urban center (behind London, New York, Paris, and Berlin), with a metropolitan area twice the size of the city of London, as he noted. Like Berlin, it was a new industrial and commercial magnet and transportation hub, with a rapidly increasing working class and staggering labor, public health, and social issues. Nowhere else could one experience so immediately the raw, untamed energy of the New World, as well as the kind of dynamic pace and assault on the senses that Weber’s colleague, Georg Simmel, had described in his remarkable essay of 1903 on the modern metropolis. The language Weber himself was to use on a later occasion would have suited Chicago well: “The modern metropolis with its streetcars, subways, electric lights, show windows, concert halls, restaurants, cafés, smokestacks, massive buildings, and the wild dance of impressions of sound and color that play on the sexual fantasy, affect the constitution of the soul, and encourage us to brood about all of the apparently inexhaustible possibilities for the conduct of our lives [Lebensführung] and happiness.”
When the Webers arrived in Chicago, the twentieth century’s first major strike by butchers, packinghouse workers, teamsters, and affiliated trades in the stockyards had just ended in defeat for the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen’s Union. The AMCBW, an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor and chartered by Samuel Gompers as recently as 1897, had been engaged over the previous four years in organizing the packing industry. As AFL president, Gompers (whom Weber was to meet a month later in Washington, D.C.) had urged caution and argued unsuccessfully against a strike, concerned about lack of discipline in the union, a surplus of unskilled workers in the labor market, and the organizational strength of the “Big Five” packing companies—Armour, Swift, Morris, Wilson, and Cudahy. When contracts expired in May the union membership became impatient, especially in the skilled crafts, and the strike began in July and was settled temporarily by arbitration, but then resumed and continued for another six weeks. Despite the union membership’s apparent support for continuing the strike, the executive leadership, led by Michael Donnelly, declared the struggle at an end on September 8. Union leaders issued positive pronouncements for the press, but the outcome was in fact disastrous. Unionization of the stockyards failed completely. Some workers and leaders were blacklisted—Donnelly included—and nothing was achieved related to the main demands: a ten-hour working day, a minimum wage of 18.5 cents an hour for unskilled workers, and a preference for hiring men rather than women in the slaughterhouses. The outcome provoked Finley Peter Dunne’s (Mr. Dooley’s) ironic reprise in the Chicago Daily News, “If I was a wurrukin’ man I’d sigh f’r th’ good ol’ days whin Labor an’ Capital was friends. Those who lived through thim did.” At the very least the strike and its aftermath added to the passions and drama of the Webers’ week.
Max Weber’s descriptions of Chicago are unparalleled in their vivid metaphors and memorable imagery. He wrote two letters about the city, and Marianne wrote one, covering about one-tenth of their entire American correspondence. In Max Weber: A Biography Marianne selected parts of the most colorful passages, but she also missed a lot: their comments about Hull House, Jane Addams and her circle; Max’s asides about churches and religion; and the day spent in Evanston at Northwestern University (confused by later editors with the University of Chicago). Max’s topic was the anatomy of the city; for good reason Marianne cited his first lengthy reflections, written with a clinical eye and apt comparisons upon their arrival in St. Louis:
Chicago is one of the most unbelievable cities. By the lake there are a few comfortable and beautiful residential districts, mostly with stone houses of a very heavy and cumbersome style, and right behind them there are little old wooden houses such as one finds in Helgoland. Then come the tenements of the workers and absurdly dirty streets that are unpaved, or there is miserable macadamization outside the better residential district. In the city among the skyscrapers the condition of the streets is utterly hair-raising. Soft coal is burned there. When the hot dry wind off the wastelands to the southwest blows through the streets, and especially when the dark yellow sun sets, the city looks fantastic. In broad daylight one can see only three blocks ahead, even from the