commercialized intercollegiate athletics and the 1903...

Commercialized Intercollegiate Athletics and the 1903 Harvard StadiumAuthor(s): Ronald A. SmithSource: The New England Quarterly, Vol. 78, No. 1 (Mar., 2005), pp. 26-48Published by: The New England Quarterly, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1559707 .

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Commercialized Intercollegiate Athletics and the 1903 Harvard Stadium

RONALD A. SMITH

JUST a few years after the War between the States was

concluded, the newly installed president of Harvard College threw down the gauntlet, a gesture he lived to regret. In his 1869 inaugural address, Charles W. Eliot called on the college to excel in sports. "There is an aristocracy," Eliot told his audi- ence, "to which sons of Harvard have belonged, and let us hope, will ever aspire to belong-the aristocracy which excels in manly sports."' Among those manly sports, Eliot did not mean to include football, an activity the faculty had banned in 186o. But just as Eliot was assuming his post, Harvard football was rising from its ashes. By 1903, with Eliot still in the president's seat, football had become such a dominant force in the college's extracurriculum that a stadium was erected to accom- modate those eager to watch the game. "As a spectacle, football is more brutalizing than prize-fighting, cock-fighting, or bull- fighting," Eliot protested, but his complaints were drowned out by the roar of the crowds pouring through the gates and the jin- gle of coins dropping into university coffers." Intercollegiate athletics, the engine Eliot hoped would fire collegians' charac- ter and Harvard's reputation, was racing down the track, other institutions of higher learning in hot pursuit. And no one- neither students, nor faculty, nor administrators, nor alumni- had the will or the way to apply the brakes.

'Charles W. Eliot, "Inaugural Address," 19 October 1869, p. 22, Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, Mass.

'Charles W. Eliot, 1905 Annual Report to the University Overseers, quoted by John Powers, in "Landmark Celebration: After loo Years, Harvard Stadium Still Standing the Test of Time," Boston Globe, 14 November 2003.

26



HARVARD STADIUM 27

Well into the nineteenth century, the curriculum at the nation's elite colleges, dry and relatively unchanging, consisted of rote recitations from the classics and boring sessions of bibli- cally inspired moral philosophy sandwiched between twice-a- day compulsory chapel services. Students hoping to enliven their days often met stiff opposition. From 1636, when Har- vard, the nation's first institution of higher learning, was founded, college presidents and their faculties claimed the authority of in loco parentis to assert control over students' lives. In pre-Revolutionary Harvard, for example, students were pro- hibited from hunting, fishing, or skating unless they received permission from Harvard officials.3 A 1774 publication of Yale's regulations stipulated that "If any Scholar shall play at Hand- Ball, or Foot-Ball, or Bowls in the College-yard, or throw any Thing against the College, by which Glass may be endangered

. he shall be punished six pence."4 Students regularly re- belled against these and the many other restrictions on their lives, resistance that occasionally spilled over into riots. At Princeton, for example, students angry about the quality of the food being served to them burned down Nassau Hall in 1802, and on other occasions professors were injured, a few fatally. In the early nineteenth century, a University of Virginia student killed a professor who had angered him, and in another inci- dent, a student stabbed and killed the president of Oakland College in Mississippi.5

In the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, students proposed, and the faculty and administration sometimes approved, an innovation, the extracurriculum, a set of opportunities in three areas: the intellectual, the social, and the physical. Students wanted to read and discuss modern literature, and so first at Yale, in 1753, and soon in other colleges throughout

3Harvard College Records, vol. 31, p. 154, Harvard Archives. 4The Laws of Yale-College (New Haven: T. & S. Green, 1774), p. 11I sFrederick Rddolph, The American College and University: A History (New York:

Vintage Books, 1962), pp. 44, 97-98.



28 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the country, they created literary societies and debating clubs. They wanted to improve their social life, and so in the 1820os and 1830s they formed fraternities and other communal organi- zations. They also demanded opportunities for physical activity. By the mid-nineteenth century, when college athletes found occasion to compete against their peers at rival institutions, athletics had already begun to dominate the extra-curriculum.6

It was not surprising that American colleges would initiate sports, first within individual campuses and later across them, for the English universities, Oxford and Cambridge, had done the same a generation before. Once students in the elite En- glish institutions participated in such sports as cricket and football (soccer style), it was only natural that American students would follow their lead. At Harvard, a tradition of "Bloody Monday," part of fall hazing in which the sophomores sought to "annihilate" the incoming freshmen in a soccer football game, was established by the 1820os (see fig. 1). By the mid-1840s, a Harvard sophomore wrote, "The great annual battle between the Sophs and the Fresh came off at the beginning of the term. We 'licked' them 'all hollow' of course."7

While baseball, cricket, and football were popular on a number of college campuses, not until the advent of the railroad in mid-century did intercollegiate athletics become widespread. Harvard's intercollegiate athletics program was initiated by students in 1852, and from the first, it was a commercial affair. The owner of the Boston, Concord, and Montreal Railroad, eager to attract a vacationing clientele, offered the Yale crew an all-expenses-paid, eight-day excursion if they could persuade the Harvard team to row against them on New Hampshire's Lake Winnipesaukee.' Harvard, which had been rowing since its first rowing club was formed in 1844, accepted the challenge

6For a more in-depth discussion of the extra-curriculum, see my Sports and Free- dom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 13-25.

