American History Reform

University Press of Kansas

Chapter Title: Psychologists: Body, Mind, and the Creation of Discipline

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.8

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C H A P T E R 3 Psychologists: Body, Mind, and the Creation of Discipline

In 1888, University of Iowa philosophy professor George T. W. Patrick wrote that Americans needed to reshape their “notions about the rela- tion of body and mind.”1 One of many middle-class men who suffered from the fin de siècle malady neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion, Patrick explored the meanings of work, play, and mental health throughout his career. He identified sport as a way to counter the mentally draining effects of a rigorous, modern education that was be- coming grounded in an overwhelming number of disciplines. This conclusion was only appropriate, since the scholars who worked to unlock the mysteries of the nervous system were themselves en- meshed in transatlantic webs of research and gaining academic posi- tions in departments of psychology, philosophy, physiology, and peda- gogy. Within these disparate yet related fields, modern intellectuals theorized a world where mind and body were intimately yet tenuously connected via the nerves. As such, they plumbed the meanings of physical culture and college athletics, arguing that strenuous games like football could aid society by building young men’s bodies and thus preparing them for the stresses of modern life. It could also in- spire white, male, middle-class spectators to participate in the strenu- ous physical activities that would help them maintain their supposed position at the top of an evolutionary hierarchy. But to be beneficial, sport had to be played safely, with no danger to the central nervous system. Football had to be reformed. Psychologists provided a key part of the intellectual foundation for Progressive Era football reforms, but the institutional and disciplinary structures they were simultane- ously creating also signaled a change in the order of American higher education. Scholars were helping to turn the university into a rational and orderly gridiron of departments, presaging an era when the ath- letic field—itself measured and laid out in an orderly gridiron— would be one of the few campus spaces culturally accessible to most nonacademic Americans.

It helps to start out with the modern history of the discipline of

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psychology, which is rooted in the fields of philosophy and physiol- ogy. In the early nineteenth century, mental philosophers began studying the “science of the soul.” By the late 1800s this field became the science of the nervous system, the organ where mind and body in- tersected. This materialistic approach originated in midcentury Ger- many, where scientists like Hermann von Helmholtz and Carl Ludwig crafted biological laws for the human body.2 Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, published in 1859, augmented this approach. The Origin of Species led thinkers to theorize the mind’s organic, not super- natural, basis. The brain and nervous system had apparently evolved as individuals suited to the rigors of life reproduced and perpetuated their biological characteristics. This idea had serious implications. If the human mind developed and adapted as the result of chance muta- tions, not divine decrees, the likelihood of an immortal soul was seri- ously diminished. Once scholars saw the mind as a mere product of biology, it became difficult to believe in absolute, divine truth. Influ- enced by natural selection, thinkers such as William James laid the foundations of pragmatic philosophy and modern psychology. Each mind was not part of an entity with physical, mental, and spiritual el- ements—it existed in a physical body operating within social matri- ces.3 The nerves, not the soul, were the seat of intellect, sensation, and volition. This idea made Whig faculty psychology obsolete. By the late 1800s, many scholars saw the mind as a survival tool rather than a collection of disciplined, rational faculties that deduced truth. The brain was an organic creator of thought and behavior, not the divine seat of righteousness. Scholarship was not a gateway to one heavenly truth. It was a means of crafting a multitude of truths through induc- tion, observation, and experimentation.

According to late 1800s psychologists, the evolutionary mind was fragile, perhaps too fragile for modern mental work. One physician who made this argument was S. Weir Mitchell, a Philadelphia doctor who first gained fame by studying Civil War gunshot wounds and nervous injuries. Mitchell reiterated his findings in fiction and popu- lar nonfiction, including Wear and Tear (1871). He also invented an in- famous “rest cure” for hysterical women that was, in many cases, worse than the disease. Mitchell (like George Beard, who coined the term neurasthenia in 1869) explained that mental work fatigued the

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brain, not just the muscles.4 Mental fatigue could quietly overtax minds, sap men of nervous energy and procreative capacity, and thus imperil Anglo-American civilization. Psychologists such as G. Stanley Hall even saw strenuous sport as a way to preserve young male bodies and minds from nervous fatigue. This argument echoed the refrain of mens sana in corpore sano, a Victorian credo that permeated both high- brow and lowbrow literature.5 Many used this phrase, best translated as “a sound mind in a sound body,” to explain the importance of exer- cise. They included President Theodore Roosevelt, whom The Outlook magazine dubbed the nation’s best proponent of mens sana in corpore sano, as well as the German-born strongman Eugen Sandow, who coauthored the illustrated book Sandow on Physical Training (1894). Teachers also embraced the concept of strengthening the body to maintain the mind. When late 1800s educators split subjects into sep- arate fields, students were confronted with an exponentially increas- ing amount of specialized information. This, in turn, led to mental fa- tigue, which inspired schools and colleges to prescribe physical culture.6

