by Dave Revsine
Word of the White House summit was met with approbation. The New York Times was particularly complimentary of Roosevelt’s initiative, praising his “superabundant vitality” and calling the move “the most important step yet” in eliminating the game’s brutality. But not everyone was convinced that the president had entrusted the job to the right group of men. While complimenting Roosevelt’s vigor, Harvard president Charles Eliot told the Times, “It is hard to bring about a reform through the very men who have long known about the existing evils, and have been largely responsible for their continuance.” Indeed, after Reid sent a note to Yale’s Owsley several days later looking to elucidate what exactly constituted holding and rough play, the Elis’ coach showed little interest in furthering the discussion, responding, “these matters will have to be left to the officials of the game, as they are all dealt with in the rules.”
Therein lay the fundamental conflict. The very men charged with overseeing the game were those who were being enriched by it. Out of pure self-interest, they were reticent to make any significant changes. As the Princeton Alumni Weekly wrote, “It has been plain for some time that, unless football is radically reformed, this great American college sport is doomed.” It was a fact, the magazine commented, that was apparent “to most every one but a few of those entangled in the dominant theory and practice of the game itself.”
As the secretary of the rules committee, Camp was the ringleader of the old guard. For years the committee had operated under the premise that any changes needed to be unanimous. The net result, as Reid complained to Eliot in the fall of 1905, was that the committee was “merely a tool of Camp’s.” It was an opinion shared by the chairman of Columbia’s Committee on Athletics, Francis Bangs, who, in a fall letter to university president Nicholas Murray Butler, referred to Camp’s committee as “self-perpetuating, non-representative, pig-headed, oblivious to public opinion and obstinate in refusing to modify the rules of play as demanded by public sentiment.”
Less than a week later, Butler replied to Bangs in a note of his own, quoting a letter he had received from Harvard president Charles Eliot. Of the possibility of reforming the rules, Eliot wrote that Camp “has the matter completely in his own hands. He has always controlled the existing irresponsible committee on rules.” As a result, Eliot felt that meaningful change was impossible. “The trouble with him,” Eliot had written of Camp, is “that he is deficient in moral sensibility—a trouble not likely to be cured at his age.” As it turned out, though, circumstances were about to force Camp’s hand.
In late September 1905, William Beebe, a member of the Yale faculty, sent a letter to university president Arthur Hadley alleging financial abuses in the school’s athletics operation. While still technically run by the students, athletics at Yale were overseen by the alumni, a group headed by Camp. He had accepted the position of treasurer of the Yale Financial Union in 1892, a role that gave him control of the school’s athletic finances. So, any questioning of the operation of Yale’s athletics was a de facto questioning of Camp himself.
Within a month, the allegations hit the newspapers, with word that Hadley had formed a committee to investigate the charges. “The whole matter of what is termed athletic abuses will be gone over,” the New York Times reported, “including the matter of the predominating influence of the undergraduate’s life at Yale . . . the relations of athletics to scholarship, and the charge of financial extravagance in connection with athletics.” Camp’s impeccable public reputation had taken a hit.
Football was coming under fire in Cambridge as well. In early November Reid received an urgent late-evening phone call from Herbert White, a former graduate manager of the Harvard football team, who said that he needed to speak with the Harvard coach immediately. Not comfortable sharing his news over the phone, White drove to Reid’s house. Once there he told Reid that he had received word “from an authoritative source that the Harvard Corporation had voted to abolish football.” The source had told White that the group had not yet decided when it would publicize the results of the vote.
Reid, White, and a couple of other football men decided to make a preemptive strike. They prepared a letter, signed by Reid, which was released to the Boston papers. In an effort to appease the sport’s opponents within the university, it used language borrowed from Eliot’s criticisms of football. “I have become convinced that the game as it is played today has fundamental faults which cannot be removed by any mere technical revision of the rules,” the Harvard coach wrote. “Although I am willing to admit that the necessary roughness of the game may be objectionable to some people, that appears to me to be much less serious than the fact that there is a distinct advantage to be gained by brutality and evasion of the rules, because they are committed when the player and the ball also are hidden from the eyes of the umpire. For these reasons, I have come to believe that the game ought to be radically changed.” Reid appealed to the Harvard Corporation to form a committee to help reform, rather than abolish, the sport.
Just days later Reid found himself at the center of an on-the-field controversy. After repeatedly complaining to the referee that he was being struck by an opponent “in an illegal and extremely painful manner” during a game against Penn, Harvard’s center, Bartol Parker, fought back. In full view of the official, he slugged the offending Quaker player in the face and was summarily kicked out of the game.
News of the incident quickly reached the White House, and Reid was again summoned to Washington, sharing an informal dinner with a group that included the Roosevelt family, a number of US military officers, and the German ambassador. Reid remembered later that the president had been in fine humor, at one point looking to his end of the table and quipping, “You getting enough to eat down there, Reid? My wife doesn’t know what these football appetites are like, you know.”
