Football

College football originated in informal matches. Students played both the soccer and rugby versions in pickup games and interclass rivalries. In November 1869 Rutgers University defeated Princeton University, 6-4, in the first intercollegiate football game at New Brunswick, New Jersey. The contest combined rugby and soccer. Princeton won a rematch, 8-0, at home a week later. Harvard University and McGill University in the spring of 1874 played a rugby style of football. Harvard defeated Yale University, 4-0, in their inaugural game in 1875. In November 1876 Columbia University, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale formed the Intercollegiate Football Association to standardize rules. Harvard’s rugby style prevailed over Yale’s soccer style, with play continuing until the ball went out of bounds. Opponents stopped the ball carrier by nearly any means. Football did not have a line of scrimmage, a series of downs, or forward passing. New rules added blocking, alternating ball possessions, and a fixed numbers of downs. Students operated college football teams, selecting, coaching, training, organizing, and financing the squads. Student captains trained and disciplined their teams, while other undergraduates held fund drives and raised subscriptions. Faculty and administration gradually intervened in the organization and oversight of the sport, but students continued to direct onfield activities.

Walter Camp transformed rugby-style football into American football. An all-around athlete at Yale from 1876 to 1882, the six-foot 200 pounder starred at halfback for six years as an undergraduate and medical student. He captained his final three years, picking the starters and deciding plays. Camp abandoned medicine to join the New Haven Clock Company (ultimately becoming its president), but he also directed the Yale football team and built it into a pow-

Football game between Yale and Princeton (Library of Congress)

Erful winning program. Camp analyzed the team’s work with student coaches each evening, institutionalized regular practice and training, and stressed team work, strategy, tactics, and character building.

Camp represented Yale for 48 years at football’s annual rules conventions. In 1878 he pushed through a rule restricting starters to 11 players, and in 1880 he secured a rule establishing the scrimmage line. Organized plays further transformed English rugby into American football. To speed football, Camp in 1882 proposed a series of downs (three) to gain a set number of yards (initially five), new styles of blocking, and tackling below the waist. The committee established a scoring system, awarding one point for a safety, two for touchdowns, four for conversions after touchdowns, and five for field goals. Camp tried to outlaw the flying wedge, a play conceived by Princeton in 1884. The flying wedge placed the ball carrier in the crook of a V-shaped mass of offensive linemen who stampeded into the defense on each play. Camp proposed penalizing teams five yards for crossing the scrimmage line before the ball was snapped. In 1893 Camp became secretary of the intercollegiate football rules committee, securing the sport’s future. The group eliminated the flying wedge and other dangerous plays.

Besides being an innovator, organizer, and tactician, Camp was football’s most prominent national spokesman, promoter, and defender. He headed a blue-ribbon commission to investigate football brutality and concluded that football had markedly benefited players both physically and mentally. Camp also promoted football by selecting an all-America team beginning in 1889. Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Pennsylvania dominated college football, often trouncing smaller schools and boasting all but two all-America players between 1889 and 1898.

By the 1890s college football had gained a degree of popularity among the middle and upper classes and became a national sport. The Ivy League and Western Conference were formed, rivalries were established, and teams traveled longer distances for intersectional games. As football’s popularity increased, the alumni gained virtually complete control over college sports. Universities began to see football as a means of making money. Yale football receipts grew to $100,000 yearly, one-eighth of the institution’s total income. The annual giving Day championship game between the two best college teams eventually drew more than 40,000 spectators in New York City and started the winter social season.

Football provoked considerable controversy. It was a brutal sport, causing frequent injuries: In a 19-year period, 50 players died from injuries. Football also developed a win-at-any-cost mentality. Players and alumni emphasized victory so much that many colleges engaged in shady, dishonest recruiting practices. Tramp athletes made a career of playing college football. Martin Thayer performed for 13 years at nine schools, while James Hogan played football at three other schools after being expelled from Yale. As college football truly became a spectacle, university officials began denouncing the sport. Dean Shailer Mathews of the University of Chicago protested, “Football is a boy-killing, education-prostituting gladiatorial sport,” while President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University called football “madness and slaughter.” By 1900 college football needed to reform or face extinction.

Further reading: Ivan N. Kaye, Good Clean Violence: A History of College Football (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1973); Michael Oriard, Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Sporting Spectacle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Ronald A. Smith, Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big Time College Athletics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

—David L. Porter

Forbes, John Murray (1813-1898) merchant, reformer, railroad entrepreneur

John Murray Forbes was born into a mercantile family on February 23, 1813, in Bordeaux, France. From 1823 to 1828 he attended the progressive Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts, which had recently been established by George Bancroft (later a distinguished historian) and Joseph G. Cogswell, under whom Forbes studied. When Forbes left, at the age of 15, to enter the China trading house of his uncles, James and Thomas Handasyd Perkins, in Boston, Cogswell declared he possessed “a far better education than nine tenths of” college graduates. Two years later his uncles sent him to Canton as their resident agent with Russell & Company, to replace his older brother, who had recently died. Soon becoming the confidential agent of Houqua (Howqua or Wu Bingjian), the head of the Hong merchants who controlled Chinese foreign trade, Forbes, who was fluent in French and Spanish, handled his foreign correspondence. After three years of hard work Forbes returned home in 1833 at the age of 20 to “recruit” his health and fell in love with and married Sarah Hathaway on February 8, 1834. They had six children.

