Seven

Filling a Need

In 1874, American professional baseball, still in its infancy, organized a tour of England and Ireland. The group was led by Harry Wright, manager of the Boston Red Stockings, who proclaimed that the purpose was to showcase the game and the “virtues of the American way.” The tour, featuring players from the Red Stockings and the Philadelphia Athletics, failed to generate much interest or revenue and was considered a failure.¹

After that tour, which Spalding helped arrange at the request of Wright, Spalding was of the view that baseball’s roots lay in England.² But the constant assertions of a British origin by Henry Chadwick, who by 1881 was editing Spalding’s popular baseball guides, so irked him that he sought American roots. A rising tide of American national pride no doubt played a role in his change of heart and in 1888 he decided to organize another world tour to again spread the gospel of American values and of its game. As Spalding’s biographer Peter Levine put it, “although less aggressive and more modest than other late-nineteenth-century adventures in American imperialism, Spalding’s gambit clearly aimed to extend an American presence in the world.”³ Besides, by then, baseball was his business, and he was determined to travel as far afield as Australia, he told a reporter, “for the purpose of extending [his] sporting goods business to that quarter of the globe and to create a market for goods there.”⁴ Baseball had been very good to Albert Goodwill Spalding and he was going to use the game to further his sporting goods empire.

The tour lasted from October 1888 to April 1889 and included players from the Chicago White Stockings, of which Spalding was president. He also brought along players from other National League teams so the Chicago team could play against a league all-star league team as the tour circled the globe. They headed to San Francisco, playing a number of games between themselves and exhibition matches with local teams along the way before sailing for Australia. After finding mixed results Down Under, the tour visited Colombo, Ceylon, for a heat-shortened game before continuing west to Egypt and a game beside the pyramids in Cairo. Italy was the next stop, where a game was played in Rome, but Spalding failed in his efforts to arrange an audience with the pope and a game in the ancient Colosseum. Then the tour traveled north for games in Florence and in Paris. Crossing the English Channel, Spalding’s “All Americas” played 11 games in England, Ireland and Scotland, where the reception was warm for the players, but less so for the game they played. On the bright side, they met and played before British royalty.

On April 6, 1889, the tour sailed into New York harbor, having played 42 games around the globe before about 200,000 people during the previous six months. Parades and banquets greeted the returning heroes and Spalding soaked it all in. He told a reporter that after meeting royalty, seeing the sphinxes, admiring the beauties of Paris and sampling worldly delights, “I am proud to be called an American.”⁵

A highlight of post-tour celebrations was a gala all-male banquet held at Delmonico’s banquet hall in Manhattan on April 8. Delmonico’s, the most fashionable restaurant in New York, staged one of the most elaborate events in its history for the globetrotters. On hand were 300 celebrities, including Theodore Roosevelt, the author, adventurer and former New York State assemblyman who was a rising star in Republican politics and still a dozen years and an assassin’s bullet from the U.S. presidency. Also present were Mark Twain and famous actor DeWolf Hopper, known for his theatrical performances of “Casey at the Bat,” who recited it yet again.

The host of the event was A.G. Mills, the former president of the National League and a good friend of Spalding. He saluted the players that night as “gladiators ... covered with their American manhood.” Mills insisted that the game they played for the world to see was baseball and that “patriotism and research had established that the game ... was American in origin.” His assertion drew thunderous applause and chants of “No rounders! No rounders! No rounders!”⁶

Twain, whose days as a cub reporter in Virginia City were long behind him, delivered a rambling but well-received speech in which he spoke about the Sandwich Islands, now known as the Hawaiian Islands. He praised the ballplayers for having “ploughed a new equator round the globe, stealing bases on their bellies.” Twain declared that they had “carried the American name to the uttermost parts of the earth—and covered it with glory.” The now-famous writer saluted baseball as “the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive, and rush, and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century.”⁷ Twain’s apparent enthusiasm for American expansionism was in stark contrast to the strong anti-imperialist tendencies he was developing. In just a few more years he became prominent in a movement that decried American imperialism. Meanwhile, Roosevelt, a fellow diner that night, would soon become a leading proponent of pushing American interests far beyond its borders.

