PROFESSIONALIZATION OF AMERICAN COLLEGE FOOTBALL closely followed professionalization of the curriculum. For much of the nineteenth century, an Oxbridge-inspired program of classic education, plus or minus theology, was compulsory in English and American universities, with social Darwinism in the wings. In England, Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s great champion, argued in 1868 that for the sake of the empire, its gentlemanly college curriculum must be replaced by the sort of entrepreneurial program launched by the Germans: Erdkunde, “ . . . a description of the earth, of its general structure, and of its great features—winds, tides, mountains, plains: of the chief forms of the vegetable and animal worlds, of the varieties of man.” Agriculture and soil management, as Ohio State would have it today.
The very next year, President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard University sniffed the spoor of social Darwinism and put Huxley’s proposal into action. America was on the move after the Civil War, and expansion into the western territories called for practical education in the arts of empire. Pointing to European success at technical education, President Eliot proclaimed, “We are fighting a wilderness, physical and moral, and for this fight we must be trained and armed . . . ” It may sound like social Darwinism these days, but it was a call for the elective system, which put an end to the classic core forever. Thanks to Huxley and Eliot, elite universities on both sides of the Atlantic replaced the study of Latin, Greek, and the quadrivium with elective courses in the natural and physical sciences, modern languages, sociology, geology, and engineering. To the sounds of that beat, students have been naturally selecting their own majors ever since.
WITHIN A MONTH OF ELIOT’S CALL for manly vigor at Harvard, Princeton and Rutgers played the first intercollegiate football game in November 1869 before a rapt crowd of 200. That initial fight for survival of the collegiate fittest spread rapidly from coast to coast. Colleges accustomed to recruiting for academic excellence (and family standing) soon turned to recruiting for athletic skill (plus or minus family standing). The turning point came when the University of Chicago hired Alonzo Stagg as the first professional college football coach in the country—only two years after the university was founded in 1890.
Stagg, now honored as a patron saint of the coaching cult, founded an athletic dynasty at the University of Chicago. His brawny football team, the Maroons, earned its alliterative nickname “The Monsters of the Midway” by dominating its opponents in two out of three matches he coached. Entrepreneurial savvy came with football know-how. To boost sideline enthusiasm, the Maroons were first in the nation to wear varsity letters, and a mere two years after he was hired, Stagg gained national attention for the Maroons with a trip to Stanford, beginning the tradition of cross-country “Bowls.” Under Stagg, the University of Chicago was a founder of the Big Ten conference in 1895 and instrumental in putting together the NCAA in 1906. For half a century, Stagg’s business acumen carried the day. The modest athletic stadium of his day, first known as Marshall Field (“Marshall” as in the department store), was soon renamed Stagg Field, eventually holding as many as 50,000 weekly fans of the Midway Monsters. The Chicago temple of Brawn came to an end when football was abolished in 1939 by Chancellor Robert Hutchens, a champion of the seven liberal arts.
A sidebar: The end of football at Stagg Field marked the beginning of the atomic age when, under the abandoned west stands, Enrico Fermi monitored the first nuclear chain reaction. Sic transit, as the Brains would have it.
Alonzo Stagg’s legacy is huge. The billion-dollar football world of Cardale Jones and others today became what it is thanks to Stagg’s invention of that uniquely American institution, the football scholarship. It was called a “student service payment” in the 1890s and evolved to guarantee survival of the strongest on the field, if not the classroom. Poor kids, rich kids, and kids of any color or origin, one and all, could go to college as long as they had Brawn—plus or minus Brain. Before “student service payments,” tryouts for the team were open to any student who could handle a ball, as long as parents paid tuition. On to the era of Stagg, who was not always scrupulous in his selection of players. Hugo Bezdek, one of the 1904 Monsters of the Midway, was identified as a professional boxer named “Hugo Young” by a rival from the University of Illinois. Years later, Bezdek recalled to the Detroit Free Press that his Illini accusers had plotted his exposé at “some saloon,” adding: “I don’t know anything about the Illinois teams hiring the iceman to play for them . . . I don’t know whether they really were a gashouse gang or not. They may have been genuine Illinois students.”
