Rockne had the unique situation, and its attendant problems and perks, of coaching at a private, religious university not connected to any established intercollegiate league. As such, Rockne and his program were able to weather the forceful criticisms of reformers actively trying to de-emphasize collegiate athletics, primarily through the Western League (what would later officially become the Big Ten Conference). The main thrust of the critique was the commercialism of big-time college football, whose vast profits led to a win-at-all-costs mentality, which benefited the pocketbooks of coaches and athletic departments but did little good for the universities and the students. Most people believed that financial support should be given only to those college students who had earned it through academics, not athletics. And while this was the goal in theory, in practice, most football players received financial support of some kind, whether in the form of a scholarship, a job, or a scam.
The reformers were led by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which in 1924 issued a short report denouncing the “commercialism,” “excessive expenditure of money,” and “too great an insistence on turning out a winning team” evidenced in college sports. Much of the blame, the report stated, should be placed on the coach, who “sets the standards of the whole system of intercollegiate sports and is responsible for many of its most demoralizing features.”75 They followed up this report with a five-year study of the problems of big-time college sports. Yet while the Carnegie investigation sought to uncover the seedy side of college football, its final report did little to reform college football; rather, it served as an observation on an emerging system of subsidized college athletes and on college football as an industry. Much of the failure of the Carnegie report had to do with the timing of its release in October 1929, just as the stock market crashed, marking the beginning of the Great Depression. But the failure of the reformers also had to do with the declining ideal of amateur athletics in a society that increasingly celebrated professionalism, expertise, and specialization. While college football was packaged for the public, by the press, universities, and even Hollywood, as an integral part of college life, it in fact dominated the academic mission of many universities.
Knute Rockne best exemplifies the college coach as CEO of an entrepreneurial enterprise: he cultivated relationships with powerful sportswriters, developed a network of recruiters among former players and influential alumni, and scheduled opponents that helped Notre Dame’s exposure. Rockne’s early teams traveled so much that they were generally called the “Ramblers” or the “Nomads,” before the Notre Dame administration gave official sanction to the name “Fighting Irish.” Rockne established one of the most profitable intersectional rivalries when, in 1926, the Fighting Irish traveled to Los Angeles to play the University of Southern California (USC). This series proved beneficial to both schools financially and in terms of publicity. USC developed into a national football powerhouse as a result of the series, and Notre Dame profited from USC’s close ties with the Hollywood publicity machine. Studios located in Hollywood found USC football an easy and appealing subject for newsreel coverage because of its proximity, the weather in southern California, and the star-studded sidelines. USC football players often found employment in the studios, as stagehands or extras, and one member of the 1927 squad, Marion Morrison, made his career in Hollywood after changing his name to John Wayne. Knute Rockne also attempted to capitalize on the connection between Hollywood and college football by acting in films, but he died in a plane crash in 1931 while en route to Hollywood to sign a $50,000 contract to star in a film version of the popular play Good News. But no star athlete made more of the media, both news and entertainment media, than New York Yankee baseball player Babe Ruth.