The final stop was in Chicago, where the city feted Spalding and the sports entrepreneur drank in the praise and tried to overlook the fact that he had lost $5,000 on his world tour.⁸ Despite the financial setback, Spalding took heart that his missionary effort to link baseball to American interests in the minds of the outside world had met with some success, even if other countries failed to embrace the game itself.

But Spalding was increasingly confounded by the ongoing claims about baseball’s parentage from his editor, Henry Chadwick, who insisted the game was derived from rounders—despite those loud chants at Delmonico’s. The doughty Chadwick could have been fired by Spalding, but Spalding kept him on. In the ensuing years, as the United States shifted its gaze to matters overseas and became determined to advance its national interests, Spalding grew ever more determined to prove that baseball was an American invention.

Chadwick, as we have seen, used the 1903 edition of Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guide to espouse his view that there was “no doubt” baseball’s predecessor was rounders. In late 1904 or early 1905 Spalding came up with the idea of establishing a commission, a specially appointed group of men to pursue the origins of the game and prove its American conception. He carefully picked its members in a bid to ensure that its findings would coincide with his own opinion. To act as secretary and solicit information from the public, he appointed James E. Sullivan, president of American Sports Publishing Company, publisher of Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guide. As such, Sullivan had been his employee. Spalding persuaded A. G. Mills, his longtime friend and former president of the National League to chair the commission. Also named to the group was Morgan G. Bulkeley, first president of the National League in 1876, and Nick Young, the first secretary of the league, who followed Mills as its president. Rounding out the group were former star players Al Reach and George Wright (and more recently, business associates of Spalding). United States Senator Arthur P. Gorman, who had been associated years earlier with baseball in Maryland, was also appointed but died before the commission could issue its findings.⁹ With this group, chaired by Mills, who had declared back in 1889 at the Delmonico’s banquet that “patriotism and research” had already established America’s claim to the game, Spalding was certain his friends and associates would see things his way. Then, when the commission reached the pre-ordained conclusion, Spalding could claim that his view had been endorsed by a blue-chip panel that had left no stone unturned in its efforts.

Spalding, in his continued speeches and newspaper articles, asked listeners and readers to submit their early memories of the game to commission secretary Sullivan. Over the next two years, hundreds of letters and documents were received by the commission. It was relatively early in the existence of the inquiry that Abner Graves spied Spalding’s appeal in the Akron newspaper. It’s not known when Spalding first saw Graves’s letter, but historian David Block surmises it must have been forwarded by Sullivan to Spalding at his new home at the Theosophist colony in Point Loma, California, an article appeared in a Theosophist newsletter there in August telling the Cooperstown story. The article noted that the late Abner Doubleday, the Civil War major-general and prominent Theosophist had named, invented, and developed baseball. And it attributed the revelation to Denver mining engineer Abner Graves.¹⁰ The Theosophist newsletter quoted from Graves’s letter and also reminded readers of the significant contribution to baseball made by another well-known Theosophist, A. G. Spalding. It was no doubt Spalding who leaked the Graves letter to the publication.

The same day the story about Doubleday appeared in the newsletter, Spalding fired off two letters drawing attention to it. He sent one to an old-time player, Albert Pratt, in upstate Ticonderoga, New York, to see if the Cooperstown story rang true to him. The other went to Sullivan at the Special Base Ball Commission, urging him that the “Doubleday Cooperstown tip is worthy of careful investigation and corroboration.”¹¹

For some reason, Spalding took several months before contacting Graves about his story. He had ready access to Graves’s address through his man Sullivan, so perhaps Spalding was waiting for some sort of confirmation from old-timer Pratt, who lived about 140 miles northeast of Cooperstown. Or maybe he was awaiting something supportive of the Graves tale in the hundreds of submissions that Sullivan was going through. Nothing materialized.