7"A Sophomore in 1845," Harvard Graduates' Magazine, December 1900, p. 205. 8James M. Whiton, "The First Harvard-Yale Regatta (1852)," Outlook, June 1901, p.

286, and Charles F. Livermore, "The First Harvard-Yale Boat Race," Harvard Gradu- ates' Magazine, December 1893, p. 226.



HARVARD STADIUM 29

from Yale. And so, the quiet summer resort at Center Harbor became the site of America's first intercollegiate contest. Al- though the two crews had no professional coaches nor regi- mented training schedules, they did have commercial poten- tial-at least the owners of the railroad, area hotels, and the lake steamer thought so.

On the day of the meet, the two teams took a practice race in the large and heavy-keeled boats that had been compared to whale boats. After the mile-and-a-half contest, which Harvard captured by seven and a half minutes, the winners returned to the wharf and-regaled with ale, mineral water, and brandy- ate a hearty meal, rested a bit following cigars, and returned to the wharf for the official race. Harvard rowers were decked out in red, white, and blue outfits as their eight-oared boat lined up against two white-and-blue-clad Yale crews. Framed by Red Hill in the background, Democratic presidential candidate General Franklin Pierce and about one thousand other spectators looked on as Harvard won again, by about four lengths. Not for another three years did Yale and Harvard compete again, a hiatus that might lead us to assume that the Boston, Concord, and Montreal Railroad had not realized a profit suffi- cient to justify sponsoring the event once more.9

Rowing, however, not only survived but prospered, as Brown, Pennsylvania, Trinity, and Dartmouth organized crews in the mid-to-late 1850s. By the beginning of the Civil War, a number of eastern colleges had created rowing clubs. In 1864, Yale hired a professional rower to coach its team, and in the midst of the Civil War, it succeeded in beating the Harvard crew for the first time in a dozen years.

In 1870, Harvard distinguished itself in intercollegiate sport when its college baseball team became the first to take a lengthy tour. The team journeyed as far west as St. Louis, Chicago, and Milwaukee and, only a year after the transconti- nental railroad had been completed, even considered traveling

9James Whiton, "The First Harvard-Yale Regatta (1852)," Outlook, June 19ol, p. 289; Charles F. Livermore, "The First Harvard-Yale Boat Race," Harvard Graduates' Magazine, December 1893, p. 226; Boston Daily Evening Transcript, 4 August 1852, p. 2; and New York Herald, to August 1852, P. 2.



30 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

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FIG. i.-The Harvard Bloody Monday Game, 1857. Illustration by Winslow Homer. Harper's Weekly, vol. 1, 1857, p. 489. Collection of the author.

to San Francisco. While on tour, Harvard played not only college rivals and amateur club teams but such professional teams as the Philadelphia Athletics, Cincinnati Red Stockings, and Chicago White Stockings.'o Of particular importance was the Red Stockings game. Just the year before, Cincinnati had become the first team to pay all of its players, after which it pro- ceeded to win its next fifty-eight games, one victory being over Harvard, 30-11, in Cambridge. When Harvard met the pro team on its western tour, Cincinnati had only recently lost its first game in two years. Harvard built on an early lead and was ahead 17 to 12 going into the last inning. An errant play by the Harvard third baseman, though, opened the "floodgates," and Cincinnati rose to victory. Continuing on its tour, which occu- pied forty-three days in July and August, Harvard concluded its series with a 17-8 record, having lost to professional teams only. No other sport at Harvard, with the possible exception of crew, was as important as baseball. By the mid-187os, however,

"'See my Sports and Freedom, p. 57.



HARVARD STADIUM 31

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Harvard was to pursue a course that, in less than two decades, would have a major role in propelling football into dominance on the nation's college campuses."

In 1846, John L. Sibley, longtime librarian at Harvard, described the "class battles" that marked football's origins at Har- vard: "The ball is thrown down among [the players] & the ob- ject of each class is to kick the other & bark their shins as much as possible."12 The contest moved one of the more sensitive students to poetic reflection:

Of the shins we've cracked, And noses we've whacked, And the eyeballs we've blacked; And all in fun!13

"New York Clipper, 30 July 1870, p. 123; and W. D. Sanborn, "Baseball," in The Harvard Book, ed. F. O. Vaille and H. A. Clark, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Bigelow, 1875), 2:340.

