American History Reform

University Press of Kansas

Chapter Title: Progressive Era Universities and Football Reform 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

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ch79ct.7

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C H A P T E R 2 Progressive Era Universities and Football Reform

In the 1880s football was a rational, orderly game for college men in the Northeast. But within a decade it gained national popularity and threatened to bring irrationality into the academy. Football joined an array of leisure activities, such as vaudeville, major league baseball, and amusement parks, which embodied Americans’ penchant for play and desire for diversion. As football became more popular and brutal in the 1890s, journalists, politicians, physicians, and academics clam- ored for reform. They recognized the game’s many problems, yet still saw its educational value. Football might be a commercial activity that could corrupt universities while destroying young men’s bodies, minds, and morals; but if properly reformed and regulated, it might publicize the academy while bolstering American masculinity. Al- though a few outspoken critics suggested intercollegiate football’s abolition in the 1890s, most saw the sport as a strenuous tonic benefit- ing both students and academic institutions. To purify football, pro- gressives created multiple reforms. Some of these were local or re- gional, although the most long-lasting were national. Some also had unintended consequences, as reformers constructed regulations and agencies that eventually turned football into a permanent university ritual.

Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other New England colleges em- braced rugby football in the 1870s, before Walter Camp turned it into American football around 1880. Then the sport moved west and south, mirroring a migration of scholars from the academic establishment to newer institutions. Industrialists built universities in Chicago and Palo Alto, while states like Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota pumped money into burgeoning public colleges. Both types of institutions strove for social utility: teaching students, disseminating knowledge, sponsoring social settlements, pioneering university extension, and filling state government with university-trained experts.1 This was the institutional context in which football flourished, quickly becoming virtually indispensable for any institution aspiring to university sta-

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tus. The sport spread throughout the Midwest in the decade following Michigan’s first intercollegiate game in 1879. In the West, Stanford and California embraced football by the 1890s, at roughly the same time the universities of the urban, industrial New South (especially Geor- gia, Georgia Tech, and Auburn) began play. At two of these southern schools, football was introduced by professors trained at Johns Hop- kins—University of Georgia chemist Charles Herty and Auburn histo- rian George Petrie. Georgia and Auburn played the South’s first big game in Atlanta in February 1892, at what is now Piedmont Park. Van- derbilt University became a power after 1904, when Michigan assis- tant coach Dan McGugin moved to Nashville, where he coached for nearly three decades.2

Intercollegiate sport was visible and entertaining, but while foot- ball joined the late 1800s pop-culture pantheon, its connection to in- stitutions of higher education put it in a unique position. Progressive Era universities had to decide if football was a “manly” pedagogical tool or a dangerous spectacle that threatened higher learning. For

Progressive Era Universities and Football Reform 41

Grant Field at Georgia Tech, 1920. Georgia Tech, along with Auburn, Vanderbilt, and the University of Georgia, was an institution that pioneered southern college football by the 1890s. Permission of the Georgia Institute of Technology Library and Information Center, Archives and Records Management Department.

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those who saw football as beneficial, sport provided publicity and in- stant tradition. The University of Chicago fielded a team virtually from its opening day, in large part because President William Rainey Harper saw it as a way to advertise the raw institution. In 1912, the University of Illinois’s President Edmund J. James claimed that sport could make taxpayers aware of state-funded higher education institu- tions. He also hoped that athletic spectacle would unite these increas- ingly large, unwieldy, and fragmented universities, which were becoming full of new disciplines with specialized terminologies, or- ganizations, and departments. James noted, “We are falling into sec- tions and factions and are wrapped up in the proceedings of our own colleges and laboratories to such an extent that any force that . . . bring[s] us out of that tendency, professors as well as students, is of value.” While antebellum educators had expected physical culture to produce disciplined men, progressives now gave it the new task of providing a common ground for expanding universities.3

Although the sport started in predominantly white institutions, football’s perceived advantages did not stop at the color line. Accord- ing to turn-of-the-century proponents of African-American higher education, football might demonstrate the effectiveness and equality of black schools like Morehouse College, Atlanta University, Fisk Uni- versity, and Tuskegee Institute. To some, black squads seemed so well trained and disciplined that they might even silence white critics. In 1908, Atlanta and Claflin Universities played a match in Augusta dur- ing the Georgia-Carolina Negro Fair. One account recorded that the contest, which drew both black and white spectators to the fair- grounds racetrack, showed that black sport was “orderly” and compa- rable to white sport. Those spectators who “expect[ed] to see a game where there was an exhibition of brute strength . . . having none of the elements of modern and scientific football, were rudely disap- pointed, for the qualities of football displayed by the two Negro teams compared favorably with those displayed” recently by Clemson and Georgia.4

As football swelled in popularity, tens of thousands paid to attend and watch the games. Most spectators, at least initially, were upper- and middle-class white males. Thus it is not surprising that big-time money accompanied the first big-time college sport. For example,

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Progressive Era Universities and Football Reform 43

Yale’s 1892–1893 athletic receipts totaled over $36,000, while its ex- penditures were little more than $13,000. At first, this money en- riched the university. Except for $4,000 used to service the Yale Field debt, the remainder of the profits (about $19,000) was handed over to Yale’s Financial Union. But over time, the money went back into sport. By 1903, football took in over $56,000 of Yale’s nearly $93,000 of ath- letic receipts, but the year’s athletic profit was just a little over $1,000. In addition to regular expenditures on athletics, nearly $23,000 was spent to construct new stands at Yale Field. Harvard also had a lucra- tive program that eventually used ticket sales to build a large stadium. The Crimson grossed over $40,000 in 1894; by 1901 gate receipts to- taled nearly $56,000, and the Harvard Athletic Association delivered $29,000 in surplus to Harvard’s treasurer. Soon, these funds would help construct Harvard Stadium.5

Many claimed that football ticket sales funded physical education, and at many colleges this was apparently true.6 Yet much money col- lected at the gates (or provided by alumni) never entered college cof- fers. Athletes received sinecures or loans, while coaches received pay-

Stagg Field (formerly Marshall Field) at the University of Chicago. This undated view from the early 1900s shows the Gothic quadrangles located across 57th Street. Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

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ments that were barely, if at all, disguised. In 1905 Harvard hired alumnus William T. Reid, Jr., to turn the Crimson eleven into a win- ner. While Harvard advertised Reid as a nonprofessional graduate coach hired to maintain athletic purity, it paid him a $7,000 salary.7

Some money went to stadiums and coaches, but other revenues by- passed the gates entirely, going instead to gamblers and hustlers, who thrived by exploiting the elusive promise of luck. Football gambling thrived because it mocked rational, middle-class morals and restored disorder to what could seem an overly orderly contest. Newspapers sometimes even reported the odds for major contests, including the 1892 Big Game in San Francisco, the 1894 Harvard-Yale game, and the Yale Bowl’s first game in 1914. By the early 1900s, progressives worried that young men learned wasteful habits by squandering their fathers’ money on betting, and athletic conferences sought, without much suc- cess, to quell wagering. In the 1920s, Big Ten Commissioner John Grif- fith stated that betting showed how disreputable members of the pub- lic were willing to undermine higher education by ruining the otherwise morally uplifting ritual of football. Illinois athletic director George Huff warned that the gambler was usually a hoodlum “in a class with the saloonkeeper and only above the confidence man and the burglar.”8

