American History Reform

University Press of Kansas

Chapter Title: Social Scientists: Making Sport Safe for a Rational Public

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.9

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C H A P T E R 4 Social Scientists: Making Sport Safe for a Rational Public

In 1908 Edward A. Ross, a University of Wisconsin sociologist, wrote that athletics helped players develop “moral as well as physical tone” and resist the “mob mind.” Sports did not merely train the body or strengthen the nervous system; they molded individual and social ethics. Ross proclaimed that football taught athletes to follow training rules, subdue their tempers, and display “modest self-restraint in vic- tory” as well as grace in defeat. This disciplined training demon- strated “the triumph of the will over suggestion.”1 For progressives like Ross, sport embodied the modern tension between order and dis- order. Intercollegiate football, depending on how it was supervised, could create either a moral or an immoral populace. After all, ticket sales and the press seemed to be turning sport into a sensational spec- tacle that corrupted universities, students, and spectators. Reforms, including shielding athletics from corruption by the market and the media, might eliminate sport’s vices while retaining its virtues. But to work, reforms had to be carried out on a national level. Universities had to band together to purify sport and protect higher learning. So- cial scientists did, ultimately, help shape athletic reforms. But, like psychologists, they also contributed to the construction of an aca- demic ivory tower that was not always accessible to the general pub- lic. At the same time athletic reforms began to enshrine sport as a uni- versity department devoted to exploiting the commercial marketplace, academic scholars began creating professional safeguards to protect their labor from that very market.

As in the case of psychology, the modern social sciences were trans- formed greatly in the late 1800s. The fields of economics, political sci- ence, history, and sociology emerged from the ashes of moral philoso- phy following the Civil War. At first, scholars of social science formed broad associations bridging divergent fields of inquiry. For example, Richard T. Ely, who held a Heidelberg doctorate and carried German social reform traditions to America by challenging the hegemony of laissez-faire economic orthodoxy, founded the American Social Sci-

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Edward Alsworth Ross, photographed around the time he came to the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1906), wrote about the importance of sport for college students. Photo courtesy of UW Madison Archives.

ence Association in the 1890s. While teaching first at Johns Hopkins and then at Wisconsin, Ely also supervised many graduate students who went on to be professors of sociology, economics, history, and la- bor relations (as well as commentators on college football). By 1900, though, practitioners of the various social sciences were creating spe- cial organizations for each discipline. Scholars, in short, like other pro- fessionals, embraced the modern division of labor.2 These modern in- tellectuals tended to favor, at least explicitly, empirical observation over philosophical deduction. They were particularly influenced by

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Darwinian evolutionary theory, which reinforced scientific authority and established rational order in a modern age seemingly filled with disorder. In this brave new academic world, scholars no longer en- gaged in a priori discussions of society. They constructed truth through rigorous investigation. Nonetheless, social scientists did not entirely dissociate themselves from qualitative judgments or Christian morality. Academics like Ross often employed an admixture of scien- tific epistemology and Social Gospel moralism as a way to promote their view of social order and its reform.3

Some social scientists, including Francis A. Walker, the economist and MIT president who gave the 1893 Phi Beta Kappa oration on col- lege athletics at Harvard, thought that football would help students understand and succeed in the modern industrial order. The son of an- tebellum thinker Amasa Walker, Francis Walker graduated from Amherst in 1860, during the era of the Barrett Gymnasium and Edward Hitchcock. Walker then enlisted in the Union army in 1861. It was ap- parent that collegiate gymnasium lessons were not lost on Walker, who cited Amherst’s President William Stearns in his 1893 speech. Walker contended that industry, like modern war, required special skills and efficient cooperation. He echoed psychologists when he noted that strenuous physical activities like military training strengthened the body, but hard mental labor drained it. Walker touted competitive team sports as the solution. Games like football taught specialized effi- ciency, creating robust men who possessed “courage, coolness, steadi- ness of nerve, quickness of apprehension, resourcefulness, self-knowl- edge, [and] self-reliance.” Yet sport’s benefits were also social and moral, not just mental or physical. Athletics developed the ability to cooperate and sublimate one’s personal desires to common goals—skills that were becoming essential in an industrial era when individuals were expected to contribute their specialized labor to the population. Walker also pondered the idea that sport benefited spectators. Football was so popular, he speculated, because it assuaged modern life’s “mo- notony” and inspired men to leave their stuffy offices and engage in physical activity. Sport would provide relief from the cutthroat scram- ble for money and professional status.4

Other turn-of-the-century social scientists were more ambivalent than Walker about football’s effects. Writing at the time of the 1894–

