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Web Exclusives:
Under the Ivy October
20, 2004: In a year and a half at the University of Chicago’s alumni magazine, I picked up several fascinating – OK, maybe only to me – bits of trivia. My favorite is this: What college football team has the best all-time record against powerhouse Notre Dame? Well, I’ve already given it away. It is indeed the University of Chicago Maroons (not maroon, a la the Stanford Cardinal or Harvard Crimson), who sport a 4-0 record against the Fighting Irish. The answer is a reminder of how very different the college football scene was at the beginning of the 20th century. As it does today, the sport held an enormous fascination for much of the country, but the big names were not Miami, Nebraska, or USC, but instead Princeton, Yale, Chicago. Forty thousand people might easily pack Palmer Stadium for an Ivy League match-up. Meat-packing magnate Harold Swift, chairman of the University of Chicago’s board of trustees, would charter a train to take Chicago supporters East for the Princeton game. Chicago’s Jay Berwanger won the first Heisman Trophy in 1935; stars from Yale took home the next two. In the fall of 1937, Princeton’s National Alumni Association took the occasion of the Chicago football game to hold its annual meeting in the Windy City. More than 500 people registered at reunion headquarters (the Stevens Hotel, known now as the Hilton Hotel and Towers) and according to the Oct, 22, 1937, issue of PAW, almost 1,200 attended the Saturday luncheon before the game. “Guests voted it the most successful meeting ever held in the West,” PAW reported (reminding us that Michigan, in its fight song, asks that all hail, hail the champion of the West). Alumni and administrators had more than football on their minds that weekend – a little more, though guests of honor did include players, coaches, past Princeton great Neilson Poe 1897, and Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins, who spoke Friday night on, well, football. (Just two years later, in a decision that stunned his alumni and college football fans nationwide, Hutchins shut down Chicago’s storied football program, believing that it was not possible to be dominant both academically and athletically.) But while Dean Christian Gauss, who spoke at a Friday luncheon, opened his remarks by noting proudly that Princeton was “one of the pioneers in the development of intercollegiate athletics,” he also went on to discuss the overall goals of Princeton as an educational institution. He may have been responding in part to a column in Fortune magazine by poet and cultural observer Archibald MacLeish, who condemned prep school graduates – and, by association, college undergraduates -- as sheep-like, looking alike, viewing the world the same way, and thinking, “if they think at all, with the same complete and bewildered aimlessness.” Gauss asserted that Princeton was trying to make of the campus “a microcosm of the great world outside so that it may be for the undergraduate a training school that will prepare him for life.” (This with two notable exceptions, Gauss explained: marriage and moneymaking, which, though “necessary in this low world,” were not under any circumstances encouraged or promoted.) Instead, Gauss said, administrators were guided by two principles. “One of them is that we are a liberal arts college, and we believe that the art of learning to live together should be regarded as the most important of all the liberal arts. … The second is that we are training young men to be useful American citizens.” This latter mission, Gauss elaborated, meant that they wished to draw students from “every state in the country and every social and economic stratum.” No doubt mindful of the dark situation in Europe, Gauss concluded by repeating the need to learn to live in peace, saying, “We shall not have earned our age’s salvation if we have not mastered that fundamental human problem of learning to live together.” Incidentally, according to reporter Frank Halsey ’12, on
Saturday Princeton gave only a serviceable performance in a contest
“not one to give high readings on the sphygmomanometer, or
blood pressure machine to you.” The Tigers nonetheless won,
16-7. Jane Martin ’89 is PAW's former editor-in-chief. You can reach her at paw@princeton.edu
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