The Manly, the Moral, and the Proficient in sport

The Manly, the Moral, and the Proficient: College Sport
in the New South

The Manly, the Moral, and the Proficient in sport
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by Patrick B. Miller Department of History
Northeastern Illinois University
Who are these youths with such athletic mastery and where did they come from and who taught them to play such football?
They are the sons of men who fought in the charge of Pickett and Pettigrew at Gettysburg; of men who laid down their arms with Lee at Appomattox. As their fathers learned of themselves and their leaders how to fight, so have these young men learned of themselves and their leaders how to play football.
Conversation between a prominent Virginian and
Professor J. M. Bandry, Trinity College [later Duke University],
circa 18901
Say the defenders of [football], it develops manhood of youth. I deny it unless by manhood they mean mere physical strength.
John Singleton Mosby, writing in the aftermath of the death of
University of Virginia football player Archer Christian in 19092
Surveying the American educational landscape toward the end of the nineteenth century, various commentators assessed the development of collegiate athletics by geographical region. In contrast to their appraisals of the relatively
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mature status of organized sports in the Northeast, and what they observed about the increasing experience and expertise of midwestern athletes or what they perceived as growing enthusiasm for sports along the Pacific Coast, those who took any note of the southern states simply asserted that they lagged far behind in matters pertaining to the sporting spirit. Neither the general nor college public at the South manifests much interest in athletics or gymnastics, the U.S. Bureau of Education concluded in its Bulletin of 1885. In attempting to account for this particular anomaly, the bureau could only suggest-in a curious way-that military drill is in vogue in many places throughout the region.3
The Bulletin was clear in its considerations: it was the white South that prompted such concern. Like other mainstream commentaries at the turn of the century, the Bulletin did not deal with the expansion of traditionally black colleges; neither did it address the issue of race relations in the South. Its omissions are thus as significant historically as its assertions concerning athletics and regional culture.4 Within its narrow frame of reference, the Bureau of Education nevertheless did touch on issues critical to the assessment of Southern exceptionalism within the larger transformation of American society. Though it is true that the development of college sport in the white South followed a different pace and pattern than it did elsewhere, even as the bureaus Bulletin was being published, students on many southern campuses had started to devote an increasing amount of their leisure hours to formal competition in a variety of athletic endeavors. Most notably, players pursued long, exhausting baseball schedules against club and collegiate opponents. They also participated with a vengeance in the newly discovered, rough-and-tumble game of football. At the same time, many of their elders-educational authorities prominent among them-began to articulate a formal justification for athletics, praising sport for its contributions to the building of manly character and the strengthening of regional pride.
From a very different vantage point, it is noteworthy that the Bureau of Education ignored the numerous factors, geographic as well as economic, that actually had impeded the spread of athletics below the Mason-Dixon line during the first years of the postbellum period.5 In its reference to military drill, moreover, the bureaus report missed the connection that some observers would discern between the martial traditions characterizing the Old South and the virtues attributed to athletic competition. And ultimately the Bulletin may have been written too soon to consider yet another, contrasting, interpretation of the role of athletics in southern culture at the turn of the century: the important ways in which the rituals and spectacles of modern team sports resonated for those seeking to create a New South.6
To chronicle the origins and development of southern college sports would be to address not only a broad range of social practices but also the values and ideals defining the region a hundred years ago. First, intercollegiate athletic competition offers a case study in cultural diffusion, the manner in which games imported from the North gained popularity in the South, or from a different perspective, the ways homegrown energy and enthusiasm found expression in
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Louisiana State University Football, circa 1900. Photo courtesy of LSU.
national pastimes. Beyond that, the traits of hardihood and courage that were associated with the sport of football were lauded by many southern leaders in much the same terms employed by their northern counterparts. By the turn of the century, young men of both sections of the country might thus be seen as playing out a ritual of reunion on the college gridiron-the significance of the game widespread as well as firmly in place as an emblem of the strenuous life. Within a few short years, athletes from the South would join northerners on the All-America teams chosen annually by the coaches and journalists who stood as the arbiters of athletic culture in the United States.7
Cast within a slightly different context, athletic competition spoke to traditional notions of southern honor and, at the same time, to the New South creed, especially as both ideals reinforced distinctions predicated on gender and race. Accentuating the particular fitness of the white southern male, games such as baseball and football, like the rugged physical pursuits of the antebellum era, stood out as demonstrations not merely of difference but of dominance. Yet, with respect to continuities and innovationsan ongoing debate among historians of the postbellum Souththe desire by students to increase their proficiency in technical terms, like the efforts of their coaches to organize games and athletic seasons, attested to increasingly modern sensibilities. Along with frequent evocations of football as a scientific sport, such developments reflected an ideology bound to the processes of urbanization and industrialization rather than an attempt to redeem an idealized agrarian past of horses and gentlemen or the legacy of the Lost Cause. As in so much else, one recent historian has concluded, modem innovations [in sport] did not so much dilute Southern identity as give it new, sharper, focus.*
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Set against the backdrop of intraregional cultural rivalries, debate over the conduct of college games became implicated in broad-based discussions about the meanings of manliness and morality, as well as modernity. This occurred when New Southerners extolled sport as a carrier of the modem creed, while evangelical Protestants-joined by old warriors like John Singleton Mosby inveighed against the excesses they believed were bound to the games played by a younger generation. That numerous colleges dropped football within a few years after its arrival in the South suggests that the gridiron was, at least at the outset, contested cultural territory Ultimately, football prevailed. But when pigskin fetish-worship triumphed over religious pieties-a victory not completed until the 1920sthe new cult continued to embrace a paradox. Since that time, an exalted notion of manly sport has played an exaggerated role in shaping popular perceptions of a traditional white southern culture within the modernizing experience.
*** Congruent in many respects with field sports, horse racing, and other
gentlemanly but strenuous pastimes, baseball in its early versions was first introduced to the region before the Civil War and became popular both in the larger cities and on some collegecampuses.9 Nonetheless, the conflagration of the 1860s was devastating to the educational institutions of the Old South and thus militated against the further organization of athletic competition until rather late in the nineteenth century. Several state-supported colleges closed during Reconstruction for lack of funds as well as a strategy to suppress the educational aspirations of many freedmen; numerous other schools, whether affiliated with various Protestant denominations or publicly-endowed, operated on the most meager of budgets. As a consequence, extracurricular activities, which might involve the expense of equipment, travel, and lodging, found little place in the programs of state legislators or of educational leaders, just as such endeavors often might lie beyond the financial reach of many students.10
If the destruction of life and property during the Civil War created an enormous gap in the student traditions of the South, other factors inhibited the process by which new patterns of social and cultural exchange might replace, or augment, the old. The dearth of high schools and more formal systems of secondary instruction (such as those being established in the Northeast and upper Midwest) severely limited the ways students might share their interests and expertise in athletics. College campuses of the South, moreover, were in many cases located farther from one another than those in New England or in states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, while transportation networks were far less extensive than in other sections of the nation. And with fewer large cities in the South, the region lacked the concentrations of a middle-class population that elsewhere had been instrumental in sponsoring the expansion of sporting activity.11
Against these impediments stood numerous incentives for southern youth to participate in games of strength and daring. An abundance of warm weather as well as the history and lore of the rigorous frontier experience were conducive in their own ways to the development of sports in the South. Indeed, southern
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Cadets in uniform watch an early football game at Louisiana State University, circa 1902. Photo courtesy of LSU.
commentators of the period consistently stressed the prominence of outdoor life, the pleasure derived from trials of skill, boldness, and tenacity, and the need to maintain the ethos of aggressive white manhood as central to the perpetuation of a rugged regional culture.12 According to the catalog of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, the institution had been established in 1858 to promote the raw planter mentality, its founders arranging the academic calendar to allow the student enough time to engage in the sports which make him a true Southern man, hunting, shooting, riding . . . . In this instance, such pursuits were intended to lend themselves to the training of young men in the management of large plantations and their slaves. After the Civil War, southern elites could project on other sports-especially those conceived in terms of certain rules a similar means of training for social leadership and racial control.13
A richly textured tradition of southern honor that had long animated the region also facilitated the rise of intercollegiate athletics. Though the Bureau of Education, in its Bulletin of 1885, had suggested that military drill could distract students from athletics, both the structure of organized sports and the sensibilities they were intended to inspire corresponded well with a passion for the physical, a fascination with violence in formal as well as spontaneous manifestations, and antebellum military tradition.14 Rough and romantic, like the martial valor representing the legend of the Lost Cause, athletic exploits thus could give young men a sense of exhilarating contest and conflict in battle. This was a shadow, perhaps, of what their fathers might have recalled from their exploits at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, but it was a deeper experience than marching on a parade ground might ever provide.
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For some educators, moreover, college sports served to unite tidewater and up-country metaphorically if not always politically, socially, and economically. As Professor John Spencer Bassett of Trinity College observed at the turn of the century, athletic competition brought together the well-bred scion of an established family and the rough-hewn lad down from the hills to compete on the level surface of the baseball diamond or football field. The intense masculine bonding of the sporting experience thus could ease tensions on campus by channeling, temporarily at least, distinctions of class into a shared endeavor. Once again, as in memories of combat, for white southern males dauntlessness and dash represented by the bristly faced rebel and in Robert E. Lee, respectively-could ideally reinforce each other.15
Interpreted from a substantially different perspective, the embrace of muscle by southern college students not only appeared to fit the dominant culture- of the Old South; their games also sustained analogies to an emerging new southern mentality, following patterns originally derived from the Northeast. To be sure, what occurred in Charlottesville or Chapel Hill did not compare in magnitude to the contests being orchestrated in New Haven or Cambridge, even by the turn of the century. Yet, in admiration of the techniques and strategies of so-called scientific sport, southern college athletes emulated their northern counterparts when they could, and their increasing emphasis on organization and regulation, as well as their desire to stage events with appropriate care, bespoke a changing games ideal in the South.16
With the structure of sport beginning to conform to models of commercial and industrial enterprise associated with the urban North, the rituals of competition acquired added significance. Representations of strength and energy thus came to share the sporting arena with more clearly recognizable limits to the play-just as the notion of manliness might be defined in terms of vigor and assertiveness, yet also as the measure of discipline and self-control. Spatial and temporal boundaries imposed by the size of the field and the precision of the clock or stopwatch placed an emphasis on the coordination and timing of well- ordered teamwork. The rules of games, codified and published nationwide, likewise stressed increasingly rational processes as opposed to spontaneous action. And an emerging hierarchy of authority headed by expert, professional coaches and trainers (often imported from outside the region) suggested efficient management along the lines of the factory system. By the 1890s, furthermore, numerous southern schools had adopted distinctive emblems (colors, mascots, songs, cheers, and chants) and had inaugurated local rivalries, as well as seasonal pageants surrounding big games. Still, as much as these symbols and spectacles reflected loyalty to a specific college and community, they also marked the assimilation of many institutions in the region to a national intercollegiate culture.