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1895 football crisis initiated by Charles William Eliot’s critiques, Har- vard economist Frank W. Taussig (a member of the 1879 Harvard Col- lege class, which later contributed to the Harvard Stadium construc- tion fund in 1902) argued that athletics might corrupt students and pervert education. While Taussig noted that sport could promote “loyalty and public spirit,” he also feared that it would damage college men’s morality and intellect, in addition to causing physical injury. The public’s vast expenditures on football prompted students to spend too much time, energy, and money on the spectacle. As in mod- ern party politics, vigorous enthusiasm was good, but it should not steal the show. The public’s overemphasis on athletics, though, was dangerous insofar as sports like football were starting to overshadow universities’ role “as training-places for educated, intelligent, public- spirited, rightly guided, and rightly ambitious men and citizens.” Taussig contended that colleges had to teach discipline, but he was afraid that sport might limit their ability to do so. He implied that ath- letic leaders, like political campaign organizers, must not pander to the untutored masses.5 It is not surprising that Taussig voiced such cau- tions. Concerns about lack of discipline in politics and social life were common in the late 1800s “Gilded Age” of industrial and urban ex- pansion. Capitalist tycoons monopolized wealth in an era of scarce economic regulation, while “machine” politicians, represented most famously by Tammany Hall’s Boss Tweed, seemed to control city poli- tics. Meanwhile, national parties spawned spectacular electoral cam- paigns. In this large, disorderly, and apparently corrupt society, re- formers hoped to curtail power brokers’ influence and create a society with purer political conduct. To strengthen democracy, individuals needed moral discipline. This trait would supposedly steel the “best men” against the temptations of quick money and corrupt politics. Critics like Taussig pointed out that while college sport might teach self-control and promote genteel manliness, it might also corrupt col- lege men and, as a result, American life.6

But there was a younger generation of scholars—many of whom were influenced by Richard T. Ely—who initially viewed college sport neither as a way to prepare young men for lives of industry nor as an activity that would corrupt the nation’s politics. Rather, they saw games like football as a way to instill a progressive spirit that would

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help to reform a modern society dominated by large, capitalist corpora- tions. In early 1893, not long after earning his Ph.D. in economics at Johns Hopkins, E. A. Ross—then a rising star of West Coast progres- sivism—told Stanford students that strong male bodies and morals would facilitate political reform. Ross deplored the “survival of the fittest” mentality that enabled investors and leaders of massive corpo- rations like Standard Oil to stockpile riches, and he debunked the So- cial Darwinists like William Graham Sumner who justified social in- equality as a natural result of competition for jobs, money, and resources. To counteract socially irresponsible corporations and the dog-eat-dog competitive mentality of Gilded Age America, said Ross, Americans had to build durable ethical consciences. At that time a young, idealistic economist, Ross insisted that “moral health” was bet- ter than wealth, and he implored students to become “manly” through reform-minded political activity. Athletic training was crucial to this process, since it produced the bodily stamina that would help young men save society from corrupt captains of industry.7 One of Ross’s col- leagues, Stanford economist Burt Estes Howard, articulated a similar connection between football and public conscience. At a 1901 football rally after the annual athletic banquet, which Howard attended with psychology professor Frank Angell and Stanford president David Starr Jordan, Howard spoke on football’s moral potential to hundreds of stu- dents in Stanford’s crowded assembly hall. He expected Stanford to win the upcoming Big Game against California, yet implored the team to play only “clean football” and win via honest means. Howard warned, “Do not come back to us with a stain on our colors. An un- clean victory is the worst possible defeat.” After all, he noted, main- taining honorable manliness was more important than winning a foot- ball game. This theme was present throughout Howard’s larger body of scholarship, including a 1901 book, Education and Democracy, in which he dismissed monetary disputes between Populists and conservatives as a superficial manifestation of a much deeper conflict. Society needed the right type of man, he said—not just the right type of money.8

Budding progressive social scientists like Howard and Ross held both great hopes and great fears for football. This perspective was not lost on students. In 1895, Michigan students observed that President Charles Kendall Adams of the University of Wisconsin argued that

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football taught players “manhood, self-restraint, [and] courage.” Four years later, they heard from New York’s Governor Theodore Roosevelt, the Spanish-American War hero who would soon be elected vice pres- ident and assume the presidency in 1901 upon William McKinley’s as- sassination. During a visit to Ann Arbor, Roosevelt discussed sport in terms that anticipated his stances on antimonopoly trust-busting as well as pure food and drug legislation. While football was good for America, said Roosevelt, its positive effects were felt only because of successful reform movements, especially in the Midwest, which eradi- cated “taints of professionalism.” He told Michigan students to “play fair and keep the money element out”; that was the only path to “hon- est, manly” athletics. Students also heard this refrain from professors who defended football as a way to raise the moral tone of the entire student body; yet teachers and other critics warned students that if college sport became a business carried out by mercenaries, its manly benefits would be lost.9 Although such optimism ran high, students were not blind to sport’s problems. Stanford students discussed foot- ball’s potential for “manly self-control” as early as 1891, but they also realized that the extent to which the game cultivated manliness de- pended on how it was played. In 1900, a Stanford alumnus, sounding a lot like Burt Howard, implored players to follow training rules and to be “honest, manly, square fellows” in football, just as in life. Univer- sity of Michigan students even printed a piece on sport by alumnus Delos Wilcox, a municipal reformer in Grand Rapids (and later New York), who equated trickster athletes with students who cheated or rigged class elections. Wilcox recommended that reformers remodel education to limit possibilities for dishonesty and ruthlessness.10

Football was good, but only if it improved young American men. For some turn-of-the-century observers, this meant that sport should promote a type of competition that would strengthen the white race and enable it to dominate the globe. Francis A. Walker—who had de- veloped harsh Indian policies for the federal government in the 1870s and warned against the dangers of unchecked foreign immigration in the 1890s—insisted that sport might bolster the hereditary traits of the white race without depleting its ranks (as war might). He thus an- ticipated William James’s call for a “moral equivalent” of war when he proclaimed that “the blood of the whole community is stirred by

