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The Origins of Southern College Football: How an Ivy League Game Became a Dixie Tradition
College football is a massive enterprise in the United States, and southern teams dominate poll rankings and sports headlines while generating billions in revenue for public schools and private companies. Southern football fans worship their teams, often rearranging their personal lives in order to accommodate season schedules. The Origins of Southern College Football sheds new light on the South’s obsession with football and explores the sport’s beginnings below the Mason-Dixon Line in the decades after the Civil War. Military defeat followed by a long period of cultural unrest compelled many southerners to look to northern ideas and customs for guidance in rebuilding their beleaguered society. Ivy League universities, considered bastions of enlightenment and symbols of the modernizing spirit of the age, provided a particular source of inspiration for southerners in the form of organized or “scientific” football that featured standardized rules and scoring. Transported to the South by men educated at northern universities, scientific football reinforced cultural values that had existed in the region for centuries, among them a tolerance for violence, respect for martial displays, and support for traditional gender roles. The game also held the promise of a “New South” that its supporters hoped would transform the region into an industrial powerhouse. Students and townspeople alike embraced the new sport, which served as a source of pride for a region that lagged woefully behind its northern counterpart in terms of social equity and economic prowess.The Origins of Southern College Football is an entertaining history of the South’s most popular sport cast against a broader narrative of the United States during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, two momentous periods of change that gave rise to the game we recognize today.
256 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 12, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 14, 2020
Most college football fans, broadcasters and writers will agree that the Southeastern Conference has the best teams and players in the game today. However, that hasn't always been the case as in the early history of college football, the game was primarily played at Ivy League schools and the quality of play in the South wasn't considered as good. This book by Andrew McIlwaine Bell gives the reader an insight into the game in that region during those early days.
Something the book shows that might be surprising is that there is no single "ah-ha" moment or game when football became the game of the South. Instead, it was gradually gaining acceptance and popularity as the South was recovering from its losses in the Civil War and was looking to its northern neighbors for ways to rebuild. Organized, "scientific" football was one of those customs that was already popular in the Northeast and some Ivy League transplants brought the game to the South, where it became a symbol of the area's strength, resilience and yes, its culture that included racism.
On that last topic, this issue and other historical matters such as two other wars (the Spanish-American War and World War I) and politics are featured as prominently as football in this book. These are important to include to bring the complete picture to the reader as they helped shape the region's attitude and participation in the game. Of course, Theodore Roosevelt's actions toward making the game safer is an example of how these issues tie in with the game.
If there are any events, games or teams that truly brought attention to the way the game was played in the South to writers and other important figures in the Northeast, it would be the accomplishments of two particular teams. One would the team from Sewanee (now known as the University of the South) in 1899. They became the first team from the South to go undefeated in one season. While they have now been properly recognized for that feat, the "elite" in the Northeast felt that this wasn't much of an accomplishment since it was believed the quality of play in the South was much more inferior than that in the Northeast. It took nearly two decades to change that attitude when John Heisman led the 1917 Georgia Tech team to a national title. That team shut out most of its opponents and still holds the record for the most lopsided win in college football history, a 222-0 win over Cumberland College.
While the book in some parts reads like a scholarly work, it is still an enjoyable book for the reader who wants to learn more about college football in the South at that time and in that culture. Even die-hard college football fans are bound to learn some new information about the game, as this reviewer did.
I wish to thank LSU Press for providing a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.
https://sportsbookguy.blogspot.com/20...
Something the book shows that might be surprising is that there is no single "ah-ha" moment or game when football became the game of the South. Instead, it was gradually gaining acceptance and popularity as the South was recovering from its losses in the Civil War and was looking to its northern neighbors for ways to rebuild. Organized, "scientific" football was one of those customs that was already popular in the Northeast and some Ivy League transplants brought the game to the South, where it became a symbol of the area's strength, resilience and yes, its culture that included racism.
On that last topic, this issue and other historical matters such as two other wars (the Spanish-American War and World War I) and politics are featured as prominently as football in this book. These are important to include to bring the complete picture to the reader as they helped shape the region's attitude and participation in the game. Of course, Theodore Roosevelt's actions toward making the game safer is an example of how these issues tie in with the game.