Late 1800s students often argued that sound minds needed sound bodies. For example, a Yale student warned in 1866 that a college man, if he did not have access to a gymnasium, could easily overtax his mind. But such pessimism did not last long, thanks to the rise of phys- ical culture. A Harvard student, foreshadowing Francis Walker’s 1893 Phi Beta Kappa speech, rejoiced in 1867 that a new “enthusiasm for sports” distinguished post–Civil War students, who no longer burned the “midnight oil” so intensely that they forgot they had bodies. In a similar vein, University of Michigan students, who posited a “close and sympathetic union” between body and mind, petitioned (albeit unsuccessfully) for a gymnasium that would rescue manly nervous systems from the insanity caused by rigorous studies.7 An Ann Arbor student even made the extravagant claim in 1868 that a student who graduated with too much intellect would be a mere shell of a man. He would never “know full manhood nor have the courage of a woman; with a shattered nervous system” he would “tremble if a door slams, a dog barks, or child shouts.” But exercise could prevent such mental wreckage. “We should exercise mind and body,” he said, “developing them both together, [and] make the latter a perfect instrument for the

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use of the former.” It should be shameful, he said, for “any institution of learning to send forth graduated, pale-faced, constitutionally ru- ined young men.”8

Perhaps such proclamations were just grandstanding, overstate- ments so that administrators would give students facilities where they could play fun games. Even if this was the case, students successfully tapped real concerns by using the rhetoric of fragile nerves, and they may have even believed that physical culture would actually save their minds. Colleges responded favorably to these demands by building gymnasia or making older facilities more accessible. In 1873, for exam- ple, Harvard eliminated its gymnasium fee; in 1879 it built the state- of-the-art Hemenway Gymnasium. In 1892, Yale’s new gymnasium, ad- vertised as the world’s best, debuted. Ten years later the University of Chicago built Bartlett Gymnasium, which even had a faculty exercise room. Athletic director Amos Alonzo Stagg proclaimed that this gym- nasium would create mentally and physically sound men whose strong physiques and “robust” minds could tackle life’s challenges. Mean- while, Michigan and Stanford built separate gymnasia for men and women.9 Physical education facilities were segregated by sex because of the era’s prevailing beliefs about male-female physiology. Thinkers like S. Weir Mitchell and Harvard’s Edward H. Clarke contended that female education diverted energy from reproductive organs, and thus could rob girls of their procreative capability. Such ideas met resis- tance, yet colleges still used them to limit the female curriculum. And separate spheres still reigned supreme in turn-of-the-century women’s athletics, despite the efforts of female physical educators like Stan- ford’s Dr. Clelia Mosher.10

Girls, according to physicians such as Mitchell, were not supposed to exercise, but these doctors endorsed men’s sport because it could prepare men for business careers. Yet they still worried that improp- erly supervised activities—including overly strenuous football— might hinder bodily development. Addressing this concern, Morton Prince, a Boston City Hospital nerve specialist who had played football at Harvard in the 1870s, contributed a piece on “Possible Injuries to the Nervous System” to the 1896 book Football by Walter Camp and Lorin Deland. Prince declared football safe for brains and spinal cords (and received a complimentary copy of the book). Yet Prince remained

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ambivalent about football’s effects upon nerves. Even though he ac- knowledged that hard hits might cause traumatic neuroses similar to “railway spine,” a mental malady caused by railroad accidents, he claimed that team doctors had never seen such injuries.11 In order to further examine this question, Prince surveyed six football programs and published the results in a Boston Medical and Surgical Journal arti- cle that appeared in 1898, a year after Georgia halfback Von Gammon died from a concussion. Prince argued that severe impacts were not likely to cause psychological damage, since football players knew in advance that they placed themselves in danger. Prince’s argument was not convincing, and he even briefly acknowledged that one doctor had recently documented that football injuries led to neuroses. Yet his premises demonstrate why he made this contradictory claim: Prince was asking whether naval battles would cause neuroses in sailors. Un- like women who fainted after railroad accidents, he concluded, men remained stoic under the stress of war, industry, and sport.12

Football was a convenient analogy, a metaphor that seemed to prove men’s combat readiness in an imperial era. It helps to recall that this was a time when Theodore Roosevelt touted the “strenuous life”; William James called for a “moral equivalent of war”; and Stephen Crane based his war story The Red Badge of Courage (1895) in part upon his college football experience.13 Whether men worked in indus- try or served in the military, their nerves seemed to be conduits for the mental energy needed to build and expand modern society. This idea became common in turn-of-the-century discussions of football re- form, at a time when psychologists began to inhabit the numerous col- lege towns where the sport was played on autumn Saturdays. Many of these scholars trained in the laboratories of European researchers like Vienna physiologist Carl Ludwig or Leipzig psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, the so-called father of psychology.14 Wundt’s many students included Harvard physiologist Henry P. Bowditch, who also studied with Ludwig and taught noteworthy students like William James, G. Stanley Hall, and physiologist Warren Lombard. Wundt also directly taught Hall, Lombard, G. T. W. Patrick, Hugo Münsterberg, and Frank Angell. Hall, in turn, mentored Patrick, John Dewey, and William Lowe Bryan. These intellectuals were professional academics, im- mersed within a transatlantic network of physiological psychology.

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They researched and taught within increasingly narrow academic dis- ciplines. Due to this process of intellectual fragmentation, we will see, universities eventually sought novel forms of public engagement, such as intercollegiate athletics. And some of these thinkers were vocal pro- ponents of college football.

