Football Fight

In 1906, UW history professor Frederick Jackson Turner helped draft rules intended to fix college football. WHS Image ID 28356

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Wisconsin’s vices, along with those of its chief rivals in the Western Conference — Minnesota, Michigan, and Chicago — were outlined in the Collier’s series. The Badger program, it was claimed, brazenly paid a couple of players during the 1905 season. A faculty committee allowed the team captain to take three “snap” courses when it appeared that failing grades were about to make him ineligible. And another player got a $400 contract from the university to move a section of the grandstand at Camp Randall — work that was ultimately done by someone else.

The charges acutely embarrassed university officials in Madison and elsewhere in the Western Conference, prompting the league to call a January meeting in Chicago. Reform was in the air, and Turner led the UW’s delegation.

A native of Portage, Turner, just 44 years old, was widely recognized as one of the preeminent scholars of American history. A dozen years earlier, at the Chicago Exposition, he had presented his famed “Frontier Thesis,” in which he posited that the closing of America’s western frontier would force coming changes in the economic, social, and psychological characteristics of the nation.

In Madison, Turner was also known as an “unwavering enemy of overemphasis on college athletics,” according to his biographer Raymond Billington. In the late 1890s, he helped expel two members of the football team who had been paid to play. He was also known to be a hard grader whose classes were generally avoided by football players.

While a few in the UW’s administration (most notably President Van Hise and Dean Edward Birge) argued for more lenient measures against the sport, the majority of professors wanted wholesale changes, including a two-year suspension. Their argument: competitive sports had gotten completely out of hand and subverted the purposes not only of college athletics, but of college education. Regarding football and campus life, Turner was quoted as saying that the tail was wagging the dog.

In Chicago, Turner and other conference representatives drafted a list of rules intended to fix the game: limit student-athletes to three years of eligibility in any one sport and restrict play to undergraduates only; cut schedules to five games per season; eliminate preseason contests against high schools; cap admission at 50 cents for any game; and require coaches to be college instructors to keep professionals out of the game. Even training tables were to be abolished. The committee urged that if any of the Western Conference’s nine member schools did not agree to abide by the changes, intercollegiate football should be suspended for two years.

In the weeks after Turner’s return, university faculty chewed on the proposed new rules. Among students, while the general sentiment was that some reform was necessary, a complete suspension of football was too hard to swallow. Because football financed other sports on campus, it meant that the track and baseball teams were in jeopardy, too.

Tensions grew as the faculty vote neared. Students staged a protest “carnival” in front of the Wisconsin Historical Society building, featuring football players playing marbles and Ping-Pong to mock faculty concerns over the physicality of their favored game. Where, students asked, was their voice in all this talk of reform? Didn’t the faculty and administration realize that football, in the words of one student petition, “is distinctively the major college sport of today and it is the only unifying force existing at the present time in the University of Wisconsin”?

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Such was the atmosphere on campus when the faculty finally voted to approve the new rules and suspend football at Wisconsin for two years. Some six hours later, 500 students, armed and angry, stood outside Turner’s home offering their say in the matter.

Three faculty effigies, including one of Turner, danced in the air above the crowd gathered at the lakeshore. There were continued shouts of “Death to the faculty!” and new ones of “Put him in the lake!”

Turner stepped out in the light of his front porch, and his appearance seemed to take some of the madness out of the crowd. Something like a reasonable back-and-forth dialogue between professor and students started. Pistols were tucked into belts; shotguns rested on shoulders.

“When can we have our football?” someone yelled.

“When you can have a clean game,” Turner answered. “It’s been so rotten for the last 10 years it’s been impossible to purge it.”

After 15 more minutes of debate, the crowd decided to find a more sympathetic ear. Students marched on to the nearby home of Birge, who played to the audience: “I understand the sentiments of this crowd to be for football,” he shouted as though he didn’t know their answer. They roared back.

To more cheers, the crowd moved on to the capitol and marched around the Square, before heading back toward campus, pulling pieces of wooden sidewalk and fence rails as they moved along. Back down by the Red Gym, they lit a bonfire with their accumulated kindling and set their effigies on fire. The evening ended when the fire department arrived. One of the burning dummies, the Turner effigy, was saved from the flames.

In the end, just one student was arrested: a freshman charged with setting off fireworks on the nearby streetcar line.

By the time Van Hise returned from a business trip to California a few days later, passions had cooled. He announced another faculty meeting for April 5 and promised students that their grievances would be heard. One day earlier, an assembly of some 1,000 Wisconsin undergraduates soberly passed a resolution denouncing the activities of the previous week’s mob — but at the same time lobbied to keep football on campus.

Van Hise offered a compromise: play the 1906 football season with a five-game schedule that would include none of Wisconsin’s major rivals. Games against Michigan, Chicago, or Minnesota brought out the worst excesses in the sport. If those games were eliminated, and the UW instituted other changes proposed at the Chicago conference, the game would be substantially reformed. When Turner agreed, the rest of the faculty acquiesced. The UW’s 1906 football season was saved.

But stopping football’s campus popularity would turn out to be a difficult thing. The Badgers continued to play a five-game schedule in 1907, 1908, and 1909, at Turner’s continued insistence, but rivalry games were back in the mix. By 1910, everyone in the Western Conference had returned to a seven-game schedule.

Turner’s days as a football reformer were over. So, too, was his time at Wisconsin. In 1910, he took a position on the faculty at Harvard.