Shortly after his wedding, Forbes returned alone to Canton to wrap up his affairs. When he was made a partner of Russell & Company and Houqua retained him on a lucrative 10 percent commission, he stayed three years, making a fortune in the cutthroat business environment of Canton. When he returned to the United States in 1837, the panic of that year was in full swing. He survived it, established J. M. Forbes & Company, invested in ships, and continued in the China trade, managing Houqua’s half-million-dollar American investments.

In 1846, at the behest of lawyer James F. Joy and engineer John W. Brooks, Forbes mobilized capital to purchase the badly built 140-mile Michigan Central Railroad (MC) from the bankrupt state of Michigan and accepted the presidency of the railroad. Under Forbes’s leadership it grew and by 1852 reached Chicago, the rail hub of the West. Moving eastward, Forbes secured a link connecting Detroit with Buffalo, through Ontario. Because he viewed RAILROADS as an investment not a speculation, he was able to mobilize investors and to thrive in a risky environment. To keep freight flowing to the MC in Chicago, the Forbes-Joy-Brooks team acquired four small Illinois lines and in 1856 formed the Chicago, Burlington, & Quincy Railroad (CB&Q). They extended the CB&Q west into Iowa and Missouri and ultimately to Denver (1882) in anticipation of freight. As in Canton, Forbes was a brilliant manager. He preferred dividing freight with other railroads in noncompetitive pools, but when they fell apart he was a tough competitor.

A man of humane impulses, Forbes was a reformer as well as an entrepreneur. The year he returned from Canton, he was converted to the antislavery cause by Wendell Phillips’s Faneuil Hall address in Boston, protesting the murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy by a proslavery mob. Ten years later Forbes originated the plan of borrowing the USS Jamestown to transport food from Boston to aid famine victims in Ireland. Forbes left the Whig Party when Daniel Webster supported the Compromise of 1850 and, despite advantages for his railroad interests in Missouri and Iowa, opposed the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which admitted slavery in those territories. In protest to the “Nebraska iniquity,” he helped found the Republican Party, supplied money and rifles for the New England Immigrant Aid Society in its struggle to make Kansas a free state, and in 1859 welcomed John Brown to his home and gave him $100 for his work in Kansas, which was probably used for his Harpers Ferry raid. In the secession crisis following Abraham Lincoln’s election, Forbes hoped to avert war, feeling that farmers and laborers would suffer disproportionately. He attended the 1861 Peace Convention but refused to compromise on slavery in the territories.

When the Civil War commenced at Fort Sumter in 1861, Forbes turned much of his railroad responsibilities over to Joy and Brooks and threw himself into the war effort. Because Forbes was both a shipowner and a railroad man, Massachusetts governor John A. Andrew asked him to ship men and supplies to the Washington area. Forbes also, without a commission, served as a purchasing agent for the Department of the Navy to secure light-draft fast steamers to enforce the most extensive blockade ever attempted. In 1863 Forbes journeyed to England, where he helped prevent the ironclad rams, nearing completion in the Laird shipyards, from joining the Confederacy and secured a loan for the federal government from Baring Brothers. Forbes was a leading fund-raiser for the U. S. Sanitary Commission, which helped care for sick and wounded Union soldiers. Forbes advocated the emancipation of slaves, helped raise black regiments, and supported the work of the Educational Commission at Port Royal, South Carolina, in educating and employing free blacks on an experimental plantation, which featured land planted in common and individually cultivated plots. To support the vigorous prosecution of the war, Forbes founded the New England Loyal Publication Society. Having significantly contributed to the Union victory, he was present when the Stars and Stripes was again raised over Fort Sumter, four years after its surrender.

Although Forbes remained on the board of the CB&Q, he continued his interest in politics, culture, and reform. At the end of the Civil War he helped found the Nation as an organ of reform. In opposition to spoils-minded politicians he advocated CiViL SERVICE REEORM, and he also backed the gold standard, tariff reform, and woman suffrage. Witty and charming, he was a member of the intellectually stimulating Saturday Club, and among his wide circle of warm friends were literary luminaries Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes and the actress Fanny Kemble. Forbes also indulged in his favorite pastimes of horseback riding, tree planting, yacht building, and sailing.

In 1873 Forbes again concentrated on the CB&Q. His fears that its expansion had been carelessly managed were confirmed when he found that his trusted lieutenants, Joy and Brooks, and other “active” directors had made more than a million dollars by owning stock in the construction companies extending the CB&Q. After failing to reform from within, Forbes organized a stockholder revolt in 1875, eliminated Joy, and three years later took over the presidency and expanded the CB&Q from Nebraska west to Denver. In 1881 Forbes turned the presidency of the CB&Q over to his cousin Charles Elliott Perkins and became an active chairman of its board of directors. Together they presided over further expansion of the CB&Q, increasing its freight and enhancing its strategic value with its connections into Chicago. Renowned for his integrity, Forbes died on October 12, 1898.

Further reading: Thomas C. Cochran, Railroad Leaders, 1845-1890: The Business Mind in Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953); Sarah Forbes Hughes, ed., Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1899); John Lauritz Larson, Bonds of Enterprise: John Murray Forbes and Western Development in America's Railway Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984); Richard C. Overton, Burlington Route: A History of the Burlington Lines (New York: Knopf, 1965).