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physical contests among the picked youth of the land, as once it was only stirred by battle.” Isaac A. Loos, a University of Iowa political scientist and athletic booster who had studied with Yale Social Dar- winist William Graham Sumner (Walter Camp’s brother-in-law), boldly proclaimed that the “English race” was in the process of establishing political and cultural hegemony throughout the world because it played the “sturdiest” type of sports. Even in the early 1900s, more self-consciously progressive social scientists like Frederick Jackson Turner and E. A. Ross proclaimed football’s racial benefits. Ross, for example, attributed white colonial success to athletics, saying that British military officers were able to keep their heads “in a Dervish charge or an Afghan rush” because they possessed the same coolness that a “seasoned football player” gained by having to make quick de- cisions on the football field when exposed to “the cheers of excited thousands” of spectators.11

Others saw football’s racial meanings in a less positive light. In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Thorstein Veblen, a University of Chicago sociologist, critiqued athletic spectacle as merely another va- riety of conspicuous consumption. Football was simply a way to shape players’ “predatory temperament”; it was a means of instilling vio- lence and trickery without teaching virtuous self-control. Veblen claimed that the game was more show than physical culture, and (in a typically dry yet colorful passage) insisted that conflating football with physical education was like confusing a bullfight with animal husbandry: “The material used, whether brute or human, is subjected to careful selection and discipline, in order to secure and accentuate certain aptitudes and propensities which are characteristic of the fer- ine state.” The game reflected moral “arrested development” and taught “truculence” or “cunning” instead of developing “physique” and “manly spirit.” It cultivated, said Veblen, a sort of competitive “barbarism” more useful in modern, capitalist society than in nature, yet still lacked “redeeming features of the savage character.” This cri- tique, in other words, read football’s Darwinian influence in reverse. The game was unfit for students because it negated evolution, rather than echoing it. Not only did football not promote the discipline that would save modern society, but it actually did promote a kind of disci- pline that corrupted American culture.12

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At a time when scholars made their reputation by critiquing each other’s ideas and disciplinary boundaries were in flux, even members of the same department might not agree on the meanings of sport. William I. Thomas, an anthropologist and sociologist who taught alongside Veblen at Chicago, argued in the American Journal of Sociol- ogy in 1901 that physical play was one manifestation of the “gaming instinct,” an innate trait that had resulted from millennia of natural se- lection. He contended that men and women in all societies and social classes expressed hereditary interest in risky or dangerous contests of “skill and chance,” including bear-baiting, street fights, prizefights, bullfights, cockfights, and football. Thomas argued that “instincts de- veloped in the struggle for food and rivalry for mates” had ingrained the desire for conflict in the human psyche. He warned, though, that modern advances had begun negating biological evolution. Life had become unchallenging and “artificial” for many. (Although he noted with relief that not everyone lived counterevolutionary lives: Chicago’s gamblers, tramps, and “confidence men” eschewed modernity’s mo- notony; some workers were still exposed to fighting at work, and even respectable men engaged in risky business, like the stock market.) If the “white race” did not embrace natural selection, said Thomas, it would fall behind other racial or ethnic groups. Atavistic behaviors like strenuous sport were a relatively safe way to introduce the risk and chance that were necessary to perpetuate America’s predominant biological and cultural group. Sport, in other words, could serve as a ritual training ground for the primitive traits that American men seemed to need to develop.13

Thomas also promoted intercollegiate athletics as a positive force by portraying sport as a form of university extension, or public engage- ment, which could develop instinctive behaviors within tens of thou- sands of spectators who possessed an innate need for conflict. Unlike courses or academic scholarship, he wrote, virtually everyone in the city could appreciate college athletics. Competitive sport was “the only phase of university life which appeals directly and powerfully to the instincts, and it is consequently the only phase of university life which appeals equally to the man of culture, the artist, the business- man, the man about town, the all-around sport, and, in fact, to all the world.” Football bridged social divisions by reaching deep into the

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human psyche. Therefore, it could bring the city together and teach important evolutionary lessons that modern society seemed to be for- getting. Unlike disciplinary scholarship, sport was relevant to a wide range of spectators located in the university’s urban shadow because it provided some of the danger missing in civilized life.14

Thomas’s idea reflected a key truth of the Progressive Era. Turn-of- the-century universities, whether publicly or privately endowed, were seen as being useful to the American public. So there had to be a way that their lessons could be extended to the broader society lo- cated outside the college walls. The University of Chicago, led by Chautauqua adult education proponent William Rainey Harper, was one of the major institutions (along with Wisconsin) to develop uni- versity extension. From its opening day, the University of Chicago sponsored academic scholarship yet also tried to reach out to nonaca - demics. In short, it wanted to be meaningful to the city. The campus was even located alongside the Midway Plaisance, the pop-culture center of the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Like Jane Addams and other middle-class, Windy City activists, men and women in the university’s pioneering departments of social work and sociology analyzed Chicago with the hope of improving it. Indeed, university records show us that other scholars in Hyde Park shared the notion that football could bolster university extension. In 1897, several years before Thomas wrote his article on the “gaming instinct,” Professor Ira W. Howerth of Chicago’s sociology department proposed to bring Extension Division students as a group to a major football game. This excursion, presum- ably, would instill “a strong interest in the University” and make ex- tension students feel like they were “sharers in its privileges.” Presi- dent Harper, always eager to publicize the university, endorsed the plan.15

