In November 1903, students at the University of North Carolina (UNC) listened attentively as the national YMCA leader, Fred B. Smith, delivered a talk entitled, “A Strong Man.” The student newspaper, the Tar Heel, noted that Smith “perfectly exemplified it in his person, being a physical giant.” Smith's description of a strong man actually included two notions of American manhood: one emphasizing a strong body, the other strong morals. First, he observed that when “we hear of a strong man our first thought is of a powerful physique. This is surely a requisite; everyone should develop and preserve his body.” But Smith then pivoted away from sheer physical strength and emphasized instead morality and good personal character. The “real strong man,” he continued, was “that man who stands up in the strength of Christian manhood and lives the noble life. That is the man whom the world admires and who is the world's leader.” Character was the “final test of the strong man, and it is this that the young man should try to attain.”Footnote ¹

The Tar Heel gave a glowing report, noting that Smith “reached every man in his audience.”Footnote ² The correspondent did not seem confused—if indeed he even noticed—that Smith had offered two distinct definitions of manhood. Nor did he find it unusual that the university evidently considered the topic worthy of instruction and contemplation. Two factors help explain this uncomplicated response: one is that by the early 1900s, UNC, as part of its effort to join the growing ranks of modern universities, had embraced the development of manhood as part of its institutional mission. Second, and also in line with the new goals of the modern university, UNC had successfully created a space where different meanings of manhood coexisted comfortably. Rather than insisting on a particular model of manhood, the melding of different models reflected the modern UNC's willingness to “explore unknown seas” of thought.Footnote ³

Examining masculinity at UNC shines an important light on changes in southern higher education at the turn of the twentieth century, a subject still underexamined. Historian Timothy J. Williams does not exaggerate when he claims the “scholarship on American higher education has generally marginalized southern schooling outside the broader context of American intellectual life.”Footnote ⁴ Historians writing about American higher education at the turn of the twentieth century concentrate rightly on the rise of the modern university. The work of historians such as Laurence R. Veysey, John R. Thelin, and Roger L. Geiger, among others, have identified the features of the modern university. These included an expanding physical plant, the introduction of new disciplines (such as economics, psychology, and sociology), a new ethos of investigation led by a rising generation of PhD-trained faculty (and a greater appreciation of expertise itself), the introduction of academic freedom for faculty and the institution overall, as well as a new utilitarian ethos of service to the community through the production of the faculty's expertise.Footnote ⁵

But we still do not fully appreciate how in the midst of its modernization and as a function of its self-proclaimed expertise, university leaders and faculty embraced the development of their male students’ bodies and a more modern understanding of manhood as part of their larger purpose. In his excellent work on educational reform in North Carolina between 1880 and 1920, James Leloudis includes a brief discussion of masculinity in his introduction to that important cohort of post-Reconstruction, UNC-trained education reformers: Edwin Anderson Alderman, Charles Duncan McIver, and James Yadkin Joyner. Their view of masculinity was rooted in what they saw as a tension between the life of the mind and that of action. As UNC students in the late 1870s, and then as educational reformers in their careers, they sought to celebrate the life of the mind over “public displays of physical daring and verbal power.” Control and development of the mind, they argued, was vital as the “secure basis of self-development.”Footnote ⁶ This path toward intellectual self-development would then, they hoped, ready North Carolinians to find success in a more competitive New South era. While the thrust of Leloudis's book is on state educational reform and not masculinity, my conclusion here parts from his on this particular issue in that, at least by the end of the century, I do not see the same tension over models of masculinity; rather, UNC comfortably embraced more than one definition of manhood.

My examination of UNC and masculinity from an institutional perspective during this era also hopes to add a southern example to the work of those scholars whose examination of masculinity has focused primarily on northern schools. They include Heather Munro Prescott's superb examination of the rise of student health services on college campuses, Brian M. Ingrassia's analysis of the rise of college football, Kim Townsend's work on Harvard and manhood, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz's history of campus life, all of which portray the looming sense that the definition of manhood itself was undergoing a change.Footnote ⁷ Writing about Williams College, Horowitz notes that the college's “real education in the years before the Civil War was in gentlemanly behavior. … The postwar years brought changes that reflected a new purpose. The trials of college life turned the boy into a man prepared for success in the competitive world of American business.”Footnote ⁸ Ingrassia depicts an even sharper line of demarcation between the old and the newer, emerging model by comparing the late nineteenth-century perspectives of Harvard's president, Charles William Eliot, versus that of James McCosh, the president of Princeton: “For McCosh, manliness entailed proper posture and the ability to function gracefully in public, like a skilled, even developed gymnast. To Eliot, manliness indicated ability to win strenuous competitions on the athletic field or battlefield, in the academy or the commercial economy. … In modern society, force and victory counted more than self-restraint or virtue.”Footnote ⁹

UNC students, faculty, and administrators all invoked both the older ideal of gentility and poise and the newer ideal of “force and victory.” As examined more fully in this paper, an important part of the explanation for why this was so lies in the recent history of the university itself and its intersection with the rise of the modern university nationwide. UNC, as a southern university, continued to keep its student body exclusively white and nearly all male, while also touting its own entry among the ranks of modern universities. For UNC, this meant, in addition to enlarging the physical campus, adding new disciplines to the curriculum, giving students more choice within the expanded curriculum, embracing expertise more explicitly, and—instead of learning by rote memory and recitation—creating an ethos of inquiry in keeping with the rise of the modern university. As a result, as it took the first full step toward becoming a modern university, UNC also permitted its sheltered students a degree of latitude in exploring and defining, under the university's expert tutelage, their own understanding of manhood.

This apparently easy comingling of different models of manhood at UNC came at a time when writers and intellectuals elsewhere perceived and proclaimed American manhood as being in crisis. Fred B. Smith's address, for instance, came at a time of widespread concern over the strength and mettle of American men—educated white men in particular. Prominent figures such as Theodore Roosevelt were convinced that this class of men was in danger of losing its ability to maintain its rightful place as the nation's leaders. These fears were embedded in a context in which white middle-class men were, they worried, being overrun by the urban hordes of poor immigrants from unusual places, while a new generation of confident, educated women challenged traditional male prerogative. Meanwhile, an industrializing economy and a growing consumer culture meant many educated white men spent their days indoors seated at a desk.Footnote ¹⁰ The concern that this class of men was becoming physically weaker year by year led some writers to conclude, as E. Anthony Rotundo writes, that “civilization had so fully repressed their passions that their very manhood—their independence, their courage, their drive for mastery—was being suffocated.”Footnote ¹¹ In response, social critics questioned whether the older ideal of the white American man still held any aspirational value. The “archetypal button-down Victorian gentleman” or the “old model,” Clifford Putney writes, “stressed stoicism, gentility, and self-denial.”Footnote ¹² But now, one critic “warned that men ‘must be on our guard to see that modern conditions do not soften our fiber until, when confronted with hardships, we become as helpless as a hermit crab without a shell.’”Footnote ¹³