In a letter dated November 10, 1905, Spalding advised Graves that he was seeking further information about the Cooperstown story. The letter asked the question: “Who was Abner Doubleday?” Spalding knew full well that Graves had claimed it was the Civil War major-general, so it would seem to be a strange question. Unless, of course, Spalding was feigning ignorance as some sort of test of Graves’s mind. Spalding then asked for Doubleday’s age at the time of the embryonic game. And he sought clarification of the year because Graves’s reference to the “log cabin and hard cider campaign” of General William Henry Harrison meant that it could have taken place anywhere from 1839 to 1841. “Could you give me the name and address of any persons now living in Cooperstown, New York City, or elsewhere, that could substantiate your recollections of Doubleday’s invention or his first introduction of the game of Base ball?,” he asked. Spalding also wondered if Graves could share any more recollections that he may have omitted from his letter.¹²

Graves didn’t waste any time in replying. In a letter dated November 17, 1905, he responded that he believed all the players from 65 years ago were dead, except for two aged men, one living in Cooperstown, the other in Cleveland. Graves added that there was virtually no chance any diagram made by Doubleday had survived. He recalled that Doubleday was about 16 or 17 years old and living in Cooperstown when he invented the game. Graves also claimed that he remembered a game in which the inventor played catcher for Otsego Academy. Doubleday, he wrote, drew a diagram of the positions in the dirt for Graves and some other boys who had been playing marbles in front of a tailor’s shop. The mining engineer failed to clear up any confusion about the year and provided little more about Doubleday. He concluded with an editorial comment: “Just in my present mood I would rather have Uncle Sam declare war on England and clean her up than have one of her citizens beat us out of Base Ball.”¹³ Graves may have been referring to Henry Chadwick and his rounders theory. While Spalding likely admired Graves’s patriotism and determination, he was doubtless unhappy that the response failed to provide any corroboration for his tale. Graves did include a diagram he created to show “Abner Doubleday’s plan of ‘Base Ball,’ made in Cooperstown, N.Y. 1839 -40 or -41.” It showed eleven men and their positions on a diamond-shaped field. Five of them were infielders, three at the bases, with shortstops between first and second and between second and third base. Also depicted were a pitcher, a catcher and four outfielders.¹⁴ The game had all the hallmarks of the New York game played at the time.

Another letter written by Graves about the same time describing Doubleday’s invention of the game appeared in The Story of Cooperstown, a book published in 1917 by Ralph Birdsall, Rector of Christ Episcopal Church in Cooperstown.¹⁵ It is unclear how Birdsall obtained the letter or whether it was sent to Spalding, but it contains further information that Graves felt compelled to share about Doubleday. According to Birdsall:

“Abner Doubleday,” writes Graves, “was several years old than I. In 1838 and 1839 I was attending the ‘Frog Hollow’ school south of the Presbyterian church, while he was at school somewhere over the hill. I do not know, neither is it possible for anyone to know, on what spot the first game of Base Ball was played according to Doubleday’s plan. He went diligently among the boys in the town, and in several schools, explaining the plan, and inducing them to play Base Ball in lieu of the other games. Doubleday’s game was played in a good many places around town: sometimes in the old militia, or training ground, a couple of hundred yards southeasterly from the Court House, where County Fairs were occasionally held; sometimes in Mr. Bennett’s field south of Otsego Academy; at other times over in the Miller’s Bay neighborhood, and up the lake.

“I remember one dandy, fine, rollicking game where men and big boys from the Academy and other schools played up on Mr. Phinney’s farm, a mile or two up the west side of the lake, when Abner Doubleday and Prof. Green chose sides, and Doubleday’s side beat Green’s side badly. Doubleday was captain and catcher for his side, and I think John Graves and Elihu Phinney were pitchers for the two sides. I wasn’t in the game, but stood close by Doubleday, and wanted Prof. Green to win. In his first time at bat Prof. Green missed three consecutive balls. Abner caught all three, then pounded Mr. Green on the back with the ball, while they and all others were roaring with laughter, and yelling ‘Prof. is out.”¹⁶

While Spalding may never have seen this letter, its style suggests that it was, in fact, penned by Graves. And, with a local man of the cloth quoting from it, it would seem to be genuine. For his part, however, Spalding must have felt that there was little more to gain from additional correspondence with Graves. There was no further exchange between the two men and Spalding looked in vain for corroboration. In the end, he set aside any misgivings he might have had and accepted Graves’s story about the game’s invention by an American military hero and fellow spiritualist.