the babe and modern celebrity
In the 1920s, while professional boxing gained respectability and college football gained a national audience, professional baseball attempted to regain the respectability and audience it had lost after the 1919 “Black Sox scandal,” in which baseball commissioner Judge Ken esaw Mountain Landis banned from professional baseball eight members of the Chicago White Sox for participating in a scheme to fix the World Series. Not only did professional baseball come under the iron fist of the baseball commissioner, but it also changed from a game focused on pitching and defense to one that highlighted the crowd-pleasing attraction of hitters, especially home-run hitters. Owners increased the possibility of hits by, among other things, eliminating trick pitches, such as spitballs, and using cleaner, more frequently replaced balls during the game. These changes allowed more players to hit the ball, making the game more exciting for spectators and much more profitable for owners. In addition, owners increased their profits by enlarging the capacity of their fields by building stands in the outfield, thus making in-the-stands home runs much more possible and likely. As a result, overall batting averages increased in the 1920s, as did the number of home runs, hits, and runs batted in and pitchers’ earned-run averages. Baseball won back its audience and their respect by making the game more entertaining and dynamic.76
Much of that lost respectability returned in 1927 with the incredible run of the New York Yankees, who won 110 games that season and swept the World Series against the Pittsburgh Pirates. H. I. Phillips, writing in the “gee whiz” style popularized by Grantland Rice, claimed the 1927 Yankees to be “a team out of folklore and mythology.” He described the roster as having “magicians, miracle men, jinns, a Beowulf and a couple of Thors on it.”77 The press dubbed the team “Murderers’ Row” for its punishment of the baseball and its opponents. In strictly statistical terms (another popular method of judgment in the 1920s) the team lived up to much of its praise. The American League’s top four pitchers in winning percentages were all on the Yankee roster (Waite Hoyt, Urban Shocker, Wilcy Moore, and Herb Pennock), as were the league’s top hitters. Earl Combs led the league in base hits (231) and triples (23). Tony Lazzeri amassed the third-most home runs in the league (18) and the third-most stolen bases (22). Lou Gehrig led the league in runs batted in (175), total bases (447), and doubles (52) and was second in base hits (218), triples (18), bases on balls (109), and home runs (47). Babe Ruth was second in runs batted in (164) and total bases (417) and led the league in slugging percentage (with a slugging average of .772), runs scored (158), and home runs (60, breaking his previous record of 59, set in 1921). Many still consider the 1927 New York Yankees the best team in baseball history, but as impressive as the players were as a team, no member of the “Row,” or of professional baseball, was as well known and popular as Babe Ruth.
Born in 1895 to Kate and George Ruth in Baltimore, George Herman Ruth was one of eight children, only two of whom survived to adulthood. Growing up around his father’s saloon, Ruth, as he put it in his autobiography, “was a bad kid.” In 1902 he was declared “incorrigible” and sent to St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, where he would stay, for the most part, for the next twelve years. In early 1914 Jack Dunn, the owner of the minor league Baltimore Orioles, offered Ruth a $600-aseason contract and also agreed to be Ruth’s legal guardian (both his parents had died while he was at St. Mary’s). As Dunn’s “son,” Ruth’s teammates called him “Dunn’s Baby,” which eventually turned into “Babe.” Ruth made a name for himself as a pitcher, but the minor league team was strapped for cash, so Dunn sold Ruth to the Boston Red Sox, along with two other players, for $25,000. In Boston, Ruth gradually transformed himself from a pitcher to a slugger, as well as living the unrestricted and hedonistic life that made him infamous.78
At the end of the 1919 season, Harry Frazee, owner of the Red Sox and a Broadway play investor, needed funds to finance a musical, No No Nanette! so in January 1920 he sold Ruth (by now the biggest star in baseball) to the New York Yankees for $125,000. Once with the Yankees, his days as a pitcher coming to an end, Ruth began a number of record-breaking home-run years that turned baseball from a game of pitching and strategy to one highlighted by strength and home runs. His best year wa
s 1921, when he hit 59 home runs (nine more than any other team’s total), had a batting average of .378, and led the league in runs (177), runs batted in (171), and walks (144, many of them intentional). After the 1921 season, Ruth embarked on a barnstorming tour, as had become customary among big-name ballplayers, who would travel mainly the South and the West playing exhibition games for those who would not normally get a chance to see a major league game. The baseball commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, hired by club owners to clean up baseball after the Black Sox scandal, banned barnstorming as an activity detrimental to baseball and demeaning to professionalism. As a result, Ruth was sidelined for part of the 1922 season, and subsequent seasons were sometimes marred by illness (mainly as the result of too much drinking and sex with prostitutes) and personal troubles (a bookie filed a lawsuit against Ruth for gambling debts owed, and Ruth’s wife, Helen, suffered a breakdown in 1924). Still, he managed to perform in grand fashion until he collapsed during a preseason exhibition tour in 1925. While newspapers proclaimed Ruth’s illness to be “the stomach ache heard around the world,” it is more likely to have been a case of a venereal disease. After a dismal 1925 season, Ruth performed well in 1926, as illustrated by his three World Series home runs in a single game, but many felt his best years were behind him. What was not behind him was his popularity. Ruth had become a fixture in daily American life.