Commercialism and gambling were unsavory aspects of turn-of-the- century football, but the game also threatened to corrupt universities in other ways. The tramp athlete, a significant concern at this time, transcended monetary issues. Like hobos, whose lack of homes destabi- lized society, tramp football players destabilized colleges by rendering academic standards meaningless. They enrolled for the season, helped secure key victories, and then disappeared. Others never enrolled at all. Stanford’s President David Starr Jordan complained that football “ringers” were “a drag” on universities.9 How could the academy maintain rigor in an era of electives if unqualified students enrolled just to play (or watch) a game? Sport was also dangerous because it crossed institutional boundaries. Football pitted colleges with varying standards against one another. If one school had lower admissions re- quirements, even properly enrolled students might give its team an un- fair advantage. To add to the confusion, spectators often had little in- vestment in academic aims. Even alumni were sometimes more

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interested in entertainment than in collegiate purity. Since football was not entirely contained within one college, administrators or faculty could not easily regulate it. Unlike classrooms or gymnasia, intercolle- giate contests were not subject to one school’s rules. Players, teams, and coaches were beholden to the cultural marketplace. Football was sub- ject to the desires of those who enjoyed victories, spectacle, and profit—not just those who operated under university auspices.

Additionally, football was becoming a violent and brutal game by the 1890s. Since Camp had introduced rational rules a decade earlier, coaches and players devised tactics to reduce the risk of losing the ball, enhance the chance of scoring, and increase the possibility of victory. One tactic was the mass play, in which players grouped to- gether to gain yardage through brute force. Such plays were the har- bingers of “scientific” football, played with strict rules and complex strategies. Such play was epitomized by the notorious flying wedge formations, pioneered by Lorin Deland, a Boston businessman (and admirer of Napoleon), in 1892. In one variety of the wedge, six offen- sive players began moving before the ball was snapped, and then sur- rounded the ball carrier in a V that swept down the field with “half a ton of bone and muscle,” crushing defenders. “The victim,” said one newspaper critic, “is generally sent sprawling with his nose broken or his chest crushed, and if the man with the ball gets through the line for ten or twenty yards the critics all exclaim: ‘What a grand play!’” In effect, the wedge helped teams win by minimizing the chance of losing the ball and maximizing the chance of attaining the goal line. Conversely, though, it also led to risks that had little to do with vic- tory. The New York Times noted, “every time a youth steps on the field to uphold the reputation of his college he assumes nearly the same risk that a soldier does on the battle field. Every day one hears of broken heads, fractured skulls, broken necks, wrenched legs, dislo- cated shoulders, and many other accidents of a more or less serious na- ture.” One writer even quipped that a player who perused a book on naval history would recognize the diagrams and the dictum to over- whelm the “enemy’s line.” If Admiral Horatio Nelson “had lived a lit- tle later we should have found him playing his ships in a Princeton V or in a Deland revolving wedge.”10

Rule makers, responding to the public outcry, legislated against the

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wedge in February 1894. Representatives from Harvard, Yale, Prince- ton, Columbia, and Dartmouth conferred with New York’s University Athletic Club to eliminate dangerous plays. Yale’s Walter Camp, then an executive at the New Haven Clock Company, was part of a commit- tee charged with making specific changes. Since these reformers were from the Northeast, the dominant region in both academic life and col- lege football, they believed they were legislating for the entire coun- try. Camp and his cronies abolished the flying wedge, yet did not end mass play altogether. Soon, coaches crafted plays to follow the law’s letter, if not its intent. Even with reforms, therefore, injuries did not cease. Indeed, dangerous plays persisted in distant parts of the coun- try where teams did not observe rules agreed upon by the “Big Three”—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.11

As the Big Three tried to eliminate dangerous plays, Harvard’s Pres- ident Charles William Eliot drew attention to football in his annual re- port. At first, Eliot merely proposed six reforms: eliminate freshman squads, limit games to college-owned grounds, ban graduate students, allow each student to play only one sport per year, reduce brutality, and hold contests only in alternating years. Some of his proposals were more practical than others, but some members of Harvard’s Board of Overseers were receptive. Industrialist Charles Francis Adams agreed that something should be done, since college men spent too much time and energy on football, but he was sure it would not be abolished. Some critics interpreted Eliot’s proposals as a call for aboli- tion, and some accused him of effeminacy or immaturity.12 Even some who supported Eliot misinterpreted him. Yale law professor Simeon Baldwin commented that Eliot had “struck a hard blow” against foot- ball. The game, said Baldwin, besides being nearly as “dangerous to life and limb” as prizefighting, had “tended to lower the grade of scholarship and literary achievements” by distracting students and el- evating athletes to a level of prestige formerly held only by scholarly young men. Soon, Philadelphia’s Art Club held a debate where Prince- ton’s Woodrow Wilson squared off against Cornell’s Burt Wilder. Wil- son, who supported football, said the game developed morality. Wilder, who opposed football, thought it had deteriorated since he played in the 1850s; yet even he believed that appropriate reforms might fix the controversial game.13

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Eliot’s 1894 critiques were not as strident as some imagined them to be, but his attack became harsher after several highly publicized, vio- lent games. In November 1894, Yale beat Harvard in a game at Spring- field, Massachusetts, characterized by an “unusual amount of bad blood and foul play.” Injuries included broken bones, a “contusion of the brain,” and other head wounds. By comparison, prizefighting seemed tame.14 The next Thursday, Thanksgiving, Georgetown half- back George “Shorty” Bahen was seriously injured in a game against the Columbian Athletic Club of Washington, D.C. Bahen fractured two cervical vertebrae, with his spinal cord crushed in between. George- town’s faculty reacted quickly and immediately banned football until new rules could reduce the risk of serious injury. Meanwhile, Bahen lingered for four months in the hospital, where surgeons operated on his spine and restored some sensation to his limbs. Fellow students or- ganized a benefit to pay the medical bills, but by spring Bahen had be- come irrational and was succumbing to “nervous chills.” He died on March 26. Despite the Georgetown Alumni Association’s stated intent to sue, a District of Columbia coroner’s jury refused to pin the blame for Bahen’s death on one specific player. Although the situation was complicated by the fact that the death had occurred in a game with a noncollegiate team, it was not easy for Georgetown to maintain a high moral stance in the dispute. As the Columbians’ Captain Bivens pointed out, both teams had simply played to win.15

More critiques ensued. Two months after Bahen’s injury and the Harvard-Yale debacle, Eliot issued his 1894 annual report. He scathingly wrote that football was unsuited to college life. The rules led to “a large number of broken bones, sprains, and wrenches” and helped those who played “with reckless violence or with shrewd violations of the rules to gain thereby great advantages.” The game had become too risky, and the public no longer believed that coaches could fix the sport. In fact, said Eliot, the public was part of the problem, since players were “swayed by a tyrannical public opinion” to which even the worst “gamblers and rowdies” contributed. The possibility of death was ever present, and urban spectators resembled “the throngs which enjoy the prize fight, cock fight, or bull fight, or which, in other centuries, delighted in the sports of the Roman arena.” Eliot crit- icized the belief that more officials or penalties would solve football’s