1"John L. Sibley, Private Journal, 27 August 1846, vol. 1, p. 74, Harvard Archives. 13Quoted by John A. Blanchard, ed., in The H Book of Harvard Athletics, 1852-1922

(n.p.: Harvard Varsity Club, 1923), p. 336.



32 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY At about the same time, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, later a writer of some renown, fondly recalled the '"joyous shouts, the thud of the ball, the sweet smell of crushed grass ... [and] the magnificent 'rush.' It seemed," Higginson said, "a game for men and giants."''14

In 186o, a year before sectional animosities broke out in civil war, however, the Harvard faculty banned the game of "vio- lence & brutality" so loved by its students.'5 Staging an elabo- rate ritual, Harvard sophomores displayed their abhorrence of the faculty edict. While over one hundred freshmen looked on, the sophomores marched slowly through town, as a pair of mourners kept beat on muffled drums. Six pall bearers carried a six-foot coffin containing the leather-covered bladder, and the remaining sophomores, wearing the torn shirts and pants remi- niscent of past battles, followed. Four spade bearers then pro- ceeded to dig a grave on the campus delta, and the casket was lowered into the ground as groans, sighs, and lamentations filled the evening air. The class-appointed elegist took his place. "Exult, ye freshmen, and clap your hands! The wise men who make big laws around a little table have stretched out their arms to encircle you," he began. "And for this once, at least, your eyes and 'noses' are protected, you are shielded behind the aegis of Minerva," the Roman goddess of wisdom and war.'6 At other schools-including Brown, Williams, Yale, and the U.S. Military Academy-faculty took Harvard's lead and banned the sport, yet students continued to break bones as well as windows at many institutions of higher learning. Football, even though duly buried, had refused to die.

In 1869, shortly after Princeton met Rutgers for the first intercollegiate football game, Harvard began playing football

14Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "The Gymnasium, and Gymnastics in Harvard College," in The Harvard Book, 2:187.

15Sibley, Private Journal, 3 September 1855, vol. 1, p. 366. "6Sibley, Private Journal, 3 September 186o, vol. 1, pp. 536-40; New York Clipper, 4

September 186o, p. 172.



HARVARD STADIUM 33

again. Early in the next decade, students organized the Harvard College Foot Ball Club, for which they soon drew up a code of rules. The football of Princeton, Rutgers, Yale, and Columbia resembled soccer, but Harvard's game was more like rugby. Ac- cording to Harvard's rules, a player could pick up the ball and carry it but, strangely, only if he was being chased. If the pur- suer abandoned the chase, regulations stipulated, he would call out, and the ball carrier had to stop running as well. "If the run- ner did not at once also stop, the cry was taken up by the whole pack of opponents," according to The H Book of Harvard Ath- letics, and the player with the ball was forced to kick it down field or pass it to a teammate.17 The opportunity to pick up and run with the ball was a key element in the development of American football, and, given football's status today, Harvard's choice to forgo the soccer-like version of the game for its rugby equivalent was probably the most significant decision ever made in the history of intercollegiate athletics.Is In 1872, Yale played its first intercollegiate football match, against Columbia. Victorious, Yale went on to dominate the sport. Soon after Yale's first game, a western school, the Uni- versity of Michigan, challenged Cornell to a contest in Cleve- land, halfway between the two institutions. Cornell students pe- titioned the faculty to approve the trip, but the request was unanimously defeated."19 The school's president, Andrew D. White, who earlier that year had presented a rowing shell to the Cornell crew in hopes that they might win the intercollegiate regatta, adamantly refused to sanction the Michigan-Cornell contest. His explanation is memorable: "I will not permit 30 men to travel four hundred miles merely to agitate a bag of wind."20

'7Blanchard, The H Book, p. 348. 'sParke H. Davis, Football: The American Intercollegiate Game (New York: Charles

Scribner's Sons, 1911), pp. 51-56, for the Princeton and Yale rules and a discussion of their differences. The codified Harvard rules can be found in Blanchard, The H Book, p. 609.

9'Cornell Faculty Minutes, 24 October 1873, Cornell University Archives, Ithaca, N.Y.; and Cornell Review, December 1873, p. 201.

2oHoward W. Peckham, The Making of the University of Michigan, 1817-1967 (Ann




Despite White's dismissive remark, interest in the sport was sufficiently high that the Yale Football Association called for a convention in mid-October 1873 to determine whether a league, governed by a uniform set of rules, should be formed. Invitations were sent to Harvard, Columbia, Rutgers, and Princeton but not to Cornell and Michigan. Harvard, displaying its characteristic propensity for individualism, chose not to at- tend. The college's football captain, Henry Grant, understand- ing that numbers were on the side of the soccer form of the game, explained Harvard's decision.