observation towers. Everything is mist and thick haze, the whole lake is covered by a purple pall of smoke from which the little steamers suddenly emerge and in which the sails of the departing ships quickly disappear. It is an endless human desert. From the city one travels on Halsted Street—which, I believe, is 20 English miles long—into the endless distance, past blocks with Greek inscriptions, Xenodochien [Hotel], etc., and then past others with Chinese taverns, Polish advertisements, German beer halls, until one reaches the stockyards. For as far as one can see from the Armour firm’s clock tower there is nothing but herds of cattle, lowing, bleating, endless filth. But on the horizon all around—for the city continues for miles and miles until it melts into the multitude of suburbs—there are churches and chapels, grain elevators, smoking chimneys (every big hotel here has its own steaming elevator, etc.), and houses of every size. The houses are usually small, for at most two families each (hence the enormous dimensions of the city), and they are graded in cleanliness according to nationality. All hell had broken loose in the stockyards: an unsuccessful strike, masses of Italians and Negroes as strikebreakers; daily shootings with dozens of dead on both sides; a streetcar was overturned and a dozen women were squashed because a nonunion man had sat in it; dynamite threats against the Elevated Railway, and one of its cars was actually derailed and plunged into the river. Right near our hotel a cigar dealer was murdered in broad daylight; a few streets away three Negroes attacked and robbed a streetcar at dusk, etc., etc.—all in all, a strange flowering of culture. There is a mad pell-mell of nationalities: up and down the streets the Greeks shine the Yankees shoes for 5 cents. The Germans are their waiters, the Irish take care of their politics, and the Italians of the dirtiest ditch digging. A very instructive illustration in Hull House (which Marianne probably wrote about) showed how this residential mixing together of nationality groupings actually worked. The table of wages next to it showed (to my surprise) that the Italians have the lowest wages, lower than the Russians. With the exception of the better residential districts, the whole tremendous city—more extensive than London!—is like a human being with its skin peeled off and whose intestines are seen at work. For one sees everything—in the evening, for example, on a side street in the city the prostitutes are placed in a show window with electric light and prices on display! Characteristic here as in New York is the maintenance of a specifically Jewish-German culture. Theaters perform in Yiddish [Judendeutsch] “the Merchant of Venice” (with Shylock prevailing, however) and stage their own Jewish plays that we want to see in New York. The role of the Germans in Chicago is not very significant, despite their large number. They have even sold their “Schiller” theater because of dissension. By contrast St. Louis has a large number of highly regarded German families (with Americanized children, of course) and German wealth is equal to [that of] the Anglo-American. Carl Schurz lived here [in St. Louis] earlier, and he still owns 2/3rd interest in the Mississippi newspaper, which manages the novel task of publishing a strictly Republican morning edition, and with other editors, an equally partisan Democratic evening edition. That speaks volumes about the party system here and its particular orientation only to office-holding, or even more so its unprincipled character. (September 19; MWP)
The city as a human body with its skin peeled off and inner workings made visible: for urban sociology, a midwestern Chicago invention, there is surely no better fantastical vision of the organic, fully transparent life of the metropolis.
The Webers marveled at the extreme contrasts: wealth and comfort alongside poverty and squalor, civility together with criminality, decency with vice (in the words of the Chicago Daily News)—as well as the mapping of social structure and ethnic demographics onto the urban grid and the built environment. The steel-frame skyscrapers first seen in Manhattan were a Chicago invention, and Marianne now noted the “several magnificent and aesthetically satisfying structures,” while Max called them “an expression of economic strength” evoking the capitalist spirit—allusions to the new architecture of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, D. H. Burnham and John W. Root, Charles Atwood, and William LeBaron Jenney.