These writers and thinkers thus wondered what kind of man the new century required. In the difficult process of answering this question, Rotundo writes, the “male body moved to the center of men's gender concerns.” (As Fred Smith explained to his UNC audience, men should not only have healthy bodies, they should have powerful bodies.) In addition, “manly passions were revalued in a favorable light; men began to look at the ‘primitive’ sources of manhood with new regard; the martial virtues attracted admiration; and competitive impulses were transformed into male virtues.”Footnote ¹⁴ Also referred to as Muscular Christianity or “passionate manhood,” this new ideal reflected “a growing sense of opposition between action and thought. Increasingly, middle-class men saw action—even unthinking action—as manly.”Footnote ¹⁵

While the goal of this work is to situate the institutional change taking place at UNC at the turn of the twentieth century primarily within the literature on American higher education from this era, it is also informed by the scholarship on white southern masculinity in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Historians like Craig Thompson Friend have pointed out how the impressive body of scholarly work on changing notions of masculinity largely overlooks developments or “contestations of manliness” in the South.Footnote ¹⁶ Those who have explored the subject argue that the Civil War caused a “crisis in gender” that lingered through the remaining decades of the century.Footnote ¹⁷ Following their humiliating military defeat, responding to black freedom and citizenship, enduring years of falling farm commodity prices, and unsettled by the first signs of industrialization, white southern men lived through the last decades of the 1800s with nerves seemingly and unrelentingly stretched to the breaking point. The Victorian model of manhood at first fit neatly within the postwar myth of the Lost Cause, which depicted former Confederates as noble, brave, and true to the last man. To cite just one of the numerous examples, LaSalle Corbell Pickett, as Lesley J. Gordon has shown, long after the war wrote lovingly of her husband, Confederate general George Pickett, as “the model of the courageous Southern gentleman and duty-bound Confederate officer.” Pickett, notoriously bitter and resentful during his life, became in his wife's postwar portrayal “noble, peace loving, and unselfish.”Footnote ¹⁸ This model gave white southern men a familiar language of respect and chivalry that they then invoked even as they went about the often violent, unsavory work of ending Reconstruction and ultimately restoring white supremacy with the brutal rise of the Jim Crow South by the end of the century. But, privately, defeat left many Confederate veterans “feeling less like men” or unable to “escape the unsettling sense that they had failed as men.”Footnote ¹⁹ The simple, nagging fact remained, as Dan R. Frost explains, that while the ex-Confederates believed they had “fought bravely enough to satisfy the demands of honor,” in the end “individual honor and courage had proven inadequate in the faceless reality of industrial war.”Footnote ²⁰

Underneath the misty-eyed postwar paeans to the gallant old soldier, as the twentieth century neared concerns grew that the Lost Cause, Victorian ideal of the southern Christian gentleman was no longer capable of providing sufficient leadership. As Friend explains, other models of manliness emerged to address the postwar political and economic challenges to the authority of white southern men. The “masculine martial” ideal celebrated the white southern man as a warrior, literally, in defense of “honor and mastery.”Footnote ²¹ Here one may also think of what Glenda Gilmore describes as the New White Man. Action-driven, aggressively racist, the New White Man at the turn of the century reasserted control over “his” women, over all black people (often through violence), over the local governments, over the changing economy, over the South itself.Footnote ²² Finally, Friend also notes the rise of the “self-made man” ideal as part of the emergence of the New South. Whereas antebellum notions of white southern manhood were communal or relational, an industrializing, more commercial southern economy opened up greater acceptance of the self-made male ideal.Footnote ²³ By World War I, Friend concludes, these three models—the Victorian or Christian Gentleman, the warrior, and the self-made man—“coexisted uneasily in the South.”Footnote ²⁴

One must, therefore, account for the factors at UNC that combined to facilitate what appears to be the easy commingling of different models of manhood at a time when white southern men were purportedly in the grip of an identity crisis elsewhere. Certainly, ongoing events in North Carolina, namely the violently racist campaign of 1898 to remove black voters, suggested that the model of the aggressive white male reigned unchecked. But this is not so evident at UNC. Through its admissions and hiring policies, the university created a nearly all-male student body led by an all-white, all-male faculty and administration. Therefore, they did not encounter the “new assertiveness of women” that led other commentators to fear that American society was becoming “feminized.”Footnote ²⁵ Neither were they, by law, about to be challenged anytime soon for superiority in the classroom, in student politics, or on the playing field by African American students.Footnote ²⁶ Thus sheltered, the men of the UNC faculty and student body were free to embrace the modern academic ethos of inquiry and exploration emerging at this time. Of far greater concern than whether their inquiry into manhood was appropriately southern or represented an acceptance of northern ideas, the institution focused on the faculty's expert tutelage and on creating a space where students were encouraged to “gather their own information and devise their own conclusions.”Footnote ²⁷ UNC, at the turn of the century, allowed that there was more than one model of manhood at the same time that the university encouraged the young UNC student, with guidance from his professors, to carve out his own path “to suit his tastes, talents or necessities.”Footnote ²⁸

In this climate of relative openness toward ideas of masculinity, two models dominated. Evidence shows the persistence of the postwar Lost Cause ideal of the white southern gentleman of which Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson remained the exemplars.Footnote ²⁹ (Lee, after all, ended up being a college president after the war, and Jackson was a college professor before it.) These postwar Victorian values included restraint, gentility, fair play, and, of course, honor, while it also celebrated human potential and the quest for greatness. But it is also clear that the university, as part of its modern mission to introduce the newest thinking from experts, had begun to accept the emerging ideal of the physically fit, rugged, action-driven man celebrated by northerners like Theodore Roosevelt and sociologist G. Stanley Hall, an ideal that, unlike the Victorian model, often disdained restraint and poise in favor of physicality and aggression for its own sake.Footnote ³⁰ UNC's leaders enthusiastically promoted the “powerful physique” that Fred Smith invoked as being “a requisite” for the modern man. Varsity sports became immensely popular at UNC, and the university began to apply its expertise to instructing students on the latest developments in nutrition, hygiene, and physical fitness.Footnote ³¹ There is almost no indication in the sources that the students found these differing versions of manhood confusing; neither did they feel compelled to choose one over the other nor the need to identify the southernness of what they were doing. Meanwhile, they were reassured that the end result of their university education—even in its modern, more scientific incarnation—would be the same as it had been for previous generations of UNC graduates. To be certain, gone were the days when the school trained its students for leadership of a slave-based, agrarian economy; its students now took their place in the state and in their local communities as bankers, insurance men, textile manufacturers, lawyers, and, of course, legislators.Footnote ³² But, as UNC president Alderman assured the student body in 1898, “Educated men will rule: ignorance cannot rule intelligence.”Footnote ³³