What appeared, then, at the end of the century as changing means and ends in athletics did not emerge suddenly as successors to venerated rites of passage or patterns of belief. Nor did new methods and standards necessarily intrude on the conventional imperatives of racial and gender solidarity. The cultivation of manly self-expression continued to serve a narrowly based system of social
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leadership both regionally and nationally. Thus, for the majority of white southern males, an idealized conception of sport, traditional evocations of honor, and emerging modern sensibilities formed a widely respected constellation of values and virtues, which functioned as complementary discourses supporting the assertions of strenuous masculinity. And though this system of thought and action did not go unchallenged, it would ultimately prevail in defining a significant dimension of New South culture.
***
Although students participated in a wide range of muscular pursuits, baseball had no rivals in popularity among organized collegiate sports until late in the century. The running and jumping contests of field days, part of the rites of spring at Washington College as early as 1872, remained informal affairs and bore scant resemblance to the events performed by English university students or northeastern track and field squads. During the 1880s undergraduates at the University of North Carolina initiated a series of competitions, ranging from the 100-yard dash and 3-mile run to the long jump (with dumbbells in hand) and the fat mans race. A decade later, athletes at the University of Alabama competed for a variety of cups and gold medals in intramural competitions before they challenged Tulane to an intercollegiate meeting. And at the University of Georgia, a gangling senior named Ulrich Bonnell Phillips set the school record in the one-mile run before hanging up his spiked shoes and undertaking graduate study in the history of the South. Yet track and field did not enjoy widespread popularity in the region until well after the turn of the century.*
Likewise, crew attained only limited support in southern colleges. It may be noteworthy that Robert E. Lee, the president of Washington College in the late 1860s, was an appreciative spectator on some occasions, sitting on horseback to watch students row on the North River near Lexington. The trustees of Washington College even provided $400 for the boat club. Yet elsewhere, aspiring oarsmen, like those at the University of Virginia, grew impatient as they suffered high-standing rocks below the water or low-hanging branches above their boats while practicing their rowing. In most cases the athletes simply lost interest in the sport after a few seasons of hardship.19
Baseball, on the other hand, was played nearly everywhere. Known in some parts of the region before the Civil War, it was learned from Union occupation troops and carried to more remote parts of the South after the struggle. Baseball grew in popularity in both the town and the country during the ensuing decades. Much in the manner of midwestern teams, college associations competed first against local squads, then against rivals from nearby schools. Clubs such as the Franklin, Dixie, Adelphian, and Champion could be found on the campus of the University of Georgia in the late 1860s; during the next decade, the best players on campus were assembled as a varsity team and sent off to defend institutional honor against a variety of foes. Cadets from the Virginia Military Institute used their parade ground as a field in games against the neighboring Washington College. In other parts of Virginia, undergraduates from the state university, Roanoke College, and the Polytechnic Institute (later Virginia Tech) participated
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Abe Mikel, Quarterback, 1933-35. Photo courtesy of LSU.
in the sport regularly and formally in contests against other clubs and colleges. By the 1890s the game played between the University of Virginia and the University of North Carolina weighed heavily, as an interstate as well as intercollegiate rivalry, its outcome stirring passions beyond the immediate campus communities. It was also during the last decade of the century that northern college teams first ventured into the South, and a few southern clubs traveled northward during the spring and summer. The southerners more than held their own. In fact, for the last two years of the century, the Georgetown varsity, composed largely of semiprofessional players
from the Carolinas, was considered the unofficial college champion in baseball.2O
If baseball remained the most popular athletic activity at most southern colleges for many yearsdrawing large numbers of fans and inspiriig voluminous student newspaper reports and editorials-it may have been because the game was customarily learned at home in childhood and played at many levels. For numerous participants, it must have seemed a natural part of the maturation process, its rhythms and routine woven into the fabric of southern male custom and convention as part of a largely agrarian culture. Significantly, football was conceived by undergraduates, their teachers, and other observers in contrasting terms: it carried physical prowess into a new realm of discipline and organization, and thus embodied some of the features of modem higher education in the South. Ultimately, many perceived it as a scientific sport. Stated in different terms and at the time, without irony-the pigskin game stood for progress.
Football was a predominantly collegiate sport. It reinforced elite standards within an educational setting, yet at the same time, it suggested the egalitarian element in the shared virile tradition of white southern sporting competition. It stood as a means of expressing, or even inculcating, the qualities of strength, endurance, and valor deemed highly honorable by generations of cultural commentators. Football highlighted struggles in hand-to-hand combat along a moving line, anticipating-perhaps promising-the rush of life-threatening violence. It also brought together mass and mobility in the manner of an infantry charge; it rewarded bravery and, as it evolved, technique and strategy as well. Both in its own form and in the public response to the spectacle, the sport
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embraced the deep play of hazard and chance, of numerous degrees of risk Yet it also demanded considerable preparation and exalted the pushing, driving coordination of teamwork. Largely because it offered numerous meanings and expressed a formidable array of virtues and values, football grew substantially in its appeal to participants and spectators alike.
Football possessed enormous metaphorical value concerning the rites of passage for southern manhood, and it clearly corresponded with the regions martial culture and tradition of blood sport. Yet no one denied that the game was imported from the North, or that it somehow spoke to the imperatives of modernity. Indeed, students as well as professors articulated pride in the fact that football bound their often small and relatively impoverished institutions to a prestigious collegiate pastime. The first facts in the history of southern football often concern the ways the game was introduced, which was either by Yankees or by native southerners returning from the North. At AddRan Christian University (now Texas Christian), two professors, one the son of the college president, returned from Michigan, where they had been bitten by the football bug. Soon much of the campus community received instruction in the strange new sport. The great football tradition at the University of Alabama began in a similar fashion when Bill Little returned to his home state after a year at Andover Academy, bringing with him canvas clothes, cleated shoes, and a pigskin. Meanwhile, officials at Transylvania College in Lexington, Kentucky, recruited an instructor from Yale to teach the young natural athletes from mountains and blue grass the rudiments of the sport.21
Among scores of other football missionaries, Hugh and Thomas Bayne departed Yale for New Orleans in the late 1880s to teach the game to students at Tulane. Thomas eventually laid out an athletic field, handled all the tickets, and served as referee for home games. In the early period of sporting competition (some later recalled it as the halcyon days), it was not always necessary for the new mentor to have been a former player, someone who had only been a bystander in the North might also be sufficiently knowledgeable and energetic to introduce the intricacies of the game to the unschooled youth of the South. Vernon L. Parrington was such an advisor. A Harvard graduate who joined the English Department at the University of Oklahoma in the mid-1890s, Parrington guided the football team during the first seasons of its existence before moving on to a distinguished academic career as one of the foremost interpreters of American history and culture. As the resumes of the early coaches might suggest, the diffusion of the new system of play could take many forms.22
Despite the northern origins of the game, regional pride in football manifested itself in a number of ways. To read through the clippings in college archives, or the early filiopietistic histories of southern educational institutions, is to discover contending assertions of priority concerning football competition. Long before intersectional rivalries developed, even before intrastate clashes marked the high point of a season, ardent alumni linked the first games of football to the coming- of-age of their alma maters. In similar fashion, civic boosters tied the development of the sport to the maturation of the New South. The earliest games were actually
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intramural rather than intercollegiate frays, however, resembling an Irish faction fight more than the modem version of football. The editors of the college magazine at the University of Virginia, for instance, reported that one afternoon in November 1870, members of the junior mathematics class, upon hearing that there would be no lecture, adjourned to the Lawn to initiate the Souths first game of football. This would have meant that the Virginians had closely followed on the heels of the first eastern colleges, Rutgers and Princeton, which had engaged in a game like soccer in 1869. But the sport that the southern students claimed was football, other observers described as a crowd of coatless youth engaged in what seemed. . . [to be] the insane sport of rushing together and trying to kick each others hats off. Before the decade had ended, though, Virginia athletes had played one team of British citizens from Albemarle County and another squad from Washington and Lee, reportedly based on rules they had requested from Rutgers, Princeton, and Yale. Yet even with the northeastern regulations in hand, southern players sometimes modified the game to suit themselves; in 1872 no fewer than 200 students participated at one time in a contest in Charlottesville, while in Lexington, athletes from Washington and Lee and Virginia Military Institute argued whether 50 or only 35 men should be allowed on a side.23
It was not until the late 1880s that southern college teams became familiar with northeastern rules, then adequately organized to challenge cross-county or interstate rivals to a game they all understood. Within the context of increasing interregional competition, undergraduates at the University of Virginia learned harsh lessons about the sport from their neighbors in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. In 1888 the Cavaliers of Virginiaas the team had come to be called-defeated two local high schools but then lost to Johns Hopkins University. In 1889 they succumbed to more formidable opponents from Lehigh University and the Naval Academy, after defeating Johns Hopkins. And the following year they began their season with humbling losses (62-0 to the University of Pennsylvania and 115-0 to Princeton) before crushing less experienced foes from Randolph-Macon and Washington and Lee. Through the decade, which was marked by depression and Populist upheaval nearly everywhere in the South, University of Virginia teams traveled widely and sometimes hired a coach for a few weeks or a season. Ultimately, the level of their play was good enough to post victories against both neighboring and distant rivals.24
Elsewhere in the state, however, football remained a more rustic affair. Students at up-country Emory and Henry College learned the game from the most recent rule book they could obtain or from an enthusiastic professor educated in the North. Sometimes ardent and aspiring athletes practiced formations and plays invented at Yale, Princeton, or Pennsylvania; more often, they devised their own systems or played without much method. One participant on the early teams of Virginia Polytechnic recalled that there was no idea of team play, whoever got the ball-by luck-ran with it; no one knew anything about interference, and tho we had a system of signals, it was a question of luck how each play went. Those most interested in the sport removed rocks from the field, then measured and traced a quadrangle, but even this would not always conquer difficult
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Charles Pinky Rohm, quaterback 1935-37. Photo courtesy of LSU.
terrain. At Virginia Polytechnic, the boundaries of the field were marked off with a plough, as were the 25-yard lines. The field was not as smooth as the bed of the new Blacksburg railroad, but ran up and down hill, with interesting little hollows which hid the play from spectators on the other side of the field.25 In the attempt, at least, if not always in the outcome, southern college youth enthusiastically embraced modern college sport.