Max Weber’s description of sex, violence, and crime were perhaps somewhat overdrawn, depending on one’s perception and expectations in the confused aftermath of the failed strike. The Chicago Daily Tribune editorialized that although “there was some violence during the strike … the accounts of it have been greatly exaggerated.” But the Tribune and the Daily News continued to report attacks in the stockyard district as the strikebreakers departed. The violence reflected not only labor and economic issues, but also ethnic and racial tensions. The AMCBW was dominated by Irish and German workers, especially higher-status butchers, though with a new influx of Polish, Lithuanian, and other eastern European nationalities. The ethnic mix was accurately depicted in Upton Sinclair’s best-seller of the period, The Jungle (1906), based on firsthand observations in the stockyards in 1904. The packing companies hired large numbers of African Americans and probably some Italians and Greeks as strikebreakers, and much of the mob violence was directed toward them, adding to ethnic and racial conflict that existed already within the union itself. The union’s inability to maintain working-class solidarity by mediating internal ethnic conflict was often given as one of the main reasons for the strike’s failure. The Tribune did on September 13, 1904, report the mob assault on streetcars loaded with men, women, children, and two alleged (black) strikebreakers, listing the injured by name. The press also reported the cigar store holdup and murders on West Lake Street, as well as the activity at Hotel Casino with its “nocturnal debauches” on Madison Street.
Americans found their own depiction of the city in muckraking journalism, the term drawn by Theodore Roosevelt from an impeccable moral source and one of Weber’s favorites: the man with the muckrake in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. In addition to Sinclair’s novel, the most famous tract of the times was Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities (1904), serialized in McClure’s magazine, where he was managing editor. Steffens published a lengthy chapter on Chicago, matching Weber’s metaphor with one of his own: “First in violence, deepest in dirt; loud, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, irreverent, new; an overgrown gawk of a village, the ‘tough’ among cities, a spectacle for the nations.” But he also credited Chicago with the spirit of adventure, a love of audacity and the “sporting spirit,” a city that had not just talked reform but actually done something about it. “Chicago should be celebrated among American cities for reform,” he wrote; “real reform, not moral fits and political uprisings.”
The prospect for political reform and the consequences of it in the face of corruption, rule by bosses, and the big city political machines was of course the larger problem for Weber and the American Progressives. Chicago offered the perfect setting for addressing the issue: Jane Addams’s Hull House.
The Webers visited Hull House on their first weekend in the city, and Marianne returned for a Sunday evening meeting of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), a chapter of the association founded by Jane Addams earlier in the year. They toured the facility and examined the social surveys. Having already seen the Buffalo settlements, Marianne reported,
The most interesting thing I’ve seen here is a large settlement that has been built at considerable expense in a workers’ district by a quite extraordinary and engaging woman. It includes a day nursery, accommodations for 30 women workers, a sports facility for young people, a large concert hall with a stage, an instructional kitchen, a kindergarten, rooms for all kinds of instruction in needlework and manual tasks, etc. During the winter 15,000 people of both sexes come here and receive instruction, inspiration, counsel, and enjoy themselves. It is truly remarkable and requires not only superior organizational skill but also a sense of design and good taste. Miss Addams, the founder and leader, always with a lot of men and women volunteers at her side, is an engaging, gentle, distinguished person. One believes immediately that she has earned the appellation “angel” Joanna. Her ability to persuade the wealthy to provide support and to recruit working assistants is to me no less impressive than her ability to attract the poor and the workers and gain their trust. (Undated, probably September 13; MWP)
Marianne was particularly interested in the question of women’s employment, access to occupations, working conditions and wages, and participation in trade union organizations. These topics had already begun to occupy her as an activist and essayist in Germany, centered at the time in her leadership of the association known as the Verein Frauenbildung-Frauenstudium:
Miss Addams and her circle promote the working women’s organizations as much as possible and in that respect work hand in hand with the male trade union leaders. Clearly here they already have had greater success than we’ve had with the women’s organizations. They have succeeded even in organizing the women home service and outworkers—that is, making them trade union members and forcing employers to hire only such “labeled” women (i.e., members of the unions).
In the meeting [of the WTUL] only the failure of the great stockyard strike was discussed, the strike of the men and women butchers (20–30,000) that still agitates all of Chicago and keeps it partly in the grip of a rebellion. The train of thought and viewpoints about the event expressed completely those of my circles. Thus I felt surrounded immediately by the atmosphere of home and the tasks I know so well, but had to be impressed once again by the charming eloquence of American women. Like American men, they have a delightful way of expressing their views vividly and with warmth and humor.