As the flagship university in a largely impoverished southern state, the backdrop against which UNC sought to enter the ranks of the modern universities was starkly different from the reactions to industrialization, urbanization, and immigration driving the rise of northern research universities. North Carolina's economy remained predominantly agricultural. The textile industry was still a generation away from dominating the state's politics and economy, although by the late 1800s it was growing fast. In 1900, North Carolina's two largest cities, Wilmington and Raleigh (populations 20,976 and 18,091 respectively), were tiny compared to New York City (3.4 million), Chicago (nearly 1.7 million), or Philadelphia (over 1.2 million) at the same time. Immigration to North Carolina was practically nonexistent. Politically, conservative white North Carolinians launched a period of racialized political violence in the late 1890s that broke up the biracial, Populist-Republican “fusion” coalition that had governed the state after the 1894 state elections.Footnote ³⁴

The university had only reopened in 1875, and enrollment remained in the few hundreds until the 1890s. Its advertising reflected the hard times, in that UNC offered free tuition to “teachers and ministers’ sons” as well as “loans for the needy.”Footnote ³⁵ Without much state support, the resources of a wealthy alumni base, or students arriving well prepared (by the late 1800s, North Carolina still had few high schools), UNC's leaders nonetheless aspired to create a modern university whose goal was to “keep step with the … march of knowledge, invention, and discovery.”Footnote ³⁶ While underfunded, UNC's leaders in the 1890s, living on the other side of the seismic rupture the Civil War had created from its antebellum traditions, worked from a relatively clean slate. As a writer in the North Carolina University Magazine explained in 1892, “The present era is one of progress in the University; of active and aggressive push and energy. The University is imbued with the spirit of a progressive age, and is making mighty strides towards that perfection—if perfection be possible in human affairs—which is her ideal, the goal of her ambition.”Footnote ³⁷ By the turn of the century, as university historian Louis Round Wilson noted, UNC had begun “the transition from the status of a good college of liberal arts to that of a modern university” and a new generation of administrators and faculty had arrived on campus, armed with modern degrees and modern ideas about what the university ought to be.Footnote ³⁸

Indeed, for its time, it was a modern faculty, one whose degrees came from the leading institutions of higher education in their day. Francis Preston Venable, a chemistry professor and later UNC president, who received his graduate training from the University of Göttingen, had also studied at the University of Berlin and was “familiar with the organization curricula, methods, and spirit of the German universities.”Footnote ³⁹ Biologist Henry Van Peters Wilson had a doctorate from Johns Hopkins, a university on the cutting edge of American graduate training at the time, and had also spent a year at the University of Berlin. Henry Farrar Linscott arrived with his PhD in Latin from the University of Chicago, also a new, leading force in the modern university ideal. Alvin Sawyer Wheeler brought to the faculty a PhD in organic chemistry from Harvard. Modern languages professor Walter D. Toy had studied at Leipzig and Berlin. Geologist Collier Cobb was Harvard trained, after having studied at MIT and the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines in Paris.Footnote ⁴⁰ These make up only a sample of the academic pedigrees on the UNC faculty as the twentieth century began.

Other campus developments at UNC reveal a modernizing university as well. At the “University Day” celebration in 1905, President Francis Venable listed the latest improvements. They included “the completion of the Bynum gymnasium, the appropriation for the Chemical laboratory and the increased appropriation for general purposes, the appropriation from the General Education Board, the Carnegie gift for a new library … establishment of the Department of Applied Sciences … and the organization of the Graduate Department … the granting of a charter to Phi Beta Kappa, the establishment of fellowships in Chemistry.”Footnote ⁴¹ Wilson notes that in the years leading up to the new century, UNC had also added an elective curriculum (“an idea made popular by Eliot at Harvard”), graduate degrees, and courses in political science, social science, philosophy, and pedagogy.Footnote ⁴² These all line up neatly—almost identically, in fact—with what Thelin has listed as the identifying characteristics of the “Great Modern American University” of this time.Footnote ⁴³ By the early 1900s, therefore, UNC's leaders had gone a long way toward creating a vibrant, if still small, intellectual community and a modern university, one that was engaged with its immediate context, but that also encouraged contemplation and investigation of new and larger issues under their expert tutelage. These larger issues that demanded the institution's attention and resources now included the development of manhood in a new century.

Underneath the image of an enlightened intellectual community, however, there was still plenty of rough and tumble on the UNC campus. As Horowitz describes this part of university life at the turn of the century: “This male world violent.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Even as the university modernized, UNC administrators and student leaders often voiced their concern over hazing and vandalism through the Victorian language of boyhood rambunctiousness and lack of restraint that needed elevating into controlled manhood. But by publicizing these reports, the university did more than just frown at the students’ bad behavior. Their publication reminds us that UNC, in the modern academic spirit of open inquiry, sought to frame publicly its emphasis on developing manhood as part of its institutional mission. In this sense, the university's ongoing public airing of its own masculinity is reminiscent of the importance of “performing masculinity” that Nicholas L. Syrett describes in his examination of white college fraternity boys.Footnote ⁴⁵

In 1899, the Tar Heel, citing lack of student self-control, complained of the “destruction to college property on Wednesday night by the members of the different classes” as behavior “more characteristic of barbarians than of college students.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Later that year the Tar Heel again lamented a recurrence of vandalism on campus. The “doctrine of total depravity seems to be at least partially confirmed by the destructive tendency of a great many fellows in college. A case in point is the destruction of the globes to the incandescent hall lights. Three fourths of the hall lights have been destroyed and from no motive whatever than pure wantonness. … Why not give up some of our infantile tendencies?” the Tar Heel asked.Footnote ⁴⁷