Universities became fragmented and departmentalized because they were embracing the modern division of labor by the late 1800s. At this time, fields once occupied by lightly trained philosophers or clerics were becoming disciplines mastered by rigorously trained academics with earned doctorates and pragmatic orientations. The production of ideas, said late 1800s thinkers, could not be left to chance. It had to be carried out systematically, by scientists. Psychologists such as Hugo Münsterberg, imported from Leipzig to supervise Harvard’s new labo- ratory, regularly stressed this scientific rigor. Upon his 1892 arrival in Cambridge, curious Bostonians asked Münsterberg about the nature of experimental psychology almost as often as they asked whether Ger- mans played football. Harvard’s new psychologist did not record his answer to the football question, but he did explain to curious readers that the budding field of psychology emulated natural science without engaging in speculative philosophy. Universities, Münsterberg said, should hire scholars who focused exclusively on experiments, not ab- straction. Recently, he noted, psychologists had established labs in cities and university towns such as New York; Philadelphia; Madison, Wisconsin; and Champaign, Illinois. Through rigorous scholarship, he predicted, experimental psychologists would become true “men of sci- ence.”15

One such experimentalist and self-conscious man of science was G. Stanley Hall, who earned America’s first psychology Ph.D. at Harvard in 1878. He also studied with Wundt and Ludwig in Europe before be- coming a professor at Johns Hopkins and, later, president of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts (Hall even lured Vienna psy- chologist Sigmund Freud to Clark for his only American visit in 1909). One of the era’s most influential thinkers, Hall theorized psychology in terms of evolution and racial and gender hierarchy. Using Darwin’s theories and the concept of biological recapitulation, which was pio- neered by German scientist Ernst Häckel in the 1860s, Hall posited that children, women, and nonwhite races occupied lower stages in

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evolutionary hierarchy. He and his contemporaries saw sport as a rela- tively safe way for male children to reenact the evolutionary struggle for existence. Play trained children to withstand modern society’s mental pressures, remain sexually viable, and reproduce white civi- lization. Football, he said, was a valuable form of “mental and moral training.”16 Hall also spread his ideas via his graduate students, in- cluding G. T. W. Patrick, a “promising” protégé who began teaching philosophy at Iowa in 1887.17 Hall, as the founding editor of the Amer- ican Journal of Psychology, even published Patrick’s entire dissertation, “A Further Study of Heraclitus,” in 1888. By today’s standards Patrick’s analysis, contrasting ancient Greek philosophers Heraclitus, Plato, and Socrates, seems out of place in an academic psychology journal. But the young scholar was writing at a time when modern in- tellectual culture was still under construction and disciplinary bound- aries were not yet firm. Patrick showed that pre-Socratics like Heracli- tus valued the relationship between body and mind, while the Platonists, like modern thinkers, did not appreciate such links. His sympathies clearly lay with the pre-Socratics.18 Such academic border crossing was reflected, by necessity, in Patrick’s job. He was the Uni- versity of Iowa’s lone philosophy professor until the early 1890s, teaching both experimental psychology and philosophy. He even studied with Wundt and Ludwig for six months in 1894 in Leipzig, where he purchased apparatus for Iowa’s new psychology laboratory. As department chair, Patrick supervised the laboratory’s construction, and he continued teaching psychology after experimentalist Carl Seashore joined Iowa’s faculty.19

In a 1903 American Journal of Psychology article titled “The Psychol- ogy of Football,” Patrick noted a gap in prevailing discussions of the popular collegiate sport. While he did not dispute the belief that foot- ball might teach players self-control, discipline, and manliness, he com- plained that those who discussed football’s ethics were ignoring its psy- chology. Unlike muckrakers or social scientists who criticized football as a morally corrupt spectacle, Patrick gauged its effect on minds and bodies. He noted that English thinker Herbert Spencer had argued that play helped children expend “surplus energy,” while German psychol- ogist Karl Groos contended that it helped children prepare for adult life. Yet neither theory satisfied Patrick. He estimated, based on his cor-

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respondence with Walter Camp, that as many as 40,000 spectators at- tended college football games. Patrick wanted to explain this phenome- nal spectatorship. He dismissed the claim that football embodied inter- collegiate rivalry. After all, Patrick wryly noted, debates did not draw crowds quite like gridiron contests. He thought football was popular because it helped players and spectators return to evolutionary roots. The modern world was a place of streets, railways, factories, banks, of- fices, schools, libraries, and laboratories. Paying homage to Hall, his mentor, Patrick hypothesized that adult play, by reverting to earlier phases of evolution, protected men from overcivilization. Football’s “primitive features”—“the bare heads and long hair; the dust and dirt and grimy faces; the Indian-like blankets worn by the players when at

G. T. W. Patrick in 1878, before earning his doctorate in philosophy under G. Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins University. Frederick W. Kent Photograph Collection, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.