Roosevelt’s mood turned serious after the meal, though, as he ushered the coach into the library. “Now, Reid,” he said, “what’s this I see in the papers about a Harvard man slugging? You and I are both Harvard men, and it puts me in a very awkward position—after our agreement—to have a Harvard man the first one to violate the agreement. What happened anyway?”
“Mr. President,” Reid responded. “I will tell you exactly what happened without mincing words.” He did exactly that, emphasizing that Parker had been provoked. “What would you have done, Mr. President,” Reid asked, “if you had been placed in a similar position?”
“He paused a moment,” Reid recalled many years later, “and then, turning to me, said through his teeth, as was his custom, ‘It wouldn’t be policy for me to state.’ ” Reid made a third and final visit to the White House again at the end of the season to discuss an incident that occurred in Harvard’s loss to Yale. The Crimson’s Francis Burr suffered a broken nose after Yale’s Jim Quill ignored a fair-catch signal and struck the Harvard guard in the face.
Much has been made of the president’s role in the crisis, with some going so far as to suggest that Roosevelt “saved” the game of football. Though Roosevelt did continue to exert his influence in writing, particularly when it came to the composition of the rules committee, the Reid meetings appear to have been his final face-to-face discussions with any of the game’s power brokers.
He certainly had an abiding interest in football’s future, and he kept in touch with the principals. For instance, as the the sport’s leaders continued to look for solutions to their difficulties, the president forwarded several suggestions for modifying the game to Camp, including one from the head of an Australian Rules Football league recommending that the United States adopt that country’s game.
But Roosevelt left the ultimate decision making to the football men. “Now that the matter is in your hands,” he wrote to Camp after the initial White House meeting, “I am more than content to abide by whatever you do.” A later correspondence concluded, “I am sure you are doing everything that can be done, and I won’t vent
ure to make a suggestion.” Historian Guy M. Lewis put it aptly when he called Roosevelt’s role “a significant, but not a crucial one.” As the president watched anxiously from the sidelines, public perception of the game went from bad to worse.
In the first half of a November 25 game between New York University and Union College, Union’s William Moore suffered what proved to be a fatal injury. Moore was tackled hard and buried under a horde of men. When the group was finally separated, the nineteen-year-old Moore remained motionless, facedown on the turf. He was rushed to Fordham Hospital, where he died later that evening. An autopsy showed he had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage.
Moore’s death was cited in reports of the day as the nineteenth on football fields across all levels of competition in the fall of 1905, though later articles put the toll at eighteen. It was one of three fatalities on the college gridiron. Due to the fact that it had occurred in the nation’s largest media center and involved two well-known universities, though, Moore’s death caused more outrage than the rest of the year’s fatalities combined.
Under the headline The Homicidal Pastime, the New York Times published a strongly worded editorial against the game just days after Moore’s death. “In theory boys play football for their health,” the paper asserted. “The breaking of a youngster’s leg, the twisting of his spine, and the fracturing of his skull are of doubtful advantage to his health. To kill him is indeed a very bad thing for his health.” Citing “the silent protest of the nineteen graves,” the paper contended that the game had to be reformed “by attacking the evils which afflict it in their source. The source of them is the insane rivalry that has grown up among the colleges and universities, the ferocious pursuit of the honor and distinction of supremacy.” The Times concluded, “Football has degenerated into a savage, brutal, bloody fight between men animated with the passions of pugilists, seeking to win, not by demonstrations of skill and strength, but by the blackguardly expedient of physically disabling as many of their adversaries as possible. Kick the ball or kick a head—it is all in the game.”
It was an attitude that was shared by many educators. In a widely repeated quotation, University of Chicago professor Shailer Matthews said of the game, “Football to-day is a social obsession—a boy-killing, man-mutilating, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport. It teaches virility and courage,” he added, “but so does war.” The forces that had criticized football for years coalesced after Moore’s death, further escalating the game’s ongoing crisis. It was, historian John Watterson has observed, “a crisis of public confidence fanned by newspaper headlines and exploited by groups that disliked the existing gridiron system.”
Columbia University, which had resumed playing the sport just six years earlier, struck the first blow. On November 28, just days after Moore’s death, the school announced that it was abolishing the game. In explaining the action, Professor H. G. Lord, chairman of the Committee on Student Organizations, said it had been an easy decision, as the sport had “proved itself harmful to academic standing and dangerous to human life.” The student newspaper, the Columbia Spectator, responded with disappointment. “The solution to the football problem lies in constructive not in destructive action,” the paper editorialized.
NYU chancellor Henry MacCracken shared that opinion. Horrified that his school had been involved in the game that had caused Moore’s death and convinced that action had to be taken, he called for an early December conference in New York to discuss the football question. Interestingly, Harvard’s Eliot declined the invitation, saying he didn’t feel the university presidents had it in their power to abolish the game. He also thought the timing was bad. “There should be an interval for cooling down,” he wrote to MacCracken. “Deaths and injuries are not the strongest argument against football. That cheating and brutality are profitable is the main evil.”
MacCracken carried on without him. His December 8 meeting was made up only of schools that NYU had played in the past. That group of thirteen voted to reform rather than abolish the game. Sensing they needed a broader mandate, though, they adjourned, calling for a national meeting in late December.
