American History Reform

University Press of Kansas

Chapter Title: Physical Culture, Discipline, and Higher Education in 1800s America

Book Title: The Rise of Gridiron University Book Subtitle: Higher Education's Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football Book Author(s): BRIAN M. INGRASSIA Published by: University Press of Kansas. (2012) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ch79ct.6

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C H A P T E R 1 Physical Culture, Discipline, and Higher Education in 1800s America

Francis Amasa Walker, a Civil War veteran and president of the Mas- sachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke on college physical culture in his 1893 Phi Beta Kappa oration in Harvard’s Sanders Theatre. Walker argued that the nation needed efficient, healthy, and vigorous male bodies to fuel commerce and industry. Thinking back to his stu- dent days at Amherst College before the Civil War, Walker recalled that students then did not develop their bodies. Instead, each strove to display a large forehead, combing back his hair to reveal a “remark- able phrenological development.” Students back then had cared only for mind, not muscles. As a result of this disdain for physique, the body had become “but a shell, a prison in which the soul was con- fined.” Thankfully, the war intervened and successfully demonstrated the superiority of body over soul, the importance of action over rheto- ric.1 Walker’s memory, while vivid, was only partially correct. He was right that antebellum educators usually did not value strenuous ath- letics. Most were Whig moral or mental philosophers, immersed in a moment when Scottish Common Sense philosophy reigned in Ameri- can colleges. As such, they argued that a proper education—including gymnastics—taught manly self-control. Collegians contended that in- dividual physical culture, not team sports, might teach young men moral and mental, as well as physical, discipline. But both American society and education were in flux at midcentury. By the late 1800s, some academics began to embrace football, the prototypical intercolle- giate sport. They saw athletics as a way that increasingly large, ra- tional universities could train young men’s bodies, minds, and morals for modern life.

Early American colleges stressed a curriculum that trained men for the ministry and other professions. Into the 1800s, colleges usually emphasized the divine unity of knowledge by structuring courses around three branches of philosophy: moral, mental, and natural. The college president, often a Protestant minister, taught ethics, political economy, and a rudimentary version of psychology within a capstone

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course designed to instill mental discipline and self-control. But as American society changed in the 1820s, so did colleges. Influenced by new communications and transportation technologies, America under- went what historians call a “market revolution.” New colleges ap- peared in areas where the market economy (and Second Great Awak- ening religious revivals) flourished, including upstate New York and northern Ohio. In this context, some colleges served as focal points for vibrant, local intellectual cultures, and they also started attracting students who sought practical skills that would help them thrive in an increasingly market-oriented society. In the 1820s, a few budding uni- versities even experimented with practical elective curricula. Some, though, disdained such innovations, fearing that the market would destabilize the nation’s social life, politics, and morality. Therefore, they created or reinvented cultural institutions to mitigate the new economy’s moral effects without negating its economic benefits. Mid- dle-class moralists fashioned a “sentimental” culture of open and hon- est self-presentation, to protect against the social tricksters who prof- ited from capitalism and urban anonymity. But even those who claimed to resist the market economy were often ensnared within its web. Tension grew as colleges tried to maintain a traditional emphasis on discipline in the face of the increasing desire for practical studies. Some educators feared that young men would learn to reap material rewards without becoming responsible citizens. Colleges thus had to find the right mix of utility and morality. Colleges could only respon- sibly build the economy if they taught students to resist the market’s temptations.2

To do this, antebellum college educators, typically followers of the Whig Party, adhered to the “faculty psychology” of the Scottish En- lightenment. They stressed self-control, preaching a balance among mechanical, animal, and rational faculties. New England educators, in particular, argued that each individual had to suppress the passions while cultivating virtues. In this way, he could shape a disciplined self that could resist temptations of the “lower nature.”3 Most famously, Yale College’s faculty articulated this pedagogical ideal in its influen- tial 1828 report on a “Course of Liberal Instruction.” Yale’s professors argued that students needed to learn mental discipline in order to maintain faith and morality in an era of social instability. Responding

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to critics who charged them with “monkish ignorance,” the Yale Re- port’s authors explained that colleges must teach self-control, not offer practical studies—they had to train “mental faculties” to provide minds with “discipline,” not “furniture.” Thus educated, graduates would contribute to political, economic, and social life. By contrast, a less rigorous education would turn students into mere confidence men, their schooling having hardly provided them with broader hori- zons than they would have gained through “conversation in stages and steam boats; or the reading of newspapers, and a volume or two of elegant extracts.” Americans needed well-tutored intelligence, not just commerce. Yale’s professors even analogized instruction to physical culture. They wrote, “As the bodily frame is brought to its highest perfection, not by one simple and uniform motion, but by a variety of exercises; so the mental faculties are expanded and invigorated, and adapted to each other, by familiarity with different departments of science.” As bodies needed gymnastics, minds had to be exposed early to a regimen cultivating “proper symmetry and balance of character.”4

That the Yale Report used this analogy is not surprising, consider- ing the gymnastics craze sweeping New England at that time. Al- though student sports, including early versions of football, date to the colonial period, most educators did not start endorsing physical cul- ture until the 1800s. Modern gymnastics originated with the national- ist Turner movement in Prussia. To cultivate nationalism and military strength during Napoleon’s 1806–1814 occupation, Friedrich Ludwig “Vater” Jahn encouraged his countrymen to study German history, lit- erature, and physical training. He promoted athletic fields as spaces for popular military training and nation building. Student gymnasts, subsequently, became cultural icons during the 1813–1814 wars of lib- eration. Their ideology, however, threatened the post-Napoleonic gov- ernments, and several German states banned gymnastics after 1818. Jahn, who published a treatise on physical culture in 1816, was im- prisoned. Some of his followers were also persecuted. In 1824, two stu- dent radicals, Karl (Charles) Follen and Karl (Charles) Beck, fled Europe. Upon arriving in America these, men with help from German-educated Americans George Ticknor and George Bancroft, located teaching po- sitions. Follen became German instructor at Harvard, while Beck taught Latin at the Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts.