So, college football players can do business at “some saloon”? Icemen and gashouse workers can be hired to play college ball? The prestige of a university can hang on victory over a rival at sport? It sounds like a recipe for a Hollywood comedy. It was.
THAT 1932 COMEDY IS CALLED Horse Feathers and forms a wicked footnote to a Carnegie Foundation report that had blown the whistle on a generation of collegiate shenanigans: “College football is a highly organized commercial enterprise. The athletes . . . are commanded by professional coaches. . . . The great matches are highly profitable enterprises,” the report stated. In the flick, Groucho Marx plays Quincy Adams Wagstaff, the brand-new president of Huxley College. Groucho’s son Frank, played by Zeppo, had been an undergraduate football player at Huxley for twelve(!) years. Groucho tells Zeppo that Huxley hasn’t won a ball game for decades and that the college’s reputation is on the line. The only way to save Huxley is to hire two hulking football players who hang out at a ’32 speakeasy—“some local saloon,” as in Stagg’s Chicago. Alas, as luck would have it, the president of Darwin College, Huxley’s archrival, had got to the saloon before him, and the two real hulks were gone. Groucho had to settle for two saloon regulars: Chico, a boot-legging iceman; and Harpo, an iceman and dogcatcher (shades of the Illini gashouse). Back on campus, university president Groucho took on the additional tasks of football coach, guidance counselor, locker-room trainer, and biology professor. Meanwhile, Chico and Harpo, like Cardale Jones today, went on to do what they were hired to do: to play FOOTBALL and to show that “classes are POINTLESS”:
GROUCHO (as a biology professor): Let us follow a corpuscle on its journey . . . Now then, baboons, what is a corpuscle?
CHICO: That’s easy! First is a captain . . . then a lieutenant . . . then is a corpuscle!
The climax of the film, as expected, comes at the annual Thanksgiving football game, which pits Huxley against Darwin. All four Marxes are suited up, Groucho the president dons helmet, knickers, and cleats and goes on to make a tackle from the sidelines. It’s a tight match, but Huxley has a selective advantage in this struggle for life. In the final quarter, bearing several concealed footballs, the four brothers are carried into the end zone in a chariot: Harpo’s horse-drawn garbage wagon. Huxley wins 31–12: Brain beat Brawn in Academe, but it’s only a flick. That image of four comedians riding across the goal line, Ben-Hur–style, was featured on the cover of Time magazine. It made the point that, in 1932, you could buy football players at a saloon and that the Carnegie Foundation was right: “The great matches are highly profitable enterprises.”
THE FOOTBALL ENTERPRISE is perhaps even more profitable these days. There’s that $7.3 billion contract signed between the NCAA and ESPN. As for the athletes, I’d argue that they should be rewarded for their Brawn and not be forced into the realm of Brain. Footballers in Division 1—as in the Big Ten—are on a professional career path and should be unionized; they should also be permitted to major in football itself. Like the Olympians who trained in the groves of Plato’s Academe, the players have “no free time for anything else” and should not be forced to go to classes the principles of which they can acquire on the field. If you can major in Turfgrass Management, well . . .
Cardale Jones had it just right after the championship. He told the New York Times, “I don’t think it’s going to be based on your athletic ability. It’s going to be based on your ability to process and diagnose
information.” Shades of Huxley—Thomas Huxley, the Darwinist, that is. I’d argue that a Division 1 football player should be free to pick any class he chooses that can teach him anything more valuable than “to process and diagnose information.” As for the rest of us in Academe, how about the seven liberal arts for a start?
8.
Apply Directly to the Forehead: Holmes, Zola, and Hennapecia
There is nothing men will not do, there is nothing they have not done, to recover their health and save their lives. They have submitted to be half-drowned in water, and half-choked with gases, to be buried up to their chins in earth, to be seared with hot irons like galley-slaves, to be crimped with knives, like cod-fish, to have needles thrust into their flesh, and bonfires kindled on their skin, to swallow all sorts of abominations, and to pay for all this, as if to be singed and scalded were costly privilege, as if blisters were a blessing, and leeches were a luxury.