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rest; the colored and decorated suits”—simulated steps in the struggle for existence. To top it all off, the prevailing style of football play even resembled “a scrimmage of savages.”20

By implying that women, children, and nonwhites were located on lower biological planes, Patrick (like Hall) invoked recapitulation the- ory. Spectators at football games, like children and so-called savages, did not try “to restrain emotional expression.”21 By watching football, white men could release inhibitions by reenacting earlier evolutionary stages, and thus get a reinvigorating dose of the premodern struggle for existence. Patrick’s argument seems paradoxical, though, if we re- call that in the early 1900s, many Native American youths were force- fed modern American life, including football, at federal boarding schools. In highly publicized games against major colleges and mili- tary academies, these players—along with white coaches and journal- ists—challenged traditional manliness by turning football into a sport of trickery.22 Who, we might ask, were the true savages: the Native Americans who figured out how to win at football, or the white Amer- icans who invented this rational yet brutal game, tirelessly promoted it, and encouraged supposedly primitive peoples to play it?

While Patrick argued that white children resembled other races by instinctively playing games that helped counteract modern civiliza- tion, he implied that adult white men could get the necessary mental release by simply watching athletic sports—and that such spectator- ship might be the only way for the crowd to relieve stress. Indeed, nonspectator sports sometimes puzzled him. Before publishing this ar- ticle, Patrick, who was then president-elect of the Western Philosoph- ical Association, became anxious and ill. He crossed the Atlantic to re- cover in Europe, where a German physician diagnosed neurasthenia. In Germany, Patrick observed a sporting mentality different from one he had seen in Iowa City. An association football game in Berlin seemed “childish” because the cheers of the mere 200 spectators com- pared poorly with the noise made by tens of thousands at American football games.23 An aspect of football that made it manly, he implied, was the roar of the crowd. Where were all of the German men who should have been gathering for the psychological or physical release their monotonous jobs required? Such observations were logical to early 1900s experimental psychologists, but they would have made no

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sense to antebellum educators like Charles Beck, who warned against allowing untutored spectators to attend school athletic contests. If spectators had no serious interest in disciplining bodies, minds, and morals, they could corrupt physical culture. Many Progressive Era so- cial scientists, as we will see, also found negative meanings in huge, unruly crowds. But even some social scientists worried that football developed neither mind nor body and argued that if sport caused nerve damage, it lost its practical utility. Certainly, exhausted athletes who left the field crying did not reflect “the best traditions of Anglo- Saxon manhood.” If this was the case, could hysterical, “overstrained” male nerves be the true goal of college athletics?24

Psychologists often argued that football facilitated manly behaviors and mentalities, but they were not the only ones to do so. Students also portrayed football as a sport beneficial to the mind and senses.25

They found encouragement from professors like Indiana University psychologist William Lowe Bryan, who liked to warn students about mental fatigue and nerve damage. A charter member of the American Psychological Association who counted both David Starr Jordan and G. Stanley Hall as mentors, Bryan advised students not to study too hard, lest they go insane. All should get enough sleep, shun drugs, eat properly, and play. “It is not enough for the five hundred and eighty to hurrah at the twenty’s game,” Bryan warned. “Go to the gymna- sium. Or play tennis. Or saw wood.”26 Such words aptly captured turn-of-the-century Americans’ belief that healthy nerves were a type of capital, an investment in the future of both the individual and the nation. The nervous system was a crucial symbol for embodied manli- ness, an obsession for a society that saw commercial and political suc- cess resting upon men’s intact bodies and minds. Nerves and spinal cords were the threads holding together modern life and thought. Football could strengthen those threads, but it might also damage them beyond repair. Healthy nerves indicated robust manly character, but deficient nerves implied the opposite. Late 1800s jingoes branded peace advocates as spineless, and they criticized President William McKinley’s lack of a “backbone.” Magazines even illustrated lethal nerve injuries as a way to warn readers about football’s dangers.27 In Collier’s in 1905, muckraker Edward S. Jordan declared that the Uni- versity of Wisconsin faculty did not possess enough “nerve” to reform

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football. The athletic committee’s incompetence reflected a “flabby faculty spine”; it would “take a big man with a strong nervous organ- ism and more than a smattering of practical brains to save Wisconsin from herself.” He even charged that men who entered universities only to play football would one day constitute “a flabby backbone” for their respective states.28

In this cultural context, psychologists were heavily invested in de- termining football’s significance for the nerves. Another scientist who crossed both the Atlantic and early disciplinary lines to explore the relationship between body and mind was physiologist Warren Lom- bard. Like G. Stanley Hall, Lombard studied with Bowditch; like Mor- ton Prince, he played football at Harvard in the 1870s. In 1881, Lom- bard traveled to Europe to study in Carl Ludwig’s Institute of Physiology, a cosmopolitan Vienna laboratory where students ex- plored the nervous system in experiments conducted upon the ex- posed nerves of dissected frogs. Lombard later attended Wundt’s course at Leipzig, and Hall hired him in 1889 to teach at Clark. When William Rainey Harper raided Clark’s faculty in 1892, luring many of its disillusioned professors to Chicago, Lombard left for Michigan’s medical school. Like G. T. W. Patrick, Lombard wrote in the American Journal of Psychology about the mind-body relationship, but he used empirical evidence instead of philosophical reflection. His article, the journal’s first, recounted an experiment in which Lombard’s wife struck his knee 6,639 times for a month and measured each reflex. He concluded that his knee-jerk varied according to the effects of exter- nal stimuli. Without indicating the extent of Mrs. Lombard’s contribu- tion to this part of the experiment, the author recorded a “seminal emission” one morning, but stated that he was not sure whether the ejaculation had caused a subsequent depression in the strength of his reflex. Besides implying that sexual release lowered nervous energy, Lombard was also implying that manly, strenuous sports might actu- ally affect the nerves positively. He would occasionally doze off and dream that he was “kicking a football [or] . . . performing some other vigorous action.” His reflex, if induced at this time, was unusually vi- olent.29 These findings seemed to show that the mere thought of vigor- ous activity might actually increase nervous energy. In the next two decades, Lombard’s research found a wide reception, attracting the at-

