1927 and the Rise of Modern America

by Charles Shindo

  As the brawling champion met the intellectual challenger, “things went so much according to plan that they were almost unexciting to me,” recalled Tunney (162). The 1926 match validated Tunney’s belief that a good boxer could beat a good fighter; that training, study, and planning could defeat strength, natural ability, and a killer instinct. But while the result of the fight was in Tunney’s favor—both in victory and in validation—the public favored Dempsey. Sportswriters and fans alike criticized Tunney for being “sneaky” and suggested that there must have been a fix on the match for Dempsey to lose to Tunney. In victory, Tunney confidently asserted that he had known all along that he would win; in defeat, Dempsey simply told his wife that he lost because he “just forgot to duck.” In his press statement he simply said, “I have no alibis to offer. I lost to a good man.”59 The simplicity of Dempsey’s remarks contrasted with the perceived arrogance of Tunney’s aloofness and reinforced the popular appeal of a working-class Dempsey over a middle-class Tunney, and many people were convinced that, had Dempsey not taken so much time off since his last championship defense (three years), he would have beaten Tunney. Less than a month after their fight, both Tunney and Dempsey attended a fight as spectators. Dempsey was greeted by loud cheering that lasted for minutes, while Tunney received “scattered cheers mingled with boos.”60

  What Dempsey had, and Tunney did not, was charisma, an attractive personality, or what Hollywood called “it.” Dempsey was admired by fans not just because he won fights but because of his celebrity, a celebrity based on accomplishment and personality. While Tunney was the more accomplished, in terms of boxing knowledge and skill, and the victorious head-to-head in the ring, Dempsey was the bigger celebrity, the bigger draw, and the crowd favorite. Realizing the attraction Dempsey held for fans, promoter Tex Rickard devised a plan in which Dempsey would have to earn a rematch with Tunney by defeating the lead challenger for the title, which meant holding several elimination bouts to see who would fight Dempsey. The interest in the road to a rematch built as Jack Sharkey won the right to face Dempsey in the summer of 1927. Their fight, the first nontitle fight to earn gross gate receipts over a million dollars, was as big an event as the 1926 Dempsey-Tunney title fight. When Dempsey knocked out Sharkey in the seventh round, a rematch was assured.

  Rickard planned the rematch for Chicago instead of New York because New York had no stadiums large enough to hold the anticipated crowd and because the New York boxing commission limited the prices charged for tickets to boxing matches in the state at $27.50, even though spectators paid black marketeers up to $200 for a seat. Rickard selected Chicago’s recently constructed Soldier Field as the site of the rematch. Dempsey had earlier drawn criticism for not participating in the AEF during the Great War, even though it was the machinations of his manager—unwilling to lose his chief championship prospect to the trenches of Europe—who obtained a deferment for Dempsey to work in a war industry instead of enlisting. Denouncing Dempsey as a slacker, four of Chicago’s aldermen protested the staging of the fight at Soldier Field, built as a memorial to the men who had fought and died in the war, but these protests did not deter the promoters or the spectators. Rickard brushed off these protests by saying, “That war-record business is old stuff. The war is a long way behind us.”61 And ticket sales did not lag either, with total sales of over $2.5 million—the largest amount paid for a sporting event, and perhaps any event, up to that time.62

  Politicians, film stars, athletes, industrialists, and royalty packed the stadium around the ring, and the hundreds of members of the press corps covered the fight. Radios across the nation tuned in to the fight, as did those who could receive strong broadcast signals as far away as England. Even convicted murderer Ruth Snyder, in Sing Sing prison, listened through an open door between the women’s and men’s cell blocks. What they witnessed and heard was a former champion better trained and prepared to meet his opponent, but Tunney’s boxing skills still frustrated the powerful Dempsey. By the end of the sixth round, Dempsey had not landed enough punches to win many rounds, and most observers understood that he would have to knock out Tunney if he were to regain his title. In the seventh round Dempsey let loose a barrage of right-left combinations that left Tunney stunned and fallen on the canvas. Dempsey, in his usual manner, stood close to his victim, hoping to hit him as soon as he rose, forgetting the change of rules brought about by those actions. Referee Dave Barry directed Dempsey to move to the far corner, but Dempsey did not move. “I couldn’t move.” he later said “I just couldn’t. I wanted him to get up. I wanted to kill the sonofabitch.”63 Barry then took Dempsey by the arm and escorted him to the neutral corner. By the time the referee got back to where Tunney sat, four seconds had elapsed, but instead of picking up the count at five, Barry began at one. Tunney, listening to Barry, waited until he reached nine before standing, as any intelligent boxer would, in order to rest. As a result, Tunney was able to recover for thirteen seconds before regaining his feet and resuming the fight. For the remainder of the round, Tunney fought a defensive retreat, forcing Dempsey to use what strength was left in his legs. Dempsey motioned Tunney to stop running and fight, but by the end of the round Tunney had regained his bearings and energy and was able to take the offensive in the next round and command the fight for the remainder of the ten rounds and win the decision.