Babe Ruth was, according to historian David Voigt, the most photographed man in the country during the 1920s.79 Newspapers across the country carried stories about him almost daily, even in the offseason, when Ruth would perform on the vaudeville circuit, on radio shows, in newsreels, and in theatrical films. Ruth was able to translate his success on the baseball diamond into mainstream celebrity status rivaling that of Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, and Clara Bow. His widespread popularity was the result not only of his celebrated talent as a slugger but also of his charisma as a showman and the media’s need for exciting and titillating copy. As newspapers reduced the space devoted to national and world issues of politics and economy and increased their coverage of crime, entertainment, and sports, they also shifted away from their nineteenth-century role of local political advocate and mouthpiece and became nationwide commodities searching for a mass audience through syndication. Ruth provided this journalistic shift with “the perfect content for the dailies. Ruth, despite his often questionable behavior, was never politically or culturally controversial. He presented a safe ideology that antagonized few, and, most importantly, he gave New Yorkers and Americans everywhere a sense of national pride.”80 The ideology that Ruth presented to the public was an archetypical rags-to-riches story.
Though it was Ruth’s record in 1927 that brought him acclaim, it was his actions (both on and off the field) that brought him notoriety. He embarked on an approved barnstorming tour with Lou Gehrig and other members of the World Series–winning New York Yankees and released his second film, Babe Comes Home, in 1927. Both events illustrate the role Ruth played in Americans’ adjustment to the modern world. Ruth began filming Babe Comes Home in the winter of 1927 after a post–1926 season barnstorming tour ended in Los Angeles. The film, like his first, Headin’ Home in 1920, featured Ruth as a baseball player; but instead of being a semiautobiographical coming-of-age story like his film debut, Babe Comes Home touched on Ruth’s lessthan-heroic actions off the field. Ruth plays Babe Dugan, a star player with a nasty habit of chewing tobacco, much of which ended up on his uniform. His laundress, Vernie (Anna Q. Nilsson), concerned about his untidiness, attends a game and is struck by a ball hit by Dugan. This incident brings the two together, and after a date to an amusement park, Babe and Vernie fall in love and become engaged. Vernie plans to reform the ball player, especially after a flood of tobacco cubes and spittoons arrive as wedding gifts, but the resulting cleaner Babe is ineffective on the ball field and is benched by the manager. At a crucial moment in a game and in the season, Babe comes to bat after Vernie, realizing her misguided attempt to change her man, tosses him a plug of tobacco; as a result, he hits a home run.81 The film basically forgives Ruth’s off-the-field indulgences because of his on-the-field abilities. Unlike Headin’ Home, in which Ruth plays George Ruth, a sincere but not too intelligent young ballplayer who wins both the girl of his dreams and a big-league career primarily by being a good guy, Babe Comes Home implies that performance on the field is more important than values and behavior.
In these two films (the only two in which he had a starring role), Ruth illustrates the tension present in American society between nineteenth-century Victorian values and twentieth-century modern values. Whereas George Ruth succeeds because he maintains his good character, saving the girl of his dreams from moral disgrace, Babe Dugan succeeds regardless of (and in fact because of) his uncouth manners. George Ruth is good on the field as a result of being good in life, while Babe Dugan is so good on the field that he is allowed transgressions in life, a basic conflict over means and ends and over which one should be the basis for American celebrity. Both films were, at various times, the same stories told about Babe Ruth in newspaper and magazine articles, celebrating his humble origins while forgiving his hedonism, both in explanation of his tremendous talent. For some, Ruth’s talent outweighed any character flaws he exhibited, while for others, his background was what accounted for his baseball success.
