The Modern Knight Errant

Abstract

This chapter examines the rise of organized American tackle football for high school and college students in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The sport became most prominently associated with white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant students at elite colleges and universities. Early safety debates turned on whether football’s physical dangers were uncivilized and “brutish,” or whether exposure to its risks fostered American ideals of civilized manliness. These ideals were in turn intertwined with dominant understandings of race, gender, and national identity. School administrators and other leaders, including President Theodore Roosevelt, saw football as preparing boys for future business and military leadership. As a consequence, they contended that the sport’s perceived violence was civilized and conferred moral benefits upon players. By the early twentieth century, football was firmly established in elite American colleges and expanding at the high school level.