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problems. Not only was it difficult to find impartial officials, but a game that required such scrutiny was “not fit for genuine sportsmen.” Eliot did not oppose physical culture. He merely disdained the sensa- tionalism and expense of collegiate athletics, which now repulsed pro- ponents of “simple and rational manly sports.”16

By 1895, Eliot had been Harvard’s president for over two decades and was one of the nation’s most influential educators. His words echoed through the press, inspiring strenuous defenses of football. Walter Camp was one apologist. In 1894, after mass play reform and Eliot’s initial critiques, Camp wrote Football Facts and Figures, a book of sympathetic testimonials and doctored statistics. Camp claimed that carriage-riding and sailing were more lethal than football, and he cited numerous authorities, including school headmasters, football players, and college professors, who proclaimed the sport’s physical, mental, and moral benefits. For example, Yale mathematician Eugene Lamb Richards argued that the game made students healthier, instilled self- control, reduced discipline problems, strengthened religious faith, and created citizens who could defend their nation. Even Harvard Law Professor James Barr Ames, a contributor who thought the game too brutal, conceded that Camp’s statistics would certainly show that the public overstated the “physical risks” of the game. Football’s de- fenders often invoked the book.17

Younger university leaders, especially William Rainey Harper and David Starr Jordan, tended to favor football, which resembled their strenuous university-building methods. Harper made Chicago into an imposing institution by raiding other faculties, and he promoted the new venture through football. Indeed, Coach Amos Alonzo Stagg turned Chicago’s Maroons into a dominant midwestern program known as the “Monsters of the Midway” long before the NFL Chicago Bears inherited that moniker. Harper, realizing football’s usefulness, took a pragmatic stance on brutality. He blithely proclaimed, “If the world can afford to sacrifice the lives of men for commercial gain, it can much more easily afford to make similar sacrifices upon the altar of vigorous and unsullied manhood.” Meanwhile, at Stanford, Jordan proclaimed football’s positive effects on character, bodies, and intel- lect. Football, he said, promoted “manliness.” While there were “pos- sibilities of evil and possibilities of excess,” the game had not yet

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reached that point. Football was “manly” and it even counteracted debilitating fin de siècle culture by cultivating “bodies as well as brains.”18

Harper and Jordan, like many late 1800s university leaders, were well-known public figures whose statements often appeared in the press. In 1894, Presidents James B. Angell of Michigan and Jacob G. Schurman of Cornell contributed to a roundtable discussion in The Fo- rum regarding football’s brutality and immorality. Both saw football as a valuable sport in need of reform. Angell said it instilled “temperate and regular habits of living, vigor and agility of body, quickness of perception, readiness of resource, manly courage, skill in planning, and subordination of the individual will to the cooperation of the team.” Michigan’s aging president echoed antebellum Whig educators’ belief in moral discipline, but he had abandoned their distrust of team sports. By claiming that football taught teamwork, Angell thus fore- shadowed twentieth-century coaches, such as Michigan’s Fielding H. Yost, who expressed football’s numerous benefits for players and spec- tators. Likewise, Schurman discussed the game’s positive characteris- tics. Cornell’s president thought that football should be less brutal and not distract from study, but he also contended that since strenuous sport had “deep roots in the nature of man,” as many students as pos- sible should participate in athletics. Football, he implied, echoed hu- man development and thus adhered to the Darwinian order of modern society.19

Other commentators took this idea further by explicitly connecting football to racial development. Eugene Richards, the Yale professor quoted in Camp’s book, argued that football was essentially a mental game that cultivated discipline. In an 1894 issue of Popular Science Monthly, he said that the sport developed muscular strength as well as manliness and “quickness of mind.” Like Angell, Richards also em- braced teamwork. He argued that football taught submission to au- thority and resembled military discipline. In this usage, discipline meant something different than in the 1828 Yale Report. While gym- nastics supposedly tamed animal spirits and trained body and mind to work together, team sports trained multiple bodies and minds to act in concert. Richards, in fact, directly tied sport to American imperialism. “For a virile race, like the Anglo-Saxon,” he noted in the Yale Medical

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Journal, “the dangerous sports have always had the greatest fascina- tion, because they call for just those qualities which make that race the dominant race of the world. Foot-ball is one of these sports.” Like other turn-of-the-century scholars, Richards argued that football aug- mented American virility because the stress of urban life and the over- whelming mental work of university studies wore down nerves. “The circle of knowledge has become so wide that to keep pace with its in- crease, the minds of our children are crammed with knowledge from morning to night.” Football corrected such evils, enabling colleges to graduate “men of force and energy” who combined “strong body, en- ergetic will and mental culture.” Through strenuous sport, colleges could save civilization by preventing overcivilization. Instead of blindly following writers who opposed football, the public should read more about the game and understand its suitability for colleges.20

Physicians also muted fears about football, stressing instead sport’s ability to develop strong, educated men. In the 1894 Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, Dr. William Conant (who was also quoted in Camp’s book) wrote that everyone knew that no young man with an underdeveloped body could think “great thoughts.” Other prominent Bostonians—including public health officials, Cambridge’s mayor, and MIT’s Francis Walker, who had delivered his Phi Beta Kappa oration the previous year—argued that colleges should regulate, not abolish, sport.21 While such concerns originated in the Northeast, a fatal brain injury nearly ended football in the South. In October 1897, the Uni- versity of Georgia’s Richard “Von” Gammon sustained a concussion before 5,000 spectators in Atlanta, and he died the following day. Georgia and some of its rivals immediately ended their season, while Atlanta’s clergy condemned football as “uncivilized” and the state leg- islature quickly passed a bill banning it. Yet some lawmakers, includ- ing Gammon’s hometown representative, thought football should be reformed. Professor Charles Herty proclaimed that the state university needed to keep football and build a better gymnasium, which would benefit mentally overworked students who spent all day cooped up in classrooms. If the present trend continued, students would lose “vital- ity” and become “sluggish in brain and torpid in liver, without mus- cle or energy.” Gammon’s mother even asked that her son’s death not become an excuse to end the “manly sports” that he loved. When the

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press called for a veto, Governor William Atkinson obliged, defending football as a sport that developed “the highest and noblest type of our race.” As the Olympics had once trained men of ancient Greece, foot- ball prepared “young men for the life of today.” Echoing Richards, Atkinson proclaimed, “There is no quality that a nation can less afford to lose than its aggressive manliness.”22