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In addition to language instruction, both taught gymnastics. Follen in- fluenced a generation of students by leading drills in Harvard’s dining halls, while Beck established a gymnastics field at Round Hill. Soon, other schools built their own fields or gymnasia where students could learn bodily poise and stamina.5

This Germanic brand of physical culture was similar to the manual labor colleges of market revolution–era America, another antebellum educational phenomenon that was rooted in European models and transformed dramatically after the Civil War. Based on Johann Hein- rich Pestalozzi’s Hofwyl School in Switzerland, America’s manual la- bor colleges first appeared in places most affected by the 1820s market revolution. Schools like Oberlin College (in Ohio) and Knox College (Illinois) offered instruction in farming and woodworking, alongside academic courses. The goods produced were rarely of artisanal quality and competed poorly in local markets, but educators claimed students benefited from the process. Manual labor proponents argued that col- lege-educated men needed to combine powers of body and mind to survive the stressful mental work they would perform after gradua- tion. Besides benefiting students’ health, this type of education would, supposedly, “provide them with good habits, improve their studies, offer them a means for paying for their schooling, give them a trade to fall back on should difficult times demand it, and undo the tension between people who worked in the professions and people who worked in the trades.” A student trained in manual labor would better appreciate the physical labor of his neighbors, perhaps even if those neighbors were of a different race. The manual labor colleges, like gymnasia or playing fields, were intended to bolster American soci- ety’s ability to profit from the market without succumbing to its nega- tive effects. Nevertheless, the manual labor curriculum largely disap- peared by 1850—and it goes without saying that these few colleges were not successful in creating a classless, or racially harmonious, so- ciety.6

Charles Beck and Charles Follen, echoing manual labor proponents, argued that athletic fields could help tear down rigid barriers of social hierarchy. In 1828, Beck translated Jahn’s gymnastics treatise for Americans. He wrote that physical training, carried out in simple linen uniforms, would bring together “all the different classes of peo-

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ple, and thus [form] a new tie for those who . . . are widely separated by their different education and pursuits of life.” Exercise could also unite physique with morality. Two afternoons of physical activity per week, accompanied by simple rations of bread and water, could teach young men to restrain their bodily impulses. The gymnasium, in other words, was both a radical and a conservative place, promoting liberty while preserving morality. This duality was based in the Prussian Turner movement itself, which was designed to serve both the indi- vidual and the state by cultivating bodies and morals, especially through teaching youth to avoid laziness and unrestrained sexuality.7

Such prescriptions indicated the inherent paradox of physical culture: exercise could promote social leveling, but only if it were conducted in an approved manner. In the long run, the question of how to achieve proper balance between democracy and restraint would haunt educators and football reformers well into the early 1900s and beyond.

In the 1820s, gymnasia were established in many American cities. Follen, who founded Boston’s first public gymnasium in 1826, argued that gymnastics allowed city-dwellers who worked office or factory jobs to participate in mentally stimulating physical activities. In 1827, he predicted that gymnastics would become a standard part of educa- tion and would be “a source of health, strength, and gracefulness” for those whose lifestyles led them “to neglect the cultivation of their physical powers.”8 Follen’s writings and speeches embodied a common nineteenth-century belief about exercise: it was only beneficial if it was educational. In 1835, he proclaimed that exercise should neither provide mere “sensual enjoyment” nor be a popular spectacle that provided a diversion for workers bored by tending machinery. It must elevate society and strengthen the economy by giving workers both mental and physical outlets. Although he alluded to concerns about prostitution and gambling, Follen was optimistic that clerks or labor- ers could strengthen their bodies to resist urban temptations. He com- pared mind and body to management and labor, analogizing an ath- lete’s body to the crew of a commercial sailing vessel, which obeyed the orders of the ship’s captain (or “directing mind”). Workers should balance mental and physical functions the way managers coordinated labor, said Follen. Physical culture provided this balance. Work and play enabled head and hand to interact literally and metaphorically,

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thus promoting both individual and social harmony. But ironically, al- though Follen wanted to keep workers from becoming cogs in the cap- italist machine, he promoted a system that turned workers into cogs and inspired them to find fulfillment in other activities. Urban amuse- ments, including sport, usually served a different purpose than educa- tional gymnastics, by enabling individuals to transgress traditional or prescribed social roles.9

Educators said that because physical training could easily become popular culture, and since popular culture could break down social norms, collegiate physical culture had to be carefully contained in a space located outside the marketplace. Otherwise, exercise could be- come spectator sport, turning students into performers for nonaca - demic consumers. The community had to be vigilant and prevent pop- ular spectacle from undermining gymnastics’ educational purity. In a passage that football coaches would echo (and invert) a century later, Beck described a gymnasium’s proper location and specified who could congregate there. The ideal gymnasium was located outdoors in an elevated wooded area, away from the city, near fresh air and water. It should be surrounded by a fence or ditch denoting where the public realm ended and the educational realm began. After all, said Beck, “A gymnasium is no theatre, and no one has a right to expect a spectacle.” Even though a gymnasium was not a secret place, it had to be con- structed so as to separate the gymnast “from the mere spectator.” The field had to be “arranged in such a manner as to afford a perfect view” for the citizens gathered there, so that everyone had “an opportunity to obtain a correct idea of the character and value of gymnastick exer- cises.” Educators thus walked a fine line between cultivating men and creating spectacle. Instructors and qualified members of the public had to carefully watch or examine play and expel any athlete who re- fused to follow the rules. In this way, members of the “publick” could serve as the “overseers of morals.” But they could not just be seeking entertainment.10 Physical culture was pedagogically useful because it could discipline body and mind, teach morality, and prevent social fragmentation—as long as it did not cross into the realm of spectacle. The rise of late 1800s industrial society, however, would soon make it difficult for colleges to maintain pure, nonspectator sport. Yet educa- tors would still try to control the spaces where intercollegiate sport

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was exhibited, as well as the meanings that spectators crafted in those spaces.

