#1583 College Football as Cultural Lens
2024-01-22 00:59:41
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Happy New Year's everyone and welcome to this special edition of Listening to America. I have the joy today of having two guests, our old friend David McCandry, our West Coast Enlightenment correspondent. And also Dr. Kurt Kemper, historian at Dakota State University in Madison, South Dakota. Where I had the chance earlier last year to give a talk on the future of education in the era of artificial intelligence. Kurt Kemper, among other things, is the author of two really important books, College Football and American Culture In the Cold War Era, and then, more recently, before March Madness, The Wars for the Soul of College basketball. So first, welcome Kurt.
Thank you, happy to be here. Happy New Year.
Listening to America is different from the old Thomas Jefferson hour, in that our brush is wider and our lens is wider, too. And we're going to be looking at all sorts of American phenomena as we approach the 250th birthday of the United States on July 4th, 2026.
So David McCandry, you brought Kurt's work to my attention. Everybody who listens to our program knows that. One of your secondary interests, or maybe it's primary by now, is sports. And that you are, I'm sorry to say, a frequent caller into Mad Dog Russo's national radio program. We won't hold that against you, but tell me why you found Dr. Kemper's work so compelling.
Well, this has been an unusually interesting football season for me as a lifelong fan of both college and professional football. In particular, because I'm a fan of Oregon State University, and along with Washington State University, those schools were marooned by the dissolution of the Pac-12 conference. In many respects, I was following the legal front as much as the play on the field all fall. And then around mid-November, as I was scrolling endlessly to pick up news about the lawsuit that had been filed by the two against the departing 10. The writer of that story said This is not the first time Pacific Coast football has broken apart. It happened in the late 1950s, as recounted by historian Kurt Kemper. And I thought, Aha, that was not a name known to me nor his work, but I followed it up, ordered the book, loved it immensely. And for this reason, and I'll yield at this point. In many respects, it completely forecasted the events of the late 1950s, early 1960s relative to Pacific Coast. Football was, in many respects, a completely accurate forecast of what happened over the course of the summer of 22 and 2023. When 10 schools left the Pac-12 conference to join. What they think is greener pastures.
Well, so, in the 50s, what was then called the old PCC, the Pacific Coast Conference, broke up amidst what would now be considered a very mild cheating scandal. Mostly SC and UCLA, but a handful of others, too, were basically paying players under the table. And it came to light in a rather almost hilarious amount of backstabbing. Eventually, at one point, the conference appoints the dean of Oregon's law school to sort of be the tribunal judge. And I'm a UCLA fan, both of my parents are alums, but I mean, SC and UCLA were guilty. Red-handed and in a fit of pique. They basically said, we're gonna take the ball and go home and allowed the conference to break up. But at the same time, this then sort of says, Okay, well, we're not playing with any rule book right now so we can remake everything. They go hire a new commissioner. A guy named Tom Hamilton, who had been an admiral in the In Naval preparedness in World War II. He'd also been a player and then later a coach at the Naval Academy. And Hamilton envisions, along with some other voices from the campus. This is back in the day when academics had a heck of a lot more say in the structure of conferences. But they said, You know what? Let's start from scratch and let's envision a world where we get to pick who we think are the major players in college football. But not just from an athletic side, we want to pick ones that are athletic peers or, I'm sorry, academic peers. And so they rather snobbishly exclude virtually everybody from the south, and they're gonna go after the service academies they're interested in. I think Georgia Tech might have been involved in that rice back when Rice was still both an academic and an athletic player. And so the idea was we're gonna harvest what they were gonna call the airplane conference. And the idea was we're gonna create a national conference. That will have the greatest amount of prominence and still be very elite academic institutions. The one point that I would offer to challenge Gabe's assumption is that in the 50s, this proposal was coming from the West Coast schools from a position of strength.
What happened this past year and a half was them from a position of weakness. They got carved up as opposed to what they hoped to do in the 50s, which was to be the aggressor.
All right, so a couple of things. First of all, both of you keep in mind that our listeners are not in the sports weeds, quite in the way that the two of you are. And our theme really is how sport reflects on larger American themes, which is what drew me to your work, Kurt. The idea that we can look at the Cold War through the lens of college football. And that sport generally gives us a lens on the dynamics that are moving through American culture. At any given time, which the minute you hear it, you realize, of course, but it takes someone like you to point that out to us so that we really begin to understand that. So when you say airplane conference, are you saying that? The new emerging technology of easy airplane traffic makes it possible for teams to go long distances in a way that in buses they never could have done right, you know, they.
Were envisioning obviously somebody like UCLA and Navy and Army in the same conference, and believed that jet travel would make that feasible. But I think, also, to your point, relative to the Cold War. This kind of aggregation. In the 50s was something that many Americans were beginning to wrap their minds around with. What was going on with the Cold War economy? Particularly in the defense industry. I mean, you look at a company like Dow Chemical, I mean, Dow Chemical's, you know? Their annual profits exceed the GNP of almost all Latin American countries in the 1950s.
This kind of supersized corporate structure in the Cold War was something that many Americans didn't really like. And I wouldn't say they were comfortable with. But it was at least something that they had, you know, allowed themselves to at least understand culturally, and it wasn't disorienting and alienating. And so seeing that kind of similar aggregation within the athletics context was, I think, maybe more easily digestible. So I'm really fascinated by the idea that the cold.