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tention of scholars such as S. Weir Mitchell, John Dewey, and Edward Scripture, as well as Yale gymnasium director Jay Seaver.30

Throughout his career, Lombard argued that sport’s benefits bridged stages in the life cycle, from childhood to sexual maturity to professional advancement. Addressing the University of Michigan Sci- entific Club in 1938, he claimed that the intertwined instincts of play and reproduction were necessary for an individual’s growth as well as “the maintenance of the species.” Second only to sexuality in impor- tance, “motor activities” provided pleasure and developed muscle co- ordination. As a man grew older, said Lombard, he should continue to play so that he might continue to outcompete his rivals. He even com- pared the first physiology lecture he ever gave to sport. Even though he had misplaced his notes before the lecture, he succeeded because he recalled the detached attitude that had helped him win football games at Harvard. Lombard also applied his sporting fortitude and passion for athletics in institutional contexts in Ann Arbor. He served on Michigan’s Board in Control of Athletics and spoke at student foot- ball mass meetings. On a Friday evening in October 1894, he addressed hundreds of students in a campus lecture hall, asserting the impor-

University of Michigan physiology laboratory, circa 1893. Medical School (University of Michigan) records, Box 136, Folder: Gibson Photos, 1893 (1), Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

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tance of manliness and honesty in athletics.31 Although he was one of the most vocal, Lombard was not the only faculty proponent of athlet- ics at Michigan’s medical school. Charles B. G. de Nancrède, who pro- vided free medical care for the team, also spoke at mass meetings, telling students to support the Athletic Board, since they would need responsive bodies in their professional lives.32

When professors like Lombard and Nancrède participated in uni- versity assemblies, they often did so in spaces that were sex-segre- gated. After all, they inhabited an academic world that, if it did not entirely exclude women, did not entirely include them, either. At Stan- ford, female students were restricted to the assembly hall’s balcony, and one writer claimed in 1908 that each and every student “wearing trousers and claiming to be a man” should attend so they could listen to the “virile” speakers.33 Rhetoric of manliness and sport was often tied to gendered understandings of the modern nervous system. At a 1901 Stanford rally, for instance, David Starr Jordan tied sportsman- ship to the cultivation of manly nerves, noting that a good team could “take defeat like men.” He endorsed football because it was “the best way of developing nerve.”34 At the same time, such commentators were ambivalent about athletics’ implications for women’s nerves. University of Michigan students and alumni agreed that women needed physical education, but they saw sport only as a way to pre- pare women to be “good wives” and “mothers of the race.” Women needed physical training, but not competitive athletics. In 1915, Stan- ford psychologist Frank Angell explicitly warned women gathered at Stanford’s Roble Gymnasium not to imitate strenuous, commercial men’s sport.35 After all, if college sport could corrupt men, how might it transform the mothers of the race? Yet this attitude implied a general ambivalence about athletics. If sport posed substantial dangers to mind, body, or morals, why was it part of college life at all?

For turn-of-the-century psychologists and physiologists, intercolle- giate football was an essential aspect of modern universities because it seemed to hold pedagogical implications. It is therefore not surprising that as psychologists were starting to create the discipline of teacher education at this time, professors in that field also had something to say about the sport. The University of Illinois’s Edwin G. Dexter, who completed his doctorate under Columbia psychologist James McKeen

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Cattell (Wilhelm Wundt’s first American Ph.D.), was chair of pedagogy at Illinois from 1899 until his appointment as education commissioner for Puerto Rico in 1907.36 In the 1904 Educational Review, Dexter ex- amined reports of serious football accidents and produced statistics dismissing the game’s risks. His quantitative analysis of questionnaires completed by officials at various universities showed that less than 3 percent of players were injured seriously enough to lose time from study. The number of men killed or “permanently injured” was “prac- tically a negligible quantity.”37 Two years later, when football under- went its most intense period of scrutiny, Dexter published figures in the Popular Science Monthly that dismissed most injuries as the mere product of sensational journalism. Real football, he claimed, was much less dangerous than “newspaper football.”38 Dexter defended college sport because he saw it as a way to instill mental and physical disci- pline, as well as a relatively safe way to replicate natural selection. In his 1904 article he quantified the opinions of fifty-eight college offi- cers and athletic committee chairs. After weighing the responses pro- portionally to favor institutions with larger enrollments—a problem- atic analytical method that might have appealed to readers in an era when big universities were seen as more competitive or important than small colleges—Dexter declared that universities favored retain- ing football (or only slightly modifying it) at a ratio of 17:1. Among the officials quoted, many stated that football developed “manliness” and inculcated such characteristics as “discipline, brainwork, self- control, self-mastery, [and] self-measurement.” Only a few responses stressed the game’s disadvantages.39

