they wanted to get her out not for economic reasons but for social and cultural reasons because they tried to tell women you are just a parasite, your life is not accomplishing anything, the only way to have fulfillment is to be independent of men and have your own career. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. next on booktv john miller recounts president theodore roosevelt's role in the real image of football which save the sport from being banned and led to the creation of the national collegiate athletic association, the n.c.a.a.. this is about 40 minutes. >> if you are wondering what kind of knucklehead puts out a book about football at the start of baseball season, the answer

is the same kind of knucklehead who is a lifelong fan of the detroit lions. the good thing about being a lifelong fan of that detroit lions is the experience teaches important life lessons. for example, how to deal with severe and ongoing disappointment. i have learned that humor helps. who knows the difference between the 4 lions and a dollar bill? it turns out that from a dollar bill you can get four quarters. i will be performing all week. let's talk about football and theodore roosevelt. i would like to start with a statistic. 18 people died playing football in 1908. in 190518 people died playing football. we hear a lot today about the problem of concussions and head

injuries and long term health impact. this is a controversy in football today but it has nothing on the challenges the sport faced a few centuries ago. let's go back in time. in 1876 theodore roosevelt attended his first football game. he was an 18-year-old freshen who got on a train with a bunch of friendss and they went to newhaven, connecticut where they watched the second ever football game between harvard and yale. in the history of college sports there are a lot of great rivalries. michigan has ohio state. the heritage foundation has the brookings institution. harvard has yale. the ivy league had an athletic conference. in 1876 they play their second

ever football game. weather was loudly. it was cold. the winds were so strong bishops couldn't leave the harbor. roosevelt shivered and as he watched the game, the sport he saw was quite different from the one we know today. there were no quarterbacks. there were no wide receivers. no forward passes. football was in its infancy. before play began the captain from the two teams met to discuss the rules they would play bar. what would account for a score? how many people would be on the field at a time. they were like school kids at recess talking about where the sidelines would be, what is a played touch or tackle. this is what they did before that game. when it came to football, yale was the student. a few years before that game in

1876 harvard sand yale and elongated ball because until that time the yale team had been practicing with a spherical ball like a soccer ball. harvard said we will play with it. is shaped like a watermelon and the yale players didn't know what to do so they discussed fundamentals like you kicker this on the end or in the middle, they just didn't know. before the game started when the captains met on the field, harvard's veterans agreed to a couple proposals that the yale team put forward. the first would have the lasting impact on how football is played and they have 11 men per site. until that .15 was the custom. this was the first game that had 11 men and that continues today. the second suggestion would not shape the future of the game but would affect the outcome that

day. they decided touchdowns would not count for points. they give you an opportunity to score points. you score a touchdown you would get six points. you get no points but an extra point attempt. the kick after the goal alliance the score. the game gets underway at harvard scores a touchdown but don't get any points. they make their kick attempt and miss. no points at all. at halftime it is a scoreless tie. second-half start, jerrell comes out and drive into harvard territory. date lanky freshman named walter camp, important name in the history of football was a player today. tried to sever the ball backward. those funny hops that football can take and confuse the most

veteran player and take one of these and oliver thompson decides to take a chance. he puts his foot to the ball, kicks from 35 yards out and an improbable angle and the ball sales over the rope to the upper right so yale has a score. it is 1-0 yale and how the game ended. 1-0 yale over harvard. harvard's loss frustrated roosevelt. in a letter to his mother he didn't say whether he enjoyed himself. the future president, no inkling of future popularity of football and couldn't anticipate a critical role he would play in the game's future but he did give voice to the frustration we all know of the agony of defeat. i am sorry to say we were beaten he wrote to his mother, because our opponents played very foul.

in a moment i will talk about teddy roosevelt but i would like to say a few things about why football matters to me personally and to americans generally. i met my wife on the way to a football game. we walked from our dorm to michigan stadium. that was my first clear memory of her. we didn't start dating until basketball season. our bond was formed out of mutual love of the maize and blue. college football goes back further with my father saying hail to the victors as a boy. we would talk about the carter era. we were not talking about a troubled presidency in the 1970s but a time when anthony carter wore a winged helmet and scored touchdown passes under the watch of coach both shin letter of precious memory. when i attended my football

games in michigan as a student along with my future bride and 100 closest friends it dawned on me that these games are not just pieces of mere entertainment. they are more than athletic competitions. they are cultural events of deep significance. they can unite a diverse campus of english majors and engineering students. they can bring a state together. black and white. white-collar engineers, lunch bucket guys. football can bring them all together. conversations about the team our social icebreakers and the rich rodriguez year is over. it can bring people together the way a few other things can. love for a college football team weathered is the texas long

horns or the hillsdale chargers is almost tribal. whatever its origin, it has the power to form lifelong loyalty and passion. when i hear the michigan fight song i get a chill down my spine. close cousins of patriotism, this feeling. on a brisk autumn afternoon, my three made a legionss to god, family and football. objectively speaking football is an awesome sport. no other game has such a combination of brute force and pure grace, 99 yard sprint, crashing bodies of a line of scrimmage and cheerful choreography of three men on the field. the infantry combat of a rushing attack. there's a strong intellectual dimension as well.