  The end of the fight, however, did not mean an end to the speculation over the fairness of the fight and over who was the better man. Debate filled the pages of newspapers and countless discussions. Columnist John Kieran wrote in the New York Times, “There was hardly as much arguing over the recent result of the late World War as there is over the more recent Tunney-Dempsey quarrel in Chicago. Most of it is quite interesting, but practically all of it is useless.”64 And while the fight may not have revealed who was the better athlete, it does give us some insight into the era and the nation. The New York Times felt it was noteworthy “that people will contribute about three million dollars to see two men fight for something less than forty-five minutes” and stated further: “[The fight] will not only be an index of the prosperity of the period, but it will reveal to the historian how much the twentieth century American was willing to pay for a thrill.”65

  The Tunney-Dempsey fights, especially in the media characterizations of the fighters and the descriptions of the bouts, reinforced the conflicts of the era. According to historian Elliott J. Gorn, “Each boxer came to represent key values in American life, and the two men together in the ring symbolized central tensions and contradictions of the 1920s.”66 For Gorn, Tunney represented both the Victorian values of a self-made man—perfecting himself through education, perseverance, and self-restraint—and the ideals of the modern corporate order: a scientific approach to problem-solving, the use of experts and the techniques of psychology, and a sense of being a part of a larger endeavor, primarily a result of Tunney’s Marine Corp background. “As a symbol, the Fighting Marine affirmed that America’s past and future were of a piece, that virtue and self-reliance could still thrive in a technocratic environment.”67 Much like Charles Lindbergh, Tunney represented the best of the past and of what the future had to offer. But Tunney was popular not primarily for what he represented but, rather, as a foil to all that Dempsey represented. His celebrity “came largely as a result of his being matched against Dempsey.”68

  Whereas Tunney represented an urban Victorian past, Dempsey represented a rugged pioneer past, reinforced by his western birth and work as a miner. As such, Dempsey was seen as a bit of an outlaw, someone who, by virtue of his abilities and temperament, was dangerous. He “made no effort to hide his connections with a loose-moraled, thrill-hungry, big-spending crowd.”69 His fighting style reinforced this image as he fought with an animalistic power and drive, especially in comparison to Tunney’s studied approach in the ring. But Dempsey’s image and style did not express just a frontier past; it also contained valuable insights for the present. Dempsey fought from the heart, not the head. He fou
ght because he loved the ring, unlike Tunney, who fought as a way to earn big money so he could unashamedly ask for the hand of his sweetheart, an heiress. That difference is why Tunney was able to give up the ring as champion—he defended his title once more in 1928 in one of the few bouts that cost Rickard money—while Dempsey continued to fight over a hundred exhibitions in 1931 and 1932. Audiences stayed away from a championship fight when the champion was seen as a cold, calculating machine. These were the aspects of modern life people feared, while they reveled in the midst of raw natural ability and power exhibited in a man who loved what he did, things that could not be quantified, learned, or re-created by science. Dempsey and Tunney illustrated this conflict in modern America. According to Gorn, “bringing Dempsey and Tunney together in a single ring transformed abstract norms into emotionally satisfying drama, converted a conflict of values into a palpable physical struggle, fused symbols, metaphors, and blood into messages mere words could not convey.”70 This drama, Gorn notes, is in itself simply one of many diversions that people used to cope with the increasing rationalization of modern society, and while it may contain positive elements of modernity, it is in its entirety a means of escaping modernity through entertainment.

  Another sporting diversion that developed into a multimillion dollar industry was college football. “More than any other sport,” writes historian Michael Oriard, “football embraced the competing values of the modern and the antimodern,” as illustrated in the portrayal of college football in the popular media as something different from professional sports like boxing and baseball.71 In the 1920s, football was predominately a college game. The newly formed National Football League did little to remove the impression that professional football was a disreputable activity. Unlike baseball, which began as a club sport in cities, football began as an extracurricular activity in the Ivy League, primarily at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. The connection of football with elite institutions (even after its spread to state universities and religious schools) and with young men in a transitional period of their lives reinforced ideas about the amateur nature of the sport. Sportswriters portrayed football as an educational experience, like college itself, teaching young men cooperation, courage, camaraderie, and competition while fostering pride in one’s alma mater, all characteristics associated with traditional values. This focus on the team aspect of the sport meant more attention was paid to the coaches than to individual players and had to do both with the philosophical belief that the team was more important than any individual and with the practical realities of a somewhat more permanent coach and transitory players. In addition, the youth of the players encouraged sportswriters and audiences alike to view them as boys being led by an adult coach, students being taught, boys learning to become men. Not only did sportswriters view the coach as the adult spokesman for the team, but they also developed personal relationships with coaches, who through interviews, press passes, transportation to games, and other perks, made the sportswriter’s job much easier.