We cannot but recognize in your game much but brute force, weight, and especially "shin" element. Our game depends upon running, dodging, and position play. ... We are perfectly aware of our position in regard to other colleges. I assure you we gave the matter a fair discussion last spring. We even went as far as to practice and try the Yale game. We gave it up at once as hopeless.2

Grant's prediction about the majority opinion on football was correct. Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Rutgers agreed to ad- here to the soccer rules, and most other football playing institutions accepted their leadership. Going its own way, Harvard accepted an invitation from McGill University for a series of matches in the spring of 1874. The opening two matches took place in Cambridge: the first according to Harvard's hybrid rules and using its round ball; the second with McGill's more classic rugby rules and oblong ball. This first intercollegiate football contest between a U.S. college and a Canadian one at- tracted a crowd of five hundred spectators, among them a group of Yale students curious about the two varieties of rugby- style football, all willing to pay the rather hefty fifty-cent admis- sions fee. Harvard won the first game; the second ended in a scoreless tie. The McGill athletes bested Harvard in only one area, their neat uniforms, traditional English rugby suits of red-

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), p. 77; Kent Saagendorph, Michigan: The Story of the University (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1948), p. 150; and Cornell Era, 31 October 1873, p. 60.

"Harvard Advocate, 3 April 1874, p. 113.



HARVARD STADIUM 35 and black-striped shirts, white pants, caps, and stockings; the Harvard players wore raggedy white undershirts, dark pants, and, tied around their heads, the magenta handkerchiefs sported by Harvard crews." Following the match, the Harvard students agreed that McGill's rugby football was preferable to their own less rigorous version of the game. As one Harvard journalist noted, "The rugby game is in much better favor than the sleepy game played by our men."23

The next fall, Harvard's rugby-style football team visited McGill and, in a contest before fifteen hundred spectators at the prestigious Montreal Cricket Club, scored a victory (fig. 2). Harvard had treated McGill to a banquet in Boston, funded by gate receipts, where champagne flowed freely; McGill returned the favor and, the next day, hosted a spectator sport not available in Boston, a fox hunt.24

Besides McGill, the only school that played a form of football compatible with Harvard's was Tufts College. In the spring of 1875, Tufts and Harvard met in the first intercollegiate rugby game between two U.S. teams. That Tufts won the game was soon forgotten, especially by Harvard. The Harvard freshman baseball victory over Yale that day was much more newsworthy. As the Harvard Advocate reported: "Our Elevens are not in practice every day, as our Nines are."s25 Two years later, the Harvard eleven scored the victory that had eluded them in the first match.

In the fall of 1875, when Harvard rejected an offer to join the soccer-playing schools for the second time, Yale relented. Al- ways mentioned second in any sentence containing the word "Harvard," Yale wanted to play its rival in all sports, including football. Because Yale needed Harvard much more than Har- vard needed Yale, Yale decided to play Harvard using "conces- sionary" rules-rules that essentially defined rugby, not soccer.

"Blanchard, The H Book, pp. 360-63. 23Harvard Advocate, 14 May 1874, p. 8o. 24Harvard Advocate, 30 October 1874, pp. 35-36, and Harvard Magenta, 20 No-

vember 1874, pp. 53-54. 25Harvard Advocate, 14 May 1875, p. 80.



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FIG. 2.-The Harvard-McGill Football Game, Montreal, 1874. Harvard Graduates' Magazine, vol. 13, 1905, p. 423. Collection of the author.



HARVARD STADIUM 37

Though a Princeton student writing in the Nassau Literary Magazine claimed that "we stand to lose much and gain little by a change," Princeton too-worried that it might be dropped from the eternal triangle of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton- subscribed to the rugby rules. In the fall of 1876, agreements were formalized as students from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia met to adopt standard rugby rules and to form the Intercollegiate Football Association. The two strongest teams, they decided further, would meet each year on Thanksgiving Day in New York City to contend for the championship of rugby football."