Critics cared about men’s bodies, but they were also concerned about commercialism and its negative effects upon universities. Even proponents argued that the game’s public exposure should be limited. By the 1890s, though, it was becoming apparent that sport’s meanings could not be dictated by academics. Millions of Americans attended the contests or read about football. Although most were middle-class white males, the crowd was expanding to include a number of less ed- ucated Americans as well, and this multitude often possessed little for- mal connection to the academy or did not share upper-class concep- tions of sport’s meanings. Indeed, it is likely that many readers and spectators made scarce distinction between college athletes and popu- lar entertainers. Americans were starting to imagine football as an- other cultural ritual around which to construct meanings of play, work, race, and gender relations. In this climate, press coverage could be problematic. University leaders like James Angell resented newspa- pers that criticized colleges for ineffectively regulating football, yet sold copy by exposing scandals. Angell contended that the sport’s negative aspects originated largely from sensational media attention. Young athletes who had not yet mastered the art of disciplined self- control would take questionable risks when thousands of spectators and “millions of newspaper readers” were watching. Angell and Schurman, like Eliot, argued that matches should be limited to cam- pus, not played in large, malevolent, and distant cities. Games were for students. When it was treated as commercial entertainment, football was effectively “prostituted.”23

The desire to remove physical culture from the gaze of paying spec- tators recalled Charles Beck’s 1828 English translation of Vater Jahn’s gymnastics handbook. If sport became just an entertaining urban spectacle, it would tempt students to seek easy money and play to the crowd, rather than improving their physiques and morality. We can see, though, that most late 1800s football reformers were not so much

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adamant about eliminating commercialism but rather were interested in simply regulating it. Regulations were often forged in regional ath- letic conferences, agencies that transcended institutional or state boundaries and exemplified a late 1800s era when large associations took over American life. The first formal athletic conference was the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives, later known as the Western Conference or (depending on its number of members) the Big Nine or Big Ten. In 1895, Purdue’s President James Smart proposed that the leaders of major universities in the Midwest, including Chicago, Illinois, Minnesota, Northwestern, and Wisconsin, meet to discuss football. Smart, writes historian John Watterson, wanted to re- form football without giving up access to urban spectators and their money. By initiating an interstate athletic conference, he used the same logic as the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act, which regulated rail- roads by closing loopholes resulting from varying state policies. The Western Conference restricted competition to member institutions and crafted eligibility rules, thus protecting universities’ academic reputa- tions while at the same time monopolizing ticket sales. Other regions would later form similar regulatory agencies. Like 1800s gymnasts, the founders of the earliest athletic conferences claimed sport was peda- gogy, not entertainment. They hoped to minimize corruption while preserving sport’s presumptive benefits. Regional associations allowed similar educational institutions to band together, meet perpetually at regular intervals, and craft regulations to transcend local policies. But they did not necessarily try to quench Americans’ desire for athletic spectacle.24

The unruly spectators who led universities to consolidate control over football caused problems—including injuries, deaths, or expen- sive lawsuits—when they crowded into fields designed primarily for profit, not safety. In the 1890s, the University of Chicago built stands on its campus athletic grounds, Marshall Field. Complications ensued when the university rented the field to other colleges, thus essentially turning it into a commercial venue located on campus. This arrange- ment became problematic when, in 1902, a section of the grandstands collapsed during a game between Wisconsin and Michigan. Sounding like newspaper accounts of a violent game, spectators (perhaps goaded, as one lawyer claimed, by the city’s “ambulance chasers”) re-

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ported broken bones and damaged nerves; some even requested free football tickets as compensation. Lawyers representing each univer- sity debated which institutions were liable: the host campus, the uni- versities that scheduled the game, or all three? Chicago’s lawyers thought it unfair that the university should receive a small sum for renting the grounds and then have to pay a greater sum in settlements. But Michigan law professor Victor Lane argued that the game was a three-way business venture. Chicago had clearly known the risks of selling tickets inviting the public into a facility located on its campus, while the Universities of Michigan and Wisconsin had acted responsi- bly by quickly settling claims out of court.25 This incident proved to be a cautionary tale. Universities would eventually reduce the chance—or cost—of disaster by limiting contests to campus grounds, building sturdier structures, and buying insurance policies.

Football’s popularity kept growing at the turn of the century, a time when it still had many academic proponents, such as University of California president Benjamin Ide Wheeler. More scandals, though, soon led some observers, including Wheeler and Stanford’s David Starr Jordan, to change their opinions. After the turn of the century, Jordan argued that athletes who received intricate directions or spe- cial treatment could not learn football’s true lessons. He did not want to ban football—he merely asked whether the game, as played, was living up to its potential. Sport should showcase players’ strength and skill, not coaches’ strategies. Jordan said he firmly believed in colle- giate athletics, yet thought that sport lost its educational value when colleges hired “gladiators”; he would prefer that football be banished for a decade and “athletic fields closed . . . for fumigation than to see our colleges helpless in the hands of athletic professionalism,” as they seemed to be in 1903. Supporters of military education also critiqued football. One observer contended that spectator sports placed An- napolis midshipmen under the “gaze” of the general public, thus dis- tracting from their naval training.26

Reformers typically hoped to remove the taint of commercialism without eliminating strenuous college sport. One proposal flowed from the pen of Chicago’s William Rainey Harper, who said that since football was a public relations tool, it could not be managed by stu- dents, and it should not be financed through ticket sales. It was prob-

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lematic that the “physical culture and athletics” department was sup- ported by the masses. “Shall the university depend for the support of one of its departments upon a crowd, a large proportion of which treats the game as it would treat the race-course, and patronizes it be- cause of the opportunity which it furnishes for gambling?” Should the institution “cater thus to the lowest passions of the multitude?” The answer was no. Harper wanted to publicize the university, but he dreaded any influence the public exerted upon the academy. Not only did the wrong people patronize college sport, he argued, but the right people were no longer able to do so. Ticket prices had climbed so high that many students and faculty members could not even attend the games. The athletic department had to find a way to retain academic respectability while still paying its bills. As early as 1903, Harper broached a plan for athletic endowments to Presidents Angell (of Michigan) and Charles Van Hise (Wisconsin), and in 1904 he published a piece in Harper’s Weekly where he reasoned that physical culture (“a regularly recognized department in many institutions, co-ordinate with other departments of the university”) should receive institu- tional support equal to that of other departments. Such support would reduce college athletics’ air of illegitimacy, reduce the intensity of ri- valries, and “lift . . . physical education to a plane co-ordinate with that of intellectual education.” In turn, football could become a true “gentleman’s sport.”27

Harper’s desire to make football genteel was not uncommon, but his call for endowments was. Although his suggestion was idiosyncratic and did not gain many adherents, Harper seems to have understood the relationship among the academy, sport, and the public better than most of his contemporaries. Many progressives wanted to purify foot- ball and remove the taint of the crowd from college life, but they were loath to cut off the cash flow sport provided. Many seemed to want a profitable yet pure spectacle, a game that made huge sums of money while simultaneously demonstrating a commitment to discipline. But Harper was more realistic. He knew that the only way to preserve cul- turally valuable strenuous physical activity without corrupting uni- versities was to find a steady revenue source not derived from the masses. Yet even if it demonstrated a realistic understanding of the complexity of intercollegiate athletics, Harper’s proposal itself was un-

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Progressive Era Universities and Football Reform 55

realistic. Many universities dependent upon football revenue or pub- licity did not possess benefactors with pockets as bottomless as those of Chicago tycoons like John D. Rockefeller, Charles Yerkes, or Mar- shall Field. Indeed, the Chicago Tribune reported the laconic response from Ann Arbor and Madison: “Where can we get the $500,000?”28