War can be viewed through this lens. And I remember previous work that I've done on the crisis of Sputnik and after Sputnik. The sense that we had fallen behind, not only technologically and in military terms, but that we were not fit, we were not strong enough, there wasn't enough vigor in the American people. And I can remember as a child, President Kennedy calling us to be fit and proposing a whole series of fitness programs. And bringing federal money to all of that.
And so on. So I'm slightly younger than you guys, but not by much. So. I have vivid memories of a lot of the late Cold War. We tend, I think, from an American perspective, to think of American victory in the Cold War as inevitable. You know, we can now deconstruct the weaknesses of the Soviet economic system and their vast misplay about how they were allocating foreign aid. And there was an uneven playing field.
In the early Cold War, we had no sense that it was inevitable, and there was a tremendous sense of anxiety and pessimism. And the symbols of the early Cold War, and Sputnik was just one of them, seemed to suggest that a collective, totalitarian-controlled economy might have one up on a free market democratic system. And so we were entirely anxious about this from an economic and an industrial perspective. And the essence of Cold War was also something that was immensely alienating to many Americans. There's a historian named Russell Wigley who's written a history of American military called the American Way of War. And his thesis argument is The American way of war is unconditional surrender.
That's all we know in this country. When you face us, you lose and you lose big. And the Cold War required us to approach that from an entirely different perspective. We were going to have to play this very passively, and that too, was very alienating to many Americans. Football then, and football wasn't the but it became it was more sort of the new toy to play with. Culturally was a way to demonstrate that we were going to be tough, we were going to be productive.
And maybe one of the things about football that is different than all the other sports, because these kinds of comparisons got made. Certainly, you know, seemingly nothing is more American than baseball. It got applied to a lot of things, but there's a certain amount of deprivation in football that you don't see in many other games. And Kennedy's language, and a lot of other cultural commentators at the time, saw that. In the Cold War, we needed to be virile and productive, you know, in matching Soviet, GNP and all those other kinds of economic indicator outputs. But at the same time, we had to make sure that luxury and that productivity didn't make us soft and didn't keep us from ultimately pursuing victory. And so football becomes a mechanism which many want to see then as this sort of crucible from which a particularly and distinctly American masculinity is going to emerge.
One of the really most interesting things in your book is that football involves pain and exhaustion, and sacrifice and injury. And that this was regarded as like almost ideal training for the Great World crisis that we found ourselves in. And one of the things that really surprised me and I want David Decanterey to speak to this now is that. The armed forces all over the world began to play football in faraway places like Okinawa and in Germany, and so on. And the armed forces became, in a sense, the next arm of intercollegiate football and frequently played.
Some of the elite teams. Well, Kurt has an excellent chapter at the forefront of his book about Army-Navy football and how it really set the stage for all of this. For the modern football fan, there's kind of a nostalgic appeal of the Army-Navy game. It's played by itself, the second Saturday in December as a metric of football excellence. It's much reduced from its former status, particularly during the war years, when Army-Navy kind of privileged football.
And so that's why, when Kurt was relaying this idea of the national conference, I mean, the modern equivalents of the UCLAS and the USCS. They wouldn't be looking for the service academies, they would be looking at the Penn States and the other big ten schools. Nowadays, they would be looking for the schools and the SEC. But army-navy football was a real big deal. That's hard to imagine now for those who didn't live through it.
I remember the Lonesome End and Joe Bellino, all that stuff, and it was something else. The game is significant now, but it was.
Really significant in the 1950s. Yeah, I think again, if you're not in our generation, you forget. West Point won back-to-back, you know, Heisman trophies during the war years, they were national champions in the 40s.
You know, Navy had a Heisman Trophy winner in Roger Staubach in the 1960s. I can't imagine a day in which the service academies again are going to be able to attract that kind of talent. The way we view the military culturally in the United States is vastly different. Who goes to the service academies and who sees military service, you know, as a viable opportunity, is, I think, to the detriment of the Republic, very, very different now than it was 40,.
50 years ago, absolutely, we're going to take a break here. But of course, we now have a very different army in the United States from the one that we had in the 1950s and 1960s. I remember that it used to be almost necessary for a presidential hopeful to have military service, war service, if possible.
We're talking with Dr. Curt Kemper of Dakota State in Madison, South Dakota, and my old friend David McCandry of the West Coast. We'll be back with this special edition of Listening to America in just a moment.
Welcome back to Listening to America. I'm Clay Jenkinson with Dr. Curt Kemper and David McCandry. Thanks to modern Zoom and Riverside technology, we're able to see each other. They're both ridiculously dressed in football gear.
I'm dressed as a professional, would dress all right. So something you said earlier really struck me. That back then, the academic side of universities had greater influence over how football was played than today. Where there is almost a wall of separation between the two sides. One of the most fascinating chapters in your book, Curt, is about the debate at Ohio State. Set that up.
Well, because of the dissolution of the AAU that we talked about in the last segment, beginning with the end of World War II. The AAU, the West Coast Conference and the Big Ten had a contractual arrangement to match their conference champions in the Rose Bowl. Well, because the AAU had dissolved, that negated the contract. And so the question became then which Big Ten team would play in the Rose Bowl? And so Ohio State ends up winning the conference. But there were a lot of faculty who were really opposed to this.
