When Football was Almost No More

No vintage football collection is complete without an autograph from Charles W. Eliot, the 21st President of Harvard University. Eliot was selected as Harvard's President in 1869 and had the university's longest term ever, holding the office until 1909. Eliot inherited a Harvard on the downturn; the university was facing economic turmoil brought on by Harvard's seemingly outdated classics curriculum. Elite businessmen no longer wished to send their children to a school that did not offer anything useful, such as the sciences, history, or political economy. Eliot was the visionary that saved Harvard from collapsing in its entirety. Without going into too much detail here, Eliot completely reformed American higher education; classes were expanded many fold, a greater emphasis was placed on character-building, research, technology, and a spiritual mastery of our material world. Eliot was also known for his opposition to American Imperialism and advocacy for racial equality.

While Eliot was clearly important to Harvard (and the United States) as an institution of higher learning, Eliot joins our collection due to his actions and attitudes in relation to football. The President notoriously attempted to abolish football at Harvard and thus embroiled himself in a national controversy. Eliot became the "unofficial leader" of a powerful anti-football movement. And, truth be told, the movement had some valid arguments. Football in the late 19th century was a brutal activity. For example, the 1905 season degraded into what the Chicago Tribune termed a “death harvest.” During the season, eighteen players died and over 100 others were seriously injured. Eliot explained that football was “more brutalizing than prizefighting, cockfighting or bullfighting." There were many who, just like Eliot, wanted to see football banned.

Just as Harvard's Eliot seemed to have won, and just as all hope for football seemed to be lost, the President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, intervened to help reform the sport. The relationship between Eliot and Roosevelt is discussed in Mark Bernstein's Football: The Ivy League Origins of an American Obsession. Bernstein writes, "Although relations between the presidents were outwardly polite, in private Eliot decried Roosevelt's 'lawless mind' while Roosevelt called Eliot a 'mollycoddle,' one of his favorite epithets. 'If we ever come to nothing as a nation,' he wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge at around this time, 'it will be because of the teachings of Carl Schurz, President Eliot, the Evening Post and futile sentimentalists of the international arbitration type."

On October 9, 1905, President Roosevelt held a private meeting at the White House with Walter Camp, John E. Owsley of Yale, Princeton’s Arthur Hillebrand, and Harvard’s William T. Reid. The group grudgingly hammered out new league rules to make the game safer. The select few "legalized the forward pass, abolished the dangerous mass formations, created a neutral zone between offense and defense and doubled the first-down distance to 10 yards, to be gained in three downs." The most impactful change - the legalization of the forward pass - would be revolutionized by quarterbacks like Benny Friedman and Sammy Baugh in the coming decades. Ironically, Walter Camp, the "Father of American Football," was strongly opposed to this change. Due to these changes, fatalities on the football field did decrease (with one notable exception in 1909); in 1906 and 1907, there were 11 deaths due to football each season. Although still quite a dangerous sport, football was becoming safer, and fans were becoming more comfortable expressing interest in the game. Thanks to President Roosevelt (and, truly, President Eliot), football was on its way to becoming the modern sport that we know today.



Eliot's note is on Harvard University letterhead. Signed 22 Feb. '04