If there are any events, games or teams that truly brought attention to the way the game was played in the South to writers and other important figures in the Northeast, it would be the accomplishments of two particular teams. One would the team from Sewanee (now known as the University of the South) in 1899. They became the first team from the South to go undefeated in one season. While they have now been properly recognized for that feat, the "elite" in the Northeast felt that this wasn't much of an accomplishment since it was believed the quality of play in the South was much more inferior than that in the Northeast. It took nearly two decades to change that attitude when John Heisman led the 1917 Georgia Tech team to a national title. That team shut out most of its opponents and still holds the record for the most lopsided win in college football history, a 222-0 win over Cumberland College.
While the book in some parts reads like a scholarly work, it is still an enjoyable book for the reader who wants to learn more about college football in the South at that time and in that culture. Even die-hard college football fans are bound to learn some new information about the game, as this reviewer did.
I wish to thank LSU Press for providing a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.
https://sportsbookguy.blogspot.com/20...
April 14, 2021
A highly readable, academically researched account of, well, the origins of Southern college football. Due to first-hand account irregularities, this must have been a pain to research. While keeping a basic narrative throughline for the subject's major development, I would like to praise Bell's inclusiveness for both programs of later importance and even more so, the social and historical context of each season, which is generally often less familiar to the modern reader than 20th century, post-WWI history.
May 17, 2021
There is a certain orthodoxy to histories of American football, that accentuate its basis in north eastern colleges, that celebrate its development across the north east and north into what we would now see as the northern Mid-West and since the key work of Michael Oriard its popularisation through mass media and ‘yellow’ journalism. Yet one of the paradoxes of this narrative is not that it is wrong, but that like most dominant narratives it is partial leaving as a mystery the basis of the power that is football in the South, in both HBCUs and PWIs, by the inter-war period, and the significance of teams from places such as Alabama State, University of Texas, Mississippi State and other less well known to those of us on the outside. Andrew McIlwaine Bell’s engaging history of Southern college football until the early 1920s goes some way to filling that gap.
This is a decidedly academic text, although Bell’s style makes it much more accessible than some (I confess, guiltily), in which Bell argues that football resonated with aspects of a mythologised (white) Southern culture that gained strength in the period after Reconstruction (so from the latter 1870s) accentuated by a martial self-image that was reinforced by the experiences of the Spanish-American War and World War 1. Focusing on the PWIs (HBCUs barely appear – their story is, from what little I know, a very different one), he presents the game as a student driven activity, and one that often faced opposition from Faculty and many of the region’s moral entrepreneurs who saw the game as introduction corruptions from the North, despite the powerful sense of Muscular Christianity that surrounded the game.
A less explicit aspect of the argument is a tension between diffusionism and organic development. The diffusionist aspect may be seen in, for instance, the way the argument opens in Virginia (I’m not saying this is wrong – in terms of a linear historical narrative it seems correct – just that the narrative flow suggests a spread from the North to the most Northern of the South and then out across the more distant States). This diffusionism is also more obviously present in the sense that the game is brought South by students and occasionally Faculty who experienced or played it in the North. It might have been interesting to have seen a greater sense of the dialogue this inspired, although I suspect sources are sparse to non-existent. There is, however, a good sense of the contempt with which Southern teams were held by the north eastern base of the game, and a sense of the celebration when teams from that region were defeated by Southerners.
The narrative is quite spasmodic in its earlier stages, as would be expected during the emergence of a cultural practice as teams appear and disappear in places scattered across the region. By the latter 1890s however the emerging teams and institutions of intercollegiate play have settled down, with coaching becoming professionalised a little later and the contours of a wider footballing culture emerging. From this point on the tone of the narrative shifts from one of new terrain where school and local context is a powerful element to a more conventional narrative of games and seasons, although this is far from an antiquarian chronicle. That said, some of the narrative seems influenced by more recent debates within the game: while I have no doubt that the emphasis on the power of teams from Sewanee (The University of the South), I can’t help but see part of the framing at least lying in the effects of the north eastern colleges contempt for the South and the consequent downplaying of Sewanee’s record.