The inaugural championship game, between Yale and Prince- ton, took place in 1876. Walter Camp captured the yardage that carried Yale to victory. First as Yale's student representative to the Intercollegiate Football Association and then as advisor to football and athletics at Yale, a role he filled for fifty years, Camp influenced the development of the new, hybrid sport. Within only half a dozen years, he and his cohort had trans- formed English rugby football into the American game we know today. The chaos of the rugby scrum, out of which the ball could fly in any direction, metamorphosed into the con- trolled scrimmage, marked by a set number of attempts or downs. In its original configuration, the team had three downs to make five yards, and so the field was chalked in those inter- vals, resulting in the famed "gridiron." It was students, then, who gave initial form to what would become the dominant spectator sport in America. As Camp, often called the Father of American Football, would comment: "Neither the faculties nor other critics assisted in building the structure of college athletics, it is a structure which students unaided have builded.""27

By the 189os, the Thanksgiving Day college football game was attracting huge crowds. Launching each winter's social sea-

6Davis, Football, pp. 66-70. 27Walter Camp, "College Athletics," New Englander, January 1885, p. 139.




son, the event was embraced by New York City's elite. Cor- nelius Vanderbilt, the Van Rensselaers, Mrs. William C. Whit- ney, James Varnum, and Mrs. Douglass Stewart, the matron dominating the New York newspaper society pages, could be seen at the games.'s The 1892 and 1893 contests between Yale and Princeton epitomized the event's height of splendor. Over thirty thousand spectators attended Yale's 12-0 victory over Princeton in 1892, and well over forty thousand watched Princeton's 6-o win in 1893, a game played despite that year's banking crisis and depression. The 1893 game was preceded by a four-hour parade up Fifth Avenue to Harlem and then on to the game site, Manhattan Field. Spectators lined the route, eager to see the resplendent coaches and fours, blanketed in the schools' colors, and to catch a glimpse of society's best and the collegiate warriors they championed. Once at Manhattan Field, privileged ticket holders sat in box seats valued at the enormous sum of five dollars, ten times the cost of attending a major league baseball game. Mrs. Stewart, a newspaper reported, "might have poised as the goddess of Yale, wearing a Yale gown, real university style, with trimmings of blue," while Mrs. Whitney displayed her "caf6 au lait broadcloth, with gar- net and sable trimmings, made a la Russian and royally fitted." While most oohed and aahed over the extravagance, social critics deplored the conspicuous consumption that had wrapped itself around the college contest.29

Harvard remained immune from such criticism for one reason: it was largely absent from the grand display. Only two of the famed triad, Yale and Princeton, consistently took part in the glorious occasion; in fact, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, they failed to meet in New York only twice. Once Wesleyan took the place of Princeton when its president banned his institution's participation after a dispute with Yale in

-8See, e.g., New York Herald, 27 November 1890, p. 9; 27 November 1891, p. 2; and 25 November 1892, P. 3.

"gNew York Herald, 25 November 1892, p. 3, and 1 December 1893, p. 3; Richard Harding Davis, "The Thanksgiving-Day Game," Harper's Weekly, 9 December 1893, pp. 1170-71.



HARVARD STADIUM 39 the previous year's game. It was a long day for Wesleyan, which lost to Yale 61-o.

Harvard, though generally more competitive than Wesleyan, faired little better in football. The faculties of Harvard and Yale, who three decades before had buried the game on both campuses, could no longer effectively block the sport, and yet the Harvard faculty tried to do just that. The freedom students had exercised in creating intercollegiate athletics had not been met with an equal amount of responsibility, they insisted, which had a deleterious effect on academic standards and the good name of the institution. Activities such as the Thanksgiving Day game in "sinful" New York, the baseball team's extended trips during which it played professional teams, and the weeklong festivities surrounding the Harvard-Yale regatta perplexed and disturbed the faculty. Moreover, increasingly eager to win intercollegiate matches, the students and alumni who administered athletics had begun hiring professional coaches. In 1882, concerned that the baseball schedule had been extended to twenty-eight games, nineteen of which were played beyond Cambridge, and that professional coaches were being hired without their ap- proval, the Harvard faculty formed an athletic committee of three faculty members to oversee athletics at the college.30

One of the committee's first actions was to fire the professional baseball coach, and a few years later, it fired the professional crew coach as well; both actions angered students.3' In 1883, in an effort to tame the rough and tumble of football, the committee scratched a rule that refrained from penalizing the act of "striking with [a] closed fist" until after a second infrac- tion.32 Following the 1884 season, when the Faculty Athletic

3oHarvard Athletic Committee Minutes, 15 June 1882, Harvard Archives; John W. White, "The Constitution, Authority, and Policy of the Committee on the Regulation of Athletic Sports," Harvard Graduates' Magazine, January 1893, p. og09, and Dudley A. Sargent, "History of the Administration of Intercollegiate Athletics in the United States," American Physical Education Review 15 (1910): 252.

31'Harvard Athletic Committee Minutes, 27 September 1882; and J. W. White, W. E. Byerly, and D. A. Sargent, athletic committee, to Mr. Storrow, crew captain, 19 De- cember 1894, in Harvard Athletic Committee Minutes, Harvard Archives.

32Harvard Athletic Committee Minutes, 22 November 1883 and 12 March 1884.