The gymnasium, said physical culture proponents, was a place of surveillance. Like educational institutions more generally—as well as the Panopticon, an Enlightenment-era prison intended to reform in- mates’ minds and bodies through constant supervision—playing fields instilled discipline by correcting the wayward behavior of de- viant individuals. This idea, which had emerged in Europe, also per- meated American culture in the 1830s, at a time when reformers (in- cluding educators such as Francis Wayland and Jahn-protégé Francis Lieber) founded penitentiaries and insane asylums that would pre- sumably promote social order. The 1828 Yale Report even declared that collegiate lessons in discipline extended well beyond the classroom to all places on campus located near the watchful eyes, trained minds, and tutored morals of college officials.11 School sports should not be open to those who sought a show, but they should be open to all who might help teach discipline. Gymnasia were not theaters—they were places where communities gathered to help students learn morality and self-control. The public’s presence ensured that young men shaped virtuous selves, learned to live in harmony with one another, and followed the rules of the playing field, which mirrored those of the larger society. The nation’s future, after all, depended on physical strength, mental discipline, and moral purity. Although the parame- ters of the debate and the type of sport changed dramatically, tension between egalitarian physical activity and moral development contin- ued after the 1800s. The precarious balance between the playing field’s inclusivity and exclusiveness, though, would be more difficult to maintain when college sport was carried out in a gray area located between modern academic institutions and the marketplace of com- mercial culture.

Despite the energies of its early proponents, enthusiasm for gym- nastics faded in the 1830s. Historians attribute this decline to class stratification, the rise of other bodily reform movements, resistance to gymnastics’ military origins, and workers’ unwillingness to seek addi- tional physical activity. Also, other sports gained popularity around this time. In the 1840s, baseball and cricket became common, while prizefighting gripped urban workers, who often preferred violent,

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spectacular contests.12 Yet gymnastics resurged. The Pittsburgh Gym- nasium opened in 1840, at about the same time Turnvereine, or gym- nastics clubs, sprang up throughout Germany. When Germanic states suppressed these organizations after the 1848 revolutions, many peo- ple fled to America and founded Turnvereine in booming cities like Cincinnati or in smaller urban centers such as Peoria and Jacksonville, Illinois. America’s first national Turner convention met in Philadelphia in 1851. Around this time, collegiate gymnastics started to regain pop- ularity. New England colleges like Yale, Bowdoin, and Amherst built gymnasia, as did Oberlin College and Miami University in Ohio. Edu- cators saw gymnastics as better than team sports, which could be vio- lent and even scandalous. In October 1852, Yale students participated in a bloody interclass football game that seemed to mock collegiate dis- cipline. According to the New York Times, this contest, witnessed by hundreds, resembled the Mexican-American War, and one player was even taken “bleeding from the field.”13

Within a few years, Amherst College would document the reasons why educators established gymnasia at the same time they spurned team sports. Nathan Allen, a physician, college trustee, and member of Amherst’s Gymnasium Committee, articulated the logic behind its new gymnasium—and its (nontenured) physical education professor—in 1869. Fourteen years earlier, in 1855, President William Stearns, who had studied gymnastics with Follen at Harvard in the 1820s, expressed his desire for a physical culture department that might save young men from overtaxing their bodies and minds through too vigorous study. Amherst hired Dr. Edward Hitchcock, Jr., an alumnus and re- cent Harvard Medical School graduate, to oversee the Barrett Gymna- sium and direct the physical education department. Sounding like a typical Whig educator, Hitchcock noted his strict rules and his firm belief in surveillance and self-control; students should work off their “animal spirits” “under the eye of a college officer.” In this light, Allen observed that Amherst intended physical culture to become part of the curriculum, just like Latin, Greek, or mathematics. This, he claimed—perhaps inaccurately, as some women’s seminaries already stressed physical culture by this time—was the first instance when bodily development had been made equal to academic subjects. Such equal status was significant because physical education developed

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body and brain in tandem, while also teaching the discipline that any “professional man” needed (in part, by preventing the “nameless” vice of masturbation). Gymnasium exercises were also better than team sports, Allen said, because they were less susceptible to commer- cialism or spectatorship. Yet it turned out that even daily physical ex- ercises could draw spectators. Hitchcock reported 4,787 spectators in 1869–1870, and 3,635 (including 842 “ladies”) in 1876–1877, although usually only a few were present in the gallery at any one time.14 Soon, much larger crowds would pay to watch intercollegiate football, in- spiring much soul-searching amongst educators.

When Amherst initiated physical education, its leaders had already noticed team sports contending for student attention. They did not like intercollegiate athletics because competition between colleges put students in a space not easily regulated by either college, and it would make physical culture open to a crowd of diverse spectators possess- ing unregulated desires. So why did such contests originate? Historian Ronald Smith shows that students created athletic competition as a way to resist the all-encompassing mental and physical discipline of the antebellum college, and thus embodied America’s democratic ideals.15 This is a sound argument, especially for explaining an earlier period when football had few, lightly enforced rules, and college au- thorities opposed it. But the rise and acceptance of organized athletics also signified a shift in mid-1800s education, intellectual life, and cul- ture. While pre–Civil War educators thought gymnastics fostered self- control and were superior to team sports, postwar students began to argue that athletics assuaged the monotony of the industrial-era cur- riculum. Eventually, this argument would be appropriated by coaches, educators, and progressive reformers who saw football as a way to teach teamwork and disciplined efficiency to the nation’s future lead- ers.