Bell makes clear at the outset that this analysis is not limited just to the game in its college contexts, but that it needs to be understood in the wider frame of US history from the end of Reconstruction onwards. In this he is quite correct: no cultural practice, let alone one with such a wide popular engagement, can be understood if it is hermetically sealed off from its social world. Part of the style that creates this contextualisation is a well-drawn sense of demographic and cultural shift and outlook, part of it is developments associated with wider socio-cultural relations such as see in the Guilded Age, and part is contemporaneous events. It is this latter set that cause me problems in that it is hard to see the relationship between labour movement struggles or the developing US empire in Cuba, Panama or the Philippines and the development of college football. Bell uses these for context and does not suggest any causal relationship, meaning that I am left wondering why these events and how am I supposed to make sense of the material on, for instance, the Pullman Strike of 1894?
So, I am left with a real sense of the way the game developed in the South and its importance as well as many of the disputes – cultural (whether the game was corrupting the South), institutional (as schools struggled with organised sport), and moral (such as the nation-wide concern in the early 1900s over injury and death in the game). I am not so convinced about the context Bell has built up – it may be that there is a subtlety I’m missing, but even with that this is a valuable contribution to the literature on college football in the USA.
This is a decidedly academic text, although Bell’s style makes it much more accessible than some (I confess, guiltily), in which Bell argues that football resonated with aspects of a mythologised (white) Southern culture that gained strength in the period after Reconstruction (so from the latter 1870s) accentuated by a martial self-image that was reinforced by the experiences of the Spanish-American War and World War 1. Focusing on the PWIs (HBCUs barely appear – their story is, from what little I know, a very different one), he presents the game as a student driven activity, and one that often faced opposition from Faculty and many of the region’s moral entrepreneurs who saw the game as introduction corruptions from the North, despite the powerful sense of Muscular Christianity that surrounded the game.
A less explicit aspect of the argument is a tension between diffusionism and organic development. The diffusionist aspect may be seen in, for instance, the way the argument opens in Virginia (I’m not saying this is wrong – in terms of a linear historical narrative it seems correct – just that the narrative flow suggests a spread from the North to the most Northern of the South and then out across the more distant States). This diffusionism is also more obviously present in the sense that the game is brought South by students and occasionally Faculty who experienced or played it in the North. It might have been interesting to have seen a greater sense of the dialogue this inspired, although I suspect sources are sparse to non-existent. There is, however, a good sense of the contempt with which Southern teams were held by the north eastern base of the game, and a sense of the celebration when teams from that region were defeated by Southerners.
The narrative is quite spasmodic in its earlier stages, as would be expected during the emergence of a cultural practice as teams appear and disappear in places scattered across the region. By the latter 1890s however the emerging teams and institutions of intercollegiate play have settled down, with coaching becoming professionalised a little later and the contours of a wider footballing culture emerging. From this point on the tone of the narrative shifts from one of new terrain where school and local context is a powerful element to a more conventional narrative of games and seasons, although this is far from an antiquarian chronicle. That said, some of the narrative seems influenced by more recent debates within the game: while I have no doubt that the emphasis on the power of teams from Sewanee (The University of the South), I can’t help but see part of the framing at least lying in the effects of the north eastern colleges contempt for the South and the consequent downplaying of Sewanee’s record.
Bell makes clear at the outset that this analysis is not limited just to the game in its college contexts, but that it needs to be understood in the wider frame of US history from the end of Reconstruction onwards. In this he is quite correct: no cultural practice, let alone one with such a wide popular engagement, can be understood if it is hermetically sealed off from its social world. Part of the style that creates this contextualisation is a well-drawn sense of demographic and cultural shift and outlook, part of it is developments associated with wider socio-cultural relations such as see in the Guilded Age, and part is contemporaneous events. It is this latter set that cause me problems in that it is hard to see the relationship between labour movement struggles or the developing US empire in Cuba, Panama or the Philippines and the development of college football. Bell uses these for context and does not suggest any causal relationship, meaning that I am left wondering why these events and how am I supposed to make sense of the material on, for instance, the Pullman Strike of 1894?
So, I am left with a real sense of the way the game developed in the South and its importance as well as many of the disputes – cultural (whether the game was corrupting the South), institutional (as schools struggled with organised sport), and moral (such as the nation-wide concern in the early 1900s over injury and death in the game). I am not so convinced about the context Bell has built up – it may be that there is a subtlety I’m missing, but even with that this is a valuable contribution to the literature on college football in the USA.
January 27, 2024
Actually fascinating. An interesting and quite informative tale of how college football captivated the South
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews