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Veblen's Social Satire and Amos Alonzo Stagg: Football and the American Way of Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Hugh J. Dawson
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Extract

Since the appearance of The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen's unhappy experience at the University of Chicago has been recognized as the precipitant of its criticism of American academic life. The endeavors of John D. Rockefeller, the University's founder; William Rainey Harper, its first president; and benefactors like Charles Tyson Yerkes exemplified what Veblen denounced as “the conduct of universities by business men.” Almost two decades intervened between The Leisure Class and the fuller indictment of The Higher Learning in America, which drew also upon Veblen's disappointments at Stanford, where he taught after his dismissal from Chicago. The later book developed a manuscript critique of higher education that Veblen had written in 1904. Although he professed to feel bound “under the rule of Nihil nisi bonum” to observe a “large reticence” in speaking of the University's president, his 1916 preface mocked Harper as the “Great Pioneer in reshaping American academic policy.” The book's criticisms “necessarily drew largely on first-hand observation of the conduct of affairs at Chicago” and were largely directed at the zeal for moral regeneration that Harper would have had suffuse his campus.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 14 , October 1989 , pp. 273 - 289
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

NOTES

1. Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899; rept. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1965)Google Scholar; The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (1918; rept. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1965)Google Scholar. Dorfman, Joseph, Thorstein Veblen and His America (1934; rept. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966)Google Scholar remains the best study of Veblen's life and the reception of his writings. This has been supplemented by Dorfman's lengthy introduction to Veblen, Thorstein, Essays, Reviews and Reports: Previously Unpublished Writings, ed. Dorfman, Joseph (Clifton, N.J.: Augustus M. Kelley, 1973), pp. 5–326.Google Scholar

2. Veblen, , The Higher Learning, pp. v–viGoogle Scholar. An exchange of letters between Veblen and his publisher, Benjamin Huebsch — Huebsch to Veblen, August 16, 1918; and Veblen to Huebsch, August 24, 1918 — records Veblen's accession to the urging of two publisher's readers that he excise remarks “stressing the personal note in the preface” of his original book manuscript. The letters are preserved among the Huebsch Papers in the Library of Congress.

3. Dorfman, , Thorstein Veblen, p. 197.Google Scholar

4. Dorfman, , Thorstein Veblen, p. 452Google Scholar; Warshow, Jacob, “A Few Footnotes to Dorfman's Veblen,” unpublished manuscript, University of Missouri Library, p. 2.Google Scholar

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7. Stagg, Amos Alonzo and Stout, Wesley Winans, Touchdown! (New York: Longmans, Green, 1927), pp. 102–9Google Scholar; Considine, Bob, The Unreconstructed Amateur: A Pictorial Biography of Amos Alonzo Stagg (San Francisco: Amos Alonzo Stagg Foundation, 1962), pp. 27–30.Google Scholar

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9. Dorfman, , Thorstein Veblen, pp. 56–79Google Scholar; Stagg, and Stout, , Touchdown! pp. 130–31.Google Scholar

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14. Stagg, and Stout, , Touchdown! pp. 143–48, 298Google Scholar; Boycheff, Kooman, “Intercollegiate Athletics and Physical Fitness at the University of Chicago, 1892–1952” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1954), pp. 13–14.Google Scholar

15. Stagg, and Stout, , Touchdown! p. 302.Google Scholar

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17. Stagg, and Stout, , Touchdown! p. 147.Google Scholar

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20. Goodspeed, Thomas W., A History of the University of Chicago Founded by John D. Rockefeller: The First Quarter Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1916), pp. 377–78Google Scholar; Storr, Richard J., Harper's University: The Beginnings-A History of the University of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 180Google Scholar; Murphy, William Michael and Bruckner, D. J. R., eds., The Idea of the University of Chicago: Selections from the Papers of the First Eight Chief Executives of the University of Chicago from 1891 to 1974 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 211–12.Google Scholar

21. Harper, Quinquennial Statement of July 1, 1896, reprinted in Murphy, and Bruckner, , The Idea of the University of Chicago, p. 211.Google Scholar

22. Harper, , “College Athletics Discussed,” The University of Chicago Weekly 3 (01 3, 1895): 141Google Scholar; as quoted at Boycheff, , “Intercollegiate Athletics,” p. 10Google Scholar. Veblen's friend Albion W. Small found that “athletic sports in our colleges are among the most important moralizing influences at our disposal” [University of Chicago] Record 5 no. 4: 42; quoted at Storr, , Harper's University, p. 179.Google Scholar

23. Letter, January 20, 1891, Amos Alonzo Stagg to his family, quoted at Storr, Harper's University, p. 179Google Scholar. In his autobiography, Stagg would write, “My knowledge of private cars was wholly academic; but I knew that they were vehicles of princely luxury like steam yachts, and affected only by the greater actresses, touring millionaires and railroad presidents who rode free” (Stagg, and Stout, , Touchdown! pp. 192–93).Google Scholar

24. Stagg, and Stout, , Touchdown! p. 203Google Scholar. Harper's passionate devotion to Chicago's football team continued to the end of his life. Confined to bed and dying of cancer, he had a special telephone line strung from the stadium to his room in order to bring him a play-by-play account of the 1905 game against Michigan. Stagg would delight in recalling the afternoon's emotion:

Dr. Harper's excitement grew until he Could no longer hear clearly, [his nurse] said, and he asked her to take the receiver and repeat the running report to him. When the first half ended he said to her, “You must just run as hard as you can all the way and tell Mr. Stagg and the team for me that they must win this game.” She ran as directed and delivered her Garcian message.… The word had come to me during the intermission, while I was talking to the team in Bartlett Gym, that the president asked us to win, and I had given the message to the men, pleading with them to win for the dying president's sake. (Stagg, and Stout, , Touchdown! pp. 252–53)Google Scholar

The drama of Chicago's 2–0 victory that day would not be without its parallels. The most famous reenactment was George Gipp's posthumous role in Notre Dame's 1928 victory over Army. Rudolph, Frederick (The American College and University: A History [New York: Knopf, 1962], p. 381)Google Scholar tells how, nine years before Harper's emotional intervention, the bedridden captain of Lafayette's 1896 squad provided the inspiration needed by his men to win their game against the University of Pennsylvania's team.

25. Storr, , Harper's University, p. 180.Google Scholar

26. In The Higher Learning, pp. 124–25nGoogle Scholar., Veblen offers examples of abuses that were already “commonplace.” On one campus “a valued member of one of the athletic teams was retained at an allowance of $40 a month as bookkeeper to the janitor of one of the boys' dormitories.” At the same university, athletes faced the test of translating at sight a passage in a foreign language. The barrier was substantially lowered when the examiner, “a man of high academic rank and gifted with a sympathetic good-will toward the ‘boys,’ submitted in fulfillment of the test a copy of the Lord's Prayer in this foreign tongue, and passed the (several) candidates on finding them able passably to repeat the same in English.”

27. Goodspeed, , History, pp. 336, 432Google Scholar; Stagg, and Stout, , Touchdown! p. 172.Google Scholar

28. Goodspeed, , History, pp. 258, 380, 432Google Scholar; Stagg, and Stout, , Touchdown! pp. 172–73Google Scholar. The historic grandstand was demolished in 1965.

29. Veblen, , The Leisure Class, pp. 261–62.Google Scholar

30. Boycheff, , “Intercollegiate Athletics,” p. 17.Google Scholar

31. Letter, January 20, 1891, Amos Alonzo Stagg to his family, quoted at Storr, , Harper's University, p. 179.Google Scholar

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33. Veblen, , The Leisure Class, p. 299Google Scholar; Storr, , Harper's University, p. 185.Google Scholar

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36. Veblen, , The Leisure Class, pp. 279–80Google Scholar. For a later anthropologist's analysis of sports superstitions, see Gmelch, George, “Baseball Magic,” Society 8 (1971): 39–41, 54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37. Veblen, , The Leisure Class, p. 261.Google Scholar

38. Stagg, and Stout, , Touchdown! pp. 57–58Google Scholar; Boycheff, , “Intercollegiate Athletics,” p. 20.Google Scholar

39. Boycheff, , “Intercollegiate Athletics,” p. 20.Google Scholar

40. Veblen, , The Leisure Class, p. 274.Google Scholar

41. Stagg, and Stout, , Touchdown! p. 147.Google Scholar

42. Veblen, , The Leisure Class, pp. 263, 261–62, 255.Google Scholar

43. On Veblen's debt to Tylor on games as survivals of barbaric warfare, see Hodgen, Margaret T., The Doctrine of Survivals: A Chapter in the History of Scientific Method in the Study of Man (London: Allenson, 1946), p. 136.Google Scholar

44. Veblen, , The Leisure Class, pp. 254–55; and pp. 253–56 generally.Google Scholar

45. Rudolph, , The American College, pp. 379–80Google Scholar. See also Veblen, , The Leisure Class, pp. 247, 248.Google Scholar

46. Stagg, and Stout, , Touchdown! pp. 57, 266–67.Google Scholar

47. Veblen, , The Leisure Class, p. 256.Google Scholar

48. Veblen, , The Leisure Class, pp. 271, 273, 274, 275–92.Google Scholar

49. Quoted at Stagg, and Stout, , Touchdown! p. 139.Google Scholar

50. Crane, , Letters, ed. Stallman, R. W. and Gilkes, Lillian (New York: New York University Press, 1960), p. 158Google Scholar; Sinclair, , The Jungle (New York: New American Library, 1960), p. 43.Google Scholar

51. Goodspeed, , History, pp. 253–54Google Scholar; Storr, , Harper's University, pp. 167–73, 179–80.Google Scholar

52. Letter, Stagg to Harper, November 30, 1904, printed at One in Spirit, p. 42Google Scholar; Stagg, and Stout, , Touchdown! pp. 214–15Google Scholar; Goodspeed, , History, p. 346.Google Scholar

53. Veblen, , The Leisure Class, pp. 348–49Google Scholar; The Higher Learning, pp. 139–47Google Scholar. Mitchell Tower was designed by the Boston architectural firm of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, Cobb's successors in planning the campus buildings.

54. Block, Jean F., The Uses of Gothic: Planning and Building the Campus of the University of Chicago, 1892–1932 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 110–15.Google Scholar

55. Stagg, and Stout, , Touchdown! p. 177.Google Scholar