Sports and American Education

Abstract

In November 1914, the 70,000-seat Yale Bowl opened as the home field for the New Haven university's Bulldogs, holding half again as many fans as its counterpart at arch-rival Harvard, completed in 1903. Together, both stadiums ushered in a new era of stadium construction across the nation, providing the infrastructure for what came to be known as the Golden Age of American Sport in the 1920s a building boom that included Princeton's Palmer Stadium, but also such shrines of major league baseball as Boston's Fenway Park (1912) and Yankee Stadium in the Bronx (1923). This boom echoed, in turn, a similar wave of stadium building in Britain, where football madness focused on the sport we now call soccer. The rise of what we now term big-time college athletics occurred as part of a burgeoning mass market that developed around spectator sports in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This market encompassed events as varied as the America's Cup, Pierre de Coubertin's modern Olympic movement, the rise of international soccer, the World Series, and the annual naming of Walter Camp's All-American squad in college football. Significantly, college football achieved its first zenith in this larger process through which sport became an article of mass consumption. Collegians Red Grange and Notre Dame's Four Horsemen featured prominently on the same sports pages that chronicled the triumphs of Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey. Even as thousands of fans trooped into venues throughout the country to cheer the local version of fictional Yale football hero Frank Meriwell, voices from within the academy, including Harvard president Charles Eliot