This evening ended with Jane Addams insisting that Marianne make a statement, which she reluctantly agreed to do, singing a “hymn of praise” for her hostess, as she put it, much to Addams’s chagrin. Parenthetically, in the weeks of the strike’s collapse, Addams did mediate between the union and management, Michael Donnelly and J. Ogden Armour, using her prestige and powers of persuasion to wring a desultory agreement from the packers’ firms and thus save the union for battle another day, which came again well into the twentieth century.
It was only years later in 1930 in the pages of the Frankfurter Zeitung that Marianne Weber gave a full account of Hull House and the “angel of Chicago.” The occasion was Addams’s seventieth birthday. Both a biographical remembrance and an homage to women’s culture, Marianne’s essay went about tracing the contours of moral resistance to the penetrating realities of what she called the monstrous, demonic modern city. After nearly three decades Chicago had become a more “harmonious” place, she thought. Through its evolution Addams had remained the city’s best guide and exemplar, and Hull House the realization, in Marianne’s words, of the “democratization of the spirit,” the possibility of all “to lift themselves up” that she had found most admirable and enduring in the American experience.
While Marianne’s interests focused on Hull House and the WTUL, Max’s turned to the stockyards themselves. Even Karl Baedeker’s pages extolled the drama and spectacle: “The processes of killing the cattle and hogs are extremely ingenious and expeditious, and will interest those whose nerves are strong enough to contemplate with equanimity wholesale slaughter and oceans of blood.” Weber could not resist the opportunity for direct observation: “Everywhere one is struck by the tremendous intensity of work,” he wrote,
most of all in the stockyards with their “ocean of blood,” where several thousand cattle and pigs are slaughtered every day. From the moment when the unsuspecting bovine enters the slaughtering area, is hit by a hammer and collapses, whereupon it is immediately gripped by an iron clamp, is hoisted up, and starts on its journey, it is in constant motion—past ever-new workers who eviscerate and skin it, etc., but are always (in the rhythm of work) tied to the machine that pulls the animal past them. One sees an absolutely incredible output in this atmosphere of steam, muck, blood, and hides in which I teetered about together with a boy who was giving me alone a guided tour for fifty cents, trying to keep from being buried in the filth. There one can follow a pig from the sty to the sausage and the can. (September 20; MWP)
Assembly-line mechanization was already well advanced in the packing plants, with line-speed efficiency and calculations of profitability driving the processes of production, and specialization of tasks allowing management to replace skilled craft workers with unskilled labor. The plants served as a perfect illustration of Fordism in practice well before Henry Ford’s first automotive assembly line in 1913, though one should note that the change at Ford was accompanied by an extraordinary increase in wages to $5.00 a day.
For the working class, dehumanizing rationalization of the working and living environment was not limited to the stockyard plants. As Weber noted,
When they finish work at 5 o’clock, people often must travel for hours to get home. The streetcar company is bankrupt; as usual it has been administered by a “receiver” for years, and he is not interested in expediting the liquidation and hence does not purchase any new cars. The old ones break down all the time. Around 400 people are killed or crippled in accidents every year. According to law, each death costs the company $5000 (to the widow or the heirs), an injury costs it $10,000 (to the injured party), if the company does not take certain precautionary measures. The company has now calculated that those 400 indemnities cost it less than the required precautions, so it does not bother to introduce them.
The irrationality of “rational” calculation extended to public health and safety issues as well:
The city of Chicago uses the water of Lake Michigan unfiltered, and until a short time ago the filth of the city flowed into the water supply; some still does. An Austrian colleague came down with a gastric infection, and typhus is a daily occurrence. Recently they blocked the Chicago River and used the watershed to divert it to the Mississippi and let the city’s filth descend on St. Louis. The tunnel of the subway under the river is threatening to cave in, as the ships with a deeper draught almost always scrape against it. No one considers doing anything about it before it caves in, etc., etc., ad infinitum. It is a wild life notwithstanding the refined layer of culture that overlies everything.