baseball may baskets reputation as a surreal pastime but the sport demands more meticulous planning or quick calculation than football. this is not the 4 players and fans but for the coaches and arm chair generals who can guess there every decision. little wonder that football has become the most popular sport in the united states. millions of kids play under friday night lights. millions more fans fill up stadiums and watch on television on fall weekends. americans are more likely to know the name of their favorite team than the congress men. there is a good case to be made to have their priorities straight. football occupies a central place in our lives yet there was a moment when football almost was taken away from us. time when its very existence was in mortal peril. there wasn't excess of

prohibitionist that tried to ban the game. they objected to its violence and the favored solution was to smother a newborn sport in its cradle. had the enemies of football gotten their way they might have erased one of america's great pastime's from our culture. it was a remarkable effort of the roosevelt, one of america's extraordinary men. modern controversies are with us. year-ago time magazine put a deflated football on its cover with the headline too dangerous for its own good. then there's the to statistic i share earlier. 18 people died playing football. the sad thing is this was not unusual. it was normal. every year this kind of thing was going on. a dozen or more people would die. more suffered grievous injuries.

this also affected big-time college football. players at the university of georgia and virginia, they died playing football. football isn't the contact sport. it is a collision sport. this was true in its early years. football -- this was true back then. according to the rules compress the game's action to a small area rather than spread across the field. it looks more like rugby than what we know today. it is almost a series of goal line stand that the 50 yard line over and over again as bodies clashed and gravel without the benefit of protective gear. the era of leather heads lay in the future. nobody wore hats -- that was just coming in to practice.

in the frequent pilots it in from referees players would wrestle for advantage by throwing punches and jabbing elbows. remorse and sporting participants would try to gouge eyes. bruises, sprains and other injuries were taken for granted. more serious impairment of like cracked bones and knocked heads caused greater concern but generally accepted as unfortunate byproducts of an entertaining and demanding past time. the deaths were the worst. they weren't just freak accidents, as much as the inevitable toll of an activity -- they crash into each other over and over in the course of an afternoon. and ordinary tackle could be life-threatening calamity when the hard thrusting me of a ball carrier hit the head of a guy trying to tackle him. this slaughter horrified group of activists who crusaded

against football. they wanted not merely to remove violence from the sport but to ban it altogether. at the dawn of the progressive area the prohibition of football became a social and political movement is most outspoken proponents included harvard president charles w. eliot. frontiers caller read university of wisconsin professor frederick jackson turner. muckraking journalist and even the aging confederate general john mosley. the new york even post attack the sport. so did the nation, an influential magazine of news and opinion which worried colleges were becoming, quote, huge training ground for young black leaders around him as many spectators wore as ward in a roman amphitheater. the new york times be mowed football's trend toward mayhem and homicide. two weeks after printing those words the times ran a new editorial that the headline was

two curable evils. the first they addressed was the launching of blacks in the south. the second was football. the main figure in this movement to ban football was charles eliot, president of harvard. he was the single most important person in the history of higher education in the united states. we think of harvard as a great american university. a lot of that goes back to charles eliot and what he did over the course of four years while he was president of the college. he was to harvard what ed fulmer was to the heritage foundation. he was president for four years, longer than anybody before or since and radically rearranged the way harvard educate young people. he introduced elective courses, started professional school, eliminated compulsory worship. the list of his reforms is long. he also headed team sports. what bothered him most was

competition and how motivated players conduct themselves in ways he considered unbecoming of gentlemen. if baseball and football were honorable past times, why did they require umpires and directories? a game that needs to be watched did not fit genuine sportsmen he once said. he thought a baseball pitcher throws a curve ball engage in the act of deception which was treacherous. ..