Some of them were opposed to the contractual arrangement with the AAU. Because, I mean, really, again, from a 1950s morality. What SC and UCLA had been caught doing was kind of the original sin of paying amateurs and doing it wantonly. Others were also anxious about the interruption of the academic process that big-time football was becoming. Ohio State's spring semester started the first Monday after the New year back then. And so anybody who was going to journey all the way out to Pasadena was not going to be back in time for classes. An underlying threat of all of this was a fear, I think, on the part of many faculty, that there was this presumption at Ohio State, on the part of too many. Within the campus, as well as within the state of Ohio itself, that Ohio State University was essentially an adjunct of the football program. And so they felt that if we restrained the football program and denied this, what was essentially an exhibition game that had no bearing on anything. That this would hopefully reorient priorities, particularly in the face of the Soviet challenge.
And you know, we're just a few years after Sputnik. You know the consequences of the National Defense Education Act and the effort to really reorient higher ed in the United States.
Yeah, so when I read that chapter, I found myself smiling and at times laughing. It's almost quaint to think that. There was a many-hour, serious, even passionate debate at the university about whether it was in the interests of young people to be diverted from the sacred business of higher education. To go play a football game somewhere, as you say, a football game of no actual consequence, today, such thing could never occur. I remember teaching at the University of Nevada and, of course, with 100 students in it, and one of them was a very prominent football player. And two-thirds of the way through the course, I got a call saying you will pass him, you will give him a C. It's absolutely essential.
And when I protested that that was a fundamental violation of ethics, I was told that it would be really in my interest to just close my mouth and let this happen. So, Kurt, tell us about the vast C change between then and now.
Well, I think there's several things, but ultimately, you have to understand the nature of American higher ed. What we have is a sort of ruthless free market in American higher education, where students are both product as well as customer. What we have now. The phrase often is that athletics, specifically football, is the quote front porch to the university, and whether we like it or not. The presumption of an American higher ed extracurriculum, which for many includes maybe the Greek system, an athletics environment, but a social component that is intended to maybe not finish in the same way that we would have used that term earlier in the century. But at least provide a maturation process for young adults. That's considered to be an essential element to American higher ed for many people. And so now. The notion that athletics would be restrained by a faculty meeting is laughable to all of us. Because of the amount of money involved and the prominence of it.
But you get some tiny, out of the way school that nobody's ever heard of. That suddenly wins a game in March madness. And their admissions office witnesses a massive spike in a request for information in applications. The long retired president at Harvard University, Derek Bach, wrote a very famous book called The Commodification of Higher Education. And this is one of the things he's talking about is that schools now have to play in a marketplace like other purveyors of commerce. What should be prominent here is the intellectual growth of individuals.
And when we have to win and fight and scrap for customers in the form of student enrollment, that's why athletics has become the way that it has.
Yeah, back to Ohio for just a minute. That debate lasted for hours. The purists, the faculty members who made the pure claims that this is about higher ed, this is about learning, this is about the search for truth. They got death threats, there were effigies of them burned in the streets.
The president of the university got death threats. This was serious stuff, Kurt.
Yeah, and whipped up by a fairly partisan Columbus newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch, who printed the home addresses of those faculty members. By the way, so there was a bit of, you know, a kind of totalitarian coercion involved here.
When you read this book, I mean, it's astonishing, isn't it? I mean, you've been on the board of regents of a college, of a university. But when you read that as a historian, a couple of things. First of all, death threats are nothing new today in American politics. But also, it really does tell you about a strange trajectory of sport, especially collegiate sport, of the last half a century.
Well, I think the principal takeaway from Kurt's book and the chapter on Columbus and Ohio state in particular, that was a riot in Columbus. I mean, the faculty lounge was trashed, I think there were demonstrations outside the president's House. The notion that the riot wouldn't be about anti-war protests or Black Lives Matter. The protest would be about the fact that the faculty isn't going to let the football team play in the Rose Bowl.
I mean, that is just a very stark contrast from modern sensibilities on any number of levels.
We've had many conversations about the professionalization of college sport, and it's moving at a very rapid acceleration these days. As someone who has roots in both cultures, the high academic culture, but also a deep love of collegiate sport. Do you see where things have headed since then as basically inevitable, the right direction, or a sad decline?
I think it's a very sad decline. And I'd be curious about Kurt's perspective on this as well. There are always kind of certain hypocrisies and sham aspects to the amateur notion. Kurt already talked about. Pay for play money under the table. I mean, think of it, clay.
Athletic scholarships back in the 50s, that was considered a reform. It's a subject of great, became a subject of great abuse. Of course, we've transcended that now with the pure play for play image and likeness, where college players are getting millions of dollars in order to play. And so the contrast from the world Kurt describes in college football and American culture versus where we are today. But the stark contrast within that micro universe between 1961 and where we find ourselves on the second day of 2024, I just can't imagine a more dramatic departure.
I agree with everything Dave has just said, and I look at it from the drastic transformation of higher education. I'm sure Dave can speak to this also with his regental experience. But this kind of level of faculty authority was not at all uncommon until the mid-60s and the upheavals over the war in Vietnam. Less extent civil rights. But prior to that period, the faculty dominated, and presidents often got themselves into trouble when they ran up against the faculty.
