Pay for Play: A History of Big-Time College Athletic Reform

5. Football, Progressive Reform, and the Creation of the NCAA

42 | Chapter 5 5 Football, Progressive Reform, and the Creation of the NCAA “In view of the tragedy on Ohio Field today,” New York University Chancellor Henry M. MacCracken telegraphed Charles W. Eliot, requesting that the Harvard president call “a meeting of university and college presidents to undertake the reform or abolition of football.”1 Thus began a series of events addressing not only the death of a Union College football player in a pileup in a game against New York University , but also the larger question of brutality and unsavory practices in football that had been going on for several decades. The telegram at the conclusion of the 1905 college football season, to the president who was most identified with a desire to reform or abolish football, was answered almost immediately. “I do not think it expedient to call a meeting of college presidents about football,” Eliot telegraphed MacCracken. “They certainly cannot reform football, and I doubt if by themselves they can abolish it. . . . Deaths and injuries are not the strongest argument against football. That cheating and brutality are profitable is the main evil.”2 Charles Eliot, the most imposing educator of the time and the one who attempted to reform athletics from the 1880s on, dropped out of the arena to reform athletics on a regional or national basis. Chancellor MacCracken’s involvement in athletic reform was an electrifying action that began with the death of a player his school was competing against, but it was only one of a series of events leading up to a major reform of football rules and the creation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Had it not occurred in the midst of the Progressive Movement in American history, the ensuing reform would likely not have taken place. With the issues raised about the industrialization and urbanization of America in the second half of the nineteenth century, a reform movement was born. The Progressive Movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was based on the belief that society collectively could be cured of its ills through economic, political, and social reform.3 There was a shift from a traditional laissez-faire policy to governmental activism in areas such as legislation to prevent corruption in politics, industrial monopolies, adulterated food and drugs, child labor and other worker exploitation, and abominable urban living conditions. The investigative journalists who exposed societal issues, such Football, Progressive Reform, and the Creation of the NCAA | 43 as corrupt political bosses, monopolistic industrialists, and fraudulent claims of patent medicines, were called muckrakers. Some of the leading muckrakers included Lincoln Stephens (corrupt politicians), Ida Tarbell (Rockefeller oil), Ray Stannard Baker (Pullman Strike), Jacob Riis (slums), and Upton Sinclair (meatpacking). It was Theodore Roosevelt, U.S. president in the early years of the twentieth century, who coined the term muckraker, based on the man with the muck-rake in John Bunyon’s Pilgrim’s Progress who raked up the muck of society. Those who raked the muck of intercollegiate athletics had a large impact upon the reform of football and the creation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association in 1905. The ills of intercollegiate athletics were only a minor problem in industrial America in the early years of the twentieth century, but they attracted attention, particularly of the popular press. College athletics were covered intently both by newspapers and by periodicals of the time, and major issues were the violence and questionable ethics found in college sport, especially football. The muckrakers of athletics attracted national attention, significantly that of President Theodore Roosevelt in the summer of 1905. Of the periodicals publishing reform articles, such as Cosmopolitan, Outlook, Nation, and The Independent, none was more important in athletic muckraking than McClure’s. Henry Beech Needham penned a two-part McClure’s series in the spring and summer of 1905 that ran concurrently with Ida Tarbell’s study of the oil monopolist, John D. Rockefeller, and Lincoln Steffens’s piece on Ohio’s political corruption.4 These two articles on “The College Athlete” attacked the most prestigious eastern universities for what Needham called the “prostitution of college athletics.” The articles condemned the win-at-all-cost behavior, including hiring tramp athletes, inducing athletes to attend college for financial advantage, paying baseball players during the summer, squandering athletic income, cheating in the classroom, collusion of faculty with athletes, unethical practices of professional coaches, building costly stadiums, commercializing college sports, and the continuing brutality of football. Needham’s condemnation of the athletic scene...