Dexter, like Hall and Patrick, clearly based his ideas on Darwinian evolutionary theory. After watching his young son play, he concluded that a process mirroring natural selection shaped human behavior. He claimed (invoking German psychologist Karl Groos) that children re- tained and perfected only those actions that were fit for facilitating mental or physical development.40 In 1906, furthermore, he asserted that even though football was not “gentle,” it was not too dangerous for American men:

No youth of bone and muscle who hears even the faintest “Call of the Wild” echoing down from a thousand generations of fighting

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ancestors—and they must have been fighters or they would never have been ancestors—comes to his own without somewhere and somehow a chance at the physical try out with worthy adversaries. With the days of almost universal war superseded by days of as universal peace and the knight-errant and the tournament things of the past, if we emasculate football and attempt to eliminate entirely the danger element, we shall close the last safety valve to virile ex- pression and may well expect an explosion.41

Play, for Dexter, was worth the minimal risk because it strengthened both mind and body. Football seemed a relatively safe way for boys to unleash violent impulses resonating from the earlier stages of evolu- tion. This stance recalled Jack London’s 1903 novel, The Call of the Wild; and by proclaiming the game a “safety valve,” Dexter also antic- ipated William James’s 1910 plea for a “moral equivalent of war.” James, in his famous call for a humane type of strenuous conflict, con- tended that by creating institutions that mimicked war, Americans could improve future generations by teaching manliness and saving civilization from weakness. Even the tremendous bloodshed of the Civil War was worthwhile, said James, if it saved Americans from a world of rampant industry, monotonous mind-work, “co-education . . . and feminism unabashed.” The Harvard psychologist and philosopher wrote that the “race” should never stop breeding “military character,” nor should it ignore warfare’s ability to teach discipline. Whether it in- volved mine labor or urban construction projects, this moral war- equivalent could strengthen young men, making good fathers who would be a positive example for coming generations. Though James did not explicitly discuss team sports, historians have interpreted football as one such equivalent for early 1900s readers.42

While some psychologists were discussing a moral equivalent of war, others were actually trying to find a moral, or at least safe, equiv- alent for football. Frank Angell, a longtime Stanford professor, helped lead the movement on the West Coast to replace football with rugby. A nephew of Michigan’s president James Angell, Frank had played foot- ball and baseball while a student at the University of Vermont in the 1870s, before he completed his Ph.D. at Leipzig, under Wilhelm Wundt, in 1891. Angell was teaching at Cornell when David Starr Jor-

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dan invited him to become Stanford’s first psychology professor in 1892. For thirty years (1895–1925) Angell was associate editor of Hall’s American Journal of Psychology, and he chaired Stanford’s Faculty Athletic Committee from 1892 to 1922. (Jordan liked to tell students that several Stanford professors, including Angell, were former ath- letes whose strong physiques had fueled their “mental machinery” and augmented their professional success.)43 Angell was strident about the positive potential of sport. Early in his career, he had critiqued Charles William Eliot’s widely disseminated 1894 critiques, claiming that Harvard’s leader “belonged to that class of estimable old ladies of both sexes who classed football and prize fighting together, and in- voked the aid of newspapers and legislatures to abolish the game.” Un- like boxing, Angell implied, football was a respectable middle-class pastime, and anyone who opposed it was effeminate. Nonetheless, An- gell did concede some of Eliot’s points, agreeing that too much time spent on training could negatively affect studies. While he thought this was not a problem at Stanford, Angell did acknowledge that con- tinuous discussions around the training table were “a drain on nervous energy,” which players should instead channel into coursework.44

Along with David Starr Jordan and President Benjamin Ide Wheeler of Berkeley, Angell fought hard for the adoption of Australian-style rugby in America. The three touted rugby in part because of its rela- tive safety for young men’s nerves and internal organs. It was, in other words, a way to make college sport safe for students’ minds and bod- ies. Angell extolled rugby’s virtues in The Independent in 1910. He re- called that the faculty at Stanford and Berkeley had not objected to football in the 1890s, when both universities hired the best East Coast coaches: Walter Camp at Stanford and William “Pudge” Heffelfinger, a Yale All-American, at Cal. Professors at that time had avidly watched the “manly, vigorous” game. But Camp and Heffelfinger made Califor- nia football a “dangerous and objectionable” contest of mass plays. Rugby was better sport, Angell argued, because it enticed more men onto the field and inspired them to keep playing later into the year. It enhanced the bodies and minds of the many rather than stultifying the intellects or damaging the physiques of the few. Rugby required rigorous conditioning, yet was still recreational and provided “exhila- rating” exercise. Rugby players were faster and more skilled, he de-

