[ARETE] Review of Dyed in Crimson

[Duncan Jamieson]

All, please find attached and below a review of Zev Eleff, *Dyed in
Crimson: Football, faith and remaking Harvard's America*
Thanks
Duncan

Eleff, Zev. *Dyed in Crimson: Football, Faith, and Remaking Harvard’s
America*.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2023.  XI+285pp.  Ill,
Notes, Index.


 Reviewed by Duncan R. Jamieson, Ashland University

While in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, baseball may
have been America’s pastime, northeastern elite colleges wrestled with the
divide in athletics between the importance of a winning score on one
extreme versus manhood, teamwork and love of the game on the other.  Harvard,
along with Yale and Princeton, took their rivalries seriously, believing
that their programs represented both American amateur sport and in a
broader sense the nation’s culture.

President of Gratz College in Melrose Park, PA and Professor of Jewish
History, with a Ph. D. in American Jewish History, Zev Eleff ‘s subtitle
for *Dyed in Crimson* clearly lays out his objectives for this, his latest
book.  He connects football (and track) with America’s changing cultural
heritage, the control Harvard’s alumni had over its athletic program and
its acceptance of Puritan ideology until the 1920s when upstart midwestern
Jews and Irish Catholics forced athletics, specifically the football
program, and ultimately the college itself to face a new reality.
Notwithstanding
the importance of defeating Yale’s Elis in “the game,” winning came to have
a deeper meaning, more aligned with good sportsmanship. Building on the
work of Marcia Synnott and Ronald Smith, Eleff “deepens the exploration of
that clash between sportsmanship and winning by placing the confrontation
in historical context” (9).

The bastion of New England Brahminism, Puritan families with roots back to
the colony’s founding, Harvard men were obsessed with winning while
Muscular Christianity and Theodore Roosevelt’s “strenuous life” advanced
honor and fair play.  Earlier, these attributes can be seen in the classic
sports novel *Tom Brown’s School Days, *by Thomas Hughes (1857).  Both the
United States and Great Britain upheld their love of sportsmanship through
the rigid distinction between “amateur” and “professional,” the former
playing for the sake of the game, with no acceptance of monetary reward
while the latter accepted cash.  To cite one clear example, Thomas Stevens,
the first person to take a bicycle around the world, 1884-1886, held
membership in the amateur association, The League of American Wheelmen.  After
successfully crossing North America awheel, he accepted a Columbia Expert
bicycle from Colonel A. A. Pope as a gift, which did not impact his
“amateur” status.  When, however, he participated in a two-man race with a
cash prize, even though he lost, the League cashiered him!

              During the 1880s through the 1920s, the decades covered by *Dyed
in Crimson*, mass media was limited to newspapers.  While most had a
regional circulation, some were in fact national in reach, which would
include Boston’s major papers.  The development of commercial radio in the
1920s and commercial television in the 1950s changed sports coverage.  In
collegiate football’s beginnings, “the game” meant only the November
confrontation between Harvard and Yale.  Though I am neither a news nor
sports nor football junkie, while I lived in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in the
1970s it was obvious “the game,” The Iron Bowl, was between the University
of Alabama and Auburn University. When the winter temperature became too
oppressive for me, I came back north to Ashland, Ohio, where I soon learned
“the game” referred to Ohio State University versus the University of
Michigan.  Here abounded what are likely urban legends; if Ohio State’s
coach Woody Hays were driving back from “the game” in Ann Arbor and ran out
of gas, he would push his car over the state line rather than fill up in
Michigan, or, for any given year if the coach had a perfect season until
the team lost to Michigan the alumni would demand his head.  The print,
radio and television sports personalities in both states offered very
little if any coverage of the Harvard Yale contest.  Obviously, these days,
“the game” is regional or perhaps even state or conference specific.

              Still, the Boston Brahmin attitude is writ large in American
culture.  The homogeneity that existed for more than two centuries after
the first English settlers arrived in North America was shattered by the
arrival of the Irish in the 1840s.  Though Blacks and Indigenous Peoples
often lived in close proximity to the white Protestant elite who between
1776 and 1787 formed the United States, they were of no account because
neither had any rights of citizenship.  In a real sense, then, it might be
argued that the 1840s saw the beginnings of a heterogeneous United States
that led to anti-immigration movements that continue to this day.  Charles
Eliot, Harvard’s longest serving president (1869-1909), opposed both
immigration and football, the latter because of its warlike nature.  When
he stepped down, A. Lawrence Lowell took the helm (1909-1933), and though
the number of Jewish students increased he proposed a quota to limit their
numbers.  Though they often came from impoverished backgrounds they prized
its education, but in addition to attending classes and studying they
frequently worked during the evenings and weekends to afford the tuition,
thus restricting their participation in the school’s culture.

In the 1920s the leadership of athletics in general and football in
particular changed dramatically when Bill Bingham became Athletic Director.
 Though from a humble background, growing up in the mill town of Lawrence,
Massachusetts, thirty miles north of Cambridge, he had attended the elite
Philips Exeter Academy, one of Harvard’s primary feeder schools.  Shortly
after his appointment in 1926, he hired as head football coach Arnold
Horween, a Jewish alumnus who led the Crimson in their 1920 win in the
Tournament East West Football Game, now the Rose Bowl, over the Oregon
Webfoots, now the Ducks.  In addition to not being from historic New
England’s Protestant stock, Horween grew up in Chicago and rather than
attending one of the elite New England prep schools that funneled their
graduates to Harvard, he graduated from Chicago’s Francis W. Parker School,
“a hallmark of democracy and Americanism” (66).  There he excelled in both
academics and athletics, captaining the school’s football team.  When it
came time to attend college, his coach who had played for Harvard,
encouraged Horween to attend.  After graduation Bingham brought him on
board; together the AD and the football coach shifted the athletics
program’s policy for recruitment from social status to merit.  Though the
east coast alumni resisted the changes, they ultimately accepted the
emphasis on both sportsmanshi*p* and diversity.

              Readers more immersed in the growth and development of
collegiate football will find Eleff’s analysis interesting and
worthwhile.  Those
more interested in Harvard’s shifting culture as I am may struggle with
some of the detail, but they will enjoy the analysis of the college’s
shifting culture.  With this in mind, though not directly connected to
Eleff’s subtitle, “*remaking Harvard’s and [Yale’s] America*, readers might
be interested in *Harvard Works Because We Do*, Greg Halpern, 2003, and *The
Other Side of Prospect*, Nicholas Davidoff, 2022.  A 1999 graduate of
Harvard, Halpern spent three years interviewing and photographing blue
collar service workers while Davidoff offers an analysis of race, class and
violence in a neighborhood adjacent to Yale.  Though neither of these works
address sport in general or football in particular, they do explore the
ways in which Harvard and Yale are continuing to grow and develop more of a
social consciousness, especially relative to their neighbors in Cambridge
and New Haven as well as their service workers.
Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past

Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.
Professor of History
Book Review Editor
*AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature*
Ashland University
Ashland, OH  44805
USA
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