The same kind of social dynamic, between the rough and increasingly rational, characterized the inauguration of intercollegiate sport in North Carolina. Students at Wake Forest had organized football clubs and engaged in intramural play as early as 1882, simiiarly untutored, their peers at the state university had been arranging interclass games of football since 1883. Yet, in 1888, the Raleigh News and Observer measured substantial changes in the sport since those first contests were staged, boasting that twenty-nine-year-old John Franklin Crowell, a Yale graduate recently appointed president of Trinity College, had presided over the first scientific game of foot-ball ever played in the state. Before a crowd of 600, the small Methodist collegethen located in the hills of Randolph County defeated the University of North Carolina in Raleigh on Thanksgiving Day. Within the ensuing year, students from the two institutions, joined by representatives of Baptist Wake Forest, established the North Carolina Intercollegiate Foot-Ball Association. An intense but short-lived rivalry had begun.26
That the first match game in the state took place not on the campus of one of the contending schools but in the capital city, and that it was scheduled for a national holiday, indicated the ways intercollegiate sport would develop in the South at the turn of the century. Attracting what was, for the time, a sizable
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collection of spectators, many of whom were not college students, the contest also suggested the larger appeal of football in the region. Significantly, the rivalries among Trinity, the University of North Carolina, and Wake Forest revealed yet another dimension of athletic competition as it spread throughout the New South. For the popularity of football, combined with intensifying school spirit, motivated many students to seek outside help in order to prepare their teams for upcoming contests. First, the state university hired a Princeton player to demonstrate the finer points of the sport; then, Wake Forest acquired the services of a former athlete from Lehigh. Both teams subsequently trounced Trinity, which continued to be led by sons of the South: Stonewall Jackson Durham and, somewhat later, his brother, Robert E. Lee Durham. Given the opportunity to win through innovation, most college students were loathe to rely on something so tenuous as tradition. Social history always works within certain limits, though it has its literary counterparts. Sadly, however, such episodes as the failures of Jackson and Lee Durham never found their Faulkner.27
*** The presence of northern coaches on the sidelines of southern playing fields
not only marked the assimilation of the South to a prominent national pastime; it also contributed substantially to the rationalization of sport throughout the region. At one level, the transformation of the game meant that coaches would appropriate a dominant role in the manly ritual of athletic struggle, introducing their players to new rules, to a carefully planned training program, and to the latest formations and competitive tactics. Striking innovations such as the V a prelude to the flying wedgecaptivated participants just as they fascinated fans. They also clearly linked southern sport to the pounding, pushing game that was attracting increasing notoriety elsewhere throughout the nation.
By the mid-1890s, a growing number of schools were spending increasing sums for the special skills of coaches and trainers. In 1894, for instance, Vanderbilt University began hiring recent graduates from Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Harvard at salaries ranging from $400 to $800 for a seasons work The majority of journeymen coaches traveled from school to school for several years, earning enough money to initiate other careers. But a few stayed in the game, transforming it through more persistent experimentation. John Heisman moved from jobs at several colleges in Ohio to Auburn and Clemson Universities during the 1890s, then to Georgia Tech in 1904, earning as much as $2,000 for his talents. He drew his income from contributions by enthusiastic undergraduates and alumni and, later in his eminent career, from the college treasury. In the ensuing decades, he would be joined by other experts in sport, who often became the best paid and most prominent individuals associated with higher education in the South.29 Thus, an increasing emphasis on victory, stimulated by partisans both on and beyond the campus setting and intensified by the regimens and stratagems devised by a new elite of professional coaches, significantly reshaped the games of youth. At the same time, paradoxically, athletic competition continued to be justified in terms consonant with traditional southern standards and ideals: character, honor, and courage.
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College sport in the South, as elsewhere, originated among students who participated in the athletic enterprise variously as players, managers, cheerleaders, and fund raisers. Yet they were often joined in their endeavors by alumni and local boosters. In some instances, they found valuable allies in professors, such as Charles Herty of the University of Georgia, and in college presidents, like Trinitys President Crowell and George T. Winston, who headed the University of North Carolina from 1891 to 1896. Beyond the popularity of sport among students, the expansion of athletic competition in the South derived from the influence exerted by those who fashioned a muscular, as well as a moral and intellectual plan of education in the New Southern academy.
For some educational authorities, success on the gridiron translated into institutional prestige both within the region and in the nation at large. Just as significant as those parochial concerns was the philosophical rationale for sport, based upon the ancient doctrine of civic republicanism, as well as considerations about the future of higher education. As Crowell strenuously argued, football not only destroyed the namby-pambyisms of caste by bringing everybody face to face to stand on his own merits; it also stood as the first among those sports in which the qualities of the soldier are capable of being developed.30 Football taught significant lessons in life, the president of Trinity avowed. It developed virility, self-control, and daring courage of American youth.31 For Crowell, football served to shape the education of the well-rounded and ambitious man in other words, someone who was capable of leading a college or a region into the modem era.
Reinforcing, as well as reflecting, concerns about training in manly character, the apostles of sport linked the southern academy not only to the strength of the nation but also to the story of Western civilization. Thus, George Winston declared in 1894 that [i]t would not be dishonest to say that the greatest force in the university today contributing to sobriety, manliness, healthfulness and morality generally is athletics, asserting as well that sporting competition helped shape the stuff of social progress. The greatest men of all countries were fine specimens of physical manhood, Winston asserted: Moses, Joshua, St. Paul, Martin Luther, Shakespeare, Goethe, Humboldt, Napoleon, Gladstone, Washington, and Webster; all were men of great physical power and endurance.32 Echoing some of the sentiments expressed by Crowell and Winston but extending the argument in nationalist and racialist terms, Kemp Battle, president, then historian, of the University of North Carolina would write in 1912: A nation can not afford to lose its aggressive manliness, endurance, courage, restraint, the power to act surely and unfalteringly in an emergency. A man in football must learn to be cool headed while he is impetuous, to think and act on the instant. And if he has the making of a man in him he attains the blending of courage and courtesy, which distinguishes the strong man from the powerful brute.33 Thus inscribing football in world history, binding the sport to the future of American higher education, and marking forceful, if coded, racial distinctions, the academic promoters of athletics contributed substantially to the establishment of one of the pillars of New Southern identity and culture.
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* * *
Apart from the lessons supposedly learned through athletic endeavors, considerable pageantry accompanied the play. And beyond the articles and orations speaking to notions of character and courage, myriad rituals and symbols reinforced, for many southerners, the intensity of the intercollegiate sporting experience. The anthems and totems of college athletic culture in the South took a variety of forms and projected a range of images, in some instances evoking a particular regional identity and in others reflecting students desire to associate their games with those of more established institutions in the Northeast. The iconography of college sport, manifest in the waving of flags, the orchestration of chants and cheers, and the singing of inspirational songs, formed circles of significance around the actual sites of races or games, actively involving fans, as well as participants, in the intercollegiate sporting spectacle. The sights and sounds of boisterous athletics went beyond competitive exchange on a diamond or gridiron; those who watched became immersed in something like a sacrament against which a book, a lecture, or a laboratory experimentamong other academic offerings-often seemed to pale in comparison.
Additionally, the anticipation created by the expanding newspaper coverage of sport at the turn of the century, the knowledge transmitted by the printing of illustrated programs, and the lore passed on from one student generation to another, served to transform college culture, directing energy and interest away from the classroom and the chapel toward the playing fields. Ultimately, it also bound campus to community in terms of shared emblems and experiences. Even before the age of mass media, for the majority of Americans, the defining characteristic of a particular college or university did not reside in its curriculum or the honors accumulated by professors and graduates. Rather, the measure of a school in popular consciousness would rest on its athletic record against regional and intersectional rivals, just as the host of signs and symbols that emphasized the distinctiveness of an institution would advertise its involvement in a national pastime. Tellingly, even many of those who were entrusted with the academic mission of their schools learned to appreciate these facts. Or at least they became resigned to them.
The spectacle accompanying baseball and football games may have been communicated first through the colors of the uniforms worn by athletes and the pennants often carried by their fans. Undergraduates might have made a historical reference when they invented athletic traditions, but numerous other factors were frequently involved. Georgetown collegians chose blue and gray for their colors to signify the division between students at the outset of the Civil War. At the University of Virginia, silver gray and cardinal red were intended to represent the glory of the Confederacy, dyed in the blood of the fallen. Popular for more than a decade, the colors eventually proved unsuitable for athletic uniforms, however, because the red dye tended to fade quickly. In 1888 one of the campus football heroes, on his way to practice, dropped by a meeting where the subject of replacement colors was being discussed. He was wearing a long, striped navy blue and orange kerchief around his neck, after the Oxford fashion. Devotion to
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the Lost Cause gave way to expediency that day, and orange and blue became Virginias permanent school colors.
Collegiate identity could be appropriated from other institutions that had already won laurels in sports, but in the South, as elsewhere, the image of a school would necessarily be cast in the most masculine of hues. That the University of Mississippi chose the blue of Yale and crimson of Harvard as school colors may have been due to the fact that the football coach first made the suggestion, perhaps in the hopes of emulating the athletic fame of the New England institutions. And when students at Davidson College applauded the choice of red and black as new colors, they were rendering an opinion on the best way to display their notions of manly pride: a judicious change from pink and blue [had been] effected in 1895, the college historian has observed. Clearly there was no simple means by which to select an emblem and maintain it over time.36
Like the choice of colors, the denomination of teams and mascots could become complicated, ultimately illuminating students ambivalence concerning regional loyalties and their quest to become a part of a more expansive collegiate culture. In some places, club names readily yielded to varsity titles. Before Washington College became Washington and Lee, and before the teams became the Generals, students played baseball as the Shoo Flies, on several occasions challenging the University of Virginias first club, the Monticellos. After Yale adopted a bulldog as a mascot in 1889, several schools throughout the nation followed the lead of the most famous football institution of the era. Among them was the University of Georgia, which disposed of its goat and acquired its own bulldog during the 1890s.37
In more practical terms, bulldogs were not only simpler to come by, they were also easier to maintain than some other mascots. Varsity teams at the University of Texas had been called the Longhorns as early as 1904. Twelve years later, Texas partisans acquired a live steer with horns measuring between seven and eight feet tip to tip. Shortly thereafter, someone suggested that the Longhorn, christened Bevo, be branded with a large T, as well as the score of the 1916 Texas victory over archrival Texas A & M. But before this could be accomplished, Bevo was discovered bearing the score of the 1915 Texas A & M victory in the form of an eight-inch brand. Disfigured as he had become, Bevo also posed problems of another sort. It cost $18 a month to feed him, which was a sum many students believed to be excessive. Ultimately-again to juxtapose the pragmatic and the iconicBevo was butchered in 1920 and served as barbecue to more than 100 guests, the majority of whom, appropriately, were T-Men, the winners of varsity letters.38 Bevos immediate successor turned out to be no less controversial. His lazy disposition and refusal to conform to standards of campus behavior, according to one report, meant that he would be kept from most games. Finally, during the depression, Bevo II was officially prohibited from entering the football stadium, and due to the cost of his upkeep, his caretakers sent him back to the range.39 Some traditions might prove difficult to invent.