40 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Committee watched contests closely and claimed that football was "brutal, demoralizing to players and spectators, and ex- tremely dangerous," the committee banned the sport outright.:3"

Students were incensed and the alumni outraged. Bending to the pressure, the faculty voted in 1885 to expand the committee by two members, one representing the student population and one the alumni. Even with such modest representation, the alumni and students were able to push their agenda. Football had been dormant only a year when the athletic committee de- termined that the objectionable features of the game had van- ished, even though no major rule changes to prevent brutality had been instituted. By 1888, less than six years after it had been formed, the Harvard Athletic Committee had been radi- cally revamped. In its new incarnation, three students-often the captains of baseball, crew, and football-and three alumni joined the three sitting faculty members, thus bumping the faculty from the heights of uncontested power to the depths of loyal opposition. With this new configuration, the governing board of the college, the Corporation, granted the athletic committee "the entire supervision and control of all athletic sports," despite the fact that the committee was also, at the same time, "subject to the authority of the Faculty of the College.""34 The confusion over where power lay-faculty, president, governing board, or athletic committee-was a major question for all colleges, not just Harvard, in the latter years of the nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century. One thing was clear, however: the empire that students had built was no longer theirs alone.

As the influence of the students waned, that of the alumni waxed. A prime example of that influence was the alumni's role

"Harvard Athletic Committee Minutes, 25 November 1884, and "The Development of Football," Outing, November 1889, pp. 146-47.

34"Report of the Overseers, Presidents and Fellows," 15 October 1888, Series II, U.A. II, 10.7.2, Harvard Archives.



HARVARD STADIUM 41

in building the first steel-reinforced concrete stadium in the world. As early as the mid-189os, when a number of faculty members were seeking to ban football, the athletic committee began exploring the possibility of constructing a fitting space for the game.

From the outset, the football team had played most of its games on campus, where wooden bleachers were set up for spectators, but in time the fields on campus were gobbled up as the university's infrastructure spread. Football was removed across the river, into Boston, and onto Soldiers Field, which athletic committee chairman Joseph Beale called "a flat treeless field surrounded by shanties and mud."35 Daniel Turner, a member of Harvard's department of engineering, described the terrain as composed of "clay, loam, and muck," which, after a light rainfall, became "soft and boggy"; others thought that the area was malarial.36 Nevertheless, the field was drained and prepared for use; as a finishing touch, wooden bleachers were erected on the sidelines.

President Eliot grumbled about the "more and more thou- sands of hideous wooden seats in high banks ... built every year on Soldiers Field." Soldiers Field grounds could not be "made beautiful so long as those squalid banks of seats" were permitted to be erected each year, he insisted."7 Eliot not only detested football but, holding to an outmoded amateur ideal, disdained the presence of spectators during athletic contests. Of course, if no spectators were present, no seats would be re- quired. Joseph Beale, the athletic committee's faculty chairman, disagreed with Eliot's position. A structure with the "beauty and antique charm of the Greek stadia" would dignify the game, Beale argued, if only a wealthy benefactor could be located to fund the project."8 Eventually Eliot relented. If seats

35Joseph H. Beale, athletic committee chairman, to Charles Eliot, president, 23 June 1896, Eliot Papers, box 128, folder 615, Harvard Archives.

3:Daniel L. Turner to Ira N. Hollis, 9 April 1897, Eliot Papers, box iio, folder 143; Beale to Eliot, 19 May 1897, Eliot Papers, box 128, folder 615.

37Report of the President of Harvard College, 1898-1899, pp. 42-43. 8"Beale to Eliot, 8 July 1896, Eliot Papers, box 128, folder 615.




'b b

FIG. 3.-The Harvard College Stadium during the Harvard-Yale game on 25 Novem- ber 1911. Courtesy of Harvard University Athletics.

were inevitable, at least the school should build "permanent and good-looking seats along the sides of the football field.""39

By 1901, shortly before President William McKinley was as- sassinated and Harvard's own Teddy Roosevelt, class of 188o, assumed the presidency, Eliot reported that the athletic committee would be replacing the cheap wooden seats with "seats built of iron covered with concrete," a capital improvement that would be financed with previous gate receipts, a fund amount- ing to $33,000.40 Within a year, the class of 1879 pledged $100,000 toward a concrete-and-steel stadium. Despite his views about the sport of football, Eliot was a pragmatic man: he did not recommend that the Corporation decline the gift. He did, however, make it clear that "the University bears no part of the risks of the experiment, for it will not have contributed a dollar to the cost of the structure."4' Under the leadership of Ira Hollis, a Harvard engineering professor and head of the ath-

39Report of the President of Harvard College, 1899-19oo, p. 35. 4*Report of the President of Harvard College, 19oo-19ol, p. 1g. 4'Report of the President of Harvard College, 1902-1903, p. 41.