Throughout 1906, Sullivan continued to receive letters from old-time ballplayers and writers recalling the early days of the game. Among the submissions received were some insisting that the game was American, but none of them provided any proof. One such letter came from John M. Ward, a former shortstop for the New York Giants, who had participated in Spalding’s 1888–89 World Tour. He based his opinion on interviews with old-time players. Henry Chadwick gamely laid out his rounders theory yet again, although he must have sensed that the fix was in and that his boss’ hand-picked commission would never accept it. The work of the commission continued, but no bombshells or revelations were unearthed as the months dragged on. A three-year mandate had been given the Special Base Ball Commission when Spalding set it up in early 1905, so a report was expected by the end of 1907.

In July of 1907, with the deadline looming, Spalding put his own oar in the water with a long letter to Sullivan at the commission in which he denounced Chadwick’s rounders theory and endorsed the Cooperstown tale of Graves. “I am very strongly inclined to the belief that Cooperstown, N.Y., is the birthplace of the present American game of Base Ball, and that Major General Abner Doubleday was the originator of the game,” he wrote.¹⁷ He sent the letter from his home in Point Loma. He did not disclose his connection to Doubleday through the Theosophists. This was unlike the course taken by his friend Mills, who freely conceded his personal ties to Doubleday. In his final report on behalf of the commission, published in Spalding’s 1908 Guide, Mills readily admitted his relationship with the Civil War hero through the Grand Army of the Republic.

In October, commission secretary Sullivan sent a package of selected submissions to committee members to get their thoughts as the inquiry began to wind down. He described it as “the gist of the information so far received” and it included the letter from Abner Graves. Sullivan asked members to be discreet as they pondered the materials:

There is considerable public interest in this question, and to avoid premature publication and discussion I would suggest that this whole matter be treated in confidence until a decision is finally reached, and then it can be promulgated in some systematic way that will be satisfactory.¹⁸

There is little doubt that the “systematic way” had already been decided by the puppetmaster on behalf of the commission. The findings would be published in the next Spalding Guide, which is exactly what happened in the spring of 1908. In the end, it was left to lawyer Mills, the old friend of the late major-general, to write the report of the commission’s findings.

* * *

The push to cast baseball as a product of American ingenuity came as the nation was trying to redefine itself in increasingly urbanized and industrial times. Life was becoming complicated. Questions arose about how to cope and answers were sought in new directions. Many of them were provided by reformers known as progressives. The Progressive Era, as it was known, began in about 1890 and lasted about 30 years. It promoted the value of education and scientific methods in history, economics and political science. The era saw efforts to eliminate corruption in politics and steps toward busting or regulation of trusts. Social and moral reforms were pushed, as well as improved working conditions, a ban on child labor and introduction of food inspection. Progressives challenged the old ways of doing things and sought a better way. A muckraking press helped them expose inequities and abuses committed by governments and business.¹⁹

Baseball’s popularity grew rapidly during the Progressive Era as millions flocked to the ballparks. One observer described the connection between the country and the game this way:

The Progressive ethos framing baseball’s emergence as a national sport was of inestimable value in establishing baseball’s status as a cultural icon. Baseball grew up with America’s cities, its teams becoming a focus of civic pride and energy. At the same time, baseball’s fields and parks, the leisurely pace of the game, and its becoming an outdoor, daytime spectacle invoked rural and pastoral associations that were particularly evocative to a generation of Americans confronting an increasingly urbanizing and industrializing environment.²⁰

The country had become more complex as agricultural and rural interests gave way to the rise of cities and industry. Americans, no longer tied to the land and farm animals, had more leisure time to pursue and follow sports. Baseball was there for them and it hearkened back to simpler times. When a story emerged that baseball had its roots decades earlier in a small town in upstate New York, Americans embraced it. It was perfect. It made so much sense and it filled a need in the hearts and minds of those who heard it.