The sea change was the upheavals in the war in Vietnam, which brought great, you know, sort of outside political influence in the public schools. Governors, for example, Ronald Reagan in California. Really, you know, inserting himself in the way decisions were made at Berkeley. But also the money, because a lot of the things that were targeted were contracts with university research elements. And that drift now in higher education is witnessing a much greater CEO top-down influence, and I can tell you from a faculty perspective. I mean, we just got an email this week. The Regents are now not only mandating in South Dakota a statewide uniform syllabus, but what our email signatures have to look like or cannot include.
So the notion that the faculty would be able to tell the athletic department, No, you're going to turn down a $15 million, you know? Whatever a major College Bowl is now, because we think it's against the best interests of the academic interests. The president is going to veto that in a heartbeat, because that's just where, you know, higher education is gone.
We could go on about this and we should, but let's shift this conversation to race in America, the post-war civil rights movements and so on.
Race intervenes in this, at least in my book. Because once Ohio State decides not to accept the invitation, in fact, actually, you have to follow the dates. But even before Ohio State voted no, they had offered the invitation to Alabama. But once the West Coast schools, with Tom Hamilton at the helm, decided, Hey, we're going to throw it open to a national selection process. They started looking at the best teams in the country, and one of which was number one ranked undefeated Alabama. But also close behind them was LSU. But when you start looking at in playing Alabama or LSU in 1961? Particularly if it's going to be a West Coast school, you're going to run into a question of segregation. And whether they're even going to be willing to play integrated teams. And the whole landmine that is race in America, essentially right in the midst of the civil rights movement.
So then, you know, the debate is, should we do business with them, should we invite them, would they come? I mean, it's about 95 different, you know, pathways of conversation. Here we can go.
So before I get too far into it, tell me where you want to go with it.
Well, I'm interested, first of all, in those key moments when universities and conferences had to decide how to handle this. That certain southern universities did not want to play in games that involved integrated teams and refused on some occasions. And then how that was transformed by experience. So, Kurt, I know you're the expert on that. Yeah, so there's a sort of a fairly clear.
But overly elongated evolution of this, and for many years, well before World War II, and carrying briefly after World War II. Southern segregated schools could insist on what were called gentlemen's agreements. In which, if they were going to play an integrated team, the integrated team agreed to hold out their Black players. So as not to offend quote Southern sensibilities. This was usually games in the north or the west, but sometimes they would get those teams to come south, and then that was absolutely a condition an integrated team would.
Say, all right, we'll enter into a gentleman's agreement with a segregated team so as not to offend their sensibilities or to jeopardize the game. And imagine the coaches having to go then and tell the African Americans on their team, we're going to go do this thing. Unfortunately, we've made the decision that you will stay at home, I mean, you must have evidence from your.
Research about how deeply hurtful that was it was. Maybe one of the more notable ones was a back from Boston College named Lou Montgomery. Boston College did it to him two years in a row. And the other thing about this that, I mean, it's shameful and inexcusable on the part of universities. And some universities that, you know, enjoy reputations. That would suggest that this was supposedly not part of their DNA.
But integration in the north wasn't very widespread either. If you were a college player in this time period and you were Black, you were excellent. Because if you were moderate, they could find some average white guy to play instead. So the point is that if you're saying we're not going to include our Black players, you're also willingly putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage. I mean, Lou Montgomery was Boston College's leading rusher two years in a row. And they left him at home so they could go to the Orange Bowl.
And then you're going to go play in a bowl game without your best player. So the gentleman's agreements were just astoundingly illogical and corrupt, and morally bankrupt on so many different levels. But eventually you got the southern schools that could no longer ask those because schools, NYU, Boston College, these places where it had occurred. Their students often made such a stink about this that it became embarrassing to the universities. And so this decision in 1961 is right, smack in the middle of that sort of third evolution that we're a long way from. Willingly playing with Black players, but now what they're really trying to do is OK, how do we manage playing against Black players in a very complicated social and political and cultural environment?
Now, let's look at this from a positive point of view for just a moment. What were the universities and colleges that led the way towards integrated teams?
Well, I would say Syracuse University, Pittsburgh, Boston College, a few Iowa, Iowa State, a few Big ten teams. UCLA, UCLA was paramount. We could have a whole discussion about the UCLA fact, that's probably where we should end up the conversation.
I would throw in there, I don't know how you want to splice this. But while those schools and UCLA, certainly, I think Dave's right has to be near the top of that list. We always have to qualify that. In the 40s, when UCLA had its, you know, famous for 30s and 40s, you know, you got Jackie Robinson, Kenny Washington, Woody Strode. There were less than 100 Black students on all of UCLA's campus. And while Woody Strode and Kenny Washington and Jackie Robinson they were notable, they were also one, you know, three, of only about five players on the football team. So when we talk about places like Michigan State, like UCLA, Syracuse, they were better than almost everybody else.
But we need to be very careful about how many plaudits were willing to give. Those campuses because those students still struggled to find campus housing, they were still often excluded from campus barbershops. They still couldn't eat at the diners and the drive-ins that all the other students could enjoy.
Now, let me just remind our listeners that Harry S. Truman, in Executive Order 9981, integrated the military in 1948 to great national backlash from some quarters. So we're talking about something that is quite recent in our national history. Dave.
That's again, I think one of the great it is. The great attribute of Kurt's book is that it's not primarily about football. I mean, football is merely the lens through which we're looking at the post-war liberal consensus, we're looking at the civil rights struggle.