Cases of typhoid in St. Louis did number in the hundreds annually, but scientific evidence of Chicago’s complicity in water pollution was not conclusive. In one of the early decisions of environmental law, Missouri v. Illinois and the Sanitary District of Chicago, decided in 1906, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes expressed the U.S. Supreme Court’s view that the cause of water pollution had not been proven and dismissed the suit, but “without prejudice.”
Closed finally in 1971, at the turn of the century the packing plants, animal pens, packaging and shipping facilities bounded by Halsted and Ashland, Thirty-ninth and Forty-seventh streets in south Chicago, were a microcosm of the struggle between capital and labor. The statistics of the time are breathtaking, reaching into the millions of head of cattle, hogs, sheep, and horses, but the most impressive figure was a simple one: when Weber visited the yards, over 80 percent of all the meat consumed in the United States came from this single location, and it was an era without uniform public health standards, regulation, or oversight. Hastened in part by Sinclair’s writings on conditions in the stockyards, however, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration legislation was signed by President Roosevelt two years later. That was one valuable result of the bright spotlight cast by the strike, though hardly the radical solution that Sinclair as a socialist had intended.
The assembly line mechanization and rhythms of labor that Weber saw were a capital intensive production process. But it still required a significant labor force, numbering about 25,000. The AMCBW began as a craft union, with its members considering themselves skilled workers. However, rationalization of the enterprise had the effect of deskilling the labor force, replacing skilled with unskilled workers, and driving down wages. Skilled workers tended to be men from the older immigrant population, while unskilled workers tended to be newer immigrants, women, or African Americans. There were exceptions, of course: the union had about five hundred black members, for example, and women tended to dominate the packaging operations. But the economic trend was unmistakable in 1904: skilled workers and their craft orientation were under siege. For the skilled workers the loss of jobs, status, wages, and vocation had become more than a mere threat.
Max Weber devoted a massive amount of attention to capitalism and labor relations from the beginning of his career—capitalism as a system of production, the institutions of market finance and the market economy, and the historical development of capitalist economic systems. His reputation at the time rested largely on his work on agrarian labor. But in 1908 he did take up questions of industrial labor, completing the Verein für Sozialpolitik’s study of work and vocation in heavy industry, Zur Psychophysik der industriellen Arbeit. The text remains untranslated and is rarely cited today. It is scarcely known even to specialists. But in it Weber explicitly addresses the problem of mechanization and its consequences, the effects (quoting his words) “on the personal qualities, vocational fate and extravocational ‘style of life’ of workers,” as well as the “ethnic, social, and cultural” factors affecting the entire conduct or way of leading one’s life, the “Lebensführung,” of the workforce. Such questioning would only have been reinforced by the observations in Chicago.
Weber was alert to the totality of working-class life in the cities, both in Germany and in the United States. His frank exchanges about social democracy with Robert Michels always vigorously underscored the sociocultural dimensions of labor relations and labor organization, a point of view apparent in his assessment of the “moral order” seen in Chicago. Commenting on the working-class districts, for instance, he noted an apparent contrast with New York related to ethnicity and religious institutions, and then elaborated on the theme of secularization:
Because of its ethnic mix Chicago is less religious [kirchlich] than New York. Nevertheless, precisely in the workers’ districts the number of churches supported by the workers themselves is quite large. Here lie the most characteristic features of American life, as well as the most fateful factors for a deep inner transformation. Up to now it was the orthodox sects here that gave to all of life its special character. All sociability, all social cohesion, all agitation in favor of philanthropic and ethical and even political concerns (such as the campaign against corruption) are held in their grasp. Now along with the Catholics (who maintain or even increase their number because of immigration) only the large Lutheran Missouri Synod is a rock of orthodoxy. Everything is now in flux. The Presbyterians have abandoned the theory of predestination and belief in the damnation of the unbaptized. The large sects are adopting “pulpit change”—that is, their ministers often exchange preaching in each others’ churches—and the workers are not interested in hearing about dogmatism. The “Ethical Culture” has a temple with preaching on Sundays in New York. Temples of Christian Science are present everywhere, often enormous in size, and the states have to enact laws to deal with the immorality of refusing to acknowledge illness and seek medical attention for patients. The old harsh strain of Methodism is likewise fading away. It’s difficult to say how these matters will develop further. (September 20; MWP)
If the trend toward secularization was interpreted as a shift away from orthodox theology in the mainline denominations, then the trend did not necessarily also indicate a decline in religiosity or the public and social importance of the religious sects. Weber thought this was a distinctive American pattern, replicated even in newer immigrant enclaves: matter-of-fact skepticism about dogma, combined with a sectlike form of social organization, still permeating working-class public life.