As much as Ruth’s actions reflected the carefree lifestyle of the Roaring Twenties, he was, for the most part, a celebrity of the nineteenth century. Ruth’s movies did not do well, primarily because he had no acting ability, and even when he was playing himself, his natural charisma did not translate to film. Neither did it translate well on radio. His manager, Christy Walsh, tried to keep Ruth off the radio as much as possible, never being sure what might come out of the player’s mouth. Grantland Rice recalled an incident on his radio show in which a coached Ruth was to refer to the Duke of Wellington’s famous statement that the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton: “Babe managed to come out with this gem: ‘As Duke Ellington once said, the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Elkton.’” When asked how he had messed up the line so completely, Ruth explained that he did not know Wellington, but he did know Ellington, and that he had been married in Elkton, Maryland, and that was what had confused him (in reality Ruth had been married in Ellicott City, Maryland).82 Ruth was at his best when face-toface with an audience or crowd. He was best seen unmediated by technology, since what people wanted most was to be in his presence. Still, whether on film or not, Ruth was never an entertainer. Having been suspended for the start of the 1922 season for his violation of the barnstorming prohibition, Ruth toured in the off-season in vaudeville theaters. Vaudeville shows, made up of multiple acts, would often use sports stars as a way to attract audiences to the theater. Ruth’s twenty-week, $60,000 contract was one of the longest and most profitable for an athlete, made possible by Ruth’s suspension until late May 1922, but Ruth’s performance in skits and comic banter did not take the stage by storm. While crowds did appear, many preferred to see Ruth in uniform, not on stage. Ruth’s vaudeville tour ended weeks early by mutual consent.
Aside from actual major league games, barnstorming events were the preferred way to see Babe Ruth. Following the Yankee’s victorious 1927 season, Ruth and Lou Gehrig embarked on a sanctioned barnstorming tour from New York to Los Angeles, covering over 8,000 miles, visiting eighteen states, and reaching more than 200,000 spectators. While Gehrig—always the quiet, shy type—shied away from attention and publicity, Ruth devoured it. The tour consisted of ceremonies with local dignitaries, visits to children’s hospitals, photo opportunities at local newspapers, and exhibition games. Most of the games featured Ruth and Gehrig forming opposing teams with local players. The Bustin’ Babes and Larrupin’ Lous would battle it out in front of packed crowds. On many occasions the games could not be completed because of the number of young boys who would inundate the field after a Babe Ruth home run. In some cases, t
he boys were coaxed onto the field by Christy Walsh as a way to bring the event to an end. Ruth never failed to make an impression on the locals, shaking hands and backslapping all the right people. In fewer than three weeks, Ruth and Gehrig played twenty-one games in nineteen different cities. Ruth signed 5,000 autographs (slightly more than Gehrig) and earned $30,000 (compared to Gehrig’s $10,000). In total, Ruth’s official income for 1927 was $180,500 ($70,000 salary from the Yankees, $30,000 for the barnstorming tour, $5,500 as his share of the World’s Series pot, $25,000 from newspaper columns and other publishing projects—none of which were actually written by Ruth but simply used his name—and $50,000 for starring in Babe Comes Home). Unofficially, Ruth may have made almost twice that amount, if one includes public appearance fees, endorsements, investments, his 10 percent cut from Yankees exhibition games, and other undisclosed sources.
Like Jack Dempsey and college football, Babe Ruth benefited from the changing cultural values in 1920s America. While being celebrated for individual achievement within a group context, Ruth utilized the modern media to present to the public a rather traditional tale of humble beginnings transformed to lofty status through talent and perseverance. At the same time that audiences thrilled to the achievements of a self-made man, they were also entertained by the thoroughly modern way in which Ruth lived his life. Ruth was ambiguously modern in that he was still being celebrated for his abilities, which were remarkable, and not just for being a celebrity, but his abilities on the playing field made it possible for him to star in films, on the vaudeville stage, and in print and photographs, for which he had little talent. Dempsey was a much more successful stage act, not only because fewer people had a chance to see him fight than to see Babe Ruth play, making Dempsey a greater novelty, but also because the fighter’s ability to exude his charm on stage and in film was greater than Ruth’s. Though both took advantage of what the modern media made possible, neither was a bona fide crossover success. Other, lesser-known athletes did make successful crossovers—such as swimmer Johnny Weissmuller, who became famous as Tarzan—and are therefore much more representative of the modern era.
1927 and the Rise of Modern America Page 16