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As various critics would assert, athletic customs often seemed to reinforce the rather crudely democratic, often anti-intellectual dimension of higher education in America. Yet at the same time, the emblems of school spirit could make powerful connections with history and community. Undergraduates at Louisiana State University, for example, nicknamed their team the Fighting Tigers not simply because colleges were beginning to nominate ferocious animals as mascots, but because the Louisiana Tigers, composed of New Orleans Zouaves and Donaldsville Cannoneers, had been among the states most distinguished fighting units during the Civil War. Students at other schools made choices almost as evocative, but sometimes they ran up against the resistance of their elders. After World War I, undergraduates at Trinity College (soon to be renamed Duke University) also planned to name their athletic teams after a military squad-in this case a crack French Alpine Corps-indicating, perhaps, the prevalence of martial imagery in the thinking of many promoters of college sports. In this instance, however, the choice of Blue Devils as a nickname occasioned considerable upheaval among the trustees and more pious alumni of the Methodist institution throughout the 1920s. The controversy was not a major one, and in the end the students won. But as was the case at Trinity, college youth at several other schools in the more secular twentieth century resisted journalistic attempts to characterize their athletic heroes as the Fighting Baptists or Fighting Parsons. Blasphemy aside, such appellations might seem altogether inappropriate, either from the vantage of the battered athlete or of the true believer in modern sport.40
With respect to songs, chants, and cheers, southern students joined in the tradition throughout the nation to boast of the prowess of their own teams and to denigrate their opponents courage or ability Often these followed a formula that did not speak to a specific regional or institutional distinctiveness and are remarkable principally for their banality: Rah-Rah/White and Blue/Vive-la, Vive-la/ N.C.U. Occasionally, however, an inspirational composition would assure students that they had much to be proud of or that they bore special responsibilities. In 1903 a campus poet at the University of Texas employed the words with which the president of the institution customarily closed his addresses. Thus was born The Eyes of Texas are Upon You. Other cheers evoked the special nature of a place, as when students at Carson-Newman, emanating primarily from the hills of eastern Tennessee, boasted of their hard-scrabble heritage:
Come out of the woods Sandpaper your chin! Were wild, were woolly Were rough like a saw.
The inventiveness of college students-southern and northern-added to the dynamic of the sporting contest; what they created to surround the field of play helped translate first impressions into memory and nostalgia.41
Distinctive colors, nicknames, mascots, songs, and cheers intensified the experience of a Saturday afternoon. Even before the era when homecoming
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extravaganzas and precision marching bands added to the appeal of sporting events, other rituals contributed to an exciting atmosphere beyond the contest itself. From an early date, college baseball and football games in the South frequently became extended social occasions, offering a splendid opportunity for courtship and a fine setting for displays of prowess with a bottle. Belles and beaux mingled freely along the sidelines of the field, a custom explained by the absence of grandstands during the early years. Southern men were emphatic in their appreciation of female attendance at collegiate sporting events, believing that their guests lent dignity and, at the same time, a more festive air to the proceedings. Undergraduates at the University of Georgia addressed special invitations to the ladies of Athens, particularly the students of the Lucy Cobb School, while the president of Transylvania College praised the enthusiasm of women spectators for inducing the boys to exert themselves more. In suggesting some form of chivalry, such acknowledgments also bespoke an exclusionary ideal of sport at the turn of the century, the marking of behavioral boundaries and the ranking of attitudes and actions. Simply stated, rough athletic contests measured substantial differences between the young men of the white South and those whom they were supposed to protect, or guide, or control.42
Even though young women stood in close proximity to the field of play and their presence contributed to the spectacle of college sport, social conventions isolated them in significant ways from the initiated: those who got dirty or bloody, who learned or displayed manly character, and who were expected to translate the lessons of a game into the talents of leadership. A writer for the Tulane Collegian illuminated the presumed gender roles in sports, asserting that with our fair friends near by we are inspired to be heroes in the base ball strife; particularly when said friends are in delightful ignorance of all rules, and applaud heartily with their daintily gloved hands bad and good plays alike. A hearty gentility in this circumstance nevertheless reflected attitudes and standards that extended throughout the culture, from home to workplace to ballot box. Manliness was cast against notions of effeminacy as a superior development of body and character. With regard to honor and courage, the masculine rituals of college sport also implicitly reinforced privilege and subordination predicated on the ideology of racial difference. Thus, even without extensive written references, numerous prescriptions, as well as proscriptions, regarding racial and gender relations were dramatized in the athletic performances of white collegians in the postbellum South.43
Beyond the means by which white male prerogative was exercised both on and beyond the field of play, other dramatic performances help explain the influence of athletics in the New South. Several of the most important events on the collegiate calendar were inspired by athletic competition, while some of the most popular activities on campus were created to support the teams and stimulate school spirit. In these practices, southern institutions followed rituals developed elsewhere, adapting them to specific sports or rivalries. Bonfire rallies often preceded the big game of the season; the chiming of chapel bells followed if a victory had been gained. Vast parades and dancing in the streets threatened at
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times to overwhelm small towns and cities with celebrating youth, who carried torches, horns, bells, drums and launched fire-works and speeches to greet conquering heroes.44 As a result, local custom flowed into what would become a national sporting culture, the similarities between collegiate festivals overshadowing their differences. First in the Northeast, but eventually throughout much of the country, athletic contests between college youths were scheduled in conjunction with other significant or symbolic events. Of these the most important was Thanksgiving Day. After the Civil War, Thanksgiving marked not only the official celebration of family and nation but also the highlight of the football season at many colleges. A secular as well as a spiritual rite, Thanksgiving Thursday embraced one of the two principal college activities in the South: wrapping football in the flag and blessing it with a prayer.45 Such an association became more thoroughly elaborated as the twentieth century progressed, with added layers of pageantry-and commercialism. Like the Fourth of July baseball game, Thanksgiving Day football glorified sport as a nationalist pastime and sanctified it as passion play.
Extremely adaptable, Americas civic religion also accommodated regionalism and the reunion of distinct generations. Even before the turn of the century, regional rivalries enriched the intercollegiate athletic experience. These customarily resulted from the efforts of the players themselves or others among the undergraduate population. While Harvard fought Yale in The Game and California challenged Stanford annually in The Big Game, what occurred when Texas struggled against Texas A & M, Georgia tackled Georgia Tech, or the University of Alabama confronted the state polytechnic school (later Auburn University) could be just as intense and brutal. In the aftermath of an interdenominational athletic affray between Wake Forest and Trinity, one participant lamented: To be beaten by a rival sect, Christians though we both were, was more humiliating than to bite the dust before the pagan hordes of the constitutionally unchurched University! Queer that we church people love each other so.46
Often breeding considerable ill will among regional foes, provoking the exchange of allegations about cheating, and increasing the tendency toward violence on the field, such rivalries intensified the meaning of southern athletic rituals. Over time, much more was at stake than the money that passed from the hands of one gambling undergraduate or alumnus to those of an another at the conclusion of a particular game. The care and tending of an individuals honor many southerners had long understood, through athletics, some believed, the prestige of an entire institution might similarly need to be protected.
Football in the South inspired emotional outpourings as well as demonstrations of physical toughness, perhaps no more than when Harvard played Yale but certainly no less. Whether the offspring of Boston Brahmins, the younger generation of a rising midwestern middle class, heirs to Old South gentility, or the sons of backcountry yeomanry: as youth, they seemed to many of their elders barbarians all. Yet southerners seemed to present extreme cases of aggression and violence, an exaggerated version of impulses and acts prevalent elsewhere in turn-
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of-the-century America. Sporting competition provoked numerous disputes among college students and partisan spectators: players attacked players, fans attacked players, and players attacked fans in the early days of southern football. On one occasion the athletic director of the University of Alabama accosted a professor from the University of Georgia who was merely standing in for the principal athletic official of the school. For many years undergraduates at Washington and Lee and the cadets of Virginia Military Institute, two colleges located across the road from one another in Lexington, extended their athletic rivalries into streetfighting.47 This confirms that sporting events meant much more than fluttering banners, boisterous yells, and cheers. It tells us that one persons memory of halcyon days coincided precisely with anothers hellacious experience. Ultimately, it suggests that football was not, in every instance, a thoroughly modern pastime, or perhaps that modem civilization would have to come to terms with the brawl.
Among the many legends and rough romances associated with southern college sport was that of Harold Ketron, the feisty player from the University of Georgia who not only pulled opponents hair but also spit tobacco juice in their faces. Another story concerns Texas Christian Universitys Edwin Cowboy Bull. Playing his first game away from home, Bull had to be persuaded not to carry a pistol onto the field in a game against the state university in Austin. And while the tale has many versions, all attempt to illuminate something central to southern culture: Standing at one end of the field is a Tennessee mountainman clad in green frock coat and a four gallon hat, bewhiskered and full of sour mash. At a critical point in the game, he loudly warns the visiting team that the first of them who crosses that line will get a bullet in his carcass.48 Possessing a rugged charm, these stories also occasioned a certain alarm about the exaltation of body over mind and the valorization of belligerence.