The week in Chicago was also an occasion for events leading up to the Congress of Arts and Science, some hosted by Albion Small and William R. Harper, president of the University of Chicago. Because a large number of Congress delegates were in the city, there was a reception scheduled for the University of Chicago campus at the Reynolds Club, a banquet at the Webers’ hotel, and tours of the city and the museums. Weber most likely met Small during the week, an inconsequential encounter, and his attendance at these events is uncertain. One excursion that left a deep impression, however, was a Wednesday (September 14) spent with Marianne and Ernst Troeltsch in Evanston at Northwestern University, the first of a growing list of stops at educational institutions and inquiries into American educational practices.
Weber would have heard already about Northwestern through Edmund James. With James having just resigned as president, the campus tour was conducted by James Taft Hatfield, a professor of German literature and language, son of a Methodist minister who in Hatfield’s words “represented the authentic Puritan-Methodist tradition of the eighteenth-century.” Hatfield was endowed with “a high and noisy tenor” voice and was attracted to the Volkslied tradition and the use of music to express spiritual longings and religious devotion—quite the opposite of the Calvinist sentiments of the primitive Baptists and the Quakers. Active in the Methodist Church and as a faculty advisor to the Beta Theta Pi fraternity, he also led the nondenominational Friday student chapel service. He was one of seven Northwestern faculty members participating in the Congress of Arts and Science, presenting a paper titled “Germanic Literature.” Much later in his career he presided over the Modern Language Association, delivering as his presidential address a rousing defense of “standards” in academia.
During the day Hatfield recruited an unsuspecting freshman and together with him treated his guests to a rendition of the Beta Theta Pi melody, sung to the tune of “O Tannenbaum.” Weber acknowledged being moved by this sort of entirely local patriotism, and puzzled over its other characteristics: “something childlike, a strange mixture of robust human understanding, enthusiasm and naïveté.” Weber described his visit thus:
The visit to Northwestern University in the suburb of Evanston was very pleasant, in the beautiful countryside along the lake with large playing fields and attractive wood-frame and masonry homes of the faculty. Once again the small and often tiny rooms of the professors’ houses—a puff on my pipe would permanently darken the study—and a very pretty house of a student fraternity (“Greek letter society”) that (except for dueling and drinking bouts) does everything we do. Also nice albums of a similar women’s sorority with amusing illustrations of the way the “old gentlemen,” or rather “old ladies” of the sorority show up at the beginning of the semester to help “recruit” the first-year students (“freshmen”), etc., etc.—in short, a lot of nice insights into the American student life that is just as full of hard work as of poetry. (September 20; MWP)
Weber acquired a surprisingly detailed knowledge of the American school system, the colleges and universities, the students’ way of life, college degree requirements, faculty appointments and workloads, teaching methods, student costs and fees, and faculty and administrative salaries. But the point of his curiosity was singular: it had to do with the ethos of education—the cultivation of habits, the formation of mind and character, and the attitude toward life related to work and accomplishment:
While the American youth has to work little and slowly in primary school, grammar school and high school, at about 17–18 (before he’s as far along as a 6th year Gymnasium student) he enjoys the greatest amount of freedom (thus for our taste [in Germany] difficult to accept), but nevertheless has become vigorous and independent. The college student (17/18 to 21/22 years old) normally enters a dormitory, has to submit to the rules, is controlled if not formally then in practice with respect to drinking, etc. His course of study is prescribed with the exception of certain electives, failure to attend classes is impossible, there is weekly chapel, and exams occur every quarter. Despite all this the magical memories of youth are focused on this period of life. Sports on a massive scale, attractive forms of sociability, endless intellectual stimulation, countless lasting friendships are the results, and above all, far more than with our students, learning the habit of work. The son-in-law of our host [in St. Louis] confirmed that a college-bred man would learn the business in half a year, others in 2–3 years.