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clared, and they were just as manly. It was a “rough game,” not a “pink tea” game. Angell even boasted, somewhat perversely, that rugby caused its fair share of injuries. But, like Jordan, he thought that rugby injuries were not as serious as those in football. Angell also argued that rugby turned players into quick thinkers because it re- placed “wearisome drill” with a quick style of play that demanded nimble minds. It should not be too surprising that Angell, who was head timer at Stanford track meets and authored academic studies on reaction time, observed that old football stars were “too slow in the head” for rugby. Even though Angell noted that rugby’s quick pace led to large crowds, he assured readers that attracting spectators should not be the main goal. His biggest concern was to protect nerves. An- gell wanted a game that was enjoyable and, if strenuous, did not cause broken spines and concussions. He cared little for the crowd, and he cared less for the “drill master” professional coach. He even called football “battleball,” a term coined by one of the professional Vancou- ver players who taught Stanford students rugby. The older game, said Angell, was dangerous and interesting mainly to spectators and ath- letic associations.45

Based on the language that spectators used to talk about the game, football may have been appealing in large part because of its perceived effects upon the nervous system. At colleges with big-time football programs, aspiring athletic impresarios used the rhetoric of nerves to promote grand football shows at the turn of the century. Charles Baird, the student manager who later became Michigan’s first athletic director, congratulated the university on the send-off it gave the Wolverines before a big game at Harvard in 1895. The farewell, he said, had helped to “nerve” the players for the big match. Some early 1900s commentators even contended that sport could positively affect spectators’ nervous systems. Stanford professor Colbert Searles im- plored students and spectators to cheer “for the sake of those little ec- static thrills that chase up and down all properly constructed verte- bral columns when a comrade combines skill, nerve and grit to do what we would all love to do” on the athletic field.46

Football might thrill sedentary nerves, but some began to fear that it was actually causing mental distress. One anxiety-inducing game, apparently, was the 1902 Rose Bowl in Pasadena. After Stanford lost to

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Michigan, 49–0, Cardinal football captain Ralph Fisher complained, in what must have been one of the first irate postgame interviews, about the Wolverines’ late arrival. This tardiness seemed like a deliberate at- tempt to rattle Stanford’s men. The players “were compelled to wait thirty minutes in the hot sun,” and each player was thus “nerved to the highest pitch.” Football was difficult enough for the nerves, and the anticipation of a pounding at the hands of Michigan’s undefeated “point-a-minute” squad, led by former Stanford journeyman coach Fielding Yost, was nearly as bad. In response to this intense pressure, coaches soon began treating players and sequestering them at rural re- treats. To counteract his players’ anxiety, Chicago’s Amos Alonzo Stagg took them to vaudeville shows and led them on an excursion to a Lake Forest, Illinois, country club in 1905. By this time, Stanford coach James Lanagan had already begun his annual ritual of taking players to a hillside resort a week before the Big Game against Cal. The season’s strain tended to make the players nervous, so the off-campus trips were “intended to obviate any chance of nervous breakdowns, and to relieve the tension” caused by the pregame festivities. Ironi- cally, the game that supposedly benefited nerves by providing release from the modern grind still proved to be intense work, a source of nervous tension that unnerved spectators. One of the 13,000 who at- tended the 1905 Big Game observed that Stanford’s victory over Cali- fornia was a “nerve racking struggle.”47

Even the advent of rugby, a game that was supposed to alleviate many of sport’s physical and mental problems, may not have been as effective as reformers like Frank Angell wanted to believe. In fact, some Stanford students described rugby in a manner evoking the in- tensity of the old game. In 1908, one student called for each player to “grit his teeth for an ordeal of nerves, speed, and force” in a coming contest. Based on such statements, it seems that rugby may not have been all that different from the sport that aggravated players at the 1902 Rose Bowl, or the one that had inspired Stagg and Lanagan to take their players to far-off, relaxing retreats before big games. One student even berated the Stanford faculty in 1912 for trying to pro- claim rugby’s “mental, moral, and physical” benefits while openly continuing to seek profit and publicity. He doubted that rugby posi- tively impacted the majority of students who did not play on the var-

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sity team and went so far as to argue that the university leadership was letting the competition for athletic supremacy impede educa- tion.48

The struggle for football supremacy became an established part of America’s colleges in the early 1900s, especially after the founding of the NCAA and the rise of professional coaching. As intercollegiate ath- letics became institutionalized, moreover, professors were less able to influence it directly. After 1910, few psychologists wrote about sport’s place in university and society, or its effects upon students’ minds and bodies. One exception was H. Addington Bruce, who published “The Psychology of Football” in The Outlook in 1910. Bruce, who studied with William James, Morton Prince, and psychologist Boris Sidis, au- thored popular books and articles but never held a formal university position. Bruce’s article rehashed much of Patrick’s 1903 piece, but he used even more belligerent terms to promote football. He also con- tended that the game helped spectators expend the “fund of nervous energy” they had accumulated. Although some spectators may have disagreed, Bruce even argued that football spectatorship relaxed the mind. The game led to “self-forgetfulness” and allowed spectators to “let go.” Watching sports did more than just inspire the primitive be- havior that rescued men from modern civilization, said Bruce. Specta- torship actually relaxed the mind, an argument that reflected Bruce’s position as one of Sigmund Freud’s acolytes and anticipated Ameri- cans’ twentieth-century fascination with psychotherapy.49 Although Bruce was too late to contribute to progressive football reform, his ar- ticle did foreshadow the writings of University of Illinois coach Bob Zuppke, who would later portray football as a psychologically fulfill- ing game in the 1920s.