 * * *

That Spalding, Mills and his fellow commissioners would be anxious to conclude that baseball was purely American was no surprise, given the rampant jingoism and patriotism of their time. America was on a roll and baseball was its game.

In 1901, when Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in as president upon the assassination of William McKinley, he became the most powerful man in what had become the most powerful nation on earth. As one of his biographers noted:

For several years both he and the world had been aware that the United States was the most energetic of nations. She had long been the most richly endowed. This first year of the new century found her worth twenty-five billion dollars more than her nearest rival, Great Britain, with a gross national product more than twice that of Germany and Russia. The United States, with seventy million citizens, was already so rich in goods and services that she was more self-sustaining than any industrial power in history.²¹

America’s manufactured products were shipped around the world and Wall Street was booming as investment flowed in from Europe. “Even the Bank of England had begun to borrow money on Wall Street. New York City seemed destined to replace London as the world’s financial center,” it was noted.²² So it wouldn’t do that the popular national pastime of this robust new world power was derived from a game played by English schoolchildren. Just as Daniel Webster had sought to make the language of the English more American, Spalding and company felt the need to ensure baseball had an American identity. America was emerging as a military power and tying baseball’s birth to an American military leader like Doubleday was just what the country needed. As one writer explained the situation:

Besides the military connection, the Doubleday story also helped the U.S. dispel its lingering sense of inferiority to Great Britain. In the absence of having a native language and people (with most Indians now killed off), having a homegrown sport was important for America’s national identity. And beyond shaking off inferiority, baseball’s creation tale was instead used to proclaim America’s superiority.²³

So it was important for America to lay claim to its favorite sport as the nation arrived on the world stage. Increasingly, militarism and expansionism fit the mood of the day. The country was awash in pride over the swift and successful Spanish-American War of 1898, when Teddy Roosevelt and his volunteer Rough Riders captured San Juan Hill in Cuba. That war provided overseas possessions in the Philippines and Puerto Rico and, for a brief time, Cuba. An assertive president was in the White House and he was outward-looking. Roosevelt took steps to dramatically expand the navy, he took over construction of the stalled Panama Canal and he mediated a peace treaty between Russia and Japan and a dispute between France and Germany over Morocco. He espoused the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine of years earlier, which had insisted that no European nation should intervene in the Americas. His corollary reasserted that no European nation had any business interfering in countries to the south of the United States, but added that, under certain conditions, American intervention might be warranted. He settled the lingering Alaska boundary dispute with Britain and he ordered the voyage of the Great White Fleet, the first circumnavigation of the globe by any country’s naval forces. When he was U.S. Assistant Navy Secretary in the 1890s, Roosevelt readily conceded that he was an expansionist, but had rejected the derisive “imperialist” tag bestowed by people like Mark Twain and the Anti-Imperialist League. Roosevelt was forging a new, more aggressive role for America in the world and he enjoyed wide public support.

When American forces went to other lands, they took baseball with them. The game, which had been played by soldiers during the Civil War, became incorporated in military programs and into military education at West Point and the Naval Academy. The annual Army-Navy baseball game began in 1901.²⁴

Baseball’s connections to the military had been recognized long before Spalding touted them in America’s National Game, where he argued: “Base Ball is War!,” adding pointedly, “The founder of our national game became a Major-General in the United States Army!”²⁵ Surprisingly, one of the first had been Henry Chadwick, the Brit, who in 1889 published How to Play Base Ball and laid on the military metaphors with a literary shovel. The prolific sportswriter wrote about a “well placed attack” in the game, with tactics drawn up and co-ordinated by the captain or “commander of the field.” Chadwick noted that the battery of pitcher and catcher is “what the battery of a regiment is to the line of the infantry.” The pitcher, he wrote, fires at the opposing team’s “home base.” Chadwick insisted that the success of the “field corps” (infielders) depends on the ability of the catcher “to stand the hot fire of the pitcher’s delivery.” For his part, the batter faces “hot fire courageously” from a pitcher who wants to “capture” him.²⁶ Little could Chadwick have known that he was helping to prepare the ground for a story about an American origin of the game in which an American military leader would get credit for inventing it.