The specific reference (as we shall see in the next chapter) is to the very successful iron and steel manufacturing magnate Frank Mesker, whose views seem entirely representative. But the more general reference is, in a word, to asceticism. The question is, what are the sources and the institutional reinforcements for the formation of the type of person who is committed to action in the world?
In pursuit of an answer to this question, among the “habits” that most startled Weber none was more impressive than the requirement of chapel attendance:
It seems incredible when one reads in the statutes of Northwestern University in Chicago (originally Methodist, the large University [of Chicago] founded by Rockefeller is Baptist, and both compete in the same city!) that a student must attend either 3/5 of the daily services or one additional hour of lectures instead of 3 hours of services. If he has a bigger “chapel record” (!!) than required, he is given credit for the next academic year, and then he needs that much less attendance. If the “chapel record” is inadequate for two years, the student is expelled. Yet the “religious service” is peculiar: sometimes it is replaced by lectures, for instance on [Adolf von] Harnack’s History of Dogma. At the conclusion the dates of the next football, baseball, cricket match, etc., are announced, as the harvesting used to be announced in German villages. The whole thing is utterly confusing. It is hard to say how great the indifference is at this time; that it has increased, particularly because of the Germans, is fairly certain. But the power of the church communities is still enormous in comparison with our Protestantism.
Weber’s memory was essentially correct. The Northwestern University Bulletin cataloged the pertinent rules:
The charter of the University provides that “no particular religious faith shall be required of those who become students of this institution.” The University was not established with the view of forcing on the attention of students the creed of any particular church, but for the promotion of learning under influences conducive to the formation of a manly Christian character. This continues to be its aim and purpose.
Students in the College of Liberal Arts are expected to attend public worship on Sunday in the church of their choice.
Chapel service is held at noon on each week day except Saturday, throughout the college year. Attendance upon at least three-fifths of these services is required under the following regulations:
1. When a student’s record of chapel credits is deficient as many credits as he is expected to secure in one-half of a semester, his registration in all studies is cancelled, and it may be restored only on the recommendation of the faculty committee on chapel attendance.
2. Surplus chapel credits in excess of the three-fifths required in any semester are carried forward to the chapel record of the following semester.
Northwestern University was not exceptional. Similar requirements existed at the University of Chicago and the University of Tennessee, for example. But the “utter confusion” Weber registered was surely his own. Having lived through a similar modified “weekly chapel” regimen at the coeducational college I attended, I have no doubt that the students found the requirement completely understandable and rationally manageable. Needless to say, the culture of the “college” has changed; the practice by now has gone the way of in loco parentis and other survivals from an earlier era.
In 1904, however, the invocation of “character” was an expression of the times, essentially a topos linked by Americans to the educational regime of the college as an institution and a formative life experience. The idea appeared everywhere: in the pages of the Chicago Daily Tribune, where the vice president of the First National Bank announced to an audience that “character is real capital”; or during President Theodore Roosevelt’s visit to Northwestern, accompanied by Edmund James, when his message to students was, “Now it is a great thing to have a safe and strong body. It is a better thing to have a sage, a strong and a vigorous mind. But best of all is to have what is partly made up of both, partly made up of something higher and better—Character.” On such matters Roosevelt was often a bellwether: “character” signified not merely personality or learning but an existential quality, a synthesis of mental and physical agility, an inner spiritual strength and independence of judgment. To appeal to “character” and its qualities—honesty, modesty, frugality, hard work—was to restate Benjamin Franklin’s homilies in more modern terms. The college was supposed to embody the ideal.