As Harper’s proposal for athletic endowments made little impact, anti-football opinion mounted in the early 1900s. Newspapers re- ported at least fifteen players dead in 1902, and another fourteen in 1903 (although many were high school students and several did not actually die). The year of crisis was 1905, when football, like pure food and drugs the following year, became a target of progressive reform. Some of the loudest voices calling for reform were familiar. Eliot con- tinued to argue that sport distracted from academics; showcased

William Rainey Harper built the University of Chicago’s academic reputation and also initiated big-time athletics at the institution. In the early 1900s, he proposed endowments for athletics so that college football could remain respectable as well as popular. Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

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“brawny” bodies rather than “slighter, quick witted men”; and en- couraged immoral behavior.29 One new critic was President Theodore Roosevelt, who had recently mediated an end to the Russo-Japanese War and supported the Hepburn Act, which bolstered the Interstate Commerce Act. In October 1905, Roosevelt called representatives from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to the White House. This group included Walter Camp, who had attended Yale when Roosevelt was at Harvard. The president was particularly sensitive to football’s dangers. His son, Ted, had recently been injured while playing on Harvard’s freshman team. Roosevelt liked football, but thought his guests should work to reform the game so it embodied “fair play”—not brutality. He wanted young men to play manly sports, but he also hoped to protect them from the physical and moral effects of the strenuous life. He was aware that public opinion against football brutality was rising, and that grid- iron deaths would eventually cause football’s demise. Camp and others assured Roosevelt that they would implement reforms.30

Roosevelt’s call for reform was widely publicized. And while Eliot was skeptical that men who had long been aware of the sport’s nega- tive aspects could successfully implement reform, others were more optimistic. Cornell’s President Schurman argued that Roosevelt was an ideal leader for athletic reform and suggested that a convention of uni- versity representatives be held in Washington. Some commentators even proposed a national governing body, a “Supreme Court” or “Na- tional Board of Review” that would oversee amateur athletics. The members of this hypothetical body might include Roosevelt and Eliot, as well as Presidents Harper of Chicago, Jordan of Stanford, Angell of Michigan, Arthur Twining Hadley of Yale, Woodrow Wilson of Princeton, Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia, and Francis Preston Venable of North Carolina. Amateur sport luminaries like James E. Sullivan and Luther Gulick of the Amateur Athletic Union and Caspar Whitney of The Outing might also serve on the board. This body would set eligibility standards and serve as a “court of final resort,” thus protecting amateur sport’s potential.31 While this national, pro- gressive agency was not actually formed, a national convention was soon held in New York City that would lead to sweeping changes.

Reforms happened, in large part, because of the 1905 season’s sen- sational violence. That year, eighteen men died on college and high

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school gridirons. In the highly publicized Harvard-Yale game on No- vember 25, a Yale defender broke a Harvard ball carrier’s nose on a late hit. The same day, Union College’s Harold Moore died of a cere- bral hemorrhage in a contest against New York University. NYU’s Chancellor Henry MacCracken, shocked at Moore’s death and even more incensed at accusations against the NYU team, called for foot- ball’s reform or abolition. He outlined three reasons for ending the sport as then played. First, it was murderous; while other sports might cause injuries or fatalities, football caused both deaths and “subtle injuries to the physical organs” that might prove to be even worse than death. Second, only a few large, skilled “gladiators” were able to play the game and benefit from exercise. Third, and most damningly, football had become a commercial spectacle unsuitable for institutions of higher learning. MacCracken made a striking compari- son. Suppose Americans learned “that the great universities of Ger- many had decided to permit the student corps to fight their duels be- fore grandstands full of spectators in Berlin or Vienna for $2 admission per head! Would it not degrade them at once from their high esteem?” Americans, said MacCracken, were so obsessed with moneymaking that they were willing to overlook the “sordid charac- teristics” of intercollegiate football and the shadow it was casting over the nation’s universities.32

Football’s critics were already primed for outrage, since the middle- class reform press had recently published muckraking articles about football. In summer 1905, McClure’s Magazine, which had published Lincoln Steffens’s influential “Shame of the Cities” municipal reform articles two years earlier, issued a piece by Henry Beach Needham on football’s commercialism and professionalism. Needham critiqued the coaches who had to win at all costs. Along with alumni and under- graduates who were hungry for football victories, professional coaches and trainers were destroying college athletes. Equally critical of college football commercialism was Edward S. Jordan, a young Mil- waukee newspaper reporter and University of Wisconsin alumnus who wrote four articles published in Collier’s in November 1905 as “Buying Football Victories.” This series, very similar to Steffens’s ear- lier muckraking pieces, exposed midwestern football’s impurity. Jor- dan wrote that coaches’ recruiting practices turned players into

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“grafter[s],” and he uncovered an $80,000 slush fund at Chicago. Cor- ruption permeated the region’s colleges, he said, including the public universities that were supposed to be fostering progressive reforms on the state and municipal levels. He particularly targeted university ad- ministrators like Minnesota’s Cyrus Northrup who prized popularity over morality and allied themselves with the “bleacher crowd” rather than with progressive ideals. Even worse, Jordan charged the Univer- sity of Wisconsin in Madison, a bastion of progressivism, with field- ing pro players and enrolling athletes in “snap” (or blow-off) courses. A law professor even arranged state sinecures for athletes who “packed political mass meetings, cheered and hissed speakers in turn, and gained a livelihood by a perversion of the fundamental principles of the service of the State.” Clearly, college football was not living up to its progressive potential.33

The confluence of deaths, injuries, media outrage, and White House attention led to a movement, or a congeries of movements, to banish football’s evils. The most enduring football reform was the creation of a national supervisory agency. In response to MacCracken’s call, on December 8 (two weeks after the violence of November 25 and not long after the publication of Jordan’s articles), representatives from thirteen colleges convened in New York City. Union College, NYU, and Columbia favored abolition, but they were in the minority. Delegates from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, along with seven other colleges, rallied in favor of football. Three weeks later, sixty institu- tions from the East and Midwest convened at a larger conference, which created the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS). This organization was renamed the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in 1910. At the first annual meeting in 1906, the group’s president, West Point’s Major Palmer Pierce, articu- lated their progressive aim to make football safer and more moral. He observed that institutions all over the nation had “banded together to control more effectively college athletic sports in the interest of educa- tional work, and of amateur standards”; by establishing a new rules committee, they had made “a vast improvement in the game of foot- ball, both in regard to the risks to life and limb [that] were felt to have been too great, and especially in the better moral tone of the play.” Amos Alonzo Stagg, Chicago’s head coach and professor of athletics,

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also touted that the organization would raise standards of “honesty, fair play, and manliness.”34 The IAAUS pursued this goal by proposing new rules and adding better officials. But the delegates were not satis- fied with a few modifications. They wanted to construct an organiza- tion to perpetuate the process of reform. While the IAAUS’s founders intended it as a “governing body,” they soon realized the impossibility of imposing their will on many institutions. Instead, they shaped it into an advisory body that promoted amateurism and discouraged commercialism.35