First, though, we should be aware that collegiate team sports began in England, at Oxford and Cambridge, in the early 1800s, when stu- dents organized rowing crews and football teams. Some observers, in- cluding Harvard’s Ralph Waldo Emerson, compared Cambridge’s stu- dents to steam-powered machinery and likened the university’s curriculum to an engineer’s apprenticeship. Organized sport seemed to emulate modern education’s competitiveness while fortifying bodies

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against its rigors. But games soon became so demanding that some stu- dents longed for the days when they had been encouraged to develop their minds as well as their bodies.16 English athletic culture came to the United States a decade before the Civil War. America’s first inter- collegiate athletic competition was the 1852 Harvard-Yale crew race, modeled on the Oxford-Cambridge regatta. Seven years later, in 1859, students at Amherst and Williams Colleges inaugurated intercollegiate baseball. Yet this development prompted critiques, especially from some educators. John Bascom, a Williams College professor (and future University of Wisconsin president), complained that Amherst stu- dents demonstrated an “exact and laborious discipline” in their train- ing and play. Such single-mindedness seemed to contradict a more ho- listic vision of physical culture in which individual development was much more important than spectator sport. But by 1860, when the Harvard and Yale gymnasium directors staged a “scientific” gymnas- tics exhibition alongside a regatta, the carefully managed pedagogical exercise of gymnastics was clearly in the process of becoming a sideshow.17

This transformation was representative of larger changes in post– Civil War American society. In a time of rapid industrial growth and intense nationalism, meanings of time and discipline shifted. Modern warfare, which came of age at this time, instilled a new kind of rigid time discipline in soldiers, many of whom shed premodern rhythms of labor after the conflict and became industrial workers—or else tramps who eschewed the daily grind of a time clock by refusing to work or by moving from job to job.18 Postwar physical education reflected the new, more rigorous approach to discipline. By the 1870s, observers noted military drill’s potential for instilling rigid manliness and na- tionalism, and some colleges even tried, with mixed results, to com- bine drill with gymnastics.19 These changes—as well as reactions against those changes—prefigured college football’s popularity as a strenuous, time-regimented game played by students (and a few “tramp” athletes) at increasingly rationalized universities.

The Civil War also contributed to a more complex understanding of humanity because the physicians who aided wounded soldiers studied the nervous system and came to comprehend it more thoroughly than ever before. Subsequently, new academic fields emerged as intellectu-

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als restructured the meanings of mind, body, and social relations within a scientific, physiological framework. Mental philosophy frag- mented into psychology and related disciplines, while moral philoso- phy splintered into the social sciences and natural philosophy became natural science. Late 1800s pragmatic thinkers even reimagined the nature of intellect by arguing that ideas were tools for crafting truths, not representations of divine, absolute truth. People who employed those tools were enmeshed in a complex social matrix, not souls be- holden to God’s unyielding will.20 Modern scholars could not be ex- pected to teach scientific truths alongside moral discipline because the professor was no longer a shaper of morals or a cultivator of student virtue. He was one individual in a network of truth seekers who read, experimented, and wrote, crafting new ideas representing the whole range of human thought and experience. In this context, even sport could serve a purpose in America’s universities by knitting mind, body, and morals together. It could teach discipline to both athletes and the public, and it might even advertise those increasingly rational yet cumbersome institutions in which the production of knowledge had splintered into a wide range of individual fields.

But there was no guarantee that sport would only have academic meanings, or that its meanings could be controlled by those located within the college walls. After the Civil War, historians have demon- strated, competitive sport became increasingly popular throughout American society. Urban baseball clubs turned into professional teams by hiring “revolving” players, charging admission, and relegating wealthier, less talented members to the sidelines. Athletic teams— whether they were professional baseball clubs like the Cincinnati Red Stockings or collegiate teams like those at Amherst and Williams— were able to move between urban centers because of expanding rail- road networks. Railway and streetcar companies were very conscious of their role in this process. They gladly transported spectators to ur- ban athletic parks such as Manhattan’s Polo Grounds as well as cam- pus venues like Yale Field in New Haven (or even far-off Lake Win- nipesaukee in New Hampshire for the 1852 Harvard-Yale regatta) in order to collect fares and even promote tourism or development. Sport also gained popularity because it made the new industrial order com- prehensible at the same time it challenged modern labor’s mores. The

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baseball diamond, for instance, reflected the disciplined coordinates of a commercial city at the same time it became a workplace rife with the language of labor and management. Yet in the same way that the prizefighting ring could symbolize an alternate shop floor that gave working-class men a sense of autonomy or artisanal identity, the dia- mond could also be a space for an enjoyable release from modern life. Even more simply, sport often appealed to working-class Americans who were becoming more strident in their demands for spare time. The ring and the diamond, like the theater or dance hall, were becom- ing urban spaces for leisure, recreation, and the forging of community bonds.21

By midcentury, when sport became a cultural terrain for urban spectators, thinkers like Charles Follen—who had warned against spectatorship in the 1830s—had been all but drowned out by the clanking of factory machinery and the cacophony of the urban crowd. In the intertwined urban industrial centers that created consumer sport, paying to watch others play became spectacular entertainment, not self-culture.22 And when physical activity, whether professional or amateur, became spectacle, it took on unpredictable meanings and traveled routes that Jahn, Beck, and other antebellum college leaders had not endorsed. This point was clearly illustrated by Dudley Sar- gent, who later served as the director of Harvard’s gymnasium. Sar- gent, like vaudeville pioneer B. F. Keith, toured with a circus in the 1860s. Reflecting on his big-top days, Sargent noted his gymnastics troupe’s broad appeal and the diverse reactions they elicited from crowds filled with individuals of varying socioeconomic statuses and tastes. Some spectators appreciated the educational side of gymnastics, but others considered it mere “monkeyshines” similar to working- class billiards or bowling. Under a circus tent both literally and figura- tively big, Sargent transformed physical culture from a display of edu- cational discipline into a cultural commodity. He wrote, “In gymnastics, we used to win applause . . . in college or school towns, where the audience was familiar with the work of the gymnasium, and understood and appreciated the fine techni[que]. In small rural towns, the minstrels, clowns, and side-show freaks were the darlings of the public.” A performer adjusted to the audience’s expectations: “He may loaf before an unappreciative crowd, or exert himself to the utmost be-