Indeed, the relationship among notions of rugged masculinity and violence contributed substantially to the early rendering of the history of southern athletic traditions. By adhering all too carefully to the rhetoric lauding sports as an expression of manly aggression, students sometimes violated both the customary and more rigidly legislated distinctions between football and battle. And by enlisting outsiders to help in the struggle, they consciously withdrew athletics from the educational setting that some commentators believed it was supposed to enhance. The speed with which southern colleges adopted new strategies to gain advantage over their rivals-the use of tramp athletes and trick plays, for instance-jeopardized the exalted status of football. To some extent, this was a natural and more honest approach to athletics than the rather arbitrary, often hypocritical, notion of amateurism that would thicken the rulebooks of college sports in later years. Yet, set against heavily endowed notions of honor, modem athletic practices created their own hypocrisies. Such practices also set up some very dangerous situations.
Even before the turn of the century, it became evident that in many instances the young men of the South were competing against far more mature athletes, and that a few of their strongest adversaries were not even students. The most
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telling incident occurred during a game between Georgia and Georgia Tech in 1893, a recently conceived, but already intense, rivalryShortly before the game began, rumors surfaced that several of the athletes on both rosters could not be found in the academic records of the competing institutions. During the contest those suspicions were confirmed. An unfamiliar player, identified only as Wood, dominated play for Georgia Tech. Described as invincible by one observer, he dragged Georgia tacklers up and down the field, literally fighting his way to three Tech touchdowns. Toward the end of the game, Georgia fans grew surly, first yelling at the referee, then striking out at Wood. According to one report, a large stone hit him in the head opening a gash three inches long. Woods response was to plaster the face of a Georgia player with a large handful of blood and gore. Once the game had ended, Georgia Tech players sprinted from the field amid a hailstorm of bricks, stones, and other projectiles; Wood reportedly walked off, went to his hotel room, and stitched up his own wound.49
The account derives from a presidential campaign biography written in 1919. Even allowing for much exaggeration, therefore, the story is instructive. In 1893 Leonard Wood was a thirty-three-year-old army surgeon stationed near Atlanta. He had already helped pursue Geronimo through the Arizona-New Mexico border territory, and even before he launched his career as a muscular imperialist in Cuba and the Philippines, he had been described as a splendid type of American manhood . . . as fine a specimen of physical strength and endurance as could easily be found. For all its hyperbole, the biography suggested that if it was good to be a military hero when running for president, it was even better to be a football hero too. As for southern culture, Woods participation in the University of Georgia-Georgia Tech game provided an ironic twist to the discussion of the relationship between athletics and a distinctive martial spirit. Not only did his appearance illustrate the proximity of numerous army camps to the colleges of the region, it also suggested that few team captains or coaches could resist the temptation. of enlisting soldiers or veterans to augment their own forces in important athletic conflicts.50
***
Though what occurred that afternoon in the autumn of 1893 represented tendencies that were not confined to the region, the event illuminated several issues that were particularly vexing to educators and athletic reformers in the southern states. The use of professional players, called ringers or tramp athletes-proficient in the sport if not by many reckonings manly or moral- opened up bidding wars among rival teams and kindled ill will wherever it was detected. It also signified an increasing distinction between students and the athletes who represented them in sporting competition. Alarmed professors and college presidents first addressed the problem of corruption. A few critics among them argued for the eradication of off-campus competition. Many more interested officials seemed to be persuaded that they could regulate sports by establishing committees to supervise student athletic associations and by drafting eligibility rules for participation in sports. During the mid-1890s, faculty members at numerous institutions agreed to form regional conferences to set the standards
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by which athletic enterprise would be governed in the future. At the forefront of that movement was William L. Dudley of Vanderbilt University, who was instrumental in creating the Southern Inter-Collegiate Athletic Association. A decade later, college presidents came together to organize what would become the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Like the federal regulation of Wall Street financiers and corporate trusts, this was a progressive reform in intent, structure, and lack of effectiveness. Various southern college conferences hoped to mediate the increasingly antagonistic relationship between a growing athletic establishment and longstanding educational ideals. Yet as loud as they were in their pronouncements about the number of assaults on the morality of sport, athletic reformers were ultimately very modest in their accomplishments.
If the corruption of sport troubled many commentators around the turn of the century, an even greater number inveighed against the Football Moloch, devourer of young athletes. Some critics cited medical studies about the injuries the game produced; others pointed to newspaper photographs showing mangled football warriors. And when they described instances more horrible even than broken membranes and bones, dislocated joints and bruised bodies, still other reformers used the term manslaughter. One of the earliest deaths on the gridiron occurred on November 30, 1894, when Georgetowns George Bahen suffered a broken back during a rough contest against a local club. Since threats of intentional hitting had circulated before the match, and because the coroner believed that the fatal injury had been the result of a kick from behind the player, school officials suspended football for two years. During the decade following the revival of the game, yet another Georgetown player lost his life on the field. The bloodshed had been altogether out of proportion to the athletic benefit, concluded the head of the university, who proceeded to banish the sport again.52
Most of the deaths and major injuries counted up by the critics of the game could be traced to secondary school matches or sandlot games. Occasionally, however, a football fatality in a major contest drew enormous publicity, focusing attention on the seeming ruthlessness of the sport. In 1897 Georgias star fullback, Richard Vonalbade Van Gammon, missed tackling a University of Virginia runner and fell heavily on his head, his chin striking the ground first. Massed around the play, the majority of the two teams ended up falling on him. He was removed from the field semiconscious and taken to a hospital, where he died the next morning. As in several other instances, the popularity of the athlete and the circumstances surrounding his death immediately fired up the debate over football violence. In the aftermath of Von Gammons death, some observers predicted the end of the game in Georgia. The editor of the Athens Banner called football an outrage which should have been stamped out long ago. The state legislatures of both Georgia and Virginia drafted bills outlawing the sport. But two letters to Atlanta newspapers appeared to save the game of football for the youth of the South. The first, written by Charles Herty, one of the most prominent members of the University of Georgia faculty and the patron of sport at the college, not only defended football but also urged lawmakers to make provisions for better training and conditioning facilities for athletes. The second, solicited by Herty
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from Von Gammons mother, was an impassioned plea that her sons death not be used to defeat the most cherished object of his life. In response, the governor of Georgia pocketed the bill.53 Changes in the rules governing the sport, which reduced the risk of serious injury, along with persistent calls after the turn of the century for a reinvigorated college youth, meant that such legislation was never again considered in the South.
Still, some individuals condemned football for its violence. One person in particular, John Singleton Mosby, fulminated against such analogies as those advanced by Crowell, who had likened football players to the sons of men who fought in the charge of Pickett and Pettigrew. Mosby disputed assertions that many a soldier [who] charged up that memorable hill at Santiago had been developed in courage, manhood, and nerve on the football fields of American colleges, just as he denied any resemblance between football and the martial traditions of the Old South.54 For his part, John Mosby had demonstrated considerable manly assertiveness before the Civil War, having been expelled from the University of Virginia for shooting another student over what may have been a point of honor. In later years he was held in high esteem in the region for his courageous exploits as a Confederate guerrilla leader during the war. To Mosby, who wrote in the aftermath of the death of the Virginia football player Archer Christian, the sport would best be banished from the university. I do not think foot-ball should be tolerated where the youth of the country are supposed to be sent to be taught literature, science, & humanity. Then he asserted, mixing metaphors with a vengeance, cock-fighting is unlawful in Virginia: Why should better care be taken of a game chicken than a school boy? . . . Football is only a polite term for prize fighting, he continued. It marked a renaissance of the worst days of the Caesars.55
Mosby, the Gray Ghost of Confederate lore, went on to reject the notion that athletic training prepared men for battle, arguing that Stonewall Jacksons men won their victories without any such nursing. Indeed, he declared that athletes belonged to a class invincible in peace and invisible in war. During our war, he observed, I often wondered what had become of the bullies and bruisers I had known. Ultimately underscoring his belief that football stood in contrast to ancient traditions and as a testament to modem evils, Mosby concluded that it is notorious that foot-ball teams are largely composed of professional mercenaries who are hired to advertise colleges. Gate money is the valuable consideration. There is no sentiment of romance or chivalry about them. The swords of the old Knights are rust.56
***
No less resistant to the transformation of manly pastimes, and far more influential than old Knights such as Mosby, were evangelical religious leaders, whose problems with college sport concerned the profound moral issues it raised. Many prominent Baptists sat on the boards of trustees of institutions like Wake Forest; Methodist piety likewise guided the development of Trinity, Vanderbilt, and Emory. Other Protestant conservatives exerted their influence through the pages of the religious press. To a considerable extent, ministers throughout the
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South took pride in the progress of denominational colleges, especially as the means of propagating the true faith. Thus, the Raleigh Christian Advocate, organ of the North Carolina Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, regularly carried notes from Trinity College during the early expansion of the institution and its move to Durham. For several years it boasted of the accomplishments of John Crowell, the schools new president, especially when he expanded the academic program. Increasingly during the early 1890s, however, the journal became vehement in its criticism of the athletic policies at Trinity.57
The controversy in North Carolina was charged with dramatic elements, wherein the pious discerned paganism in some of the activities that others saw as ideal emblems of a progressive model of education. Matching F. L. Reid, editor of the Christian Advocate, against President Crowell (and the Duke family), the conflict surrounding sports measured the reactions of evangelical authorities against the secularizing tendencies at Trinity and other colleges of the New South. Reid, a trustee of the college, was upset about the intrusions of outside influences on the moral life of undergraduates. Accordingly, the Christian Advocate periodically bombarded its readers with indictments of college sport, carefully distinguishing, however, between the pernicious aspects of off-campus competitions and the benefits of vigorous athletics pursued close to home.
Arguing that contests between colleges, often taking place in cities such as Raleigh and Richmond, tend[ed] to evil, Reid not only enumerated the charges against match gamesand what attended them; he also noted the efforts of other Christian educators and reformers who took up the standard against athletic enthusiasm. Specifically, he praised the stance taken by W. A. Candler, president of Emory. Inter-collegiate games bring needless expense, Candler wrote in the Wesleyan Advocate. They provoke gambling and other immoralities; waste time; and arouse states of excitement absolutely subversive of habits of study, he continued. [E]very proper end of college life is hindered by them, and no good purpose is promoted by them. Emory, therefore, forbids them. Authorities at Davidson College, as well as Emory and Henry College, likewise enacted prohibitions against college sport, joining the campaign against urban vice and extending the evangelical crusade against the violence that prevailed in the manly traditions of the region. As a recent historian asserted concerning similar controversies, the praying South had finally taken on the fighting South.58
To highlight the evils attending collegiate sporting rituals, the Christian Advocate published a diatribe in 1893 that had first appeared in a New York Methodist journal. In The Morals of Intercollegiate Games, the Reverend C. H. Payne labored to condemn the football craze, seizing on analogies of the sport to Spanish bullfights, the gladiatorial arena of Rome, and the criminal class in general to make his point about the barbarities of the sport. The violence of the game was but one of its evils, Payne contended. Good old-fashioned Christian intolerance, he argued at length, should also extend to the ways athletic enthusiasm hindered study and encouraged gambling, as well as to the demoralizing effects of modem intercollegiate games. Sporting spectacles had fostered conduct disgraceful in the extreme . . . wild revels, bacchanalian songs,
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and delirious shouts . . . enough to make a stout heart quake. A post-Thanksgiving game orgy in New York City, Payne observed, had made the night hideous. For further effect, he quoted a former army officers condemnation of college youth drinking recklessly, acting the part of roughs and rowdies, seizing and insulting women in the streets, passing the night in houses of prostitution, and all this as representatives of our higher seats of learning. Clearly manhood was imperiled, Payne concluded. Others shared his anxiety about the fate of Christian colleges and the betrayal of Christo et ecclesiae. Reid not only endorsed that view but also added that if its youth turned from the path of righteousness to riot, he also feared for the South.59
The Christian Advocate kept up its campaign throughout 1893, reflecting the opinions of the North Carolina conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church that football was a source of evil, and of no little evil, and ought to be stopped. Finally, in 1894 evangelical crusaders forced the resignation of Trinitys ambitious president Crowell and abolished intercollegiate football. Crowells successor at the Methodist institution, Reverend John Carlisle Kilgo, maintained the ban throughout his tenure. Indeed, it was not until 1920 that the intercollegiate game was permitted to resume in the precincts of Durham that would soon thereafter become Duke University.60
*** The enormous tension and turmoil characterizing the Methodist crusade in
North Carolina suggest that the modernization of southern sport and society was not a simple endeavor. Southern evangelicals made it clear that there were contests other than football and baseball that could be pursued aggressively. Steadfast in their own pieties, against the athletic pieties advanced by men like Crowell and Winston, they offered a competing discourse on the meaning of expressive masculinity in the postbellum South. Beyond the widely held view that athletics came into conflict with academics, many religious leaders argued that sports created an enormous rift between the manly and the moral. A traditional notion of southern honor had been extended and reinforced with the advent of intercollegiate sports, and it had flourished, in most respects, even as numerous innovations had rendered athletic competition more modem in form and structure. Yet for evangelicals, the game appeared to subvert their ideal concerning the matter and manner of gaining manhood and fame. Or perhaps, in hindsight, the boundaries between energy and excess had been vaguely defined all along. The reaction to football ultimately illuminated the complex processes of social change, the contrary tendencies woven into the fabric of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century southern history. That the successes of evangelical reformers were mostly local and temporary should obscure neither the influence exerted by the leaders of the praying white South nor the widespread and deeply rooted convictions they have long represented.61
Still, sport won out. The transformation of an elite endeavor, which was also vastly popular, into a spectacle uniting audience and performers ultimately occurred more slowly in the South than in the North, but it followed the same broad outlines. After 1906, when a football player from Vanderbilt was selected to Walter
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1.
2.
3.
4 .
For the purposes of this article, it should be understood that, consciously, all references are to the white South, or to the white New South. By the 1890s, black southerners were barred from competing against white southern youth in such games as baseball Within the context of prevailing cultural considerations, white commentary conscientiously omitted the African American presence from discussions of the values exemplified or inculcated by athletic competition. These facts should direct our attention to parallel developments and modes of interpretation. Fit, African American students and educators at colleges and universities such as Livingstone and Biddle, Talladega and Tuskegee, Fisk and Howard, established their own athletic agendas. Ever since the 1880s, this has been a history enormously rich in fact and lore. It is just as important to understand that the ideal of white southern manhood was constructed against the conception of the slave and freedman, that within the mainstream culture such notions as character, honor, and courage loudly implied what were conceived of as their opposites: docility, servility, and lack of control. Whiteness, thus, was not only cast apart from, but above, blackness in these formulations, although it was not until the early twentieth century that emphatically
Camps All-America squad, an increasing number of southern athletes and their teams gained national prominence. They began to play in the Rose Bowl during the 1920s and became household names throughout the country thereafter.62 For youth, both in the South and the North, sport represented an important means to manliness, an expressive activity both emotionally and physically charged. It was at the same time a utilitarian undertaking, a training ground for the develop- ment of character and self-control in the modernizing social order. Here was an impressively powerful testament to tradition but also to innovation: a new means of extending old ideals concerning both individual growth and certain social relations based on gender and racial hierarchies. During and after the Spanish- American-Cuban-Filipino war, when the tenets of the strenuous life were translated into a more muscular imperialism, athletic competition was enlisted in the service of larger goals as part of a national creed. Yet even then, the rugged rituals of football could be perceived as the embodiment of distinctive customs and traditions, popularly identified with both white southern honor and a highly self-conscious masculinity.63
I am indebted to Gaines Foster, Jeffrey Sammons, Edward Ayers, Ted Ownby, Elliott Gorn, Charles Martin, and David Wiggins, as well as to Robert Argenbright, Johanna Garvey, and Ursula Bielski for their readings of early versions of this article. I would also like to thank Pamela Dean for the photographs.
John Franklin Crowell, Personal Recollections of Trinity College of North Carolina, 1887- 1894 (Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 1939), 230.
Mosby quoted in Kevin Siepel, Rebel: The Life and Times of John Singleton Mosby (New York St. Martins Press, 1983), 285.
See, for example, Walter Camp, California Athletics, Harpers Weekly 37 (February 25, 1893): 191; Henry Sheldon, Student Life and Customs (New York: D. Appleton, 1901). The Bulletin of the Bureau of Education is quoted in Bruce A. Corrie, The Atlantic Coast Conference, 1953-1978 (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1978), 11.
An exception can be found in J. Breckinridge Robertson, Foot Ball in the South, The Southern Magazine 3 (January 1894): 632. In mentioning that some southern athletes had ventured to northern colleges, Robertson snidely observes that The darker side of Southern life seems also to be blossoming out athletically in [William Henry] Lewis of Harvard.
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5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
racial readings of sport made their way into print. I have attempted to address this topic from several perspectives in The Playing Fields of American CuIture: Athletics and Higher Education, 1850-1945 (forthcoming). For a brief assessment of the racial nuances within southern sport, see Edward Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). See also Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black- White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). For an examination of one dimension of the black experience in southern sport, see Patrick B. Miller, To Bring the Race Along Rapidly: Sport, Student Culture, and Educational Mission at Historically Black Colleges during the Interwar Years, History of Education Quarterly 35 (Summer 1995): 111-133.
Robertson, Foot Bali in the South, 631-632.
Concerning ritual and spectacle, I have tended toward the looser definitions of vernacular usage, though my arguments also depend on the more technicaI meanings of the terms, devised principally by cultural anthropologists. See Clifford Geertz, Religion as a Cultural System,Ideology as a Cultural System, and especially, Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight, in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York Basic Books, 1973); John MacAloon, ed., Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984); Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969). See also Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), esp. 263-308. Here I am suggesting along with Edward Ayers-the integration of the South into the economy and mass culture of the nation could be expressed through an elaborate system of rituals and symbols identified with sport. See Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 311-316.
For notions of masculinity, the strenuous life, and the emerging ideology of sport, see Elliott J. Gorn and Warren Goldstein, A Brief History of American Sports (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 47-149; Miller, The Playing Fields of American Culture. Regarding the rituals of reunion, I am taking a cue from the impressive study by Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
Quotation is from Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 315. See T.H. Breen, Horses and Gentlemen: The Cultural Significance of Gambling Among the Gentry of Virginia, William and Mary Quarterly 34 (April, 1977): 329-47; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York Oxford University Press, 1982), esp. chap. 2; Elliott J. Gorn, Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry, American Historical Review 90 (February, 1985): 18-43. See also Dickson Bruce, Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979); Edward Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century South (New York Oxford University Press, 1984). On postbellum southern culture, see Paul Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970); Gaines Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, The Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); See also Don H. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860- 1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). See also Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor & Slavery (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).
See Dale Somers, The Rise of Sport in New Orleans, 1850-1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), 49-51, 74-78. The obvious contrast would be to cockfighting, the brutal wrestling matches, and the duelling of antebellum culture across the classes. A positive value would be increasingly placed on male assertiveness balanced by self-discipline. See Gorn, Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch and the comments of late nineteenth-century southern educators on the value of sport.
10. See, for instance, Kemp P. Battle, History of the University of North Carolina (Raleigh, N.C.: Edwards & Broughton Printing Co., 1907); Philip A. Bruce, History of the University of Virginia, 1819-1919 (New York MacMillan, 1920-22). Joseph Steter, In Search of
310 Volume 24, Number 3
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11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
Direction: Southern Higher Education After the Civil War, History of Education Quarterly 25 (Fall 1985): 341-367.
On the relationship of urban development and the expansion of sport, see Melvin L. Adelman, A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics, 1820-1870 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Steven A. Riess, City Games: Thc Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).
To a significant extent, the standards and ideals represented in the southern sporting creed contrasted substantially with the set of concerns that animated northern muscular moralists of the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Fretful about the effects of city life on the health and character of young men of commerce, an increasing number of northeastern reformers were equally apprehensive about the sedentary, contemplative existence they presumed that college students were leading. Arguing with evidence from the lessons of classical antiquity, as well as the legacy of the revolutionary and early republican generations, elite reformers sought to restore to gentility its tradition of virility, just as they hoped to combat the maladies of modern civilization. To them, gymnastics and athletics offered a means of reconciling muscles and morals, of training young men in self-control and for social service, and, ultimately, of restoring a salutary balance to both individual and social development. On the masculine crisis in the North, see, for example, David Pugh, Sons of Liberty: The Masculine Mind in Nineteenth Century America (Westport, Conn . : Greenwood Press, 1983); E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993); and Rotundo, Body and Soul: Changing Ideals of American Middle- Class Manhood, 1770-1920, Journal of Social History 16 (Summer 1983): 28-33; Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), esp. chap. 6; Gorn and Goldstein, A Brief History of American
The Code of Honor in the Old South, Reviews in American History 12 (March 1984): Sports, chaps. 2, 3. See also Orlando Pattersons review of Wyatt-Browns Southern Honor,
24. Nina Silber brilliantly demonstrates the connection between northern anxieties and perceptions of southern masculinity in The Romance of Reunion.
See Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 94, 96-97, 165.
See Ted Ownby, Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990) for an excellent analysis of southern manhood out-of-doors.
For an important assessment of sport in the South, see Jim L. Sumner, John Franklin Crowell, Methodism, and the Football Controversy at Trinity College, 1887-1894, Journal of Sport History 17 (Spring 1990): 5-20. The reference to Bassett is on p. 15.
For the cultural and social history of early college sport in the North, see Michael Oriard, Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Ronald A. Smith, Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics (New York Oxford University Press, 1988).
The key text on the rationalization of sport is Allen Guttmann, From Ritual to Record The Nature of Modern Sports (New York Columbia University Press, 1978). It should be noted, though, that Guttmann is not persuaded by Marxist or neo-Marxist analogies of sport to the means of production. See also Donald J. Mrozek, Sport and American Mentality, 1880-1910 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), esp. chaps. 2 and 3.
Tom Scott, A History of Intercollegiate Athletics at the University of North Carolina, (D. Ed. diss., Columbia University, 1955), 59, 87; Edgar S. Kiracofe, An Historical Study of Athletics and Physical Education in the Standard Four Year Colleges of Virginia, (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1932), 22; John H. Roper, U.B. Phillips: A Southern Mind (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1984), 17.
While tennis captivated the undergraduates at Tulane University and gymnastic exercises found about the same number of partisans and practitioners as running and rowing, those activities played a negligible role in the development of athletics in the postbellum
Fall 1997 311
South. See Ollinger Crenshaw, General Lees College: The Rise and Growth of Washington and Lee University (New York Random House, 1969), 213; Crew folder, Georgetown University Archives, 1876 to 1900; John S. Patton, Sallie J. Doswell, and Lewis D. Crenshaw, Jeffersons University: Glimpses of the Past and Present of the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, Va.: The Michie Company, 1915), 67.
20. See John E. DiMeglio, Baseball in Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, eds., Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 1210-11; Somers, The Rise of Sport in New Orleans, 49-51; E. Merton Coulter, College Life in the Old South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1951), 268. See also W.K. Woolery, Bethany Years: The Story of Old Bethany From Her Founding Years Through a Century of Trial and Triumph (Huntington, W.Va.: Standard Printing and Publishing Company, 1941), 217; Jerome A. Moore, Texas Christian University: A Hundred Years of History (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1974), 22-23; and Bruce, University of Virginia, chap. 4, 133-137.
21. Moore, Texas Christian University, 211; James B. Sellers, History of the University of Alabama, 1818-1902 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1953), 524; John D. Wright, Transylvania: Tudor to the West (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1975), 306. For an expansive treatment of the development of the sport in the region, see Lorenzo (Fuzzy) Woodruff, A History of Southern Football, 1890-1928 (Atlanta, Ga.: Walter W. Brown, Publishing, 1928).
22. When such personal advice was not readily available, college students sought assistance by writing to friends or acquaintances in the Northeast and, later in the century, by consulting the rule book published by the SpaIding Company. See John P. Dyer, Tulane: The Biography of a University, 1834-1965 (New York Harper & Row, 1966), 165; Jonas Vilas, et al., The University of Missouri: A Centennial History (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1939), 260; Edwin Mims, History of Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1946), 276; Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Knopf, 1968), 371-372; Patton, et al., Jeffersons University, 69.
23. Bruce, University of Virginia, vol. IV, 140. A similar appraisal of southerners first attempts at the sport appeared in the New Orleans Picayune in 1893 concerning a contest between Tulane and the University of Mississippi: All that was visible from the benches were 22 long-haired and unkempt youths rushing wildly to a common center, animated by an insane desire to make pemmican of each other. Quoted in Somers, The Rise of Sport in New Orleans, 258. If the Virginians claim to the Souths first game of football remains problematic, perhaps that of the Kentuckians was better founded. On April 9, 1880, Centre College competed against Transylvania in a cow pasture. The players, 15 of them to a side, wore heavy shoes and padded apparel. Although that much is clear and impressive, the rest of the story is in dispute. Since one member of the Transylvania team had immigrated from Australia, the game may have been played according to the Australian custom; certainly the Centre College players were confused, protesting afterwards that they had been deliberately sent the wrong set of rules and the wrong size football with which to practice for the big match. See Wright, Transylvania: Tudor to the West, 302.
24. Bruce, University of Virginia, vol. IV, 143; Kiracofe, Four Year Colleges of Virginia, 19.
25. George J. Stevenson, Increase in Excellence: A History of Emory and Henry College (New York Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963), 192; Robert E. Wilder, Gridiron Glory Days: Football at Mercer, 1892-1942 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1982), 2-17; Duncan L. Kinnear, The First 100 Years: A History of Virginia Polytecnic Institute and State University (Blacksburg: Virginia Polytechnic Institute Educational Foundation, 1972), 152.
26. History of Football, Trinity College, 1888-1891 and Trinity College Athletic Association in Duke University Archives; Scott, University of North Carolina, 67; Glenn E. (Ted) Mann, A Story of Glory: Duke University Football (Greenville, SC.: Doorway Publishers, 1985), 46-51. An especially thorough treatment is Jim L. Sumner, The North Carolina Inter-Collegiate Foot-Ball Association: The Beginnings of College
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28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
College Sport in the New South
Football in North Carolina, The North Carolina Historical Review 45 (July 1988): 263- 286.
John Franklin Crowell, Personal Recollections, 45-46; Mann, Story of Glory, 50-55; Sumner, North Carolina Inter-Collegiate Foot-Ball Association.
On the role of the coach, see esp. Smith, Sports and Freedom, 147-164.
John F. Stegeman, The Ghosts of Herty Field: Early Days on a Southern Gridiron (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1966), 69-70. See also Paul Conkin, Gone With the Ivy: A Biography of Vanderbilt University (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 135 141; and Wiley Umphlett, Creating the Big Game: John W. Heisman and the Invention of American Football (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992).
Stegeman, Ghosts of Herty Field, 2-3; Crowell quoted in Sumner, Methodism and the Football Controversy at Trinity College, 8.
Crowell quoted in Sumner, North Carolina Inter-Collegiate Foot-Ball Association, 267.
Winston quoted in Battle, History of the University of North Carolina, chap. 2, 510, and in Raleigh Christian Advocate, March 22, 1893. With regard to Winstons mingling of references to military and religious figures, an instructive text is Robert J. Higgs, God in the Stadium: Sports and Religion in America (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995).
Battle, History of the University of North Carolina, chap. 2, 549.
One of the best discussions of symbols and school sports appears in James Anthony Mangan, Athletics in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: The Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 142-143. See also Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), 386: From identifying an institution with a color to identifying it with a football team was a very short step, and before long very many Americans were acting as if the purpose of an American college or university were to field a football team. See also Miller, The Playing Fields of American Culture, chap. 2; Benjamin G. Rader, American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Televised Sports (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1990), 101-106.
New York Times, October 12, 1932; Patton, et. al., Jeffersons University, 75.
Allen Cabaniss, A History of the University of Mississippi (Hattiesburg: University Press of Mississippi, 1971), 116. Mary D. Beaty, A History of Davidson College (Davidson, N.C.: Briarpatch Press, 1988), 190.
Crenshaw, General Lees College, 215; Stegeman, Ghosts of Herty Field, 8.
Regarding Bevo, see Margaret C. Berry, Student Life and Customs, 1883-1933 at the University of Texas (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1965), 130-136. It is noteworthy as well that the universitys finest women athletes were invited to the feast. The participation of southern college women in sport has received scant attention in the historical literature. Ayers, in The Promise of the New South, 316, makes an initial foray, though the most impressive work to date is by Pamela Dean, Dear Sisters and Hated Rivals: Athletics and Gender at Two New South Womens Colleges, 1893-1920, in this issue.
Berry, Student Life and Customs, 135-136. For more on Texas football, see Lou Maysel, Here Come the Longhorns (Austin, 1978); Kern Tips, FootballTexas Style (Garden City, N.Y., 1964); John D. Forsyth, The Aggies and the Horns (Austin, 1981). For an examination of football at the University of Texas during the depression, see James W. Pohl, The Bible Decade and the Origin of National Athletic Prominence, Southwestern Historical Quarterly (October 1982): 299-320.
Peter Finney, Fighting Tigers II: L.S.U. Football, 1893-1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 12; William H. Lander, How the Blue Devils Got Their Name, Duke Alumni Register, October 1964.
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41. Berry, Student Life and Customs, 168; Sumner, North Carolina Inter-Collegiate Foot- Ball Association, 267; Isaac Newton Carr, History of Carson-Newman College (Jefferson City, Tenn., 1959), 262. Note too that the excitement and pageantry suffusing southern college sport depended as much on the armies of auxiliaries as they did on the feats of the leading athletes. Cavorting and yelling cheerleaders combined with the first pep bands added fun and frivolity to the drama of athletic conflict and filled the gaps between intense moments during the sporting duels on gridiron, diamond, and track. Cheerleaders such as Dukes Wesley Frank Craven, later a prominent historian, became well known just a step below the athletes themselves in the hierarchy of popularity and influence. See The Chanticleer, Duke University Yearbook, 1926, 54.
42. Stegeman, Ghosts of Herty Field, 5; Wright, TransyIvania, 302; Crenshaw, General Lees College, 215. If women were perceived in some ways as marginal to the athletic extravaganza, the inspiration provided by alcohol often played a major role in the experience, both during the period of local option in the South and during the era of national prohibition. Spirits were prohibited at denominational colleges, but elsewhere they were a popular part of the Saturday afternoon and evening rites, especially in the cities where many intercollegiate contests were staged. One athletic tradition holds that, during the late nineteenth century, Georgia players and fans alike raced away from the football field toward the Broad Street Dispensary in order to make purchases of liquor before sundown, the time when state law mandated that such establishments be closed. Though such habits extended the euphoria of a day at play, they also provoked the wrath of the pious. Before long, moral reformers in the South would include drinking in the litany of abuses they associated with college sports, though their attempts to dry up masculine rituals would prove largely unsuccessful.
43. TuIane Collegian quoted in Somers, The Rise of Sport in New Orleans, 249. Concerning the issues of gender and sport (specifically the meanings attached to various modes of play, see Dean, Dear Sisters and Hated Rivals. On the diverse ways white supremacy was cast (though not including sport), see Williamson, The Crucible of Race and Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). On the ideology of sport and race relations, see Miller, The Playing Fields of American Sport, chaps. 7 and 8. For Jim Crow on the college gridiron, see Charles H. Martin, Racial Change and Big-Time College Football in Georgia: The Age of Segregation, 1892- 1957, Georgia Historical Quarterly 80 (Fall 1996): 532-562.