In 1900, another string of incidents prompted concern over “rowdyism.” The Tar Heel complained that, “The wanton, useless, and cruel killing of the beautiful larks on the campus should be condemned by authorities and students alike. The faculty have passed a law forbidding the firing of a gun on the campus, but why is it not enforced? Day after day, the larks are shot and there is no one to say the Vandals nay. A very few students, for a moments diversion, destroy a constant source of pleasure to the majority of the students and some of the faculty.” Again, a lack of Victorian era self-control and poise was the culprit: “This selfish habit should be stopped at once.”Footnote ⁴⁸ By the end of 1900, the Tar Heel again took UNC students to task for bad form and childishness: “Manners here seem to be in a crude state. When the college assembles for any purpose, the behavior of many of the students is unworthy of the kindergarten, much less of the University. Shuffling of feet, stamping like wild things, caterwauling, and calling for speeches by students are common, and sometimes Bedlam breaks loose. How long is this sort of thing, disgraceful to the institution as it is, to last? Where is the gentle breeding of which our people are wont to boast?”Footnote ⁴⁹

Hazing was an annual problem, the tradition being that the sophomore class would initiate the freshman class through some form of physical roughhousing, or worse. In 1906, the Tar Heel reported an “unfortunate mistake” when sophomore Bernard O'Neil was shot on campus and received “a slight wound in the groin.” Freshman J. J. Hatch was returning to his room late at night, having waited tables at a Chapel Hill boardinghouse, when he encountered four sophomores heading across campus in the other direction, and one of them jumped and caught him “somewhere about the shoulders.” Having twice recently “stood off with his pistol crowds of Sophomores who had come to his room with the intention of hazing him [Hatch] pulled his pistol and shot once.” The sophomores claimed they had no intention of hazing Hatch, they “merely jumped forward to startle him when they recognized him.”Footnote ⁵⁰ But Hatch's shot hit O'Neil. While the incident prompted yet another round of condemnations of hazing and its unintended consequences, the practice continued at least for a few more years. Hazing as a quasi-sanctioned campus ritual seems to have faded for a time after the tragic accidental death of UNC freshman Isaac William Rand in 1912. A group of sophomores forced Rand from his room and out onto the athletic field to dance and sing on top of a barrel. Rand fell and landed on a piece of broken pottery that sliced his jugular vein, causing him to bleed to death in minutes.Footnote ⁵¹

In addition to invoking the older Victorian values of self-control and restraint, however, UNC leaders also began to channel the high energies of these young men into more modern, constructive areas, for example, toward organized team sports such as football. Modern athletics, therefore, emerged as a means of invigorating the educated white male body and building community or team spirit.Footnote ⁵² Starting first in the urban northeast, by the late 1800s football had moved south, where at first it met with a chilly reception. As Andrew Doyle has argued, southern evangelical Christians resisted the sport's emphasis on the development of a strong body as leading boys into moral danger. The body, after all, was inherently sinful. Obsessing over its fitness did not, in their view, take away that fundamental truth. The passion football generated, moreover, threatened to undermine the evangelical and Victorian admonition of self-control and restraint.Footnote ⁵³ The sport took off anyway, championed by administrators and faculty confident that under proper and expert instruction, football would be a healthy addition to modern university life. As Ingrassia has observed, modernizing research universities played a vital role in creating “the institutional context in which football flourished.”Footnote ⁵⁴

In 1888, UNC was among the first southern universities to adopt collegiate football. From 1892 on, the team consistently played a full schedule of at least six games. Football gained enormous popularity in a short time; for instance, the Tar Heel reported that four thousand people watched the UNC-University of Virginia (UVA) game in 1893.Footnote ⁵⁵ Its importance on campus was unmistakable as well. In September 1902, the Tar Heel, made the football team the focus of its overview of the new school year: “The dominant issue among the college boys for the last week has been, ‘what sort of team is Carolina going to have this year?’”Footnote ⁵⁶

Leloudis has argued that the rise of football at UNC gave students a new chance to bond at a time when their academic experiences were becoming more diversified with the addition of new academic disciplines and electives. “Young men might view themselves as historians, chemists, economists, or philosophers during most of the week, but on game day, they were all united as ‘Tar Heels.’”Footnote ⁵⁷ But the growing popularity of the Carolina football team, and the rise of other team sports, also meant that the university had a new opportunity to champion the development of the fit, strong body as part of its mission to produce the well-rounded college man. The modern interest in the actual bodies of those participating appeared as the student paper began listing the height and weight of football players. Ahead of the UNC-UVA clash in 1898, for instance, the Tar Heel listed the weights of the Cavaliers’ starting eleven, ranging from 135 pounds to two players listed at 200.Footnote ⁵⁸ On the 1900 UNC football team, guard T. R. Brem weighed in as the heaviest at 196, while back G. Berkeley came in as the lightest at 130 pounds. If accurate, the team averaged over 163 pounds and stood a little over five feet ten in height.Footnote ⁵⁹

Moreover, sports like football enabled UNC to pull together key aspirations in its quest to become a modern university: its own expertise, its interest in developing the physical and mental fitness of its male students, and its willingness to both embrace and shape currents of contemporary life. As Leloudis observes, “On the gridiron, as in academic pursuits, success required the mastery of specialized knowledge of plays and strategy, and the difference between winning and losing was measured by a cold numerical score.”Footnote ⁶⁰ At the beginning of the 1898 football season, President Alderman told a lively UNC assembly that “honest wholesome sport” helped the university “make men, not scholars or students merely, but good sound all round men.” The qualities sports encouraged included “courage … grit, endurance, steady nerves, quick to act and the wit to do things aggressively.”Footnote ⁶¹ Speaking in the wake of the nation's recent victory in the Spanish-American War, Alderman connected this language of the well-prepared team of fit men to the newly emerging language of empire, adding that “the training of Americans in honest athletics had much to do with the great success of the American army in our recent war.”Footnote ⁶²

In keeping with its claim of providing expertise in all phases of student life, Tar Heel coverage of football games included numerous references to the superior physical and mental training UNC players received and not simply whether the team won or lost.Footnote ⁶³ When UNC defeated North Carolina A&M (what became North Carolina State University) 34–0 in 1898, the Tar Heel not only covered the exciting plays that led to victory, it added, “The A&M boys were heavy and played snappy ball but were no match for the better trained Varsity team.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Victory over Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech) brought forth the observation that the “two teams were about equal in weight,” but again “Carolina's superior training and greater knowledge of the game told in the long run.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The crowning glory of that season was Carolina's 6–2 win over archrival Virginia. The paper's headlines once again proclaimed that expert training prevailed over mere physical mass: “Carolina's Scientific Football Wins Over the Superior Weight and Force of Virginia.”Footnote ⁶⁶ An editorial pointed out that the “result of Thursday's game shows that there is an element in football which counts more than mere pounds in weight, or simple brawn. … [UNC's victory] shows that superior training and endurance accompanied by cool clear head work tells more in the long run than mere strength. … It is nothing but truth to say that better judgement, superior training, and more scientific football won the game for Carolina.”Footnote ⁶⁷

While football clearly dominated the popular interest, other sports came to be promoted for many of the same reasons as football. In 1898, the Tar Heel reported that “Basket-ball has come to stay. … As a game it offers many good features to the player, combining rapid judgement with swiftness of motion, demanding almost constant movement, it requires and develops ‘wind.’”Footnote ⁶⁸ The Tar Heel in 1899 also encouraged students to try out for the track and field team by appealing to the healthful benefits of training. Speaking of the oval itself, “the track is for exercise and body building and every student in the University has a right to use it whether training for an event or not. Come out and exercise your body, you will receive closest attention, and it is needless to say that if you persevere and work wisely you will soon notice remarkable improvement in ‘wind,’ lung capacity and digestion.”Footnote ⁶⁹ In 1904, the Tar Heel again encouraged students to try out for the track team as well as plugged the new emphasis on personal hygiene. “Track work is not a bore,” the paper assured its readers. “Some men may be violently opposed to taking a bath every afternoon, but it is not so bad after a week or so. … If you want to feel like a king and several members of Parliament, come out every afternoon and drop cigarettes. The track is better than a spring tonic—makes you feel springy all over.”Footnote ⁷⁰

While the stories of the collegiate sports teams offer a vivid picture of the rising importance of male fitness on campuses like UNC's at the turn of the century, historians of higher education would also do well to study the other ways in which universities were incorporating male fitness and health into their overall mission. Changes in the UNC physical plant, for instance, reflected the new institutional commitment to developing healthy male bodies. In October 1903, the university announced plans for the construction of a new gymnasium, thanks to a donation of $25,000 from William Preston Bynum of Charlotte, in honor of his grandson, William Preston Bynum Jr., a UNC student whose life was “cut off before he could fully equip himself for it.”Footnote ⁷¹ In January 1905, the gymnasium was close enough to completion for the university to announce the opening, already celebrating that “when completed [it] will without a doubt be one of the best in the South.” The theme running throughout the celebration was its numerous modern features. A description in the Tar Heel highlighted that the “entire building will be wired for electric lights.” It included “200 lockers in the main dressing room besides the 50 which are in the dressing room set aside for the Varsity and scrub athletic teams.” The faculty had its own fitness room that included “a punching bag, ‘chinning pole,’ mats and chest-weights.” The new gymnasium, of course, included expert trainers: the “gymnastics instructor has for his use three small rooms, one to be used for his main office and the other two connecting to be used as dressing and measuring rooms.” Overall, the gymnasium would be “well equipped with parallel bars, horizontal bars, basket balls and racks, medicine balls, punching bags, spring boards, horses, mats of all kinds, chest-weights, Swedish bar stalls, flying rings, travelling rings, Albany ladders, ropes suspended from the ceiling, and a suspended horizontal bar.” The most innovative feature, however, was the indoor track, “which extends around the sides of the walls on the second floor … with banked concave corners. Only shoes with rubber soles will be allowed on this track.”Footnote ⁷²

UNC's concern over proper male fitness and expert training, therefore, extended well beyond its varsity athletes. Behind the headlines celebrating teams’ sporting victories, the university still had work to do to improve the fitness of all the young men under its charge.Footnote ⁷³ The 1905 catalog noted that all students, excluding the seniors, were required to exercise three hours per week in the new facility. Each student received a physical examination at the beginning of the school year and was given a pamphlet on the benefits of exercise. The information contained “directions for the developing of every part of the body … suggestions on hygiene and personal care of the body,” and was “free from technicalities and confusing terms.”Footnote ⁷⁴ At the highest level of institutional concern, however, the UNC Board of Trustees in 1900 received a disturbing report from Charles Baskerville, supervisor of athletics, on the “unfortunate condition of the men constituting our athletic teams during the past term.” It was, he continued, “a noteworthy fact that the men were in poor condition.” Baskerville identified two main causes: “lack of a proper training-table” and “lack of proper bathing facilities where bruised men could be massaged.” In all, he continued, the gymnasium facilities for all the students were “ineffective for several good reasons,” noting the poor heating and lack of lockers and baths, “which are absolutely essential. … Thorough cleaning of the body after violent exercise is of as great value as the exercise itself.”Footnote ⁷⁵ This was not exactly the picture UNC painted publicly, of course, where the emphasis remained on the expertise the university offered its students. In the university catalog of 1898–1899, for instance, one reads that “Systematic exercise in Memorial Hall under a skilled instructor is required of all students in the College, except Seniors. The Hall is so spacious and so thoroughly aired and lighted that it furnishes a place for physical exercise almost as healthful as in the open air. The University recognizes the training and intelligent care of the body as essential to intellectual power and culture.”Footnote ⁷⁶

Awareness of the relationship between a physically robust masculinity and the role of the modern university even appeared in discussions on academic achievement. An editorial in the February 1901 University Magazine approved in specifically gendered terms the faculty's consideration to do away with graduation honors. Too many students, the editorial held, combed the catalog to find “pud” courses in which to get a high grade. But, this writer asserted, the quest for academic glory threatened one's masculinity: “The race for honors narrows a man. It shuts him in his room and out of the library; it keeps him away from the other boys and makes of him a recluse; he knows no more about college life and human nature when he leaves here than he did when he came.” Worst of all from the perspective of the new masculinity, “He leaves here a narrow-chested, weak-eyed dyspeptic, but an ‘honor man,’ instead of the large muscled, optimistic graduate he should be.”Footnote ⁷⁷ This more modern view of masculinity stands in stark contrast to that of one UNC student as recently as 1878. William Pinkney Cline, at that time, still took a more Victorian view of the university experience by noting that “To be successful in our age … one must study, late and long, long and patiently.” This approach still held sway, he contended, over “pusillanimous physical exploits.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Public lectures on health, fitness, strength, and hygiene, as well as campus initiatives approved by the Board of Trustees, also bear witness to the modern importance of developing physically fit men. In doing so, however, university leaders were not simply responding to the wider national critique of white American manhood. University leaders had good reason to be concerned about the immediate health and fitness of this rising generation of men. The ever-present specter of contagious, deadly disease warranted paying close attention to the physical health and vulnerability of the young male bodies in their charge, and UNC leaders struggled to balance the threat to their students’ health with their claims to expertise in producing healthy male bodies.Footnote ⁷⁹

President Alderman reported to the trustees at the turn of the century that “one case of small pox was stamped out quickly and no others appeared.” Still, he worried, since “the pest house is situated in the centre of the campus” and there had been “some typhoid fever in the village.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Alderman also sent a letter to the parents of UNC students updating them in gendered language on the smallpox situation. In it he asserted that the “calm manner with which the students received the notification of the presence of the disease speaks very well of their strong manliness.”Footnote ⁸¹ The Tar Heel reported in 1899, with smallpox “being so prevalent over the State,” that many students had sought out the vaccination “and consequently a crowd are carrying very sore arms.”Footnote ⁸² Their efforts succeeded it appears: the UNC Board of Trustees reported in 1899, “It is a pleasure to report that there has been no serious sickness among the students this year, and to bear testimony to the general courtesy, manliness and good behavior of the student body.”Footnote ⁸³

A grim report from the State Board of Health in 1900, however, revealed conditions that continued to leave students vulnerable to illness. The inspection committee explained, “We have dwelt on the subject of water-supply because the one dangerous disease of all others against which college students should be protected is typhoid fever, the poison of which is in an immense majority of cases introduced into the system through drinking water.”Footnote ⁸⁴ The report criticized the university sharply for its “totally inadequate supply of water. … Upon going to inspect the lavatory we were surprised to find the door locked. … Asking the cause we were informed by the janitor that the water was out. An attempt to flush the water closets verified the statement. Owing to the same cause the baths had fallen into practical disuse.” In addition to its concerns over typhoid, the committee painted a picture of alarmingly primitive conditions for basic bodily functions: “The bearing upon the general health of cleanliness of the person and of regularity of the bowel functions is so well known that it is unnecessary to dwell upon it further.” They did anyway: “In our judgment many a student in the past has suffered in health from habitual constipation, the foundation of which was laid by the irregularities resulting from the discomfort and inconvenience of the necessary walk into the woods, in cold and rainy weather. The researches of modern medical science have shown the evils of constipation to be much more serious than was formerly supposed.”Footnote ⁸⁵

The image of UNC students reduced to dashing into the campus woods for a bowel movement must have been deeply embarrassing to the leaders of a university boasting of both a School of Medicine and a School of Pharmacy. But the efforts to modernize continued apace. The chapel lectures for one week alone in October 1909 continue to show how institutionalized the modern notions of health and hygiene had become. William MacNider from the School of Pharmacy started the week with a talk surveying the three most dangerous infectious diseases threatening the South: tuberculosis, typhoid, and malaria. Charles Mangum, MD, of the School of Medicine followed the next day with a talk on “the proper care of the body” and stressed two fundamental points: “personal cleanliness and second, proper clothing.” Mangum acknowledged that plenty of skepticism remained in the region regarding newer notions of personal hygiene. “Most of you here,” he noted, “take plenty of baths but there are some of you who were brought up by old-fashioned folks who did not believe in much washing. There are few people who really take baths enough.”Footnote ⁸⁶ In addition to the public instruction, the university charged all students a “small annual fee” for medical care by the university physician. “In this way,” the 1905 catalog explained, “the best medical advice is to be had at the least cost.”Footnote ⁸⁷

The students themselves added the importance of good, healthy food to the campus concern over their physical fitness. While students have always complained about food, these observations fit the new discourse on American manhood. “In these modern times,” the Tar Heel wrote in 1899, “we hear a great deal said about physical education; and it is generally agreed that a sound body is just as necessary to enable a man to attain success in life as is a well-trained mind.” From here the student pointed directly to the role the university should play: “This being true, it is the duty of every institution of learning to see to it that its students get good food; for without this there can be no physical development. Unless the student eats wholesome, well prepared food he cannot grow muscles, though he spend many hours each day in the gymnasium.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Clearly, the emerging ideal of white American masculinity as physically robust, powerful, and scientifically engineered had taken root at UNC by the early 1900s. The university itself now promoted the physically healthy male student as part of its very purpose as an institution of higher learning. It was not its sole purpose, however; an 1887 act of the state legislature compelled UNC to grant free tuition to “young men under bodily infirmity.”Footnote ⁸⁹ At the same time, reading many of the same kinds of sources from a different perspective, one also sees that Victorian ideals of manhood were still alive and well. In the earliest editions of the Tar Heel in 1893, the university included in its advertisements the pithy line, “Discipline manly, no espionage.”Footnote ⁹⁰ That said, generational authority still carried weight, as students could not participate over their parents’ objections in activities “entailing absence from the University.”Footnote ⁹¹ Members of the university's Board of Trustees also used Victorian language to describe their 1898 visit to campus:

As these examples indicate, despite the unmistakable steps UNC took toward embracing modern ideas on manhood, the university still cherished Victorian values as well. The deliberative ethos of the modern UNC facilitated the persistence of these values when they were deemed appropriate. Thus students, faculty, and administrators alike continued to invoke and promote the values of honor, poise, gentleness, fair play, self-restraint, and affection for one another.

While the popularity of intercollegiate athletics—especially football—helped introduce new, modern notions of manhood to the South, it also created new opportunities for UNC to continue encouraging Victorian ideas of manhood as well. In 1898, Blake Godfrey of the University of Alabama YMCA shared a train ride with the UNC football team. Afterward, he felt compelled to write to President Alderman with his compliments: “Never in my life did I see such a gentlemanly set of foot-ball players.” Godfrey described the team as “most manly, the most dignified, and the most courteous. … I did not hear one single syllable which was the least bit profane, obscene, indecent, or in any way objectionable.” The boys discussed recent victories “but not in a bragging, boastful way. … Such a team deserves to be victorious,” he added, “and I for one am glad they are.”Footnote ⁹³ In the aftermath of UNC's much-celebrated win over UVA, a poem published above Godfrey's letter, attributed to “A College Girl,” concluded, “Here's to ye knight of ye olden days / Who fought for his lady true: / And here's to the Champions of the South, / The fellows of N.C.U.”Footnote ⁹⁴ When the 1901 football season concluded, the Tar Heel made the best of the fact that, by losing to Virginia and Clemson (and despite winning the rest of their games) the season was “indeed … a disastrous one for Carolina. … Although we have failed in our biggest games this year, the season has not been without glory.” The paper lauded “the gentlemanly, sportsmanlike character of their playing and their heroic efforts against insuperable odds.”Footnote ⁹⁵ These values were not reserved for sporting events. A writer from Athens, Georgia, congratulated the UNC debate team in their 1899 contest against the University of Georgia: “Their dignified bearing, courteous deportment and intellectual ability have been the subject of much comment in the city to-day.” The writer congratulated the “young gentlemen” on the UNC team for representing the institution so admirably.Footnote ⁹⁶