he is the closest thing football has to a founding father. he invented the position of quarterback, the concept of possessions and down and line of scrimmage and formations, the way the game was sport on virtually every aspect of football camp left his mark. he was also a great salesman of this board who wrote books and newspaper articles to promote the game and make it popular. he and a journalist collaborated to invent the idea of the all-american, a term familiar now but once that didn't exist before them. one of his primary motivations was to anchorage controversy about who should he on the all-american team each year so we help make football not only great game to play and watch but he also made a it a great game to discuss and debate. in the rivalry between elliott and camp, we see one of the ongoing conflicts in american politics on the display. a fight between the progressives and their dreams of a world

without risk and the resistance to this agenda. eliot and the progressives identified a genuine problem with football that their preferred solution was radical. they wanted to regulate football out of existence because they believed its participants were not capable of making their own judgment about the cause and benefits of the game. instead elites would relieve players of the burden of choosing to play or not to play. they would take away the freedom to play and ban the sport for the sake of its players. into the struggle steps theodore roosevelt, one of the most remarkable men to walk across the stage of american politics. as a boy he grew up with a terrible handicap. he suffered from chronic asthma. he was so sick that any of his relatives wondered if he would survive into adulthood at a time when it was not uncommon for children not to survive into adulthood. his parents were so desperate to cure his asthma they tried everything they could think of resorting even to tears like having a poor kid smokes sigars.

nothing worked. eventually, his folks concluded that teddy simply would have to overcome his disability. there is a story in which the father summons the boys. theodore he says you have the mind that you have not the body and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. you must make your body. upon hearing this teddy threw back his head, flashed a toothy grin and said i will make my body. he was about 11 years old when that happened. soon after he began to exercise in the gym mack. later on he took boxing lessons and the hunted. he really did make his body. the asthma would stay with him them for years but eventually it would slip away, the way asthma often does and by the time he was an adult it was largely gone. for roosevelt the lesson was a commitment to physical fitness to take a scrawny little boy and turn them into a vigorous young

man. has roosevelt was coming to believe this he was also becoming a fan of football as were so many other americans. roosevelt remained a fan as he graduated from havard, enter politics, branched out west and became an increasingly visible public figure. in 1895, shortly before he became president of the new york city police commission, he wrote a letter to walter camp. it is a great letter and i'm going to read 300 words from it. here is what he said. i am very glad to have a chance of expressing to the obligation which i feel all americans are unfair to you for your championship of athletics. the man on the farm and in the workshop here as in other countries is apt to get enough physical work but we are attending to produce sedentary classes, almost like he is worried about too much video game watching. in part of this the athletic spirit has saved us. of all games i personally like football the best and i would

rather see my boys play it then see them play any other. i have no patience with the people who declaim against it because it necessitates a rough play and occasional entries. the roof play is confined within manly and honorable limits is an advantage. it is a good thing to have the personal contact in which the new york evening post snarled, to know fellow is worth his salt of the that the mines and occasional bruise or cut. being nearsighted i was not able to play for all in college and i never cared for rowing or baseball so i did all my work and boxing and wrestling. they are not up to football. i am utterly disgusted with the attitude of president elliott and the havard faculty about football. i do not give a snap for a good man who can't fight and hold his own in the world, citizen has got to be decent of course. that is the first requisite but the second and just as important as he shall be efficient and he can't be efficient unless he is manly. nothing has impressed me more in meeting creole its registered a

15 years i've been out of college than the fact that on average the men who have counted most have been those who had sound bodies. roosevelt saw football as a diversion. he saw it as a positive social good in it believe there's so much that in 1898 when he was recruiting the rough riders, you know the story. he won out to san antonio to sign up a bunch of cowboys and westerners to join the rough riders. if you read his memoirs it is true. he signed them up. well, he thought it would give them the experience of athletics and college and give them the stuff that would take to win a war in cuba. the duke of wellington reportedly once said that the battle of waterloo was won on the playing fields of eaton. roosevelt never said anything quite so pithy about the battle of san juan hill but when he emerged from spanish-american war as a national hero one who

was talked about his possibly presidential timber, he knew how much he owed, not just to the rough riders but to the culture of manliness and risk-taking that had shaped them. like roosevelt our society value sports, though we don't always think about why or why we should. my kids have played football, baseball, hockey, soccer, lacrosse and as a family we are fairly sports oriented. oriented. does force me to think about a question a lot of parents probably have asked at one time or another. why do we want our kids to play sports? why not let them spend more time in front of the tv or studying ancient greek literature? a lot of parents will reply with the obvious that sports are good for fitness. they will also discuss the intangible benefits of learning about teamwork, building character and things like that. it turns out that there really is something to all this. empirical research shows us that