—Dr. Oliver Wendell Homes (1871)
WERE DR. HOLMES TO OBSERVE bodily mischief today, he’d still find needles thrust without cause into flesh and bonfires needlessly kindled on the skin. But nowadays the injuries are far less likely to be inflicted on the sick in search of health than on the vain in search of fashion. Botox bruises the foreheads of matrons, collagen scars the lips of barflies. Steel grommets hang from the navels of nymphets, bolts pierce the lips of perps. Perhaps the broadest practice, however, is the application of henna directly to hair and skin. This global assault has produced rock concerts that resemble the coming of age in Samoa and turned South Beach into the South Pacific. Warriors of the NFL sport body tattoos that put Papua to shame, while trendy folk in SoHo flaunt the umbilical baroque. If the Belle Époque was the Age of Gold, ours has become the Age of Tool and Dye.
Yet the medical literature documents that neither body piercing nor henna is all that safe. Injuries provoked by cosmetic intrusion spare no age, no gender, no color, no class. Even the very young fall victim, as reported in a 2007 news item headlined “Scarred Children”:
Michelle Lolk, of River Edge, took her 6-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son to a tattoo shop this past summer for their first-ever temporary tattoos. Young Ethan got a cross on his arm. His sister, Olivia, got a dolphin on her belly. A day later, Olivia complained of severe pain. “It looked like she was branded with a poker,” Lolk said.
Skin branding of this sort (bonfires kindled on their skin, as Dr. Holmes might say) is due to acute contact dermatitis induced by henna’s active agent, lawsone (2-hydroxy-1,4-naphthoquinone) and an added ingredient, PPD (para-phenylenediamine). Henna is a shrub (Lawsonia inermis, or Egyptian privet) cultivated in India, Sri Lanka, and much of North Africa. The dried leaves are mixed with various solvents and applied directly to the skin or hair. PPD is often added to red henna powder to produce the “black henna” preferred for tattoos. But PPD also renders the mixture more allergenic and sometimes virulently toxic: see the 1996 Lancet paper “A Woman Who Collapsed after Painting Her Soles.” Temporary henna tattoos—the sort applied at rock concerts and kiddie festivals—are intended to persist for only a few weeks, but the incidence of acute inflammation, permanent scarring, and keloid formation has become epidemic in the last decade and a half. PubMed lists only three reports of reactions to henna tattoo in the two decades between 1975 and 1995—but 259 papers since 1995! A number of these cases were caused by henna without added PPD. Hair dyes come in all sorts of proprietary formulations: a 2006 study from Korea reported that of 15 henna samples tested, PPD was present in 3, nickel in 11, and cobalt in 4.
Henna has been recognized as an occupational hazard in hairdressing salons. At various doses the dye induces hemolytic anemia in lab animals and humans alike, and oral intake of henna produces an acute inflammation of the colon. In cell culture assays, lawsone causes cell death and cell cycle arrest. As might be expected for a redox-dependent naphthoquinine, individuals who lack oxidant defenses on a heritable basis, such as those with G-6 PD deficiency, are particularly at risk for Heinz-body hemolytic anemia.
In response to injuries caused by “temporary tattoos,” the FDA last year issued a warning against the import of henna preparations containing PPD, but stated that the agency was powerless to supervise ingredients in “cosmetic samples and products used exclusively by professionals—for example, for application at a salon, or a booth at a fair or boardwalk.”
So much for the kiddie trade!
WHILE THE YOUNG ARE APT TO APPLY HENNA directly to the skin, folks of a certain age mainly use henna to color their hair. The practice has been common for centuries in every corner of the world. Recently, however, France seems to have swept the honors for turning henna into art, as any stroller through Paris can attest. When the weather turns balmy, the streets are alive in a blaze of henna, offering coiffures in orange, auburn, red, and crimson.