Football, in other words, could help market America’s budding uni- versities. It could also teach both students and spectators some of the lessons regarding race and manliness that were being developed in de- partments of psychology and social science. But as the number of in- juries, deaths, and scandals piled up, concerns about sport’s negative effects on progressive universities also increased. In early 1905, in an influential piece in The Outlook magazine, Princeton history professor Paul Van Dyke defended football’s timeless educational utility, writing

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that the game, which reflected the toughness of the “Saxon” race, could suppress student “vice” and thus cultivate disciplined morality. But he also wrote that any “reasonable” person could see that college athletics had become debased. Although some critics exaggerated football’s faults, they were correct to point out that it had become filled with “evils” that reflected the sad state of American society. Football’s problems, though, were not intrinsic to the game itself. They simply showed that unsavory aspects of nonacademic culture had infiltrated the academy. Football, Van Dyke reassured readers, no more caused gambling than did presidential elections. College sport, like American political life, was a victim of the nation’s moral short- comings. Its failings were “not the native product of university soil”; they were the result of seeds that had been introduced from “outside” and had “grown into a noxious crop of weeds” that were “a disfigure- ment to the fields of university athletics.” In particular, Americans’ unhealthy fascination with chance—in the form of gambling, a special concern for progressives—had invaded football and sullied pure uni- versity campuses. Sport had to be rescued from the dissipated masses, who valued monetary gain and entertainment over education or ra- tional thought. One could not blame football when its “wildest” ex- cesses were no worse than “the senseless displays of ‘enthusiasm’ at great political conventions, when grown men declare[d] their attach- ment to political leaders by acting like maniacs for half an hour at a stretch.”16

Van Dyke, like Thorstein Veblen and other Progressive Era com- mentators, saw consumerism as a major part of college athletics’ prob- lem. To satisfy spectators, football’s proponents had transformed it from a manly game into a complicated business. Van Dyke lamented that teams possessed their own budgets, just like university depart- ments. He especially targeted the media as a major reason for college sport’s corruption. Van Dyke accused the popular press of feeding the desire for brutality, and he claimed that more readers wanted to con- sume stories about prizefights than about political orations, and ten times the number of boxing enthusiasts wanted to read about football. The root of sport’s moral decline, therefore, was the popular desire for spectacle. No longer a skillful, educational contest, football had be- come a sport with “men of extraordinary weight and strength drilled

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to mechanical exactness in executing monotonous movements.” Van Dyke used the common comparison with politics to make his point that the media caused football’s downfall. The game, like so many other aspects of American life, was a victim of the crowd, and had be- come shrouded in “hysterical” reactions. The notion that an educa- tional experience had become an irrational (even effeminate) end, rather than a sober and enlightening means to an end, was a public disgrace. Instead of embracing rational cooperation and responsible politics, Americans merely craved spectacle and profiteering.17

Football’s most vocal critics were alarmed that commercialized sport would make universities less useful to the public by inhibiting their ability to develop students’ morals. In his 1905 Collier’s series, “Buy- ing Football Victories,” muckraker Edward Jordan targeted the state universities of the Midwest, whose students were often drawn from rural areas. These growing institutions had to produce graduates who were good citizens, or else risk endangering the state by “contaminat - [ing]” its “talent.” Football was so dangerous because it had appar- ently become a business that just provided entertainment. At Wiscon- sin, charged Jordan, the athletic association rigged elections and fielded paid players. A professor even arranged sinecures for athletes who “packed political mass meetings, cheered and hissed speakers in turn, and gained a livelihood by a perversion of the fundamental prin- ciples of the service of the State.” The players and coaches became ad- mirers of trickery, which they taught to the rest of the undergradu- ates. This brand of morally reprehensible conduct needed progressive remedies, such as the “Australian,” or secret, ballot election that even- tually removed the corrupt professor from the athletic committee. (But even then, we can see that no one was immune from charges of corrup- tion within a Progressive Era public sphere where money, print, and spectacle mixed. A Michigan professor accused Jordan of printing ex- aggerated rumors merely to secure a permanent job at Collier’s.)18

It is not surprising that Jordan targeted Wisconsin, his alma mater, as one of the universities that needed to clean up football corruption. While the University of Chicago was trying to bring the benefits of knowledge to the urban masses in America’s most quickly growing city, the University of Wisconsin was trying to bring education and expertise to an entire state. The university was located in the capital of

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Madison, where progressives such as Robert M. LaFollette, Charles R. Van Hise, and state legislative librarian Charles McCarthy pioneered the “Wisconsin Idea.” Those who developed this progressive concept argued that publicly funded universities should aid government by producing knowledge, encouraging faculty to serve on public com- missions, and disseminating knowledge via university extension and public lectures. Key supporters of the Wisconsin Idea, such as Richard T. Ely (who came to Madison in 1892), E. A. Ross (1906), and historian Frederick Jackson Turner, contended that state universities could help form a rational and orderly public. They could do so by training ex- perts in industry and government who would help protect the public against both the unthinking “mob” and unscrupulous capitalists. Properly maintained universities, in other words, were moderate places of social purity that would disseminate knowledge and higher learning so as to eliminate, or at least alleviate, the cultural dangers of greed, deprivation, and the crowd mentality.19

