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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
The good things about America, Santayana wrote to Van Wyck Brooks, ‘ are football, kindness, and jazz bands ’. To many this remark would typify the philosopher's lifelong disdain of American life. But Santayana meant his description as a compliment. For he saw football and jazz as manifestations of a healthy spontaneity and goodwill. Of course, there is no question about his ambivalence towards the United States; he loathed what he took to be a lethal presence in the American psyche – a prosaic utilitarianism and moral poverty. Yet he could not write off those qualities that in part redeemed the brave new world: ‘ There is much forgetfulness, much callow disrespect for what is past or alien; but there is a fund of vigour, goodness, and hope such as no nation ever possessed before.’
1 Santayana, George, Character and Opinion in the United States: With Reminiscences of William James and Josiah Royce and Academic Life in America (New York, 1921), p. viiGoogle Scholar.
2 Brownell, Baker, ‘Stantayana, The Man and the Philosopher’, in The Philosophy of George Santayana, ed. Schilpp, Paul A. (Evanston and Chicago, 1940), p. 35Google Scholar.
3 Bowra, C. M., Pindar (Oxford, 1964), p. 184Google Scholar.
4 Even in the early days of intercollegiate football, of course, many charges were made against its violence and ‘ruffianism’. Theodore Roosevelt, himself an ardent sportsman, recalled in the days of his Presidency a particularly brutal Harvard-Yale football match: ‘About the year 1895 I saw the Harvard-Yale football game which resulted in the complete breakup of all athletic relations between Harvard and Yale for two or three years. Each team firmly believed that its opponents had been guilty of every form of misdemeanor, including attempted mayhem … I shall never forget my astonishment when I discovered that old and inti mate Yale friends of mine believed that young fellows whom I knew on the Harvard team, young men of the highest stamp, were brutal creatures with a slightly homicidal cast of mind … In my turn I was equally astonished that certain Yale men who I quite sincerely thought bore characters of almost unblemished ruffianism were, according to my friends' view, singularly high-minded and blameless people …’ [The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Morison, Elting E. (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), vol. VI, p. 1382Google Scholar. ] Yet Mr. Roosevelt, although he often held reservations about the general efficacy of intercollegiate athletics, opposed Harvard President Charles W. Eliot's attempt to abolish football in 1906: ‘I am perfectly willing to say that I think Harvard will be doing the baby act if she takes any such foolish course as President Eliot advises!’ (Letters, vol. V, p. 172.)
5 Many of the arguments used to defend big college football developed early in this century. Although these theories grew more sophisticated in later years, the defence has rested mainly on the premise that football makes money and thereby supports other collegiate programmes, both athletic and academic. Valid or not, the weight of the case seemed to be compelling, and the centres of collegiate football power moved from east to west, perhaps signalled by Army's defeat at the hands of then-unheralded Notre Dame in 1913. Cavernous stadiums were built and the bowl games inaugurated in the twenties as western schools took over dominance of the game: Chicago, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Notre Dame and Stan ford. Amid such proliferating competition, commercialism (‘athleticism’, as Robert M. Hutchins called it) could hardly be denied or its tide stemmed. Hutchins wrote acidly in his famous treatise, ‘Gate Receipts and Glory’ (1938): ‘The apologists of athleticism have created a collection of myths to convince the public that biceps is a substitute for brains’. And probably no leader of higher education was ever more maligned than was President Hutchins after his abolishing of football at the University of Chicago in the 1930s. He had found the colleges guilty of the crass professionalism that Santayana called fatal to boys' games.
As a peculiarly American phenomenon, college football became the chief undergraduate rite of autumn – pep rallies, raccoon coats, corsages, booze in the hip-flask. The Saturday game was at once a vitally electric experience for the students and an old grad's re-play of his clean-cut and unselfconscious youth. Indeed the whole mystique could be celebrated by the literary personification of the age. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in writing stories about football and college life, traded on the bittersweet memories of lost youth. By the 1920s and '30s intercollegiate football had become an American institution.
Of course, Santayana had left America for good in 1912. His memories of athletics at Harvard were unclouded by the rise of later athleticism.
6 Santayana, George, ‘Philosophy on the Bleachers’, The Harvard Monthly, 07 1894Google Scholar, reprinted in George Santayana's America: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Ballowe, James (Urbana, 1967), p. 124Google Scholar. Further page references are given in parentheses in the text.
7 Santayana, George, Reason in Art (New York, 1905), pp. 166–7Google Scholar.
8 George Santayana, ‘Marginal Notes on Civilization in the United Slates’, reprinted in Ballowe, p. 176.
9 Santayana, George, The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (New York, 1936), p. 120Google Scholar. Further page references are given in parentheses in the text.
10 Santayana, George, The Sense of Beauty. Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory (New York, 1955), pp. 18–19Google Scholar