When one reads the records of nineteenth-century educators as they wrestled with the question, “Is there a discipline of education?” one finds them very often assuming or flatly asserting that there is or can be such a science and then devoting a major part of their attention to the need for the development of it. Throughout the period this need reflected two concerns: the quality of education and professional status.

Saint Louis University, the first university west of the Mississippi and the first American Catholic institution of higher learning to develop in a predominantly Catholic city, displayed a remarkable broad-mindedness in its policies at a time when interdenominational strife gripped the land. Unfortunately, newcomers to the Midwest and nativists elsewhere in the nation failed to match the wide tolerance of the city and of the University. Open hostility on the part of nativists brought about the disaffiliation of one of Saint Louis University's finest colleges shortly before the Civil War and retarded the growth of the entire school for half a century. This sad but significant aspect of the social history of the United States throws new light on the ghetto attitudes that sometimes characterized denominational education in the latter part of the last century.

On December 14, 1857, a Vermont Whig rose from his seat in the national House of Representatives and asked leave of his colleagues “to introduce a bill donating public lands to the several states and territories which may provide colleges for the benefit of agriculture and the mechanic arts.” Justin Morrill thus began a legislative debate over federal aid to higher education that has lost little of its heat and few of its basic propositions in subsequent contests. This paper is an effort to examine the nature of the arguments that appeared in one of the earliest phases of the struggle. Some description of Morrill's proposal and the context of the debate seems in order before proceeding.

The Army and Navy Journal was considerably understating the situation when it commented in 1873 that “our Army is not, as a whole, alive to the subject of education….” Although a significant minority of army officers managed to keep themselves intellectually alive on the frontier, most officers were opposed to any elaborate scheme of formal education because it detracted from the enlisted man's regular duties and because they believed the “school of hard knocks” to be the best educational force. They also commonly assumed, with a great deal of justice in many cases, that enlisted men were not favorably disposed toward classroom instruction and were too dense to benefit by it.

In south mound cemetery at New Castle, Indiana, lie the remains of William Henry Harrison Beard, his wife Mary Payne Beard, and one of their two sons, Clarence Beard. The fourth member of that Hoosier family, whose name elevates a simple fact of life and death to a level of national significance, was historian Charles Austin Beard (1874–1948).

David Kinley, President of the University of Illinois from 1918 to 1930, was by nature, philosophy and inclination a conservative. He viewed the new and untried with marked suspicion, and he was equally distrustful of the gaudy, the common and the exuberant. Thus, his use of the new jazz age medium of radio to publicize his University seems somewhat ironic. In any case, Kinley rose to the height of his academic career in America's gaudiest, most exuberant decade—the Roaring Twenties. It was an age of frenzy and boredom; a period when a restless nation demanded to be entertained.