And it's not really all, it's not just football as the lens, it's one game the night, what would have been the January 1st, 1962, Rose Bowl? A single game becomes the framework through which all of these thoughts and themes are teased out. And I highly recommend the book to anyone who's out there listening and finds these themes intriguing at all.
How late in the 60s was it when the last all-white football teams gave up and allowed integration?
So you'll be very happy to know that the last, very unhappy to know that the last all-white national champion is actually. 1970, the University of Texas. And into the 70s, you still saw quite a lot of pushback. For example, I think it was either 71 or 72. Ole Miss elected a Black male student as the homecoming King King Rebel he was called, and the homecoming Queen was a white female debutante, Sorority Girl. And the photograph that appeared in the Ole Miss newsletter that would have required them, by tradition, to be together was literally a fence between them.
So the black male was on one side of this split rail wooden fence, the white female was on the other. That was the way they could sort of couch this otherwise culturally shocking image. For many Ole Miss graduates were 10 years at that point from the graduation of James Meredith, and so it persisted well into the 70s.
Absolutely amazing. And there are still teams I won't name them. In basketball, for example, where you see a much larger percentage of white players than you would expect in the 21st century. Out of a system of pure athletic merit, and these are Southern teams, it is not all together over.
Yet, yeah, I don't know to what level that continues to persist. Only because, again, there seems to be a bit of a negotiation on the part of many, many Southerners who want to fight against the coming of the 20th century. That winning athletics is an acceptable dividend and they can separate that. I certainly think there's a lot of work that can still be done on looking at the white Southern mentality. There's a wonderful book called There Goes My Everything that begins to examine how white Southerners come to terms with this. And he does a wonderful job on really explaining the tremendous diversity of white Southern response. That we're overly sloppy if we simply render it as a binary pro-segregation, or.
Pro-integration view And as you said, the North was not exactly exemplary in these areas either. I think of the massive segregation riots in Boston, people who absolutely were appalled by the notion of the integration of their public schools. So this is not something that we have to associate with Alabama or Mississippi, even if it was most prominent in those states.
Martin Luther King's only losses were in the north, except for Albany, Georgia.
Let's take a quick break. We're having a fascinating conversation with Kurt Kemper of Dakota State in Madison, South Dakota, and our old friend Dave McCandry of the state of Washington. You're listening to a special edition of Listening to America.
Welcome back to Listening to America. Dr. Kurt Kemper is with me today and Dave McCandry before we go to the UCLA issue. I just want to have you, Kurt, in a minute or two. Explain what's going on at Dakota State. I was there recently. A number of years ago, it redefined itself as an institution dedicated to cybersecurity, and it has now achieved an extraordinary national and even international reputation in that area.
Yeah, so in the 1980s, largely as a force of the last downturn in enrollment, we sort of had a crisis of confidence at DSU. The legislature was seriously kicking around whether they were going to have to close a state institution, and we seemed like a potential candidate for that. And so the governor decided to change the mission, or at least to urge the legislature to change the mission. And this was aided, in large measure by a tremendous amount of pressure from Citibank Corporation, which in 1979 had relocated to South Dakota.
There'd been a Supreme Court decision that allowed companies that engaged in business across state lines to selectively apply state laws in their national commerce. And so many of the credit industries, which had previously been based in the East Coast, relocated to South Dakota because South Dakota had no usury laws. And we still, to this day, do not. Which allowed credit card companies then to charge, shall we say, elevated interest rates? And so Citibank relocated there and then urged state government to do much to help them in workplace development. And so the governor responded by creating an initiative that would change the mission of Dakota State University to focus on technology. And so we have maybe not always been as far out on the cutting edge as we would like to believe, but we were one of the first. With wireless mobile computing, you know, an entire statewide or a campus-wide, you know, wireless internet access.
For 20-odd years, every student is issued a tablet, laptop, and our research and teaching, you know, is bread and butter is really in computational sciences.
Yeah, and you're a humanist there.
Which is a bit alienating. Yeah, I am very much the fish out of water, because not only am I a humanist, but I'm also not somebody who really embraces technology. I didn't get my first cell phone until a few years ago, and I'm still woefully ignorant. Almost all of my students are far more techno-sophisticated than I am.
It's good to know about that whole credit card thing. I don't think it's true, though, that South Dakota State welcome sign says We're okay with usury.
Well, the welcome sign doesn't say it, but the business culture does.
I'm from North Dakota, so, you know, we love to make South Dakota jokes. All right, so UCLA is of special interest to me because I will have to admit this. I am a great fan of Bill Walton. I find Bill Walton's commentary on basketball games to be. It's like watching a car wreck in slow motion.
You can't turn away, and yet you are so sorry that you can't turn away, but pick it up. Rose Bowl 1961, right?
Yes, so this, well, it would have been. As Dave pointed out, the January 1962 game for the 1961 season and UCLA witnesses sort of a perfect storm of events. That allows those students to look at a Rose Bowl opponent that would be potentially segregated. The first thing is is that that fall witnesses the freedom rides in the south. So, if you remember? A group called Core, the Congress on Racial Equality, attempted to test a recent Supreme Court decision. Desegregating interstate commerce, which would have included buses and the waiting rooms, and the restaurants and the restrooms, and everything there.