The IAAUS created a new football rules committee, which cooper- ated with Camp’s older group. Based on a suggestion from Bill Reid and others at Harvard, this joint rules committee considered several major reforms: increase the number of yards necessary for a first down from five to ten; raise the number of attempts to achieve a first down from three to four; add a neutral zone between the teams (so officials could spot rule infractions); and legalize the forward pass. According to sport historians, the forward pass, the most innovative of these new rules, was intended to reduce brutality and create a more “open” style of play, thus making football safer and more exciting.36 But it was also about promoting disciplined play, reducing unethical conduct, and therefore making the game more honest and transparent. According to some proponents, the more open style of play would allow for more ef- ficient surveillance by spreading players out on the field and subject- ing the game to public scrutiny. One writer even argued that open play did not result in fewer injuries, but it still produced better foot- ball, since it enabled referees to “see the character of every man’s play” and more easily punish players for breaking rules. In such a game, play would unfold in a disciplined, moral, and fair manner.37

Like the 1906 Meat Inspection Act, the new rule was designed to make football’s conduct visible to authorities and the public—and thus sub- ject to regulation, reform, and punishment, if necessary. It also fore- shadowed Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 “Fourteen Points,” which pro- claimed that nations should conduct international relations via “open covenants.” The forward pass would also minimize the effectiveness of sheer force, thus reducing the number of concussions and spinal in- juries, while at the same time reintroducing the element of chance. Unlike mass plays, which helped teams retain possession of the ball

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and methodically gain ground a few yards at a time, the riskier for- ward pass could result in a range of outcomes: large or small amounts of gained yardage, an incomplete pass, or an interception. In this way, the new type of play was similar to Roosevelt’s trust-busting efforts, which broke up monopolies and restored market competition. In 1908, The Outlook even argued that the open game gave smaller colleges a chance to compete; in 1914, the New York Times observed that “luck” was a major factor in the forward pass era.38

Initially, the impact of the 1905–1906 reforms was limited, mostly because of the continued presence of the old committee. Camp resisted the forward pass and critiqued it as an unscientific tactic that reintro- duced an element of chance that his reforms had effectively eliminated in the 1880s. But by 1910, as younger rulemakers grew in national stature and influence and older ones became less prominent, even Camp grudgingly admitted that the forward pass had become scien- tific.39 The IAAUS represented, in many ways, the triumph of Progres- sive Era reform over Gilded Age excesses. It was a national organiza- tion, created when universities banded together to reduce the influence of the market and untutored public opinion upon intercolle- giate football. Through this agency, educators tried to limit popular influence on big-time sport, a lucrative university activity that indi- vidual institutions could not easily control. By providing a forum in which many institutions spread out over a large geographic area dis- cussed reforms and collectively issued guidelines, the IAAUS was a national reform organization that resembled other progressive bodies. This analogy was not lost on its founders. Pierce explained:

This Association is the one means existing for organized effort for improvement of collegiate athletics throughout this country. Mod- ern civilization demands concentration. As a result there have arisen all sorts of societies and associations. . . . There is scarcely a trade or profession which has not a general organization. The doc- tors, the lawyers, the dentists, the engineers, have organized with certain definite ends in view. . . . Labor and capital have found it advisable to form so-called unions and trusts. The latest addition is the proposed organization of a National Health Society, announced in the New Year’s Papers.40

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Modern society’s greatest reforms did not happen via radical action, and the IAAUS was no exception. The apparatus of change in a nation connecting far-flung “island communities” together had to be bulky and, preferably, national in scope.41 While the Western Conference was a regional attempt by several universities to reform football jointly, the IAAUS encompassed the whole nation. At its annual con- vention, delegates gathered to analyze college athletics and suggest regulations that regional conferences or individual institutions might adopt. The organization also encouraged all American colleges to join, so it could have the widest possible influence. If this goal were achieved, it would be nearly impossible for a few institutions to evade reform. At the time of the IAAUS’s founding, the only significant pro- gressive characteristic that college athletics lacked was a cadre of pro- fessional experts. But coaches and athletic directors, the experts who shaped a national profession with distinct standards, expectations, and specialized discourse, were already starting to appear at this time, as we will see.

The IAAUS/NCAA became the dominant voice in football reform, but it was not the only one. Several alternate reforms were suggested in the early 1900s. While some never took off, others lasted until the World War I era. In October 1905, shortly after Roosevelt called for re- form, a British association football (soccer) team, the “Pilgrims,” toured the United States and Canada, hoping to add international competition by persuading American colleges to convert to the kick- ing game.42 While this potentially dramatic change to intercollegiate football was not implemented, a similar change did happen on the West Coast, where several colleges replaced the “American” game with rugby. This seismic shift was inspired by problems similar to those plaguing the East, but took a different turn in California, which had its own progressive attitudes and movements. A few days after the dis- astrous Saturday in November when Harold Moore died and the Har- vard-Yale game was marred by the late hit, Benjamin Ide Wheeler wrote Yale and Harvard, calling for concerted action. West Coast uni- versities could not easily go their own way because their students had to play the same sort of football embraced elsewhere in America. Cali- fornians were in a unique position because they wanted to preserve intersectional competition, but they had little say in national reforms

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because of their relatively isolated location. By December, unhappy with the direction of football, Stanford and Berkeley officials con- vened to discuss reform. They were particularly interested in adopting New Zealand–style rugby. Wheeler warned Yale that he would go so far as to create an entirely “separate Pacific Coast football game” and insisted in the Los Angeles Times that a new game should be created.43

A long-standing proponent of physical culture, Wheeler had served as a judge at the 1896 Olympics in Athens; and while a Cornell classics professor in the mid-1890s, he attended at least one Cornell-Harvard game in Manhattan. By 1906, though, he was done with football. In the American Review of Reviews, edited by Albert Shaw, Wheeler commented that although football could develop “manliness,” it had become a sport of military violence and industrial precision. Teams were “rampart-like lines of human flesh,” with the offense firing “a missile composed of four or five human bodies . . . with a maximum of initial velocity against the presumably weakest point in the opposing rampart.” Such exertion was dangerous, its monotony demoralizing and stultifying to athletes who had become “cogs in a machine.” Foot- ball was a spectacle maintained for its ability to generate revenue and ersatz “college spirit,” not bona fide physical culture. The game had become a profit machine that endangered students.44 Rugby, which was established and was known to entice many men onto the playing field, was Wheeler’s solution. By contrast, he said, the post-1905 ver- sion of American football was an unknown quantity, a mere collection of scribbled-down rules that might or might not work on the field. Rugby also gave West Coast schools new outlets for competition. Ac- cording to Wheeler, rugby was “played all around the globe: New Zealand, Australia, British Columbia, Canada, Scotland, Wales, En- gland and Ireland.” The game was common and tested; “hundreds of thousands” watched or enjoyed it regularly.45

