Cornfed Culture 247 



higher education. A college degree was not held up as some- 

 thing too sacred for the majority to dare aspire to. It was 

 presented as the common right of all Americans. 



Frederick Jackson Turner, in discussing "Pioneer Ideals," 

 declares, "By its system of public schools from the grades to 

 graduate work in the state universities, the West has created 

 a larger single body of intelligent plain people than can be 

 found anywhere else in the world." 



Not the least of the power of the state universities was 

 vested in the fact that they were the property of the people. 

 Their roots were in the soil. As state institutions they were 

 free from the control or influence of any church or religious 

 or social group. They were essentially democratic. So they 

 have created a culture which represents American democracy. 

 That spirit began to be blown eastward about a century ago, 

 profoundly affecting the culture of the Atlantic seaboard. The 

 midwestern universities with their acceptance of science and 

 their zest in applying science to all the problems of the time 

 and the environment jolted eastern scholasticism out of its 

 bondage to classical traditions. Michigan, the first of the state 

 universities, booted Yale into organizing a department of 

 scientific agriculture which was presided over by the great 

 Dr. Norton, whose influence touched all the agricultural 

 writers and editors of the country for a generation. 



From the state universities, too, came the idea of shaping 

 the university to the needs and demands of the student body; 

 not selecting a student body to fit the inflexible shape of the 

 university. This ideal has gradually influenced the old colleges 

 in the east, though they resisted it for years. Their trustees 

 and governors, the majority of whom had found small use 

 for Greek and Latin in Wall Street but who had the successful 

 business man's fixed idea that the road by which he has trav- 

 eled is the only one to success, stubbornly held out against 

 innovations from the corn belt. The competitive, cutthroat 

 world of high finance gave them no outlet for their latent 

 sentimentality. Their relations with their wives and daughters 