And they are famously arrested after a firebombing in Anniston, Alabama. And it looks like southern segregation has sort of disrupted the whole thing. And a group of students, mostly out of Nashville, that will coalesce into what becomes SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Decides to pick up the ride and they're going to try to take it all the way through to New Orleans. And what this mostly allows for is the absolute wanton ugliness of Southern racism to be on front page display.
Maybe the most searing image is the image of John Lewis bleeding profusely about the face and head, having some of his teeth knocked out. And he's forced to go to the hospital. And at one point, a reporter from the New York Times says, You know, what are you going to do? And his comment is something to the effect of the bus leaves tomorrow at 8 a..m. And I'm going to be on it.
And that's a level of bravery that I don't know where that even comes from. They got beaten within an inch of their lives. But the Kennedy administration? Because this was so disruptive to Cold War politics, and particularly because the Soviets were happy to make light or make use of racial disruptions in the United States in international Cold War politics. The Kennedy administration arranged for Mississippi authorities to arrest everybody when they crossed from Alabama into Mississippi. And because the Kennedy administration just wanted the whole thing to go away, so SNCC started basically calling in, you know, reserves from everywhere.
And many students from UCLA, then late that summer, went to Mississippi and Texas and all over the place to start riding the buses. And then they got arrested, and in fact, one of the student leaders, a guy named Robert Singleton, was arrested in Mississippi. And as Mississippi often did, when people were charged with violations of their segregationist order, they not only sent them to Parchman Penitentiary, but they put him on death row. In the effort to really intimidate the hell out of these kids. So this is all you know in the milieu of campus.
When they come back that fall is the testimony of these students. The other thing that's got to go on then is that many of them face bail hearings. And so the students want to make use of their own student association funds to lend money to the students so that they can make bail. Then that brings in the issue of campus free speech, and if you've ever followed, you know, the free speech movement at Berkeley, this is essentially the same issue.
The University of California since the end of World War II has made well. It actually predates that, it goes well back to the 30s. It engages in rigorous limitations on what students can do on campus and in their purview as students. And the rationale here was the regents and the governor, and the campuses wanted to keep education out of the political fray. They wanted to mostly avoid offending the legislature. Who might punish the university by reducing, you know, allocations, because they felt that the university was becoming overrun by fill in the blank? But it was mostly left-leaning.
Political activity Communists funded young radicals, yes, and, in fact, for a time, UCLA.
Has this very undeserved reputation as being a hotbed of communism in the 30s and the 40s? So this is all the stuff that now the students run into. Because if they use student funds from the Associated Student Body, the ASUCLA. Then that is going to violate what was then called Rule 17, which Robert Sproul famously got himself into trouble with. So the students hold this referendum and then it becomes really an issue about free speech. And in the same way, I mean, we saw the exact same argument play out in Berkeley three years later. It actually, you know, began at UCLA over civil rights, though in the same way that it was in 64, because it was about the kids who went to Freedom Summer from Berkeley in 1964.
And it was about whether they could bail out their own students from the freedom right arrests. So what's really in play here is student prerogative. Are they going to be able to exercise their own funds? Are they going to be able, as legal adults, to be able to have political views and express them? In what the UCLA chancellor at the time called the free marketplace of ideas? And so into this environment, then now, suddenly, the UCLA Athletic Department looks like they're about to dance with the devil by playing a football game against either LSU or Alabama.
And ultimately, it's Alabama who gets the preference. And so the students raise a stake. One of the players, Kermit Alexander, says I'm not going to play, I will not play against a segregated team. And the students now threaten to boycott the game.
If Alabama is invited. Dave, you are fascinated by this story.
I am at any number of levels. One of the interesting facets here, Kurt earlier mentioned the role of the press in fomenting all the discord in Columbus, of the sports boosterous press. And, of course, the press in the South, as his book ably demonstrates, is a strong pillar of defense of the segregation system of sport, culturally, more generally, in the South. But what's interesting here, Kurt is the role both the student newspaper, the UCLA Brew in place, but perhaps more particularly, Kurt Melvin Durslag and the examiner, the famous Jim Murray in the L..A. Times, because they take the story national.
And that's when the people in Alabama, in fact, bear. Bryant slinks off to New Orleans to get an engagement in the Sugar Bowl because he can see what's coming with. What the UCLA brewing turbocharged by Durslag in The Examiner, Jim Murray in the L.
A times, and although they would maintain they were never. And I'm really only telling Kurt's story, I should yield back to him quickly. When they get the sense that there might be a boycott, they maintain an offer was never made, but, Kurt, you point out that, in fact, every indication is an offer was made to Alabama. But they slinked away to the sugar bowl rather than face the music in the rose bowl.
Is that fair?
Yeah, and in fact, I've confirmed they were invited. Unfortunately, my source, who is still involved in the world of college football, has. I have asked him four times, and he still requests that I, he's my my own deep throat. And in fact, while we were at break, I googled to see if he had passed recently, to see if I should reveal that.
But he was a very, very, very young official in West Coast football at the time. And he actually pinpointed the day in which Alabama was invited to play in the 1962 Rose Bowl. And so Alabama turned that down. And they did, as Dave pointed out, because this was going to bring a tremendous amount of negative attention to Alabama. A lot of historians have examined how the South has, sort of, you know, fallen in love with Alabama football in the civil rights period. Because this is one of the few things they were good at.