In keeping with the language and imagery of Lost Cause masculinity and sentimentality, the men of UNC, both students and faculty, spoke frequently of their love for one another. In 1898, the graduating law class presented Professor John Manning with a large rug to show their appreciation. In an image fitting for a Victorian tableau, law student John Cook “spoke of the love borne by every member of the class for their faithful instructor, and referred to the gift as being symbolic of the attitude of those who gave it at his feet.” Cook, the story continued, “spoke from his own heart and from the heart of every member of the class and when he had finished there was many a moist eye in the room.” Manning responded “as a father would speak to his children, pointing out to them the way of true and noble living.”Footnote ⁹⁷

In February 1899, however, Manning, “the grand old man” died. The entire university community poured out its love and affection for the professor. The Tar Heel described the deceased as “beloved and respected by all who knew him.” On the editorial page, the student writers elaborated: “There is profound grief in our community, among villagers, Faculty and students, for he was exceedingly beloved.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The resolutions continued the next week, when again the Tar Heel editorial page included a tribute to Manning: “His love of his students, his Christ-like life, and his open and upright dealing in all that he had been connected with, showed him to be a man whom the young men of North Carolina can take as a pattern in whatsoever path of life they intend to take.” Manning was a “noble christian gentleman” and an account of his burial concluded melodramatically, “And as the setting sun was slowly sinking below the western horizon, in the quiet village of Pittsboro, by the side of his parents and departed daughter, was laid to rest all that remained of our beloved and much lamented Dr. John Manning.”Footnote ⁹⁹

As the tributes to Manning indicate, death brought forth intimate declarations of love. When Professor Henry Farrar Linscott died in 1903, colleague C. Alphonso Smith, after describing his growing appreciation of the deceased's many worthy virtues, explained that “my respect [changed] into admiration and my admiration into love.” J. W. Gore summed up Linscott as a man, scholar, teacher, and finally “as a friend—beloved.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Fellow professor Charles Lee Raper added, “I could not feel that I had discharged my obligations unless I had made a simple statement concerning a very dear friend and colleague, Henry Farrar Linscott.” Conjuring up another Victorian domestic scene, Raper continued, “Many a time have I sat with him at the same fireside, smoking, talking, and laughing together, sitting between him and his beloved wife. From our first meeting I was much attached to his very charming personality. … For sixteen months my attachment to him grew until it became a very strong and abiding love.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Student Zeb Judd described Linscott as UNC's “strongest and most beloved professors.” “Old Jack” as Linscott was called, despite only being in his early thirties, “was honored, esteemed, and loved by the entire student body, especially by those who daily sat under him as he lectured.” But now, Judd concluded, “He is gone; his labors are ended; our dear professor is no more; but, as today his body lies beneath the soil of chilly Maine, our bleeding hearts sob beside him there.”Footnote ¹⁰²

As with Manning, the outpouring of tribute for Linscott depicted him as a gentleman. Writers referred variously to him as a “northern gentleman,” a “gentleman without reproach,” a “courteous gentleman,” a “plain, honest, straightforward gentleman,” a “broadminded, cultured, manly gentleman,” a “scholar, a gentleman, and best of all, a friend.” Linscott also had “the gentlemanly dignity of bearing.”Footnote ¹⁰³

It is perhaps not surprising that the deaths of faculty members, considered by students to be old men, would prompt the Victorian language of love and grief—a language some associated with a passing age. When young men of college age died, however, the reactions mixed the modern emphasis on the body with the Victorian notions of nobility, honor, and love. One of the most dramatic episodes revealing the fluidity of these two notions of manhood came with the sudden loss of a campus football hero.

On a quiet Saturday morning in September 1907, word spread across campus: “Story is dead.” Captain of the 1906 football team, Romy Story had died the night before of typhoid fever. This young man's sudden death touched off a wrenching period of mourning and commemoration on campus and in the pages of the Tar Heel. With touching naïvety, one devastated student wrote simply, the “idea never entered our heads that Romy Story would die.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

As in the coverage of UNC football games, some of the memorials to Story emphasized the assertive, fit male—an emphasis that highlighted all the more the tragedy of Story's death since, after all, his body had succumbed in the end. For example, Edward Kidder Graham, a new English professor at UNC, wrote that Story “was a man who needed no words to make his message to his fellows clear and forceful. … Action, the best form of expression, was his natural and unmistakable mode.” For Graham, the “most obvious thing” about Story was “the perfection of his body.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Story's death, however, mostly prompted effusive Victorian expressions of love and tributes to him as a gentleman and a man of character. “We loved the man,” the September 19, 1907, Tar Heel editorial page proclaimed.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The next week, Floyd Simmons paid tribute to “this man, whom we all loved as much as one man is capable of loving another.” Professor Charles Herty described Story as “that lovable boy.” C. B. Spicer added that Story was “affectionate as a son, loving as a brother, and sincere as a friend.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ A UNC student body resolution explained how they “loved him for himself.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Professor Graham, in the same memorial to Story's perfect body, also observed that “one did not need to know him long to feel that his character and mind harmonized with his physique and brought the whole man into a singular balance and poise.” The “total effect,” Graham concluded, was “a massiveness, a safe consistency of fine strength, a confidence that he was eternally there, that made him a truly heroic figure.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Mourners also remembered Story as “a perfect gentleman,” “a gentleman on the athletic field as well as upon the campus and in the classroom,” and “the most gentlemanly athlete I have ever known.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ He was valued for “his meekness, his gentleness” as well as “his bravery, his manliness.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Another tribute noted Story's “gentleness, his self-abnegation, his many acts of kindness.”Footnote ¹¹² Finally, the 1908 UNC yearbook, the Yackety Yack, dedicated to Story, included a poem in his honor that fittingly captured the fluidity of masculinity at this moment: “His life was gentle, and the elements / So mixed in him, that nature might stand up / And say to all the world, “This was a man!”Footnote ¹¹³

In November 1905, prior to Story's death, UNC student F. M. Williams died in the campus infirmary of “inflammatory rheumatism.” Like Story, his mourners also combined remarkably specific references to Williams's fit body with Victorian tributes to his character. A member of the football team, Williams had been “quiet and undemonstrative, yet full of healthful vigor … none was there who had ever known him who had not been inspired with admiration for the rugged manhood revealed in the cut of his youthful face or that spoke in the flash of his dark brown eye.” The loss was great:

Elsewhere campus expressions of Victorian values were more straightforward. During these years, UNC frequently invited former Confederate soldiers to share with the student body their reflections on the Civil War and on life itself. Not surprisingly, many of these former Confederates still invoked the Lost Cause, Victorian ideal of manhood. In 1907, Charles Manly Stedman, later the last surviving Confederate veteran to serve in the US Congress, used Robert E. Lee as the pinnacle of Victorian values still to be admired in this modern, business-driven age. Stedman asked his audience, “When you look upon the statue of Robert E. Lee are you satisfied to think that his countrymen have done their duty by perpetuating his image in marble? Are you satisfied alone with the exquisite charm and manly beauty of his face? Not at all.” Contemplating Lee's life, Stedman continued, led one to focus on the “sense of duty” that was “the cardinal feature of his character, that he loved truth and scorned the desire for money, that he was a man of simple habits, a sincere and devout Christian, an exemplar for all the world.” Continuing to roll out the catechism of Victorian values, Stedman added, “What a story of self-denial, of duty, of valor, of gentleness, of all the virtues which adorn and beautify humanity, his life declares unto you!”Footnote ¹¹⁵

Contrast Lee, Stedman demanded, with the current age in which all that was good from the past age was “in jeopardy.” In one of the few times throughout this period when anyone at UNC referred to notions of manhood as being in conflict, Stedman held forth against the “vast accumulation of wealth by the few, at the expense of the many, the brutal tyranny of money, the insatiate greed of corporate power, the inordinate desire of gain to be used in personal luxury, all tending to debauchery and crime, are seen by all men, and foreshadow, unless checked, the commencement of the decline of the republic whilst yet in its infancy and before its work has been accomplished.” Without the Christian gentleman ideal, the future looked grim: “No race of great men can be bred in the atmosphere of commercial fraud and corporate theft when once the body politic is fully tainted and polluted by the noxious miasma in which they flourish.”Footnote ¹¹⁶

In November 1899, students thrilled to the recollections of Hunter McGuire, known widely in Lost Cause circles as Stonewall Jackson's physician, indeed the man who amputated Jackson's arm. In no uncertain terms, McGuire reminded his audience of Jackson's own background in academia and conveyed the kind of person he was. His talk was of “how one of those men—one of the elect of God—lived and died. … Let me tell you in what Titanic mould was cast that silent professor; what a king he was among men.” Jackson displayed “imperturbable coolness” and “never lost his calmness for a moment.” He was “always, perfectly cool and quiet at a time when the Confederate cause seemed almost lost.” Finally, in stark contrast to the masculinity of Theodore Roosevelt's “strenuous life,” McGuire proclaimed, “Never can I forget Jackson's kindness to me when in sorrow. He was one of the gentlest of men. He had the tenderness of a woman, and he showed me a depth of affection which cannot be measured.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

Before J. William Jones, a popular speaker in Lost Cause circles, moved away from Chapel Hill in 1902, the student paper gave him an appreciative farewell that nonetheless gave a hint of generational distance from Jones's values.Footnote ¹¹⁸ “Old soldiers thrill to the touch of this large-souled Chaplain General of the Confederate Veterans” who “bore the Confederate ‘boys’ in his ‘heart of hearts,’ and it is just this great heart that we younger men respond to while we at times smile at the enthusiasm of a laudator temporis acti [one who praises the past],” the Tar Heel observed. That said, however, “His constant appeal to us to be true to such ancestry such ideals, have not been lost on those whose faces must yet be turned to the future.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

In 1910, speaking on the university mission itself, UNC president Francis Venable reported to his Board of Trustees, “In planning for the efficiency of the great educational machine placed under my care, I have sought first to secure the enthusiastic cooperation of an able corps of teachers, and have succeeded.” In addition to using the language of industrialization here, “the efficiency of the great industrial machine,” Venable also employed modern higher education's new emphasis on faculty expertise. But Venable then added the Victorian touch: UNC professors were certainly more than experts with advanced degrees. They were “men who as cultivated gentlemen serve as models to the young men gathered in their classes.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Venable invoked both models again as he addressed the prominent role athletics and physical fitness had come to occupy at UNC and the need to keep both framed within the university's expertise. “I believe that it is one of the most important subjects which come under the supervision of college authorities. … Health and the sound, strong body,” he continued, “are two very important factors in the future usefulness of the young citizens we are training.” The university's responsibilities were heavy indeed as Venable reminded the trustees that “we have charge of them during the four years of development from youth in to manhood and in this period the physical man can be made or marred.” But more was at stake than the physical fitness of the student body, of course. The Victorian values still mattered: “Then too there are great lessons to be learned on the athletic field, courage, control of self and of others, a subordination of selfish interests for a common success, courtesy toward opponents, the up-hill fight, the straight game and, hardest of all, principle above victory.” Athletics under the university's supervision and expertise functioned as “the greatest laboratory we have for the development of true manhood.”Footnote ¹²¹

Francis Venable's report captured perfectly the blending of the new masculinity with the older Victorian model, all within the modern southern university mission at the beginning of the 1900s. His comments reflect a particular moment in time when the perception of a masculinity crisis drove some social commentators like Theodore Roosevelt and G. Stanley Hall to promote an aggressive, self-consciously modern definition of manhood for the new century. But both Roosevelt and Hall were products of, and were responding to, a changing northeastern society. As Kimmel, explains, “Rapid industrialization, technological transformation, capital concentration, urbanization, and immigration—all of these created a new sense of an oppressively crowded, depersonalized, and often emasculated life.”Footnote ¹²² This was the context in which leading northern universities like Harvard addressed what writers like Hall and Roosevelt defined as the crisis in masculinity.

But, as historians, we should remember that southern universities like UNC functioned in a very different context from Harvard or Yale. Southern universities existed within an economy that was still agriculturally based and within state political systems rigidly—even violently—controlled by white men. They relied on a rural, male population with few recent immigrants and few opportunities for women beyond marriage and motherhood. Southern universities like UNC also had to contend with the lingering devastation caused by the Confederacy's spectacular failure. Yet, despite these serious limitations, this generation of southern universities managed to introduce the ethos of the modern university to the region. UNC, at the turn of the century, advertised its faculty's degrees and expertise, and celebrated the development of its modern facilities—a new generation of leaders embedded the value of inquiry and investigation into the university culture. While UNC certainly did not always live up to its own billing, these were not empty boasts either. The school's openness toward models of masculinity and self-improvement offers one example. Francis Venable's remarks also reflect the fact that UNC students, on campus and at home, shared their world with surviving ex-Confederate soldiers, revered publicly—mythologized, really—for their Victorian sense of self-control, restraint, and sense of honor. Given exclusive access by law and by custom to the university's expertise, the young white men at UNC were relatively free to seek a masculinity that combined what they considered the best of the older and newer models.