In March 1906, a joint Stanford-Berkeley committee formally rec- ommended switching to Canadian- or Australian-style rugby until American football was satisfactorily reformed.46 It is not clear that rugby advocates originally intended this switch to be permanent, but by 1907 it was. Rugby’s staying power may have been aided by the 1906 earthquake that rocked San Francisco less than four weeks after the decision to abandon football. The quake destroyed much of the

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city, as well as Stanford’s campus. The post-catastrophe moment was a time of optimism. William James, then a visiting professor at Stanford, considered the earthquake a “‘god-given’ opportunity to re-launch” the university, and Jordan told students just hours after the tremor that Stanford would rebuild. New football rules were part of this pro- cess. By November, one Bay Area observer even suggested that Cali- fornians should create an entirely new game reflecting their determi- nation to rebuild.47 Although this game was never created, rugby did persist. Its partisans argued that rugby was more interesting and less injurious than football, involved more players, and was less commer- cial. Wheeler asked students to come down from their “sedentary” spot in the stands to “get health and fun and virility out of the hearti- est and manliest of the Anglo-Saxon sports.”48 Jordan tapped Progres- sive Era discourses about the nervous system (as well as his own Dar- winian peace eugenics) in arguing for rugby. He claimed that rugby injuries, unlike those in American football, were mostly superficial. In 1907, Jordan even traveled to Australia with two Stanford coaches to observe rugby. Subsequently, he waged a campaign, with Wheeler and Stanford psychology professor Frank Angell, to convert colleges and high schools in California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington to the game. At first, many students resisted change, especially in South- ern California, which had not felt the 1906 quake. But eventually much of the West shifted, albeit temporarily, to rugby.49

While many West Coast schools briefly replaced American-style football with rugby, other colleges responded differently to early 1900s scandals and reforms. The University of Michigan, to protest seemingly oppressive conference regulations, withdrew from the Big Nine. Michigan’s Board in Control of Athletics was particularly upset about conference regulations that outlawed the training table, cut the season to five games, gave faculty control of athletics, and limited player eligibility to three years. Many Michigan partisans perceived these rules as a strategy for smaller colleges, like Purdue and Indiana, to limit the Wolverines’ ability to train winning teams and garner ath- letic revenue. While some Ann Arbor faculty supported the new regu- lations, many students and trustees favored withdrawal. They wanted Michigan to compete against elite eastern institutions, like Harvard or Yale, rather than midwestern state universities. Michigan thus left the

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conference in January 1908 and would not return until the eve of America’s involvement in the Great War. As the Chicago press pointed out, though, Michigan’s independence posed its own problems. The University of Pennsylvania, apparently, was the lone northeastern power willing to play the Wolverines on their home field. Only a mot- ley collection of football’s “lesser lights” would play at Ann Arbor, in- cluding Vanderbilt, Oberlin (then a relatively large university), and Ohio State (not yet part of the Big Nine).50

Reactions or reforms like those in California and at Michigan turned out to be somewhat idiosyncratic, but this was not necessarily by de- sign. David Starr Jordan, for instance, actually tried to convert all American colleges to rugby. In 1908, he sent Wisconsin’s Charles Van Hise a letter proposing two major reforms. First, the whole nation should switch to rugby. This would virtually eliminate dangerous brain or spinal injuries, while at the same time strengthening a greater number of young men’s bodies. Second, universities should band to- gether to eliminate professional coaches, so as to banish monetary in- fluence and the victory-at-all-costs mentality. After all, a paid coach often evaded the rules so he could “justify his existence” by winning more games. Jordan sent copies of his letter to hundreds of colleges, and the response was overwhelming. Most replies were positive, al- though a few were unintentionally comical (Jordan did not include a cover letter, and several recipients returned it upon seeing Van Hise’s name). Many encouraged Jordan’s efforts or expressed interest in rugby; a few even reported that they had already abolished the game. But it is clear that resignation lurked in the pens of several college ad- ministrators who did not believe that substantial changes could occur, or that they could last. Ohio University’s president agreed it was time to “curb” athletics, but he also noted that he had recently given up the fight at his own institution and merely focused on “mitigating the evils of the professional athletics” by controlling the football team’s fi- nances. The head of a Missouri college noted that small schools could not reform sport without help from larger universities.51 Such skeptics understood that the modern academy was based in institutional net- works led by increasingly research-oriented universities, and that re- form was led by groups. Progressive change happened via orches- trated action, not drastic or sudden shifts at a few institutions. Indeed,

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Stanford’s rural West Coast location and persistent financial problems left it too weak to lead a movement challenging mainstream football. By contrast, reforms introduced via national organizations mitigated football’s biggest problems, even if they could not truly solve them.

Like other college leaders, Van Hise was hesitant to make the major changes Jordan proposed because he believed that reform would only result from widespread cooperation and gradual change within estab- lished structures, including the Big Nine athletic conference. Van Hise noted that if Wisconsin adopted rugby and abolished professional coaches while the rest of the conference did not, the only remaining course of action would be to leave the Big Nine. This was an extreme action that Wisconsin was not willing to take.52 Van Hise’s caution in embracing Jordan’s rugby reform was telling. Administrators wanted to clean up football, the same way politicians and muckrakers tried to purify consumer goods such as pharmaceuticals or meat. But they did not want to get left behind, and they did not want reforms to thwart ambition. For example, an institution that did not field a team playing by standard rules limited the scope of its competition and could not compete in postseason games like the Pasadena Rose Bowl (first held in 1902 and played annually after 1916). Regionally, if Wisconsin dropped football for rugby, while Minnesota or Chicago did not, both the state and its university would cut off possibilities to demonstrate manly sporting merit. While some saw football’s brutality and com- mercialism as threatening, others understood that the game’s ability to attract spectators and media attention held potential. University lead- ers chose a course that seemed safer than scrapping the game and re- placing it with a different one. Since national and regional associations seemed to be improving football, there was little incentive to follow a solitary or narrow path toward reform.

Jordan’s proposal also found little support because coaching, by 1908, was becoming a semirespectable profession of trained and earnest athletic experts. Jordan would pay coaches only if they were alumni or students, and then only under a contract limited to four years. But Charles Van Hise was less concerned about professional coaches because he did not necessarily see them as journeymen not dedicated to academic ideals. Rather, echoing a professional self-image that coaches consciously cultivated, Van Hise optimistically concluded

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that the situation was looking up because the “present group of men who are connected with athletics in the university seem to be a very nice set of fellows.” While Jordan wanted to keep coaches from gain- ing permanent positions, Van Hise would embrace professional coaches as long as they became a part of the university.53 This ambiva- lence over coaching would soon be expressed in the NCAA. In 1910, the national organization rejected professional coaches, recommending instead that universities place sport (as important “as any other line of university or college work”) under faculty auspices. Presumably, fac- ulty control would banish “all taint of professionalism and commercial spirit” from college athletics.54 But some NCAA delegates, like Purdue social scientist Thomas Moran, were at this time taking the recommen- dation for faculty control in a different direction. As we will see, Moran proposed that professional coaches could be like faculty mem- bers. Once coaches constituted a respectable class equal to academic scholars, he argued, they would make college athletics safe for stu- dents, universities, and the public.