For Max Weber the observations at Northwestern were repeated elsewhere over the next two months: at the Tuskegee Institute, the Johns Hopkins University, Haverford College, and Harvard and Columbia Universities. They were generalized into a full-scale argument that appears in different locations: the controversy over Friedrich Althoff’s policies as the Prussian minister of education; wartime texts, such as the speech “Socialism” in Vienna; and in their best-known form, “Science as a Vocation,” where the entire problematic is introduced through a comparison of American and German university life. The Althoff debate is perhaps the most intriguing of these discussions, as the retrospective and prospective orientation of Weber’s thinking is unmistakable. His position in these heated exchanges, dependent on American points of reference, was rarely understood.
Consider the striking language Weber used in a passage from his address to the professoriat at the Deutsche Hochschullehrertag in Dresden in October 1911:
The classic older type of American university grew out of the college. Colleges were located not in large cities but wherever possible in the countryside, in any case in small towns. Furthermore, the older colleges were predominantly established by religious sects. Traces of this can be seen everywhere. Nowadays, however, American universities are becoming to a certain extent metropolitan and, furthermore, there is no doubt that at least in some of them the old collegiate system, with required residence in college and strict control over the mode of life of the students, is partly in process of being discarded and partly has already been discarded. At the same time, I have been assured in American business circles that these latter conditions were responsible for maintaining the college and the particular kind of college education, which does not aim primarily at training for science and scholarship, but rather at the formation of character through the experience of holding one’s own in the society of similarly situated students, at the formation of adult citizens, and at the development of an outlook which serves as the foundation of the American governmental and social systems.
The “business circles” would have included the college-educated Frank Mesker. Of course, Northwestern fit the classic model, and though the University of Chicago was by contrast decidedly newer, more urban, and more oriented toward specialized scientific graduate training, it too had remained strongly committed to the residential undergraduate “college” with its healthy respect for education instead of training. The University of Chicago has stubbornly persisted to do so to this day, although with occasional bouts of self-doubt and struggles over “general” education and curricular reform. The modern debates over so-called general education, so often misunderstood and characteristic only of American universities, are important precisely because they touch on the ideal of the college and informed citizenship.
The alternatives to this original American model were the source of provocation in Weber’s critique of German conditions:
All the while we find that schools of economics are being founded in Germany. To express ourselves in vivid form we may say that a driving force propelling these schools of economics is the commercial employee’s wish to attain the status in which he may accept a challenge to a duel and thereby be made capable of becoming a reserve officer: a pair of sabre scars on his face, a bit of student life, a short rest from the habit of work—all things about which I ask myself: will we be able to compete with the great productive powers of the world, particularly the Americans, if the new generation of our business class is educated into such an ethos?
Substitute another nationality—citizens of China, India, or Brazil, for example—and today the question has remained the same. The problem of the relationship between education in the sense Weber discovered in the American college and the challenges of global competition has perhaps never been more visible to the public. Scarcely a week passes without another editorial, speech, report, tract, or anecdote bemoaning the erosion of the educational and civic ideals and social capital that were attached originally to the idea of the college.
However, the problem is hardly ever grasped in the way that Weber, educators like James, Harper, or Hatfield, or even politicians like Roosevelt understood it, for what they saw in the college was the beneficial effects of quite specific institutionalized forms of association and sociability for the disciplining and testing of the self and the construction of the social order. These forms embodied a pragmatic logic, of course. Max Weber was less interested in their narrowly construed utility, however, than in their implications for the totality of practical ethics and a distinctive way of life within the confines of capitalist culture. How could the ethos represented by the college be reconciled with the capitalist rationalization of the material world? The question had now been formulated. Weber was still searching for a compelling answer.