HARVARD STADIUM 43 : : ;... :--~:

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letic committee, groundbreaking commenced in the spring of 1903; within six months, the stadium was complete. The permanent structure seated nearly thirty-five thousand people; capacity could be expanded to about forty thousand when additional, temporary seating was set up in the open end of the horseshoe stadium (see fig. 3). The gift from the class of 1879 covered approximately one-third of the final cost of $320,000, with gate receipts collected during the next few years making up the difference.42

In the short term, the construction of the stadium must have seemed like a curse. Facing off against Dartmouth on christen- ing day, 16 November 1903, Harvard took a drubbing (11-o), the first ever from its rival to the north. A week later, Yale pasted Harvard 16-o, the second of seven consecutive shutouts inflicted on Harvard by the New Haven Bulldogs. By contrast, Harvard's last home game before it took possession of the new

42"Report of the Joint Committee on the Regulation of Athletic Sports," Harvard Graduates' Magazine, June 1907, p. 660, and "Yale's Football Team Defeated Har- vard," New York Times, 22 November 1903, P. 3.




stadium was supremely memorable, as the team squeaked out a one-point victory (12-11) over a team from the Carlisle Indian School, an industrial school with a mission to inculcate Native American youth with white, mainstream cultural values. The Indians were coached by Glenn "Pop" Warner, who would go on to coach Jim Thorpe, possibly the greatest athlete of the twentieth century, win national championships at the Univer- sity of Pittsburgh and three Rose Bowl games for Stanford Uni- versity, and create Pop Warner Youth Football in 1929.43

In the 1903 Harvard game, Warner opened the second half with a trick play. Carlisle received the ball, which they deftly concealed under the jersey of one player, who nonchalantly pranced into the end zone before Harvard discovered the ruse. A young debutante from Brookline recalled the game. In a let- ter to her sister, the wife of Bill Reid, who would become Har- vard's next football coach,44 she wrote:

It was rather funny thou to see the Indian go shooting down the field with the ball up his back and the other Indians were wild with joy that it worked. I suppose perhaps Harvard ought to have known where it was but I shouldn't think they had any right to conceal the ball. It was the last game played at Soldier's Field for they play Penn next week at Phila. And Dartmouth the week after is in the new stadium, which is going to be perfectly fine I think.45

Following an away game in which it scored a victory over Penn, Harvard returned to Cambridge. Thenceforth, the football team would cross the Charles River into Boston, where for each and every home game of the next century, it would struggle to best its intercollegiate rivals.

43James M. Smallwood, "Warner, Glenn Scobey (Pop)," The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives: Sport Figures, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2003), 2:482-83.

4Bill Reid kept a diary in 19o5, from spring practice to the Yale game. It is the best primary source on intercollegiate athletics that I have discovered. See my edition, Big- Time Football at Harvard, 1905: The Diary of Coach Bill Reid (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

45Louise Lincoln, Brookline, Mass., to Christine Reid, Belmont, Calif., 1 November 1903, Thomas Stetson Personal Collection, Falmouth, Mass. (Stetson is Reid's grand- son.)



HARVARD STADIUM 45

Harvard had long been a pacesetter in higher education: along with Johns Hopkins, it pioneered graduate education; it raised admission and graduation standards for the professional schools; it inaugurated the case study method in its law school; it improved practices, such as requiring a bachelor's degree to be admitted to its degree-granting medical school; it freed its divinity school from the trammels of sect; it made attendance at religious services voluntary; it multiplied undergraduate electives; it created a university student union; and it inno- vated sabbatical leaves for its faculty.46 In at least two areas, al- though there was significant tension between them, the university was a pacesetter in athletics as well: it created a faculty athletic committee, whose authority was recognized, to set lim- its on intercollegiate athletics; and it built a stadium that set a standard other institutions of higher learning would want to emulate or surpass. If the Harvard faculty, its voice soon muted by the presence of students and alumni on the Harvard Athletic Committee, had had full sway, intercollegiate athletics would have been seriously curtailed, if allowed to exist at all. And yet it was precisely this committee that took leadership for building the world's first permanent concrete stadium.

There is no question that a permanent stadium hastened the commercialization of football, the leading money generator for athletics from the 188os to our day. For that very reason, a number of individuals, both within and without the academy, criticized the move. Shortly after the stadium was built, a muckraker, Henry Needham, proclaimed: "Harvard stadium stands before the college world today as a glorification of the gate money, the evil side of athletics."47 Ira Hollis, the faculty

46Henry James, Charles W. Eliot: President of Harvard University, 1869-1909, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 2:61-64, 170-71; and Hugh Hawkins, Between Harvard and America: The Educational Leadership of Charles W. Eliot (New York: Ox- ford University Press, 1972), pp. 59, 80.