Chadwick went on, noting that to win games, teams must become “a nine who work together with machine-like unity ... [making practice a] kind of West Point drill.” He also observed that, like soldiers in a long war, baseball players prevail in pennant races who “can best stand the costly wear and tear of the campaign.”²⁷

In 1906, the Chicago American observed: “Baseball is one of the reasons why American soldiers are the best in the world—quick witted, swift to act, ready of judgment, capable of going into action without officers.”²⁸ It was not the first time sport was linked to military exploits. Rugby played on the fields of Eton had been credited with forging the character of British soldiers.

Writer C.H. Claudy issued a book in 1912 called The Battle of Base-Ball, in which he likened baseball to war and its players to soldiers. “Base-ball is a battle,” he wrote. “It has its generals, its captains, its lieutenants, its rank and file. It has its grand strategy, its tactics and its drill. It has its battlefield, its arms and its equipment.” He went on:

In war the individually brilliant and brave man frequently performs some remarkable act, and lives forever as a hero, as Pickett at Gettysburg, or Hobson at Santiago harbor. [Richard Hobson, a rear admiral was decorated for his courage at the Cuban harbor during the Spanish-American conflict.] But it is the men who think first of the good of the entire army, and the success of the campaign, who win the battles.... Just as the nerves of an army are its signals, so the nerves of a base-ball team are its signals or signs by which the captain or manager directs the play, and by which players inform each other what is about to be done.²⁹

Claudy, Chadwick and Spalding reveled in the military metaphor, which today may seem foolish since another American sport is far more like war. Baseball, in retrospect, seems an odd sport to connect to war. After all, how many military victories have claimed by an army that ran around in more circles than the enemy? And where the object of the game is to successfully reach “home”?

Football would seem to be a more fitting sport to be tied to the military. Its players wear helmets. Football teams march down the field to take territory from the enemy. They have on-field generals in quarterbacks and they clash in hand-to-hand combat, not unlike trench warfare. Over the combatants’ heads, the quarterback may throw a “bomb” during an aerial assault. Football is a game of gaining territory to reach a “goal.”

George Carlin, the late American comedian, made these hilarious but insightful comparisons between the two sports:

Baseball is a nineteenth century pastoral game. Football is a twentieth century technological struggle. Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park. The baseball park! Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.... In football, the specialist comes in to kick. In baseball, the specialist comes in to relieve somebody. Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, piling on, personal fouls, late hitting and unnecessary roughness. Baseball has the sacrifice.³⁰

Carlin went on to observe that football is often played in dreadful weather, while baseball games are cancelled if it rains. He noted that military lingo pervades football in phrases like “blitz” and ground attack” and in punching holes in defensive lines. Meanwhile, the object of baseball “is to get home, safe.”

So why did the military embrace baseball—not football—as America strode onto the world’s stage? The simple fact is that baseball was ready; football wasn’t. Baseball had been played professionally since 1869 and by 1901 the two major leagues drew 3.6 million spectators. By 1905, when Graves wrote his letter, attendance had grown to nearly six million. Baseball was booming, just like the country. Football, however, was struggling to survive. A game played at colleges and by amateur clubs, the game was still evolving and would not become professional until the 1920s. By 1905, when the Cooperstown baseball story surfaced, there were calls to ban football entirely because that year saw 18 players die, three of them at the college level. In addition, another 159 were injured, some of them paralyzed.³¹

Football was a violent, brutish sport at the time. As far back as the 1820s Americans had played the game. Princeton and Harvard students played early variations of football and, although it faded out for a time, it returned after the Civil War. For several decades the game was rife with brute force that was used to break up offensive formations. Rutgers, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell and Harvard were all fielding teams. As a young Harvard freshman in 1876, Theodore Roosevelt saw his first football game when Yale prevailed over Harvard. Roosevelt remained a fan of the game for the rest of his life, although the athletic but slightly built and bespectacled man never played it.³² In late 1876, the Intercollegiate Foot-Ball Association was formed to create a standardized field of play of 140 yards by 70 yards and establish universal rules. (Until then, captains met before games to set the rules for the match.) Football at the time bore little resemblance to the game of today. Rugby-like scrums were used, but eventually a line of scrimmage was developed and the position of quarterback created, although no passing was allowed. The concept of “downs” was eventually adopted. As experimentation continued, the flying wedge was adopted as a mass formation to move the ball forward. By 1893, Harvard was using 60 variations of it. But the formation took a toll on the players it mowed down because they wore virtually no protective equipment.

