Over the past week, I’ve been intermittently browsing a new biography by David E. Sumner of Amos Alonzo Stagg, who presided over the University of Chicago’s football program for the first 41 years of its existence. Like most people familiar with the subject, I think, I have a superficial knowledge of the school’s history with the sport: highly successful under Stagg, home to the inaugural Heisman recipient, banned by epigrammatic president Robert Maynard Hutchins in the 1930s, brought back several decades later to compete ingloriously in Division III.
This isn’t wrong, exactly, but the biography does show that there was a deeper history of opposition to football at the school from faculty that extended back to the beginning of the century, when dozens of collegiate football players died annually during games. And one aside from Sumner caught my attention: one of the biggest critics was the economist Thorstein Veblen.
Veblen is best-known for his 1899 book “The Theory of the Leisure Class” and its associated theory of conspicuous consumption. He had a contentious relationship with the U. of C., where he taught from 1893 to 1906, and its founding president, William Rainey Harper. He worried that the school was, from the outset, held captive by the interests of corporate donors, and disliked the naive pretension of the neo-Gothic architectural plan for campus.
One particular target of his derision in “Theory of the Leisure Class” is football. Though he seemed careful not to single out Stagg by name, a 1989 paper gives some evidence to show that the famous football coach was on the economist’s mind. For example, Stagg was prominently involved with the YMCA during his time at the U. of C. Veblen — who had once described the organization as “a bourgeois and capitalist agency to defend the existing order” — now linked it to the primitivism he saw in sports: “It happens not infrequently that college sporting men devote themselves to the religious propaganda, either as a vocation or as a by-occupation …. The sporting man’s sense of luck and chance, or of fortuitous necessity, is an inarticulate or inchoate animism.”
Veblen also thought that sports instilled values in young people that would end up serving them well in the business world: “The culture bestowed in football gives a product of exotic ferocity and cunning …. Sports shade off from the basis of hostile combat, through skill, to cunning and chicanery, without its being possible to draw a line at any point.”
But the efforts of Veblen and other faculty members to ban football at the U. of C. failed. The faculty senate passed a resolution in 1905 to sanction participation in the sports unless fatalities decreased, but Harper, about to die of liver cancer, vetoed it. Stagg outlasted Veblen, who left for Stanford a year later.
Football at the school continued, though the quality of the teams gradually declined. Stagg was forced to retire from his position in 1933; football was banned in 1939. (A Trib columnist wrote that the decision “ignores the bill of rights and sincerely flatters both Stalin and Hitler.”)
“Education is primarily concerned with the training of the mind and athletics and social life, though they may contribute to education, are not the heart of it and cannot be permitted to interfere with it,” Hutchins said in the aftermath of the decision, which wouldn't be reversed until the late 60s. We’ll never know how Veblen felt about his temporary triumph; he had died a decade earlier in relative obscurity at a cabin near Menlo Park, California.
