The Tail that Wags the Dog: Football and the American University

Fifty-seven years have now passed since the University of Chicago shocked the sports world by abolishing its once prestigious football program in 1939. Most educators and sports fans have long since forgotten this controversial decision, as well as Chicago’s previous gridiron accomplishments. Yet during the first quarter of the twentieth century the original “monsters of the midway,” guided by legendary coach Amos Alonzo Stagg, established themselves as a national powerhouse and a dominant force in the Big Ten Conference. Chicago’s football success played a pivotal role both in attracting public support for the new university and in making football a genuine national sport. No other college better embodied the Faustian bargain of combining big-time football with serious academic life than did Chicago, where Stagg’s athletic empire dominated the campus for decades. To the community and the nation, Chicago truly was “Stagg’s University.”

Robin Lester, a social and cultural historian, has rescued those “glory days” from obscurity, but he has done much more than merely revive faded memories of heroic stars, exciting plays, and triumphal seasons. Instead he skillfully develops the Chicago story into a case study of the creation of a national collegiate sporting culture and the construction of football as a secular ritual for both town and gown. Chicago played a central role in this process “because Stagg’s university pioneered in making football a mass entertainment industry on the American campus” (p. xvii). The author also explores in detail the corrosive influence of intercollegiate athletics within the university, a sensitive area that most official college histories prudently avoid. Although Lester’s account ends in 1939, the problems that he identifies concerning the relationship of athletics and academics remain as central to campus life today as they were nearly a century ago.

Lester first stumbled onto his topic thirty years ago when as a young Chicago graduate student working in the library he was assigned the task of unpacking the recently acquired Amos Alonzo Stagg papers. This accidental encounter between student and manuscript collection has produced an important study, though one whose appearance in print has been long delayed. The book’s narrative revolves around the interplay of three major themes: the specific gridiron exploits of Chicago football teams, the educational development and internal politics of the university, and the spread of a national collegiate football culture which created unprecedented public support for American universities. By examining Chicago football within the broader social and cultural forces of the period, the book is representative of the rapidly growing body of outstanding sport history studies now appearing in print. Recent works by such scholars as Susan Cahn, Susan Cayleff, Allen Guttmann, Peter Levine, Michael Oriard, and G. Edward White have clearly demonstrated the growing sophistication of the field. ¹ A volume in the pioneering “Sport and Society” series of the University of Illinois Press, Stagg’s University is a worthy addition to this literature.

One of Lester’s most valuable contributions is his demythologization of the pre-World War II period of college sports. Readers who expect the book to portray an innocent era when college football was uncorrupted by allegedly modern vices will be severely disappointed. Beginning with unethical recruiting, schools also provided hidden financial assistance and other forms of preferential treatment to their athletes, who in turn were sometimes poorly prepared for college work, frequently absent from class, and often negligent in completing their degrees. Academic fraud was commonplace. Even Stagg himself does not escape Lester’s careful scrutiny. Although his personal ethics were higher than those of many in the profession, the powerful coach regularly convinced administrators and selected professors to provide special consideration for his athletes in order to keep these putative scholars eligible to play. Such problems were not unique to Chicago, of course. Murray Sperber’s recent examination of Knute Rockne and Notre Dame athletics, Shake Down the Thunder...