Public universities like Wisconsin, though, could not do their job if they were being corrupted by football and its irrational spectators. Concerned about the crowd’s influence over rational universities, Wis- consin’s Frederick Jackson Turner critiqued football at an alumni ban- quet in Madison in January 1906, at virtually the same time the IAAUS was being founded in New York City. Turner did have a few positive things to say about sport: he praised the “strenuous life” for giving formerly “pale and ascetic” students a healthy physical outlet, and he also maintained that college athletics would help develop the courage necessary to build America’s national character. Yet Turner complained that the popularity of football had led some universities to conduct themselves inappropriately. “The public has pushed its influ- ence inside the college walls,” he proclaimed, thus “making it impossi- ble for faculties and for the clean and healthy masses of the students to keep athletics honest and rightly related to a sane university life.” Football was a professional business supported by taxpayers, with col- leges recruiting athletic “gladiators” (or “mercenaries” or “experts”) from distant locales for mere physical prowess. In the process of mak- ing money, it ruined “student ethics” and muddled “ideals of sport, manliness, and decency.” Such “Tammany Hall methods” could not be used to educate college students. Turner assigned blame to the ticket-

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buying and newspaper-reading spectators who would apparently rather support a “football giant” than the hardworking students who would comprise a generation of progressive state leaders. (Ironically, though, some of those hardworking students hanged Turner in effigy and threatened to toss him into Lake Mendota after he supported a proposal that the Big Nine, Wisconsin’s athletic conference, suspend football for two years.)20 For a Wisconsin Idea proponent, the idea that universities were succumbing to sports enthusiasts and market forces—and letting nonacademics degrade the academy—was unten- able. Unregulated football appealed to the lowest common denomina- tor, thus allowing the uneducated multitude to corrupt an otherwise educational ritual.

Social scientists’ concerns about football represented growing pro- gressive concerns about the place of rationality within the public sphere, as well as universities’ role within that public sphere. If not conducted properly, intercollegiate athletics could hinder social morals, and it could also limit universities’ societal effectiveness. One critic of college life was Woodrow Wilson, the president of Princeton University, who had studied with Richard T. Ely (among others) while a graduate student at Johns Hopkins. In Scribner’s Magazine (1909) Wilson asked, “What Is a College For?” Institutions of higher educa- tion, he said, had to be useful to the nation. Yet this usefulness could not be construed as mere practical utility. Rather, colleges had to train students’ “faculties” in “mental discipline.” Echoing antebellum moral philosophers, Wilson wrote that modern life needed mental ath- letes even more than it needed physical athletes. While extracurricular activities should be part of college life, insofar as they could help train students for life after college, they could not become the prime focus of America’s budding universities. Wilson lamented that the modern American college had become a “teaching machine” that no longer taught men discipline. Athletics had to be just one part of a broader educational program designed to teach both “intellectual discipline and moral enlightenment” to students. So that they could be heard over the din, said Wilson, professors and college leaders had to figure out a way to “subordinate” the distracting sideshows—like athlet- ics—to the larger academic circus.21

A critic who expressed a similar position and even corresponded

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with Wilson on the matter was Albert Shaw, another Johns Hopkins Ph.D. (and Ely student) who edited the American Review of Reviews. A well-known municipal reformer, in 1909 Shaw wrote a critique of ath- letics and student culture in which he pointed out that the taxpayers and philanthropists who were funding the phenomenal growth of Pro- gressive Era universities needed to know that their millions were not being frittered away on a corrupt enterprise. Shaw claimed that Amer- ican colleges had once been free of “drunkenness, gambling, lavish ex- penditure,” and other deleterious activities. Pre–Civil War moral philosophers had taught and inspired young men, leading them to live disciplined lives rather than just filling students with information. But by the early 1900s, said Shaw, this older educational impulse had died off at the same time the rise of “social clubs and luxurious cliques” had transformed college youths into socialites carelessly spending their fathers’ money on cocktails and fine living. Football distracted young men from study and encouraged gambling. In this way, it injured students’ morals. Colleges, now filled with such temp- tations, might actually corrupt young men and prevent them from liv- ing “lives of real industry, real intellectual vigor, and real moral power.”22

Shaw commented that universities were admitting too many stu- dents and growing excessively large. Institutions of higher education were reflecting the problems of larger society as they were becoming overrun by “cliques” that resembled urban “hoodlum” gangs. While athletics might provide a façade of institutional unity for massive uni- versities, in reality they were only a poor substitute for a true “unified college spirit.” Football, claimed Shaw, actually tore institutions apart and corrupted them. By exposing athletes to the desires of a heteroge- neous crowd of thousands of spectators—some of whom were women—colleges were training students to take foolish chances and perform a brutal ritual that destroyed their vital organs. Even worse, daily papers had turned intercollegiate sport into a disorderly specta- cle. Parents, said Shaw, did not want to see their sons’ pictures on the sports pages next to “Jack Johnson, the negro pugilist heavy-weight,” or professional baseball players. College men, he implied, should not be exposed to the public gaze in a racially mixed commercial sphere. Referring, like Taussig and others, to urban politics, he said that ath-