David Starr Jordan’s call for the national adoption of rugby and elimination of coaches was not particularly influential. As it turns out, moreover, West Coast rugby was more susceptible to commercializa- tion than its idealistic proponents would have admitted. As Walter Camp (Stanford’s occasional football coach in the 1890s) pointed out, American football had originated as rugby in the 1870s. There was no guarantee that rugby would not change again, or succumb once more to professional coaching. Moreover, it is ironic, considering rugby proponents’ amateur idealism, that Stanford and Berkeley invited pro- fessional teams from Vancouver and New Zealand to play exhibition games and teach students how to play. Thus, at the same time these universities were withdrawing from mainstream college football partly because of its popular appeal, they were forging ties to commercial sport in Britain’s Pacific Rim empire. In 1906, A. H. Baskerville, a pro- fessional rugby player, author, and the self-proclaimed “Walter Camp of New Zealand,” sent a long, rambling message to Jordan that encour- aged him to send Stanford’s team to play a game before 30,000 specta- tors in Sydney. Baskerville even implored Stanford’s president to hire him as coach at a $5,000 annual salary, a rate at which he guaranteed his “organisation” could beat any eastern team (or even Oxford and

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Cambridge, for that matter). It seems that Jordan seriously entertained Baskerville’s proposal. Apparently, New Zealand’s premier footballer was not aware that rugby was inherently an amateur game—and Jor- dan may not have been totally convinced, either.55

For some observers, the switch from the American game to the healthier and ostensibly more relaxing game of rugby was a step for- ward in the natural progression of college sport. In 1907, Dr. T. M. Williams, a former Stanford football player, joked that under the old rules the only players killed were the best athletes, who were inten- tionally targeted by opposing players. Since this type of play defied David Starr Jordan’s peace activism—which, based in Darwinian biol- ogy and eugenics, said that the end of warfare would result in a better and stronger human population—rugby reform demonstrated that West Coast society was following the mandate of evolutionary biology and had thus “advanced one step further on the road to civilization.” One might debate whether or not rugby was truly evidence of civi- lization’s forward progress, but for a decade many West Coast schools played it exclusively. Stanford and Cal held their Big Game as a rugby match from 1906 to 1914, and Santa Clara College also became a Bay Area rugby power. These colleges, though, returned to the old game during the World War I era.56

Even with all of the reform movements that emerged after 1905, not all of American football’s problems disappeared; neither did its critics. The 1909 season was particularly bad. Earlier reforms like the forward pass did not eliminate mass play, so ball carriers were still injured when they were pushed and pulled by fellow players. Injuries and deaths were once more on the rise. In all, eleven college players died that season, including the well-publicized deaths of West Point’s Eu- gene Byrne (spinal injury versus Harvard) and Virginia’s Archer Chris- tian (brain hemorrhage against Georgetown). Quarterback Edwin Wil- son of the Naval Academy nearly died from injuries sustained in a game with Villanova. The fact that two of these deaths happened to student athletes at the service academies led to renewed critique of football’s role in officer training. In The Independent, William Everett Hicks lambasted football as “detrimental” to cadets. The game was in- jurious, and it was possible that damage caused by a concussion would lie hidden for years before showing its effects. The army

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needed strong bodies to win battles, and football was not achieving this end. He noted that the modern military employed all kinds of pre- cautions that soldiers had once scorned, such as mosquito nets and flannel bandages. Similar protective practices should be extended to sport so that men’s bodies and minds were preserved on the athletic field. Soccer would even be a better sport for West Point, Hicks ar- gued, since it would allow men to survive to fight on actual battle- fields one day.57

University presidents once again weighed the need for football re- form in the middle-class muckraking journals. Collier’s cited Brown’s clergyman president William H. P. Faunce, who sounded like a pre– Civil War Whig moral philosopher when he argued that football aroused the “baser passions”; the magazine also quoted Ohio State University president William O. Thompson, who saw football’s “moral risks” as problematic as its “physical dangers.” Gridiron carnage, com-

Army-Navy game at the Polo Grounds in New York, 1916. Service academy football was controversial by the early 1900s, because it might injure cadets or midshipmen, thus making them unfit for military service. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division.

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bined with this academic soul searching, inspired more reforms. In 1909, the presidents of the Big Three (A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, Arthur T. Hadley of Yale, and Woodrow Wilson of Princeton) con- ferred. They knew that the rules and reforms they shaped would ap- ply to football in the Northeast, but they also expected to affect na- tional policy. Wilson thought that the game was too dangerous and brutal. It would be best if the Big Three “could meet public opinion in this matter and effect some reform that would save a very noble game.” Wilson’s optimistic expectation may have been true five or ten years earlier. But even though the Big Three were still very influential in shaping both academics and athletics in 1909, times were changing. Hadley distrusted Palmer Pierce and blamed him for the shortcomings of the 1905 reforms, but even he must have noticed that the soon-to- be-renamed IAAUS was gaining influence. Harvard had joined the as- sociation in 1909, news that had stirred unease in New Haven, but Lowell assured Hadley—perhaps disingenuously—that Harvard’s IAAUS membership did not affect the rules under which the Crimson played football.58

In any case, the early NCAA certainly did reshape intercollegiate athletics. Although critics still spoke against football, the vast public outcry of 1905 dissipated, and the modern form of college football and athletic control began to emerge by 1910. The NCAA’s new rules com- mittee, influenced by younger coaches like Minnesota’s Henry Williams and Princeton’s Bill Roper, finally gained power over aging pioneers like Camp. By 1910, new rules made the forward pass a more effective offensive field tactic. Once limited to the middle of the field and restricted near the goals, now teams could pass anywhere on the gridiron. To accommodate expanded usage of the forward pass, end zones were carved out of the existing field. So that colleges with per- manent stands, like Harvard, would not have to reconfigure or aban- don their stadiums, the field was shortened by ten yards, thus absorb- ing the end zones. In addition, the ball was elongated so it would be easier to pass. Because of these reforms and the increasing influence of the NCAA, after about 1911, there would be fewer challenges to col- lege football, and fewer major attempts to overhaul its fundamental rules.59

Football’s rise and reform reflected the state of American culture,

Progressive Era Universities and Football Reform 69

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politics, and academic structure in the late 1800s. Its rules were the product of a rational, industrial approach to sport, a cultural orienta- tion that helped explain football’s widespread appeal. Although aca- demic leaders touted the seemingly endless pedagogical benefits of sport and relished the attention it gave their institutions, they feared the influence of popular spectacle. Crowds and money could damage universities that were trying to exert positive public influence by cre- ating useful, modern knowledge. The next two chapters show how ac- ademics working within modern, disciplinary universities theorized football’s meanings and also contributed to discussions about reform. Psychologists focused on the nervous system, while social scientists discussed public morality. Both groups were engaged in debates over collegiate sport’s utility at the same time they were helping to create the structures and safeguards of America’s academic ivory tower. In the modern academy, each group of specialists created a discipline with its own epistemology, methodology, and discourse (or jargon). This fragmented intellectual milieu contributed to Progressive Era football reform, but it also created a realm where athletics became just one more university department—and popular culture started to gain a permanent place on campus.

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