You know, they could beat the Yankees at this when the federal court system was beating them at everything. And so they took a tremendous amount of validation, cultural, social validation in the triumph of the football team. They were not prepared to allow that source of community pride, of white Southern identity to become a source of pillory and excoriation and embarrassment. And so they chose to exempt themselves. And they knew exactly what this was going to look like.
Because you look at the second great migration, which a lot of southern Blacks migrated to the west coast. Kermit Alexander's family was from the deep South, for example. And so they knew what segregation looked like up close and personal, and it was ugly. You also had, you know, the media, and as well as moderate southern white perceptions that were more liberal than they wanted to think. You know, they felt that the West was better on this, and so they were willing to demonize the South. When, in fact, there was a lot of practices in the West that they didn't want to acknowledge.
You have the connection, I make the connection in the book to of all things. Caltech Caltech is a university that's based in Pasadena. Their students are notoriously contrarian. In fact, in 1962, they pulled one of the greatest Rose Bowl pranks of all time. By rearranging the scoreboard. So that instead of the score of the two participants, which Dave is reminding Miss Oregon State, they had Caltech beating MIT in the Rose Bowl.
My uncle, great uncle at the time, who did some work with Linus Pauling on the Nobel Prize, was a faculty member there. And they all, you know, Caltech, had everybody come to the Rose Parade. Linus Pauling turned down the offer to be the commencement speaker at the University of Alabama over authoring Lucy's expulsion. And, in fact, became so outspoken on his own issues regarding integration. The State Department revoked his passport for a while so he could not travel abroad. So the Caltech faculty are going to be involved too. And Alabama is, you know, with the Huntsville situation, that's a partner in the space race, so you know, Caltech's going to have a reception there for University of Alabama personnel.
Linus Pauling's going to be in attendance. This is going to be uncomfortable for everybody. Alabama takes a long look at this and.
Says, Thanks, it's a hard pass, all right. So just back to that prank. This is before computers. How did Caltech students pull this off? Well, if I had a better technical background?
I could explain it, but it's a kid who knows electrical engineering far better than I could explain it. But they snuck into the Rose Bowl the night before and rewired the scoreboard. And apparently with. I think it was an FM radio signal because it was wireless, it just wasn't encrypted, but they managed to essentially reconfigure what the Rose Bowl said.
And they had Mit getting beaten in the Rose Bowl by Caltech. They also famously hacked the.
Card display in the stadium, so you would turn the card and it would have a letter on it, the aggregation of cards would form a letter. And they hacked it one time, and it was on national television, to the great embarrassment of the Rose Bowl and the television network.
Yeah, that was the UCLA student section, they did that and then a third time. And this is why it's so important to take Caltech into account because their student body. This isn't a one-off. They do this a lot. One year, they snuck in the night before, dug up the 50-yard line and put a weather balloon in there that was radio activated. So that late in the game it blows up.
And again, it says something against MIT. But they've got to literally remove this device from the playing field and redo the playing surface. Because Caltech students have once again disrupted the Rose Bowl.
I hope and trust that all of those pranksters are now owners of Silicon Valley billionaire companies. I'm sure Caltech had a kind of mixed feelings about what their students were doing, because what a way to show the genius of these students.
This may just derail the conversation entirely. But Caltech has an annual event. I don't know what it's called, but it's essentially Prank Day, where the underclassmen prank the seniors. It's an annual event. It's so embedded in their student culture there.
One kid disassembled a guy's car and put it back together in his dorm room one year.
Dave, We have about eight minutes here.
You find this whole Rose Bowl saga in itself a window on America.
Yes, the genius, if I dare call it that of Kurt's scheme, is that he picked the one game that everyone in America paid attention to in the 1940s, 50s, 60s. And no doubt it always has the highest ratings. I can remember distinctly growing up in upstate New York, in the shadow of Syracuse University, where the great Jim Brown and Ernie Davis and Floyd Little, all those great African-American players played. I remember the local controversy about whether Syracuse was going to play in the Cotton Bowl against the segregated Texas, or in the Sugar Bowl against the segregated Alabama, etc.
The Rose Bowl. It was the one athletic event, with the possible exception of the Kentucky Derby, that your average person on the street paid attention to. Heavyweight fights occasionally might have reached the same status. It's come down a lot since that. I think clay my biggest takeaway from this. And I told Kurt that you like to tease me about my enthusiasm for sports and whatnot. But here's where the intersection that matters to me is this. Kurt has a line in his book where he refers to the cultural elevation of football.
It was, in fact, the cultural elevation of football that created the fulcrum, the crucible. Whatever metaphor you like, it's what brings attention to these larger issues. I mean, it's not a coincidence, I don't think that people like a Jackie Robinson, a Kermit Alexander. Later, in another environment, another book, another conversation, maybe during March Madness time, with Kurt, a Bill Russell.
It's not everyone's cup of tea again, mixing metaphors, but it's the one thing the great mass of American people follow every once in a while. The 1968 Olympics, the 1962 Rose Bowl, things kind of come together in an athletic environment. I would go so far, Kurt, as to say that without that particular cultural elevation of athletics, college football. In this case, that maybe we don't make as much progress on these broader issues as we otherwise would. Because the athletic contests and their milieu have a way of crystallizing the.
Cultural moment. Let me ask that question in a different way. Kurt. I've been thinking about this all hour. Do sports in this way, and we're talking about collegiate football today. Do they lead these social movements? do they follow these social movements?