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letics comprised “a network of commercialism that thoroughly Tam- many-ize[d] what ought to be decorous and fine, like contests in the English universities.”23

By comparing football to British sport, Shaw demonstrated a notion common among white, middle-class progressives who feared racial in- tegration and working-class culture. After all, segregation and na- tivism were sometimes considered reform-minded in an era of anti– African American violence and the arrival of millions of new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe (who were hardly seen as “white” upon landing in America). College sport, many progressive critics maintained, should be amateur and white, not professional or racially integrated. Moreover, football’s commercial appeal, gambling potential, and resemblance to violent modes of working-class leisure, such as prizefighting, might damage student morality and taint public life. Without proper regulation, sport could even create celebrity per- formers, turning progressive universities into corrupt sponsors of spectacle and transforming both students and members of the public into unthinking consumers. But with the right reforms, football might uplift American society, preserve the utility of Progressive Era univer- sities, and craft university students into upright, moral men who could reshape industrial society along ethical lines.24

As Shaw and Wilson expounded upon the meanings of sport and extracurricular activities for America’s colleges, Wisconsin’s E. A. Ross continued to see sport as a pedagogical tool for creating moral, reform- minded men. Ross argued in 1908 that sport was a “prophylactic” against the mob mind, a means of protecting society by creating a proper public attitude and teaching self-control. Education in rational analysis would equip students with the critical tools needed to distin- guish “objective truth” from popular fads. Sporting contests would strengthen individual will, instill discipline, and train participants to cooperate with one another without yielding to the crowd. For Ross, football was useful only insofar as its less savory aspects prepared col- lege men to resist cultural tricksters and ignore the crowd’s desires. College graduates, once thoroughly educated in mind, body, and morals, would be able to protect themselves from “the sweep of popu- lar delusion” and thus avoid the confidence men who peddled faulty political or social panaceas.25 Ross painted an appealing portrait of

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sport and its educational possibilities, but he avoided a key question: How exactly would athletics help students develop self-restraint? Might students, without expert guidance, get swept up in the popular spectacle and succumb to the mob mind after all? This conundrum awaited a solution that turned out to be close at hand.

Some Americans claimed that athletic guidance would come from professional physical educators or coaches. In 1908, Harvard philoso- pher and social ethicist Josiah Royce called on physical educators to aid in the moral training of athletes, teams, and crowds. Using an ar- gument that some coaches already employed, Royce claimed that phys- ical training could “extend its influence to large bodies of boys who, as spectators of games or as schoolmates, are more or less influenced by the athletic spirit.” Trained experts, in other words, could help shape the morality of those watching in the stands.26 In this light, properly supervised spectator sport seemed like a magic bullet that could solve any number of social problems. Thomas F. Moran, an Ely student and longtime Purdue University professor of history and eco- nomics, advanced a similar theory. During his thirty-three-year tenure at Purdue, Moran served as the university’s faculty representative to the IAAUS and NCAA, as well as the Big Nine. According to contem- poraries, Moran represented a progressive stance on football that was influential in the Midwest.27 But Moran broadened his sphere of influ- ence when he spoke at the annual IAAUS convention in New York in late 1909. Echoing Royce and others who wanted to clean up Ameri- can sport, he called for the moral leadership of professional athletic experts.

Moran noted that football reform would be difficult, since most spectators simply desired entertaining games and were uninterested in change. To make matters worse, most college presidents even wanted winning teams for advertising purposes. Football reform, therefore, had to be carefully crafted and widely implemented—what Moran called a “mutual disarmament” among colleges. To reform sport, uni- versities needed a new kind of football leader. Too many coaches served only during the season, migrated from job to job, sought only victory, and were not sympathetic to collegiate ideals or goals. These journeymen employed dishonest means, either to retain their current jobs or to move to new positions with higher salaries. Instead of em-

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bracing such devious, shifty types, universities should seek the “right kind of men.” A coach should be a well-paid, professional instructor, not a rover perpetually seeking money. He should be a teacher of men- tal, physical, and moral discipline. Men of unimpeachable character usually entered stable professions, said Moran, so universities should sign respectable men to full-year contracts: “Such a man is a fixture, not a transient. . . . He is a part of the college community and is inter- ested in putting athletics on a sound and wholesome basis. He is usu- ally a member of the instructional corps and as such has a feeling of responsibility.” Moran, envisioning an institutional niche for coaches, advocated a football teacher with bona fide status. The new profession would have to exist throughout all of the nation’s universities, though, since even coaches with high moral character had to compete against distant teams led by unethical tricksters. He anticipated an eager re- ception for his ideas about “clean and manly” athletics, since all of the IAAUS’s members wanted “strenuous, manly” college sport and would presumably “be zealous in protecting intercollegiate athletics from all influences of a harmful character.”28