But there may be a real downside to this display of vegetal finery. Over the years, I’ve observed on Parisian boulevards, in theaters, concert halls, cafés, and flea markets, a peculiar pattern of baldness in the French henna crowd. Women with hennaed hair, if of a certain age, seem almost uniformly to suffer from drastic, central alopecia—hair loss—quite evident at the back of the scalp, and quite noticeable in areas where the hair is parted. As a rheumatologist, I was struck by the difference between what one might call “hennapecia” and the commonly observed hair loss in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus. Nor is the pattern of hennapecia like that of ordinary female aging with its “increased thinning over the frontal/parietal scalp, greater density over the occipital scalp, retention of the frontal hairline, and the presence of miniaturized hairs.”
Alas, the phenomenon is not limited to France. Although hennaed hair is less common in the United States, the same pattern seems to rear its ugly head, so to speak. In the fall of 2015, at the Pier Antiques Show in New York, where henna is also much in evidence, I observed forty-two women (approximate ages over 45) with hair overtly dyed with henna. Twenty-nine had clear signs of hennapecia. As a control, I observed thirty-six “blonde” women, blondness presumably due to peroxide, of the same age: only five had similar areas of hair loss. In both groups, the incidence of exposed, undyed roots was pretty much the same.
Ever since Lewis Thomas and I consistently produced hair loss in rabbits given excess doses of vitamin A, I have been intrigued by alopecia induced in lab animals and humans by agents of similar chemical structure. These instances have been associated with redox-induced changes in the hair growth cycle. Lawsone and PPD are clearly involved in redox cycling, and there are good reasons to believe that oxidative stress is involved both in graying and hair loss. This sequence was described by Arck and colleagues in the FASEB Journal in 2006. Their paper, “Towards a ‘Free Radical Theory of Graying,’” concluded that “oxidative stress is high in hair follicle melanocytes and leads to their selective premature aging and apoptosis.”
Whatever the cause of hennapecia, the condition cannot be due to acute inflammation or contact dermatitis: the many scalps I’ve observed, albeit at a distance, seem to have been uninflamed. It is, of course, entirely possible that women prone to one or another type of genetic hair loss have a unique recourse to henna, but my guess would be that the striking correlation between henna and hair loss puts the onus of alopecia on the dye and/or its additives.
It’s clear that to settle the point, we need experiment, not simple observation.
THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN EXPERIMENT AND OBSERVATION was spelled out for the general reader by Emile Zola (1840–1902) and brought to mind by a lurid postage stamp issued by the French Postal Service in 2003. Probably few of the eager philatelists who snapped the stamp up at first issue knew that the image was a poor caricature of a Manet portrait of Lucie Delabigne, the redheaded courtesan who became Zola’s fictional Nana. Fewer still might have known that they were collecting a piece of scientific, as well as social, history. We can thank Claude Bernard, a founder of modern experimental medicine, for indirectly giving us Nan
a as well.
Emile Zola’s 1880 novel Nana was a landmark of naturalist fiction, overtly based on methods spelled out in Claude Bernard’s Introduction à l’étude de la médicine expérimentale (1865). In his Le roman expérimental (also published in 1880), Zola declared that
Claude Bernard . . . explains the differences which exist between the sciences of observation and the sciences of experiment. He concludes, finally, that experiment is but provoked observation. All experimental reasoning is based on doubt, for the experimentalist should have no preconceived idea, in the face of nature, and should always retain his liberty of thought. . . . The essence of the higher organism is set in an internal and perfected environment [inherited characteristics] endowed with constant physico-chemical properties exactly like the external environment; hence there is an absolute determinism in the existing conditions of natural phenomena.
Zola assigned Nana a constant internal milieu, the “inherited characteristics” of a feral, manipulative courtesan. He then exposed his heroine to a variety of external stimuli (journalists, bankers, actors, gentry, tycoons), varied the strength of the buffer (theaters, garrets, hotels, mansions), and changed the ambient oxygen tension (age, war, disease, death). He recorded the results of these true-life interactions in the laboratory notebook of his naturalist novel.
Zola introduces Nana at time zero of his experiment. In her first appearance on stage, she is clad only in a diaphanous, see-through gown:
The Fevers of Reason Page 6