47Henry B. Needham, "The College Athlete," McClure's Magazine, June 1905, p. 268.



46 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY member heading the athletic committee when the stadium was built, soon regretted his leadership on the matter. Just two years after its construction, he noted that he was "not thor- oughly convinced of the wisdom of building it, and if I had it to do over again, realizing its cost, I should not consent to its

construction.'"48 Moorfield Storey, another faculty member

who sat on the committee with Hollis, also condemned the stadium. Chastising the class of 1879 for its contribution to its construction, Storey wrote, "Twenty-five years ago Harvard College taught its students to care for nothing so much as for athletic sports," and he called its $1oo,ooo gift "misplaced expenditures."49 Even President Eliot's successor, A. Lawrence Lowell, admitted that Harvard had made a mistake in building such a mammoth monument to football, and he proposed limiting intercollegiate competition to one contest per year, presumably against Yale.50 However, while such critics were vocal and prominent, they were also undoubtedly in the minority.

Approximately a decade after Harvard built its concrete stadium, its two principal competitors, Yale and Princeton, con- structed theirs, both larger than Harvard's with Yale's nearly twice the size. Following World War I, college stadiums sprang up across the nation, and Harvard's was often taken as the point of departure for other institutions hoping to play big-time football in the style of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. In other words, with its stadium, Harvard set the terms for the athletics race a century ago. By the 1920s, the school's administrators and governing board considered filling in the horseshoe and increasing the stadium's seating capacity to over sixty thousand, and in 1927, the athletic committee voted to build an eighty-thousand-seat stadium. Not to be outdone, Tucker Burr, speaking for his class of 1879, called for a stadium of "at least

48Quoted by Needham, in "The College Athlete," p. 268. 49Storey quoted in "Report of the Joint Committee on the Regulation of Athletic

Sports," Harvard Graduates' Magazine, June 1907, p. 660. 5"Greek vs. Roman Sports," Outlook, 22 January 1930, p. 136.



HARVARD STADIUM 47

100,000, and preferably 150,000ooo" in 1928.5~ That none of those stadiums was built speaks to Harvard's serious, ongoing debate over the place of athletics, especially football, in higher education.

The commercialism that intercollegiate athletics in general and stadium building in particular generated has now spread throughout American universities and into other areas. Derek Bok, president of Harvard from 1971 to 1991, has addressed that creeping commercialism in his Universities in the Market- place: The Commercialization of Higher Education.5" Bok's concern is multifaceted. He decries the entrepreneurial university that conducts corporate-funded research in secrecy; that in- vites for-profit internet companies funded by venture capitalists to offer programs that are principally intended to make money for other university purposes at the expense of students; that condones industry-subsidized educational programs for medical doctors; that creates conflicts of interest in research on human subjects; and that engages in other questionable commercial practices. With its first intercollegiate crew meet in 1852 and its new stadium in 1903, Harvard adopted an entrepreneurial model that is now commonplace in nearly all facets of university life in the twenty-first century. And while Harvard has, for over a century, maintained a beautiful stadium now listed as a national historical treasure, some might argue that what grew out of the first commercially sponsored intercollegiate athletic contest on Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, and the first football stadium built a half-century later has not been entirely salutary.

51"Harvard Athletic Association Statement of Assets and Liabilities as of 28 February 1923," President Lowell Papers, 1922-25, folder 6A; Harvard Athletic Committee Min- utes, 12 December 1927; Tucker Burr to William Bingham, Harvard Athletic Director, 17 April 1928; and "Meeting of the Harvard University Planning Board, 30 April 1928," President Lowell Papers, 1925-28, folder 72B, Harvard Archives. The Harvard Board of Overseers believed that the present 53,000 seats (permanent and temporary) were adequate and that no new stadium or bowl should be built (see Harvard Overseers Minutes, 15 May 1928).

"Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Ed- ucation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).




Ronald A. Smith taught sport history at Penn State University from 1968 to 1996, when he retired as Professor Emeritus. He has written over one hundred articles and three books on college sport history, including SPORTS AND FREEDOM: THE RISE OF BIG-TIME COLLEGE ATHLETICS (Oxford University Press, 1988), BIG-TIME FOOTBALL AT HARVARD, 1905: THE DIARY OF COACH BILL REID (University of Illinois Press, 1994); and PLAY-BY-PLAY: RADIO, TV, AND BIG-TIME COLLEGE ATHLETICS (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). He is cur-

rently working on the second of a three-book series begun with SPORTS AND FREEDOM.



commercialized intercollegiate athletics and the 1903...

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