Moran’s approach to reform reflected a thought process typical of progressives. First it was national. Football’s savior class, made up of scrupulous, truly professional coaches, would be created through structural reform carried out on a broad geographical level. This pro- cess could be left neither to chance nor to local or regional efforts. As modern transportation and communication networks tied distant com- munities together, reforms intended to circumvent graft and corrup- tion must be all-encompassing. All institutions had to agree on changes that would, to use an athletic metaphor, level the intercolle- giate playing field. Second, Moran’s proposal negotiated a fine line be- tween two kinds of professionalism: one that chased easy money, and one that sought a steady salary. Moran deplored the journeyman coach who desired profit and fame, but he exalted the resident expert who taught football and in return demanded only a respectable living. Itinerant showmen might enrich themselves and corrupt universities by appealing to the irrational mob, while expert coaches could enrich the university by serving the interests of a rational public. Athletic experts, presumably, would not be swayed by popular opinion. Unlike a coach who moved from job to job pursuing quick money, a truly

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professional coach would, like other university experts, possess re- spectable credentials and settle at one athletic department. These men would teach moral discipline and self-control, while simultaneously creating stability and respectability for lucrative football programs. Moran held faith in the public sphere. He thought that reason would persuade students and alumni to follow the “guiding hand” of the re- formers who would save football by entrusting it to a group of expert coaches who would focus all of their time and attention on making football an honest game.29

Moran was probably not aware of it, but his proposal effectively brought social scientists’ involvement in college football full circle. A generation earlier, before regional conferences and national regulatory agencies, a few scholars directly shaped the game that was permeating American culture and campuses. In the 1880s and 1890s, some of the first coaches were social scientists, men who were professional stu- dents of society but mere amateur athletes. Indiana University’s first coach, for instance, was Arthur B. Woodford. Woodford was hired by Indiana’s President David Starr Jordan in 1885, taught psychology and social science there for four years, and led the first Hoosier squad in 1887. He later completed a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins in 1891 (the same year as E. A. Ross) with Ely, wrote on monetary policy, and advised the federal government on labor issues. Another Johns Hopkins social science graduate helped bring football to the South. George Petrie, who also earned a doctorate at Hopkins in 1891, invigorated athletics at Auburn, where he taught history. Petrie coached Auburn’s squad and led it to the school’s first victory against the University of Georgia in 1892. Five years later, Charles McCarthy, who had been a star full- back at Brown and articulated the Wisconsin Idea in the early 1900s, was Georgia’s coach for two seasons, including the 1897 season short- ened by Von Gammon’s death.30

Each of these individuals earned prestige within his respective scholarly field, but none gained the same kind of notoriety that John Heisman or Knute Rockne did in the 1920s. Unlike well-known coaches, social scientists often had to show that they were practition- ers of esoteric disciplines who were not interested in drawing notori- ety. They had to prove that they were moderate and would not endan- ger universities’ reputations as progressive institutions. For example,

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at Stanford, E. A. Ross developed a reputation as a prodigious public speaker, but incurred Jane Stanford’s wrath in the 1890s by speaking out against imported Chinese labor and supporting the bimetallic, fiat monetary standard proposed by the Populists, which would have helped farmers and laborers. He also supported the Pullman strikers and other causes hostile to big industry. The wife of railroad magnate Leland Stanford might never have noticed Ross’s remarks, except that newspapers reported (and perhaps exaggerated) his speeches. Ross later condemned the articles as sensational—another instance of the commercial press pandering to the mob mind—but he could not per- suade the only audience that mattered. Jane Stanford, sole trustee of the university named in her son’s memory, eventually convinced David Starr Jordan to fire Ross in 1900. Jordan portrayed Ross as an immature scholar who played to the crowd. Colleges could not indulge “the whims and fads of its clever young men who diffuse University ideas with their ears upon the mob and their eyes upon the newspa- pers.” Josiah Royce agreed that Ross had ignored his public duty.31

Jordan claimed that a true scholar subscribed to “sound and conserva- tive opinion.” He even dismissed Ross’s professionalism, sneering that the sociologist possessed “little scientific training.” Ross’s real problem was not his beliefs, but his lack of rigor, decorum, and self-restraint. Jordan informed Yale’s president, Arthur T. Hadley, that Ross was a stain on Stanford’s reputation. “No right of free thought or free speech has been denied here,” Jordan asserted, “but if a man’s outside speech hurts or helps his own reputation, he must take the consequences as elsewhere in the world.”32

Ross conceded the premises of Jordan’s attacks, if not their sub- stance, when he defended his academic reputation by employing a logical, if somewhat disingenuous, tactic. He protested accusations of substandard scholarship by claiming that his writings were uninter- esting and had virtually no popular appeal. Thus the same scholar who had called young men to social activism when assailing laissez- faire economics and promoting strenuous sport in 1893 proclaimed in 1900 that he was a disinterested academic. Ross assured Jane Stanford that his work was “dry” and that he did not engage any “burning questions.” He said that his articles, published in journals based at major research universities, proved he was not “dangerous.” He even

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claimed that he was so far removed from contemporary politics that students could not discern his stances on pressing issues like bimet- allism. Initially, Jordan backed these claims before he turned against Ross.33 At various points, in other words, both Jordan and Ross said that he was such a good scholar because he was irrelevant. It was not quite true, but it was the right thing to say to try to get out of hot wa- ter with a politically conservative trustee. Professors in the new ivory tower, no matter the social or political relevance of their research, had to become, or at least look like, disinterested scientists. Unlike the football team, it was probably not a good thing if the sociology depart- ment made a splash in the local papers.