In an address delivered at the school’s alumni dinner just days before that next scheduled meeting, MacCracken made it clear what his tack would be. He placed the blame for the game’s struggles squarely on the shoulders of Camp’s rules committee, a group he likened to Russian grand dukes. “[They] call themselves a committee on rules. They are really a committee of misrule. They have reigned for years by virtue of their descent from a defunct ancestor,” he said of the group, adding, “I forgive the grand dukes, every one. They think and act according to their points of view and antecedents. But I do not forgive the universities which deliver themselves over to this narrow committee.”
The second New York meeting, held on December 28, was strong in numbers but weak in stature. It was composed of roughly sixty universities, but none of the traditional powers. It was almost exclusively an Eastern gathering, though Minnesota, Texas, Colorado College, and South Dakota also sent representatives. The schools formed a new organization, called the Intercollegiate Athletic Association, or ICAA. It would be renamed the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA, five years later. Significant as that move proved to be in the long term, it was the decision to form a second football rules committee that stole the headlines. The action, a clear shot at Camp and his old guard, was an attempt to give more schools a voice in the game’s future. The new committee proposed a merger. The members of the old committee said they wanted to meet with their group before agreeing to combine forces.
Believing that it could only truly revamp the sport by combining the two groups, Harvard forced the issue. On January 8, 1906, the school proposed a list of changes aimed at radically overhauling football. The recommendations were focused on spreading the players out on the field, which, it was believed, would cut down on the injuries caused by mass plays. Among other things, they advised extending the yardage needed for a first down from five to ten yards, allowing the forward pass, adding a neutral zone between the offensive and defensive lines, adding an extra official to root out brutality, and strengthening the penalties against players found guilty of foul play. The message was clear: Were the changes not made, Harvard would abolish football. The Cambridge school was setting up for a showdown with Camp, who favored just one rule change—the ten-yard rule.
It was a showdown the New York Times believed Harvard could not win. “Camp is determined not to abandon the one-man veto rule, which in operation in the past meant one-man domination with Walter Camp in the position of dictator,” the paper wrote just days before the two rules committees were scheduled to meet separately in New York. “It is a well-known fact that football men at Yale, in spite of Camp’s professions to the contrary, do not want to see any changes in the rules that will alter the present style of the game.”
But Harvard had a trick up its sleeve. The two committees were scheduled to meet simultaneously at neighboring Manhattan hotels on January 12,1906. Just prior to that meeting, Reid called some members of the old committee together. It was a gathering that did not include Walter Camp. He told that group of Harvard’s proposed changes and then issued what amounted to a threat. “Either the rules go through,” he told them, “or there will be no football at Harvard; and if Harvard throws out the game, many other colleges will follow Harvard’s lead, and an important blow will be dealt to the game.” While Yale had the superior football team, Harvard was still the most prestigious university in the nation, and the school believed that prestige was enough to force its agenda through.
As the two committees met, Reid, a member of the old established committee, showed up outside the room where the new committee was assembled and asked to join their group. The extraordinary request was granted. Contact was then made with the old committee, which agreed to gather with the reformers.
When the groups got together, Reid pulled an end a
round. A member of the new group was elected secretary of the combined organization, the role long held by Walter Camp. It was seen as a compromise. But the new secretary, Haverford’s James Babbitt, immediately resigned his newly elected post and named Reid as his replacement. Harvard’s man now held the most powerful position in the newly formed joint committee. If football were to continue, it would be on Harvard’s terms.
Camp’s position was further weakened just days later by a startling revelation. On January 18, 1906, the New York Evening Post published the details of the athletic abuses at Yale, which had been hinted at in the papers the previous fall. Muckraking journalist Clarence Deming disclosed that Camp had what amounted to a slush fund. He had been collecting the money, which was made up of the accumulated yearly athletic surpluses, ever since the formation of the Yale Financial Union in 1892. The fund now totaled nearly $100,000.
The paper also uncovered deceptive accounting processes within the fund. The expenses for star player James Hogan’s trip to Cuba, for instance, were filed under the catch-all category “miscellaneous.” Along the same lines, Camp’s salary was included under “maintenance of the field.” Furthermore, Camp was using money from the cache to finance private tutoring for players. These expenses were buried under the heading of “maintenance.”
More newspapers quickly jumped on the story. Deming after Walter Camp, the New Haven Evening Register screamed on page one the next day. Referring to the “scandalous concealment of its administration,” the New York Press saw the enormous fund as a sign of “the frantic commercialism which has brutalized” football. The New York Times reported that Yale’s faculty was sharply divided on the game’s future at the school. The paper spoke with professors who exposed a culture of graft within the football program, revealing “that the coaches have received free trips to New York for mere pleasure jaunts during the season; that they have had carriages for the least excuse; [and] that they have, with the teams, attended theatres at the expense of the associations.” Much of the fund, the Times revealed, came directly out of students’ pockets, as the undergraduates were forced “on pain of ostracism in some cases” to pay $8 each to support athletics.