44. Wake Forest Student, December, 1889, chap. 9, as quoted in Sumner, North Carolina Inter-Collegiate Foot-Ball Association, 280.
45. See, for example, Sumner, North Carolina Inter-Collegiate Foot-Ball Association, 269, 283. Thomas Wolfe describes the intense rivalry between two fictional colleges, Pine Rock, Baptist College of Old Catawba, and Virginias venerable Monroe and Madison College: The game on Thanksgiving Day was sanctified by almost every element of tradition and age that could give it color. (Thomas Wolfe, The Web and the Rock [New York Harper & Brothers, 1939], 177-79). See also the detailed analysis in Oriard, Reading Football, 89-101.
46. R.L. Durham, The Beginning of Football at Trinity, quoted in Sumner, North Carolina Inter-Collegiate Foot-Ball Association, note on p. 276.
47. Stegeman, Ghosts of Herty Field, 66, 88; Crenshaw, General Lees College, 217.
48. Stegeman, Ghosts of Herty Field, 105; Moore, Texas Christian University, 213.
49. Joseph Hamblen Sears, The Career of Leonard Wood, (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1919), 58; Stegeman, Ghosts of Herty Field, 17-19.
50. Stegeman, Ghosts of Herty Field, 51.
51. See Corrie, The Atlantic Coast Conference, 11-13; Mims, Vanderbilt, 279-281; Paul Conkin, Gone With the Ivy, 136-140; Handbook of the Southern Inter-Collegiate Athletic Association, 1905; Ronald Smith, Preludes to the NCAA: Early Failures of Faculty Intercollegiate Athletic Control, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 54 (1983): 372-382. As late
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College Sport in the New South
Roland J. Mulford, A History of the Lawrenceville School, 1810-1935 (Princeton, 1935), 285; Stegeman, Ghosts of Herty Field, 40-43; see also Crenshaw, General Lees College, 219.
Dr. Henry Louis Smith in the Davidson College Magazine, October 1899, as quoted in Beaty, Davidson College, 190.
John S. Mosby to Thomas Pinckney Bryan, December 7, 1909, Betty Cocke Collection, University of Virginia Archives. I am indebted to Gaines Foster for sending me a copy of this document and stressing its significance to my discussion. See also Siepel, Rebel, 285- 290.
Mosby, letter to Bryan. For an extensive discussion of the episode to which Mosby was responding, see John S. Watterson, The Death of Archer Christian: College Presidents and the Reform of College Football, Journal of Sport History 22 (Summer 1995): 149- 167.
Raleigh Cbristian Advocate, February 17, July 13, 1892, and JuIy 12, 1893. The periodical supported antidrinking and antigambling crusades generally; it recommended not merely the restriction but the outright suppression of dancing on campus and it fulminated against violations of the Sabbath, especially when it involved bicycle riding. The North Carolina religious journal seemed rather ambivalent editorially on the subject of tobacco. It was much less censorious of the barbarous custom of lynching than it was in its observations concerning intercollegiate sports. See also Sumner, Methodism and the FootbalI Contronrsy at Trinity College, 12-17.
Raleigh Christian Advocate, March 30, 1892. See Frederick Bode, Protestantism and the New South: North Carolina Baptists and Methodists in Political Crisis (1894-1903) (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975). The key text for this entire discussion is Ownby, Subduing Satan. He observes on page 12 that where evangelicalism demanded self-control, humility in manner, and harmony in personal relations, Southern honor demanded self-assertiveness, aggressiveness, and competitiveness. Where home life was generally quiet and peaceful male culture was often loud and exciting.
Raleigh Christian Advocate, January 11, 1893.
Raieigh Christian Advocate, January 25, March 1, March 22, and December 20, 1893; and January 31, 1894; Crowell, Personal Recollections of Trinity College, 45-46. See also, Paul Neff Garber, John Carlisle Kilgo (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1937), 157-158. For similar conflicts at other colleges, see George Washington Paschal, History of Wake Forest College (Wake Forest, N.C., 1935-43), chap. 2, 311-313; Stevenson, Emory and Henry, 191; Henry Morton Bullock, A History of Emory University (Nashville, Tenn.: Parthenon Press, 1936), 273-275; Francis B. Dedmond, Catawba: The Story of a College
59.
60.
58.
57.
56.
54.
55.
Miscellaneous athletic material, Football folder, 1888-1896 and clipping, January, 1912, Georgetown University Archives; Joseph Durkin, Georgetown: The Middle Years (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1963) 228; Professor R. H. Dabney to Richmond Times Dispatch, December 4, 1909, Lowell Papers, 1909-1914, Folder 88, Football Rules, Harvard University Archives.
52.
as 1916, after many reforms had been undertaken elsewhere, the football coach at Virginia Tech, J. E. Ingersoll, described the great number of professionals and ineligibles on the teams here in the South, calculating that every college would have to acknowledge at least one tramp athlete. Writing to a northern correspondent, Ingersoll noted that the ringers he observed usually lived in hotels and never even pretended to attend classes. Wearing the most variegated collection of college insignia on their sweaters, they traveled from school to school, he declared, concluding that the ethics of sport in the South seemed *less developed and advanced than in other regions. See Howard Savage, Harold W. Bentley, John T. McGovern, and Dean F. Smiley, American College Athletics (New York The Carnegie Endowment for the Advancement of Teaching, 1929), 28; J.E. Ingersoll to Walter Camp, October 30, 1916, Walter Camp Correspondence, Box 15 Ingersoll, Yale University Archives. See also Carr, History of Carson-Newman, 266; Moore, Texas Christian University, 213, Finney, Fighting Tigers, 30.
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61.
62.
63.
(Boone, N.C., 1989), 93-95. See also Sumner, North Carolina Inter-Collegiate Foot- Ball Association, 284; Sumner, Methodism and the Football Controversy at Trinity College, 17-20; Mann, A Story of Glory, 50-55
For an interesting treatment on domesticated violence, see Pete Daniel, Standing at the Crossroads: Southern Life in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1986), 172-179; See also Ownby, Subduing Satan, 211-212: And most churches have come to a shaky truce with some masculine institutions such as the football game and stock-car race. In many areas of the South, both of these events still begin with prayer that asks for safety, fair play, and a brief consideration of matters more important than sport.
On the first southern All-Americans, see Mrozek, Sport and American Mentality, 181. For developments of a later era, see Andrew Doyle, Causes Won, Not Lost: College Football and the Modernization of the American South, The International Journal of the History of Sport 11 (August 1994): 231-251.
Indeed, two historians of the region conclude, pride in the strength of sectional football teams took its place along with pride in the valor of the Confederate army as a major source of Southern chauvinism. Francis Butler Simkins and Charles Roland, A History of the South (New York: Knopf, 1972).
316 Volume 24, Number 3
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Journal of Sport History, Volume 24 Number 3, Fall 1997
Contents
Articles
Sporting Activities in the American-Mexican Colonies of Texas, 1821-1835.
The Manly, the Moral, and the Proficient: College Sport in the New South.
Foolish and Useless Sport: The Southern Evangelical Crusade Against Intercollegiate Football.
Dear Sisters’ and ‘Hated Rivals’: Athletics and Gender at Two New South Women’s Colleges, 1893-1920.
Integrating New Year’s Day: The Racial Politics of College Bowl Games in the American South.
Book Forum
A Proportionate and Measured Response to the Provocation that is Darwin’s Athletes.
How Not to Misread Darwin’s Athletes: A Response to Jeffrey T. Sammons.
Book Review Essays
Brawley, Sean. Vigilant and Victorious: A Community History of the Collaroy Surf Life Saving Club, 1911-1995. Brawley, Sean. Beach Beyond: History of the Palm Beach Surf Club, 1921-1996. (Book Review Essay)
Pope, S.W. (ed.) The New American Sport History: Recent Approaches and Perspectives. Riess, Steven A. (ed.) Major Problems in American Sport History: Documents and Essays. (Book Review Essay)
Book Reviews
Decker, Wolfgang. Sport in der grieschischen Antike, Vom minoische Wettkampf bis zu den Olypischen Spielen. (Book Review)
Grundlingh, Albert, Andre Odendaal and Burridge Spies. Beyond the Tryline: Rugby and South African Society. (Book Review)
Fitzgerald, Ross, and Andrew Berkman. The Footy Club: Inside the Brisbane Bears. (Book Review)
Nauright, John, and Timothy J. Chandler, eds. Making Men: Rugby and Masculine Identity. (Book Review)
Sugden, John. Boxing and Society: An International Analysis. (Book Review)
Bale, John and Joe Sang. Kenyan Running. (Book Review)
Moss, Stirling, with Doug Nye. Fangio: A Pirelli Album. (Book Review)
Kidd, Bruce. The Struggle for Canadian Sport. (Book Review)
Marks, Lynne. Revivals and Roller Rinks: Religion, Leisure, and Identity in Late-Nineteenth Century Small-Town Ontario. (Book Review)
Daub, Merv. Gael Force: A Century of Football at Queen’s University. (Book Review)
Vennum, Thomas, Jr. American Indian Lacrosse: Little Brother of War. (Book Review)
Pope, S.W. Patriotic Games: Sporting Traditions in the American Imagination, 1876-1926. (Book Review)
Koppett, Leonard. Sports Illusion, Sports Reality: A Reporter’s View of Sports, Journalism, and Society. (Book Review)
Brown, Bill. The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play. (Book Review)
Bailey, Steve. Science in the Service of Physical Education and Sport: The Story of the International Council of Sport Science and Physical Education, 1956-1996. (Book Review)
Brown, Dona. Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century. (Book Review)
Young, David C. The Modern Olympics: A Struggle for Revival. (Book Review)
Peterson, Robert W. Pigskin: The Early Years of Pro Football. (Book Review)
Hotaling, Edward. They’re Off!: Horse Racing at Saratoga. (Book Review)
Springwood, Charles Fruehling. Cooperstown to Dyersville: A Geography of Baseball Nostalgia. (Book Review)
Shropshire, Kenneth L. In Black and White: Race and Sports in America. (Book Review)
Klein, Alan M. Little Big Men: Bodybuilding Subculture and Gender Construction. (Book Review)
Crosset, Todd W. Outsiders in the Clubhouse: The World of Women’s Professional Golf. (Book Review)
Davis, Laurel. The Swimsuit Issue and Sport: Hegemonic Masculinity in Sports Illustrated. (Book Review)