Or do they normalize the change? I think they normalize the change, and I think that's a good distinction to draw. Certainly, you can look at Jackie Robinson integrating Major League baseball before Truman's executive order that you mentioned, certainly, long before the Supreme Court weighed in, and well before Congress began legislating. That. The thing about sports that I always as a fan of UCLA growing up, Jackie Robinson was....
The same way that Catholics hung a portrait of John Kennedy and Jesus next to each other, Jackie Robinson and my family had that perspective. You have to keep in mind, I think that while sports can force some issues. Ultimately, when you look at deep, far-reaching social change. I think you have to examine what causes a society to abandon values that it has held unchallenged and collectively for decades. Certainly, the question of race in America fits that category. Sports allows that society consumers, for lack of a better phrase, what the historian Andrew Doyle has called psychic compensation. In other words, they may still be racist, but it's their team that's now winning with Black players and so they're willing to make that concession.
It's a step in the right direction. To use Clay's phrase, it normalizes, in this instance, what might be law, or what might be already considered through outsiders to be acceptable behavior. It allows them to tolerate that because they get something out of it. The conversation in civil rights often is the look at the resistance to white Southerners. Because integration at first is perceived as an entirely negative connotation, store owners don't look at it as an increased customer base.
Municipalities don't look at it as having a applicant pool for law enforcement positions. It's always what's being done to us. In this instance, sports allows even racist white Southerners to get something to get, as I said, psychic compensation. I think that makes it an easier needle move than a legislative or a judicial.
ResPonse That's a brilliant comment. Thank you so much. I want to come to it again. Psychic compensation.
With the election of Barack Obama, a veil was lifted and we saw how profound the residual racism is in the country. When you look at this today, when you see highly integrated sports—in fact, African Americans dominate several of the collegiate sports—.do you see that as still psychic compensation? In other words, a garden-variety southern white racist can sort of make an asterisk or an exception when it comes to a football team or a basketball team. Or has there been a much greater sense of generosity, of spirit?
Oh boy, that's a complicated question, I would say. I think it's fair, for starters, that we can accept that the average garden-variety racist is statistically likely to be located anywhere in the United States.
The only thing I can really say, with a sense of professional authority, is if you look at the marketing difficulties that the N.BA has. No sport, I think, is more dominated by Black athletes and Black coaches, and a Black sort of cultural sensibility than the NBA. And the athleticism is unparalleled. And yet, the N.B.A. seems to struggle still with a broader cultural consumer audience. And I have no empirical data. But my sense is, I think there are a lot of white sports fans who just can't bring themselves to find that much enjoyment in the NBA. Because race is ever-present. And I think, in credit to the N.B.A. more than any other league, they have leaned harder into the contemporary issues regarding race and social justice.
I mean, they're not spotless. They got themselves into trouble with the influence of one of the N.BA owners in having Chinese business interests, for example. But they responded far more admirably regarding social justice protests than say the NFL did regarding.
Colin Kaepernick.
Yeah, Dave, we're almost out of time. I want to ask you sort of the same question. I grew up in western North Dakota, we had two television stations, Black and White television, got up to change the channel. It was a very homogenous culture in that day, and still in North Dakota, one of the least diverse states.
The first African Americans I ever saw, I saw on black and white N.B.A. basketball broadcasts. And I remember asking my father to explain this. And this was like a revelation because we would not have had. On evening television, there were no African Americans on the Tonight show, there were almost never any African Americans. It was a white pop culture at that time.
Things have changed, of course, dramatically. But I remember during the protests over proper deportment, over the star spangled banner recently. In football, many, many white people saying, Shut up and dribble, shut up and dribble, shut up, and.
Dribble, That's why we have you. Well, my reflections are personal, they're not scholarly based like Kurt's. I'm just simply pleased that I was able to, for my own idiosyncratic reasons, read Kurt's book and brought it to your attention. Clay and your audience here with Listening to America.
But as I said earlier, I mean, I grew up 30 miles west of Syracuse. I remember this. I kind of have almost a fan's perspective, kind of personal reminiscence take, rather than a scholarly one like Kurt's or yourselves. But, you know, some memories are just hard to erase. I can remember watching intersectional football games as they called them back in the day.
And the reason they were a big deal, in part, wasn't merely East and West, but because of the racial backdrop and the burgeoning civil rights movement of the 60s. But I can remember, gentlemen watching football games. Ole Miss would score a touchdown and the cameras would pan the stadium, and you'd see hundreds of Dixie flags, Southern Confederate Battle flags flying in the stadium. And this is 1960 1961, and I'm thinking, this isn't right. And I knew the history of Syracuse football, the trouble they would have when they would play Southern teams.
So it's kind of a lived memory for me. And again, putting it in a fan's perspective to this day. Because some legacies, some memories, are kind of seared in you. I'm not making any pretense to having suffered the racial discrimination African-Americans did, but because of my affinity with their cause, to this day, I cannot root for an Alabama or an LSU Georgia. Those memories still burn.
And Kurt has a term about Western exceptionalism, referring to the more liberal outlook of Western universities, UCLA being the paramount. So I'm glad that my affinity is with that more salutary tradition than the Southern football, but that's kind of my personal.
Reflection on this larger story. We have to leave it at that. Kurt come back. We're going to talk about March madness, apparently, so this is great.
Thank you everyone. We'll see you next week for another important edition of Listening to America.
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