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fore people who show interest and enthusiasm.” The exigencies of per- forming for a paying crowd shaped physical culture, turning an activ- ity once intended for a watchful community into mass entertain- ment.23

The tension between spectacle and pedagogy became apparent in the late 1800s universities that invented big-time football at the same time they pioneered a new type of higher education focused on re- search and training large numbers of students in specialized fields. In 1862, during the Civil War, Congress, dominated by the Republicans (successors to the Whigs), passed the Morrill Land Grant Act, which gave each state at least 90,000 acres of land to endow “agricultural and mechanical” (A&M) colleges. Universities funded by this law, like Cor- nell, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Ohio State, taught scientific farming and engineering, subjects essential to the Republican “free labor” plat- form. While antebellum manual labor colleges had intended to thwart social hierarchy by training head and hand in unison, advocates of A&M universities openly promoted universities as places for facilitat- ing social mobility within class-stratified society. Moreover, the cur- riculum was not limited to farming and engineering, as many of these colleges taught a wide range of practical fields, including the sciences and military drill. This law served as a catalyst that eventually changed American higher education. By the 1870s, industrialists started endowing universities focused on specialized research, such as Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Stanford in California, and John Rocke- feller’s University of Chicago. Some older colleges also turned them- selves into universities. By forming academic departments and em- bracing the elective system, which allowed students to select courses of study, these higher education institutions became centers for pro- ducing and teaching knowledge in an array of academic disciplines, rather than for teaching fewer students traditional modes of disci - pline.24

In 1869, Harvard, the nation’s oldest college, inaugurated President Charles William Eliot, a former MIT chemistry professor. His tenure lasted an influential forty years, in which time Harvard solidified its place as a leading university and developed a big-time football team. An educational innovator, Eliot was a prototypical (to use Thorstein Veblen’s memorable phrase) “captain of erudition” who promoted

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electives and organized departments designed to produce scholarship that could build the national economy.25 In his inaugural address, the thirty-five-year-old Eliot explicitly stated that a college could not manage itself like a railroad or textile mill, yet he nonetheless advo- cated industrial methods for higher education. Eliot proclaimed, “When millions are to be fed where formerly there were but scores, the single fish-line must be replaced by seines and trawls, the human shoulders by steam-elevators, and the wooden-axled ox-cart on a cor- duroy road by the smooth-running freight train.” The most highly de- veloped societies had the greatest variety of tools, Harvard’s new pres- ident argued, and Americans needed to develop the multitude of minds that would work together to build the economy. The new cur- riculum, in other words, was another version of the division of labor.26

But not all agreed with Eliot. James McCosh, a fifty-seven-year-old Scottish moral philosopher and president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton), criticized proposals like Eliot’s as a mere path to indul- gence. Colleges should teach discipline and tame animal spirits, not train students to gain material prosperity. McCosh echoed the 1828 Yale Report, stating that colleges should strengthen a student’s facul- ties rather than stocking him with knowledge. In an era when too many men pursued wealth, a college should not try “to make its stu- dents artizans or merchants, or manufacturers, or farmers, or shipown- ers”; it must instill morality. Noah Porter, a Yale moral philosopher, also warned against tailoring education to the practical fulfillment of basic social needs.27

Despite such protests, Eliot’s influence was profound. Although he retained some of the university’s traditional features, Eliot changed its aims and methods. He pragmatically calculated that teaching should remain Harvard’s main focus, since that was the only way to support most research programs, but he also argued that Harvard had to culti- vate academic disciplines and scientific knowledge instead of focusing on the “petty discipline” that ruled prewar colleges. Eliot even im- plied that thorough precollege education would teach discipline, thus preparing young men to study specific fields at university. Therefore, Harvard could “advance the grade of its teaching” to instruct “men instead of boys.” Eliot, claiming that the college would teach mature men of twenty to twenty-five years, was perhaps taking into account

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the increased age of returning veterans, who had already learned dis- cipline in the army. Nevertheless, he belied his mistrust in student ma- turity when stating that Harvard should remain an all-male institu- tion. The university could eliminate “boyishness” and promote “manliness” through the elective system, but the presence of women would inspire men to misbehave and renew the need for onerous rules and surveillance. One day women might study at Harvard, said Eliot, but for now it should merely construct a separate institution for women.28 Such ambivalence about male students’ maturity would continue to manifest itself in Progressive Era debates about football.

The specter of biological determinism, an idea common in a post- Darwin era, also loomed in Eliot’s inaugural. Promoting an educational philosophy that rejected the Yale Report, he argued that students should choose courses fitting innate capabilities, rather than adhering to a prescribed curriculum. An elective system tailored to “natural preferences and inborn aptitudes” relied on enthusiasm, not duty. Students were better suited to some subjects than others, and they did not need to learn discipline. They should just study the specialized dis- ciplines for which they showed aptitude. The new Harvard, though, was not only filled with drudgery. As a student in the 1850s, Eliot had rowed at Harvard, and his postwar address contended that sport could help transform the university. He proclaimed, “There is an aristocracy to which the sons of Harvard have belonged, and let us hope will ever aspire to belong,—the aristocracy which excels in manly sports, car- ries off the honors and prizes of the learned professions, and bears it- self with distinction in all fields of intellectual labor and combat; the aristocracy which in peace stands firmest for the public honor and renown, and in war rides first into the murderous thickets.” Eliot posited that athletics and academics, like war, were two realms where the strongest, fittest, most educated men always placed first.29

By connecting academic success to sports victories, Eliot used an athletic metaphor very different from that of James McCosh, Prince- ton’s president. Once again sounding like Follen or the Yale Report, McCosh saw education as a way to unify body and mind. He said that education should “be a gymnastic to all our powers, not overlooking those of the body; that every muscle may be braced to its manly use; that our students may be able to assume the natural posture, and make

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proper use of their arms and limbs, which so many of our best scholars feel, in their public appearances, to be inconvenient appendages.” Ed- ucation should “strengthen by exercising the intellectual powers.”30

Though both McCosh and Eliot appealed to robust manliness, the older Scottish philosopher’s concept was very different from that of the younger American chemist. For McCosh, manliness entailed proper posture and the ability to function gracefully in public, like a skilled, evenly developed gymnast. To Eliot, manliness indicated abil- ity to win strenuous competitions on the athletic field or battlefield, in the academy or the commercial economy. This contrast represented a distinction between a manliness based on self-control and a mas- culinity based on aggressive physicality, a transition that developed late in the 1800s. In modern society, force and victory counted more than self-restraint or virtue. Even though Eliot cherished the nonutili- tarian undergraduate college at the heart of Harvard University,31 and he later appealed to discipline in Progressive Era debates over football, in 1869 he invoked a brutal version of manliness, a vision that repre- sented the changing aims of late 1800s universities.

