American Football–survival of the fittest?

In honor of Super Bowl Sunday, let’s look at American political theory through the lens of foobtall. Yes, I’m serious.

Edward Britton of Texas Tech University. Image credit*

In the May 15, 2008 lecture of his course United States Political Thinking from 1865 (website), UCLA professor Brian Walker talks about the curious case of the Great Football Rules Controversy. It seems that in the late 19th century, numerous pundits and academics opined that college football should be seen as a microcosm of the battle of life and that it was great way of showing who deserved to survive.

This was of course the age of social Darwinism, a strange perversion of Darwin’s theory of evolution, which argued that in human society the strong and virtuous would prevail, and that rules protecting the weak were wrongheaded and counterproductive.

In his lecture, Walker draws on an essay by historians Glenn C. Altschuler and Martin W. LaForse entitled From Brawn to Brains: Football and Evolutionary Thought. I tracked down the essay, which was published in The Journal of Popular Culture, March 5, 2004.

Here are some of the highlights.

As an example of social Darwinist thinking in the 1890s, the essay quotes an anonymous writer of an article in The Nation who wrote that the popularity of football was due to “The combination of discipline, individual skill and brute strength which it calls for; the splendid fierceness of the game; the element of personal combat, which delights the savage instinct lingering in the breasts of even the most civilized of us.. . .”

This was a time when injuries and even deaths from college football games were becoming more and more common. The controversy continued up until 1906, with one camp defending the laissez-faire status quo in which football games had few official rules, and one camp calling for more rules and more enforcement.

Finally President Theodore Roosevelt entered the fray. He warned the colleges to regulate football or he would abolish it by executive order. In 1906 a committee of football experts set up a central board of officials and reformed the rules. This is when we got the 10-yard first-down rule and other rules that define modern football.

So if you watch the game on Sunday, you can thank Teddy Roosevelt and the opponents of laissez-faire for the relatively civilized rules of the game.

Related posts:

• Where did the Neo-Cons come from?

*Image credit: Wikimedia Comons, GNU Free Documentation License.