Some colleges began talking about banning football because of the frequency of serious injuries and some newspapers backed the call. Even longtime fan Teddy Roosevelt realized that there was a problem, but he didn’t want it banned. “The brutality must be done away with and the danger minimized,” he wrote in Harper’s Weekly in 1893. “The rules for football ought probably to be altered so as to do away with the present mass play, and, I think, also the present system of interference, while the umpires must be made to prevent slugging or any kind of foul play.”³³

Charles Eliot, president of Harvard, Roosevelt’s alma mater, was a constant and harsh critic of the game. In an early 1905 article titled “The Evils of Football,” Eliot wrote that he disliked how it made otherwise civil men behave. He denounced the roughness of a sport that saw players “disabling opponents by kneeing and kicking, and by heavy blows on the head and particularly about the eyes, nose, and jaw.” Eliot despised its war-like quality: “The common justification offered by these hateful conditions is that football is a fight; and that its strategy and ethics are those of war ... the barbarous ethics of warfare.”³⁴

When it appeared that the threat to football’s continued existence was real, Roosevelt summoned representatives of Harvard, Yale and Princeton to the White House in 1905. He urged them to take steps to reform the game, so as to make it safer, rather than face a ban. In early December, thirteen institutions gathered to consider changes and on December 28, 1905, in New York City, a larger gathering of 62 college and university officials was convened to undertake reform. This group would become the National Collegiate Athletic Association.³⁵ Roosevelt, by intervening when he did, is credited with saving football as a sport by using the same powers of persuasion that allowed him to mediate a peace accord between Japan and Russia at roughly the same time. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for that effort a year later.³⁶ It was ironic that the warrior of San Juan Hill was an international peacemaker at roughly the same time that he was fighting to keep gridiron warfare alive domestically.

A rules committee brought in changes intended to reduce deaths and injuries in football. These innovations included introduction of the forward pass, doubling to ten yards the distance needed to gain a first down and a ban on all forms of mass formation and gang tackling. Injuries were immediately reduced, but deaths, after a dip to eleven in 1906 and 1907, increased to 13 in 1908 and spiked at 26 in 1909, with ten of those victims being collegiate players. It took many years before deaths were brought down significantly and permanently.³⁷ So while decidedly more warlike than baseball, football was still experiencing major problems that caused it to run afoul of college administrators, the muckraking press and others.

Roosevelt and others of his day viewed baseball as “too soft,” something Spalding seemed to acknowledge. However, “the Doubleday myth allowed the sport to fight back. It helped baseball establish its military credentials and sign on for empire,” Robert Elias asserts in The Empire Strike Out. He cites baseball historian Harrington Crissey’s take that although “serious baseball research has refuted the [Doubleday story, it did] not diminish the relationship that developed between baseball and the military over the last century.”³⁸

Elias went on to describe the symbiotic relationship between baseball and a newly confident nation at the outset of the twentieth century this way:

Baseball signed on early in support of America’s imperial ambitions, partly because it had similar aspirations. The sport was drafted by the nation’s empire builders, and it also eagerly enlisted. As the United States has projected its dominance worldwide, baseball lent a hand—bolstering the military, boosting the nation’s global reach, and proselytizing for the American way. As the United States expanded, conquering new frontiers, so did baseball. Each found multiple uses for each other. And for the most part, all seemed well.³⁹

Baseball had aligned itself with American interests generally and with the American military in particular. Given this relationship, when Abner Graves came up with a story about a Civil War major-general inventing the game, its appeal was irresistible. Baseball needed the Doubleday story and it filled an even deeper need in America.