Specialized academic fields dominated the changing institutional framework that stressed disciplines over discipline. Industrial-era uni- versities, like the rest of modern society, fragmented into smaller pieces. Each discipline comprised a community of discourse spread out over a broad geographic space but connected via journals and pro- fessional associations. In turn, universities created departments, cam- pus units that were institutional nodes of disciplines. Modern intellec- tual laborers had to adhere to high academic and scientific standards to maintain scholarly credibility. But this rigor often had the unin- tended effect of placing academics in a place removed from the general public. Scholars were based at university campuses, but their work was not always tied to local conditions or problems. Even though many universities would claim a mantle of progressive social utility, ideas or research produced in academic departments were not always publicly accessible. Obedience to scholarly methods and modes of thought led to the creation of an academic world located in, but not always of, the communities it served. By the 1900s, scholars created esoteric knowledge in narrow disciplines and departments, while ad- ministrators used sport to make universities relevant to Americans.

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Alienation was particularly evident in the humanities and social sci- ences by the early 1900s. In philosophy, for example, scholars re- treated into esoteric mathematical proofs and became removed from public discourse. Meanwhile, social scientists created specialized, nonhistorical disciplines, while historians prioritized objectivity over social utility.32 These modern scholars were not necessarily trying to create an ivory tower located beyond the layman’s grasp. Rather, they embraced specialization because they had to produce accurate, cut- ting-edge knowledge in order to prove to employers within a national academic market that they were true intellectuals. Progressive Era psychologists and social scientists worked in this academic matrix, as did early male physical educators and coaches, who eventually carved out an analogous space of their own.

The nationalization of research created intense competition, and it even inspired some educators to theorize a Darwinian university sys- tem in which stronger scholars and institutions survived at the ex- pense of weaker ones. Cornell’s Andrew Dickson White analogized the university to nature, as did Chicago’s William Rainey Harper and White’s protégé, David Starr Jordan.33 Stanford’s first president, Jor- dan was a biologist who promoted the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection; he also pioneered eugenics and often used scien- tific analogies in his popular writings. In 1887, while the president of Indiana University, Jordan wrote that the “law of the survival of the fittest” would eventually eliminate extraneous colleges. He called this double-edged process “the evolution of the college curriculum.” First, it weeded out small colleges that could not compete in a national mar- ket. Second, via innovations like the elective curriculum, competition would eliminate “incompetent, superficial, or fossilized” scholars. As academics struggled for funds and thwarted less productive peers, universities would evolve into mature, competitive institutions able to produce competitive ideas and graduates. Jordan said that the “strug- gle for existence” was a natural law that permeated all of society— even education.34

In a modern society that determined the value of knowledge and truth in a marketplace that was becoming consolidated on state, re- gional, and national levels, universities struggled for funding, stu- dents, and publicity. Some fields, scholars, and institutions thrived

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while others perished. The survival of an instructor, discipline, or col- lege typically depended upon the ability to prove value in both a figu- rative marketplace of ideas and a literal one of dollars and cents. America’s late 1800s universities were pragmatic institutions insofar as each was a tool—or a collection of tools—designed to produce knowl- edge and provide graduates with the skills or ideas they needed to survive modern life. In most contexts, a university or field of knowl- edge could not survive by appealing to divine authority or absolute truth. It had to prove its ability to withstand withering competition. Universities therefore had to maximize their ability to produce accu- rate research and knowledgeable graduates, while minimizing the chance that ideas or students would prove unable to compete in the market economy. This was the basic problem that Harvard pragmatist William James documented in his 1903 article called “The Ph.D. Octo- pus.” Comparing universities to industry (in particular the railroad trusts), James lamented that colleges had become so fixated upon the Ph.D. that true intellectual life suffered because university depart- ments would rather hire a man with credentials than one with talent. The doctorate was a way of proving competency and marketability, not brilliance.35 Although James did not admit it, this method of train- ing scholars was truly pragmatic. The successful academic, by earning a Ph.D., had not necessarily proven his ability to think; he had demon- strated his ability to survive in a marketplace of thought. The compet- itiveness of higher education reflected the spirit of late 1800s Ameri- can society, a spirit that eventually led university leaders to engage in aggressive institution building and to embrace big-time intercollegiate sport.

The existence of a national educational marketplace was not lost on students, nor were they unaware of the significance of athletic compe- tition within that marketplace. Before Jordan, White, or Harper ever proclaimed the relevance of natural selection for institutions of higher education, students at Harvard and Michigan crowed that their uni- versities were the best and most modern, and thus would win the “struggle for existence” against smaller colleges that still clung to out- dated, antebellum moral codes. Some even argued that once small col- leges died out, their abandoned buildings would be used as factories to create flawless machines instead of anachronistic, or obsolete, un-

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dergraduates. In a society that valued strenuous competition, success- ful teams became an indirect way of signifying success in the struggle for academic existence. Students in Ann Arbor, for example, noted that competitive sports were a way to advertise colleges. They even said that once Michigan equaled eastern colleges’ athletic success, public opinion would place it on a par with those competitors. “Be- sides excelling in popularity and in rigor of instruction,” wrote one student, “our University ought to be champion in some of the manly sports.” He eagerly anticipated an era when people everywhere recog- nized both the athletic and scholarly supremacy of Ann Arbor men.36