  College football benefited from the idea that what the audience was seeing was not something strictly created as an entertainment for paying customers but, rather, a battle between two schools and all that those schools represented. As a result, college football was seen as a traditional activity with traditional ends, the education of boys in how to be men. Much of what reporters wrote about college football reinforced this theme by taking much of what occurred on the field out of its immediate context of a big-time, money-making entertainment and placing it in a context of mythic proportions. Grantland Rice pioneered this tendency to see college football in a mythic context. Under the headline, “Notre Dame’s Cyclone Beats Army” in the October 19, 1924, edition of the New York Herald Tribune, Rice wrote:

  Outlined against a blue-grey October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army football team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds yesterday afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down on the bewildering panorama spread on the green plain below.72

  This is more than a report of an entertainment, or even a gentlemanly match between rivals; it describes a struggle between life and death. This is melodrama at its most extreme, and while it is entertaining in itself and effective in conveying the drama that took place on the field, it is not the most effective way of describing what actually occurred and what it all means. Many people and institutions profited from this melodramatic rendering of college football. Sportswriters became celebrities as they flexed their literary muscle, the subjects of the sportswriters’ melodramatic prose gained significance far beyond their achievements, and the demand for college football games and coverage grew, as did the receipts taken in by coaches, schools, and such ancillary industries as sporting goods and newspapers and newsreels.

  Though presented publicly as young scholars testing themselves on the field, in reality college football was becoming an industry. Players were a raw material, packaged and sold by the coach and the university, using all the techniques of modern industry, such as marketing, publicity, research, and development. As football spread out of the Ivy League across the country, it still retained many of its elite characteristics, though becoming more a middle-class entertainment than an upper-class one. By the 1920s many universities had made a name for themselves in the world of academia through the promotion of their football teams, most notably the University of Notre Dame, but also Southern Methodist University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Southern California. The popularity and spectacle of college football led to the erection of massive stadiums on and off college campuses to house the crowds and pageantry of the sport. Fifty-five concrete stadiums were built in the 1920s, with some seating more than 70,000 spectators. Cities (Los Angeles, with its Memorial Coliseum; Pasadena, with its Rose Bowl; and Chicago, with its Soldier Field) as well as universities (University of Illinois, with its Memorial Stadium, and University of Michigan, with its Michigan Stadium) created vast grounds for the staging of football games and all the incumbent pageantry. Michigan Stadium was built in 1927, funded by bonds sold to alumni who, as bondholders, could buy season tickets to seats located between the 30-yard lines until the bonds retired. Chicago’s Soldier Field was the scene of two of 1927’s biggest sporting events, hosting not only the Tunney-Dempsey rematch but also the second annual meeting between the football teams of the University of Notre Dame and the University of Southern California, attended by what some claim to be the largest crowd for a college football game ever, approximately 120,000 persons.73

  Knute Rockne of Notre Dame was one of the best-known college football coaches in the 1920s, partly because of Notre Dame’s national Catholic following and partly because of Rockne’s use of the press to promote himself, his team, and Notre Dame. From the early 1920s on, not only was Rockne the football coach and athletic director for the University of Notre Dame, but he also wrote articles and columns for Christy Walsh’s syndicate (Walsh pioneered the profession of sports agent), ran several different summer coaching schools for other college coaches as well as high school coaches, wrote an instructional manual that he sold to students in the coaching school, and organized and ran Camp Rockne for boys. In 1927 he signed an endorsement deal with the Wilson Athletic Equipment Company for “exclusive rights and license to manufacture, sell, and advertise footballs, football helmets, football shoulder pads, football kidney pads, football pants, football shoes, football knit goods, and any other items of football equipment identified by the name, facsimile, signature, initials and/or portrait of said Rockne and/or any nickname which hereafter may be popularly applied to said Rockne.”74 The deal netted him, by the end of the decade, about $10,000 a year beyond the proceeds of his writings, coaching schools, and personal appearances. Rockne also made sure that publicity and pre
ss about him that he did not himself generate would be positive by cultivating contacts with sportswriters and publishers, usually through such favors as complimentary tickets to games and offers of jobs as game officials. In the early days of college football, it was common for the coaches of each team to select the officials, and since there was not a consistent supply of trained officials, many sportswriters (who would be at the games to cover them) made extra money as game officials. Rockne was able to hire those sportswriters who were in a position to give Notre Dame positive publicity. As a result, Notre Dame was often held up as the model of a successful athletic program, not just because the team won games but also because the university benefited from the athletic program, as did the young men who participated in it and went on to become successful coaches themselves. While Notre Dame’s football proceeds did substantially aid the academic agenda of the university, providing the funding for academic construction projects, that benefit was primarily due to the administration’s tight control over the proceeds and the frequent rejection of Rockne’s plans for a large concrete stadium on the Notre Dame campus (a plan he was finally able to push through after a winning and financially successful 1927 season). Most athletic programs did not contribute to the academic mission of their schools, and in many cases cost the universities money. Sportswriters reinforced the belief that college athletics benefited the universities by dramatizing the success of these programs. Rockne became known as a molder of men—particularly ethnic, working-class men with few opportunities but with potential—who profited by Rockne’s mentoring.