Ross’s dismissal led to a national uproar, several indignant faculty resignations, and a major academic freedom controversy.34 After leav- ing Palo Alto he moved on, first to the University of Nebraska in Lin- coln, and then to Wisconsin, where he joined his Ph.D. advisor and mentor, Richard T. Ely. Public universities located in progressive state capitals welcomed ostensibly radical scholars like Ross more eagerly than had cloistered Stanford, but only if the professors tamed their public profiles and asserted identities as sensible scholars. Wisconsin had even put Ely on trial in 1894 for his support of organized labor. Although he held on to his professorship, the trial changed Ely’s scholarly and political orientation. Formerly an outspoken radical un- afraid to exhibit his Social Gospel inclinations, after the trial he be- came more conservative and reticent. As historian Ellen Schrecker notes, Ely then “stopped writing for a popular audience and devel- oped an appropriately scholarly niche for himself in the relatively ob- scure field of land economics.” Even the academic freedom statement that Wisconsin’s board of regents issued after Ely’s acquittal was mostly a publicity stunt formulated to advertise the university. Al- though the early 1900s was a golden age for Wisconsin progressivism, by 1914 conservatives led a backlash in state politics. They subse- quently muted the influence of the university and of progressives like Robert LaFollette or Charles Van Hise.35

At this time some critical observers were starting to see that univer- sities, by virtue of being public institutions, could never be immune from the less savory elements of public life. In 1918, Thorstein Ve- blen—near the end of an itinerant scholarly career marred by dis-

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missals resulting in large part from his own disruptive professional be- havior (not just his caustic opinions and the lack of tenure or academic freedom protection)—published The Higher Learning in America. In this book he once again critiqued football at the same time he called for universities to seal themselves off from nonacademic influences. Veblen argued that higher education should comprise a pure academic sphere untainted by politics or money. Universities trained scholars, and prolonged exposure to the gilded ways of the leisure class would sully both men and the institutions designed to cultivate them. Foot- ball was merely a distraction. Veblen said that intercollegiate sport brought the unreflective, backslapping culture of businessmen into the academy, diverting attention from education. Veblen wanted uni- versities to remain intellectual spaces, not become places for produc- ing men adept in a modern perversion of the Darwinian struggle for existence that was only useful for the unnatural selection of capitalist functionaries. Football was less than desirable because it represented the academy’s willingness to sink to the base desires of a society that did not appreciate the university’s true, intellectual function.36

Veblen’s 1918 critique of football and call for a reemphasis on intel- lectual life indicated a shift in the way some Americans thought about universities. In order to be useful to the public, they had to be pro- tected from that public. As chapter 7 will show, Ross’s dismissal in- spired American intellectuals to band together and create professional safeguards, such as academic freedom, permanent tenure, and the American Association of University Professors (a group that sought to reform or eliminate football in the 1920s). These late Progressive Era reforms did, in fact, provide some security for academics. We can see that later in life, when Ross reflected on his career in Wisconsin he praised the institution for disregarding prevailing systems of social class and for tolerating outspoken professors. Indeed, he proclaimed, Madison’s hundreds of faculty members were so well protected from American society’s “ruthless commercialism” that they felt obligated to be as critical as possible. By the 1920s, scholars like Ross were often able to speak without fear of dismissal because of Progressive Era re- forms. But other critics, as we will see, were then starting to observe that such professional safeguards might also cause them to play it safe and merely produce respectable—not provocative—scholarship. They

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may have had a point, insofar as it is evident that Ross’s fondness for Wisconsin’s intellectual climate appears to have only been surpassed by loyalty to his discipline. Since the 1890s, he observed in 1936, soci- ology had become a scientific field with a “massive body of accepted doctrine.” In turn, its practitioners were able to move between state- funded and privately endowed universities.37 The communities of modern intellectual culture provided relatively safe cocoons within which scholars could communicate complicated ideas to each other via standard jargon without having to worry about threats from the out- side world. At the same time, this disciplinary structure also provided national, transinstitutional structures for both vertical and horizontal promotion.

Turn-of-the-century social scientists wanted academic research and higher education to be useful to the American public. Studying a wide range of pressing issues, they crafted solutions to mitigate the prob- lems of a growing urban-industrial society. In particular, they focused on morality in the public sphere, envisioning collegiate sport as one activity that, if regulated, could solve many of society’s moral prob- lems. By 1910, one solution was the professional coach, who might bring the same type of stature and expertise to athletics that univer- sity professors had brought to academic studies. Coaches, however, occupied a very different public space than the one that scholars were starting to occupy. While Ross and some other progressive social sci- entists were effective public intellectuals, the very circumstances about which they wrote—the “mob mind” and the influence of money or the sensational press—forced them to create a veritable ivory tower of esoteric or arcane academic structures. To pursue knowledge relevant to modern society, ironically, they had to be pro- tected from that society—especially the market economy. Intercolle- giate football, however, found itself in a different place. By contrast, coaches directly engaged the commercial sphere. At the same time they theorized a pedagogical identity as educators who understood the body, mind, and crowd psychology, coaches solidified their iden- tity as pop-culture ingénues. College athletics’ impresarios, in other words, successfully created a cultural space located squarely between the university and American consumers.

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