Students made this connection in an era when football’s popularity and visibility were growing rapidly. On November 6, 1869, just three weeks after Eliot’s inauguration, another turning point in American higher education occurred in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Before a crowd of 200 spectators, two teams of twenty-five students each, rep- resenting Princeton and Rutgers, played the first intercollegiate foot- ball match. The final score was 6–4, Rutgers. Although this match was played as a disorganized kicking game, it foreshadowed the rise of American football, which adapted the game to the realities of indus- trial society.37 The sport quickly caught on, eventually spreading from the Northeast to the Midwest, California, and the post-Reconstruction New South, drawing tens of thousands to games in city parks or uni- versity athletic fields. For many students it gave release, while for the public it provided recreation and spectatorship. But football was not just fun and games. Commentators would eventually see it as a mirror of modern industrial society, a tonic for modern manliness and cul- ture, and a tool for American universities to publicize themselves and strengthen their competitive advantage.

Although interclass football matches took place in antebellum col- leges, intercollegiate football was a post–Civil War phenomenon. While Union officers widely encouraged soldiers to play baseball (New York rules) during the war, troops also played a type of “foot ball.” By the 1870s, baseball professionalized, while football started to become the predominant collegiate game.38 We have already seen that railroads abetted intercollegiate play, but transportation alone does not explain the rise of football. We can also see that the postwar cur- riculum caused young men to find a healthy escape in physical recre-

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ation. In 1867, Michigan students claimed that university coursework depleted “manhood” and physical strength. Worried that mental de- velopment would outstrip physique, one writer argued that modern students needed exercise. Neither cricket nor baseball was adequate, since each only provided release for a few of the university’s 1,200 physically “needy” students. Describing a game very different from the carefully measured and timed sport that took hold less than fifteen years later, the writer contended that football would provide physical activity for many:

What we need . . . is something more republican in its form than ei- ther [cricket or baseball]. What shall it be? Of all the many games played for the health and strength they give, there is no one which admits of such universal participation as Foot Ball.—In this game there is respect paid neither to rank nor person. The veriest lubber may often add materially either to the interest or amusement of the game, by kicking the ball or something else, or by being acciden- tally kicked by some blind zealot because he happens to be where the ball was but an instant before.

This description seems tongue-in-cheek, the writer ironically connect- ing republican virtue with lack of skill. Nonetheless, he indicated that football engaged more players (“the more the merrier”) than other sports. It was democratic because it did not require special grounds; a field could accommodate several games at once; and players did not need special clothing.39

In this account football, like antebellum gymnastics, connoted equality. But unlike gymnastics, it was not designed to discipline bod- ies, minds, or morals. It was simply a way for college men to unwind and enjoy a physical activity that would supposedly save their minds from too much study. Unlike the game created in the 1880s, early foot- ball was not a particularly “rational” form of recreation.40 Players did not occupy special positions or wear protective equipment; referees did not measure downs or keep time. In fact, it is not apparent that there were even goal markers or clear rules. The game was an intramu- ral romp for men who hoped to preserve their strength and manliness. It was also exclusionary. By citing the need to preserve manhood, stu- dents implied fear that women would soon take their places. This was

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a real concern for students at universities like Michigan, where both women and racial minorities were being admitted for the first time, thus challenging a then-prevalent notion that higher education was reserved for white males. Indeed, many continued to see the turn-of- the-century academy as a gendered place of competition. When as- sessing potential faculty members, some university leaders considered a scholar’s manliness, his mental and physical stamina, his ability to build strong academic programs, and even his former athletic suc- cesses. Universities often excluded female professors, arguing that scholarship required manly strength and would drain women’s repro- ductive energy—or would take time away from their roles as wives and mothers. Both research and sport seemed to be manly pursuits that demonstrated institutional virility.41

Although McCosh’s Princeton participated in the first intercolle- giate football game, Eliot’s Harvard initiated the dramatic transforma- tion whereby the sport became rational. In 1874, Harvard and McGill University staged a dual football match in Cambridge, playing one game under Harvard rules and another under rugby rules. The next year Tufts and Yale began playing rugby. But in the early 1880s, foot- ball changed once again. Walter Camp, a Yale student who later served for decades as Yale’s graduate football advisor (amateur coach), intro- duced new rules. The so-called father of American football, Camp dis- liked unorganized recreation. In 1878, he suggested that teams be re- duced from fifteen players to eleven to facilitate field tactics and team travel. Some New England colleges adopted this change in 1880. They also introduced another Camp innovation, “downing” the ball. Ac- cording to historian John Watterson, this rule “marked the great grid- iron divide that led American football down the opposite slope from British rugby.” Instead of massing in a disorderly scrum, the player with the ball set it on the ground to start play anew. This innovation foreshadowed the modern scrimmage. But the new rule created new problems. In an 1881 Yale-Princeton game, neither team tried to cross the goal line, for fear of losing the ball and thus losing the game. To close this loophole, Camp insisted that each team get only three oppor- tunities, or downs, to move the ball forward five yards, or backward ten. This rule resulted in measured plays and yardage lines, the field becoming a gridiron. American football, afterward, was “less like the

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Walter Camp, captain of the Yale football team, circa 1880. This photograph was taken around the time that Camp suggested reducing the number of players on each team and “downing” the ball. Camp, Walter, Pps, Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University.