At the same time psychologists wrote about football’s benefits and its reform, many of these scholars were becoming sequestered in a fragmented disciplinary landscape housed in a bewildering array of university departments. The process of fragmentation occurred gradu- ally as the disciplines adapted to institutional circumstances and cur- ricular needs. Some universities, such as Harvard, Michigan, and Iowa, still considered experimental psychology a branch of philoso- phy into the 1920s, long after German-trained scholars like Münster- berg and Hall had transformed it. But other universities, especially

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newer institutions in the Midwest or West, had already established psychology as a unique field at a much earlier date. At Illinois, for in- stance, psychology was originally part of Dexter’s pedagogy depart- ment, but by 1904 the field had its own bailiwick. At Stanford, David Starr Jordan planned for experimental psychology to dominate philos- ophy virtually from the university’s opening day. In the early 1890s, he hired Wundt’s student Frank Angell while simultaneously trying to lure William Lowe Bryan, a Hall student, to Palo Alto as a second ex- perimentalist disguised as a historian of philosophy. (Harvard’s Josiah Royce, a native Californian, had already refused Jordan’s advances.) But Bryan resisted Jordan’s overtures, displaying his disciplinary in- tegrity by claiming the need to retrain in Europe if he took the new position. He stayed at Indiana University.50

The split between psychology and philosophy became more obvi- ous and widespread by 1930. While Harvard had recognized the two as separate fields within the same department in 1912, by 1934 it split the two fields that were then occupying one of the nation’s last com- bined psychology-philosophy departments. Historian Bruce Kuklick has likened this process to a divorce. The separation was less acrimo- nious in Ann Arbor, where the death of Michigan’s aging philosophy chair quietly prompted the formation of a separate psychology depart- ment in 1929. At Iowa, experimentalist Carl Seashore (who earned Yale’s first psychology Ph.D. under philosopher-psychologist George Trumbull Ladd and experimentalist Edward Scripture, a Wundt stu- dent) recast his unit as the “department of philosophy and psychol- ogy” in 1905, soon after superseding G. T. W. Patrick as chair. After this intellectual shift, Iowa’s department hired mostly experimental psychologists, who comprised over 80 percent of the department by the early 1920s. Although Seashore later stressed interdisciplinary scholarship as the dean of the graduate college at Iowa, he and other psychologists often maligned their nonexperimentalist colleagues, like Edwin Starbuck, for supposedly less rigorous research methods. Iowa’s philosophers, bitter and tired of the acrimony, formed their own de- partment in 1927.51

While psychology-related disciplines shared common intellectual roots, in the early 1900s they started becoming separate disciplines less amenable to what historians call “boundary work.”52 Psychology

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was no longer a deductive mode of inquiry led by mental philosophers at semi-isolated colleges, as it was in the antebellum era; nor was it a cross-disciplinary field with a wide range of epistemologies or meth- ods. Rather, it was a rigorously experimental subject tightly focused on the nervous system, with research carried out in a multitude of nar- row departments at large universities designed to generate practical knowledge. The academic laborers who filled these departments had trained at German universities or up-and-coming American research institutions. This reality represented a trend that was becoming evi- dent in modern academic and intellectual life. The production of knowledge, although carried out on a vast geographical scale, was ra- tional and standardized. As specialization grew, so too did the quality and quantity of scholarship. The chances that scientifically accurate knowledge would grow improved as more and more scholars used sci- entific methods and were employed in a growing number of university departments. Even though it was becoming less likely that knowledge would be accessible to nonacademics in the new academic order of things, this reality did not necessarily faze those who saw the athletic spectacle as a way to keep universities in the public spotlight while at the same time strengthening students’ nervous systems for the rigors of modern life.

Academic specialization was a hallmark of the ivory tower. But, as it turned out, so was sport. Scholars who theorized the psychology of football within modern society and fragmented, disciplinary universi- ties contributed to Progressive Era discussions about football reform. What did sport mean for modern minds and bodies, they asked, and what was physical culture’s proper role within American higher edu- cation? Thinkers such as Patrick, Lombard, and Dexter saw football as an important exercise for developing men; Angell even directly shaped and promoted the briefly successful West Coast rugby reform. They were globe-hopping scholars who contributed to progressive re- form, but they were also academic laborers, workers in increasingly specialized universities. As such, they helped create the academic dis- ciplines and departments that colonized institutions of higher educa- tion and research. Universities, competing for resources and publicity, turned to a popular spectacle that attracted public attention, dollars, and spectators. But football’s popularity also caused scandals and

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moral crises. Social scientists, in turn, addressed this problem, theoriz- ing that if universities could minimize the impact of the crowd and the taint of its money, academics could use sport to teach students disci- plined morality, while also reaching out to the public. Enmeshed within their own intellectual networks, disciplines, and departments, however, social scientists were also reframing the relationship be- tween the academy and the American people. They did so by creating professional safeguards to protect academic specialists from the mar- ket-oriented world located beyond the college walls.

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