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spontaneous game that had appeared in the 1870s and more tied to discipline and organization.” It was, in other words, rational—just like the rest of American society, and just like the universities in which it was taking root.42

Why did Walter Camp introduce these innovations, and why did they last? Camp’s professional career and historical context illustrate how social and cultural transformations may have caused football’s ra- tionalization. The late 1800s was a time of rational factory manage- ment, or Taylorism. Industrialist Frederick W. Taylor (who may have been inspired by a mathematics teacher who gave timed tests) fostered efficiency by timing workers and breaking production into small steps. As some historians note, turn-of-the-century Americans were engaged in a “search for order” that facilitated the rise of urban-indus- trial society, while taming its growth and disorderliness with progres- sive reforms. Industrialists and reformers sought to minimize the un- ruly effects of chance in a multitude of ways. Time zones made trains run efficiently; reformers tried to remove gambling from politics; and insurance policies protected businesses and investors. Minimizing risk ensured social and economic stability, as well as geographical consis- tency.43 Camp, reputedly, possessed an orderly mind and disdained gambling, and he applied his distaste for chance or luck to football. Each down represented a rational unit of score production, giving the team with the ball an opportunity to stop play and impose order on the game. The time clock and yard measurements made the game progress efficiently, with precision. Scholar Michael Oriard notes that American football has shown a historical tendency toward a rigorous division of labor, and innovators like Camp sought to lessen chance’s role in deciding the game. New rules limited loss of possession, thus increasing the possibility of consistent scoring and victory. The downed ball and the scrimmage helped tame modern society by tam- ing the way it played. (The scrimmage’s military analogue, trench war- fare, similarly restructured warfare by minimizing the effects of pow- erful new technologies like the rifled musket.) New rules were a type of risk management. By stressing rational measurement and strength over chance and disorder, football was a form of leisure that appealed to modern society. Like Eliot, who applied industrial methods to edu- cation, Camp applied them to sport. Not surprisingly, Camp was also

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an industrialist. After leaving Yale in 1882, he worked for a New York clock manufacturer. The following year he went to the New Haven Clock Company, one of the nation’s largest timepiece manufacturers; in 1903, he became its president.44

The transformation of sport into work was especially visible in Ann Arbor. In 1889, less than a decade after Camp’s new rules were intro- duced, Michigan students discussed football’s new character in terms that eerily echoed the prevailing industrial order:

The players no longer rush about as of old, each playing his own game, but every individual has a definite place to fill, and the cap- tain, by means of signals, manages so as to have all his men act as a unit. The game of college football suffers somewhat from the igno- rance of its principles in the public mind, but remains, neverthe- less, one of the most fascinating and scientific of the heavy sports. It trains and brings into play the highest physical powers and man- liness, and at the same time cultivat[es] decision and self-command even under the most trying circumstances.45

This version of football differed greatly from the simple, “republican” game students played two decades earlier. The writer stressed manly physique while at the same time invoking science. The game was thor- oughly organized, no longer consisting of throngs of students kicking multiple balls in an undisciplined fashion. Perhaps it was too complex for some spectators, but it was still capable of developing physical and mental prowess—perhaps, some would argue, even more so.

Football’s emphasis on team strategies, rational order, and intercol- legiate competition represented a dramatic shift in the training of minds and bodies. Academic life was moving away from the small, an- tebellum colleges and toward the intellectual hegemony of large re- search universities that competed in a larger marketplace transcending the local community. The tasks of industry, academic production, and sport had been rationalized and broken into smaller components to produce consistent results. Whereas earlier scholars such as the Yale faculty had claimed to teach students a holistic philosophy of mental and moral discipline in harmony with God’s will, industrial-era schol- ars theorized the meaning of the modern mind and social ethics within their respective academic disciplines and departments. On a multitude

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of campuses, academic laborers conducted research based on rigorous scientific standards, and they disseminated findings to other special- ists in the same discipline. This academic organization established a rational framework for scholarship and represented the triumph of modernism, a transnational cultural and intellectual movement in which fields of knowledge splintered and proclaimed independence from one another.46

By the early 1900s, only those writers who looked back to nine- teenth-century education with humorous nostalgia could see higher education in a different light. George Fitch’s “Old Siwash” stories, loosely based on his undergraduate experience at Knox College, lam- pooned dumb football players (the most prominent of whom was Ole Skjarsen, a barely literate Scandinavian immigrant) and saw the fac- ulty as an anachronistic, uptight bunch. In a 1910 Siwash novel, Fitch’s narrator called the faculty “a collection of brains tied together” in the job of disciplining students’ lives; the professors sought to snuff out the excitement of college at the same time they acted like a “hypo- dermic syringe through which the student is supposed to get wis- dom.” They could understand Latin grammar or German folktales, but they did not know what made young men tick.47 This was a largely outdated view by 1910, but the language Fitch chose was telling. At many larger American universities in the twentieth century, professors were not necessarily expected to teach students discipline; however, they did comprise a network of minds designed to fill students with knowledge in a number of different fields. Since too much attention to extracurricular activities could stifle the learning process, administra- tors and faculty members would soon turn to departments of athletics and physical culture as a way to impose order in student life and to find a way to teach the discipline that was no longer the purview of the faculty. By the 1920s, though, coaches would become particularly well versed at turning college boys into the celebrities of big-time in- tercollegiate athletics.

Antebellum colleges had aspired to develop bodies through gym- nastics, teaching physical discipline to complement the mental and moral discipline learned in coursework. Such training was essential to preserve virtue in an era when the expansive market economy seemed to be taking over American life. By contrast, post–Civil War universi-

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ties fed the growing industrial economy and established intercollegiate football. Team sports, unlike gymnastics, reflected the rational order of modern industrial society, and they also seemed to provide relief from intense, specialized mental work. Although antebellum colle- gians had warned against turning physical culture into spectacle, postwar universities transformed football into popular spectator sport. The next chapter shows how universities tried to justify and reform a game that could supposedly teach manliness, cultivate the strenuous life for an industrial and imperial nation, and help advertise and unify universities. But it soon became clear that sport’s meanings were not easily controlled in the commercial marketplace. Eventually, educators and the public realized that the football spectacle was problematic. Matches might possibly teach students discipline, but the attention and demands of paying spectators might also corrupt young men or institutions of higher education. This concern resulted in an array of Progressive Era movements to reform football. Through progressive action that crossed local or state boundaries, reformers hoped, sport’s worst elements might be eliminated so its most promising aspects could be preserved.

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