kids who play sports stay in school longer. as adults they vote more often. and as adults they earn more money. explaining why this is true is trickier. but it probably is something to do with developing a competitive instinct and a desire for achievement. roosevelt was probably correct in believing that sports influence the americans are much more likely than europeans to play sports. we are also more likely to attribute economic success to hard work as opposed to lock. it may be that sports are a manifestation or possibly even a source of american exceptionalism. in 1899, roosevelt wrote a kids version of his famous speech on strenuous life, probably the most famous speech he ever gave. he wrote a kids version of this for a magazine called saint nicholas. he described how a boy can "grow into a kind of american man of

who america can be really proud." for roosevelt this meant playing sports. quote the great athletic sports had an excellent effect in increased manliness. he singled out the roof sports for their development of pluck endurance and physical fitness and he concluded with a direct reference to what may be regarded as the roughest sport of all. quote, in short in life as in a football game the principle to follow is hit the line hard, don't file and don't shirk it hit the line hard. that was his advice for kids. soon enough roosevelt became one of the hardest hitting chief executives ever to occupy the white house. his overall political legacy is mixed, but he was unfailingly colorful. as roosevelt presided in washington, football remains controversial and havard's elliott continued his crusade for prohibition.

in 1905 roosevelt was persuaded to act. he invited walter camp of yale to the white house and also the coaches from havard and princeton. these were the three biggest college football programs at the time. a lot has changed since then obviously that those are the three biggest programs of the times. invites them to the white house for football summit. football is on trial said roosevelt in their private meeting. because i believe in again, i want to do all i can to save it. he encouraged the coaches to eliminate mortality and they promised they would. whether they really meant it is another matter. walter camp didn't see anything wrong with the way football was played. he practically invented the game in over the years he tweaked the rules and he thought he'd gotten things just about right by 1905. he was very happy with the way football was. havard coach however was a young man named bill reid. he took roosevelt more seriously. as a havard man reed understood the threat to football

differently. he knew that elliott still wanted to eliminate the game and within weeks of meeting roosevelt came to fear eliot was on the verge of success at havard. this almost certainly would have encouraged havard to drop the sport and other colleges to do the same. they were all looking to havard for leadership. this would have endangered the future of foot wall and america reed thought. so at the end of the 1905 season read plotted with a group of reform minded colleagues to form an organization that today we know of as the ncaa. the approved a set of sweeping rule changes to reduce football's violence. in committee meetings reed outmaneuvered camp and receive critical received critical behind-the-scenes support from roosevelt. that off-season football experience an extreme makeover. the yardage necessary for first down increase from five yards to 10. the rulemakers also created a

neutral zone at the line of scrimmage limited the number players a good lineup in the backfield, and made the personal file i have fully penalized infraction. one of my favorite rules is the -- they a and the tossing of all carriers. no longer could you throw guys across the line. these were important revisions but the one that would transform the sport was the advent of the forward pass because up to that point for all with the game of running and kicking. there was no passing. there were quarterbacks but there were no wide receivers. for four years, number football men had wanted to introduce the forward pass and among them was a coach named john heisman. but camp had always blocked him and a rule of committee that he dominated. this changed after roosevelt's intervention. bill reed's committee decided to permit the forward path and in order to open up again. it took them a few years to get

the rule right. coaches and teams didn't always know how to take advantage of the latest revision. they also make football more aerodynamic, turn them from watermelons into the shape of football we know today. eventually however it all clicked. in a november 1, 1913, football moves irreversibly into the modern era. army, the u.s. military academy, west point, had one of the best teams in the country. they were considered real national championship contenders that year. on a saturday afternoon they were scheduled to play a game against a little-known catholic school from the midwest. army wants big score read the headline in "the new york times" that morning. it was going to be a blowout. just like the michigan played appalachian state a few years ago. [laughter] well you can probably guess the rest of the story.

the little-known catholic school from the midwest was notre dame. rodney and his teammates launched football's first true airborne throwing again and again for receptions and touchdowns. day 135-14. the westerners flash the most sensational for all that has been seen in the east this year -- "the new york times" the next day. the army players were hopelessly confused and chagrined before notre dame's rate playing in their style of old-fashioned line smashing play was no match for the spectacular and highly perfected attack of the indiana collegians. a cadet named dwight eisenhower watched from the sideline. he played for the army team but he had an injury that day and couldn't perform. everything has gone wrong he wrote to his girlfriend. the football team got eaten most gloriously by notre dame. before then no one had really heard about notre dame before. after then everyone knew notre

dame as a foot ball powerhouse. when you think of notre dame today it started with that very game. with a game foot football also g first chapter came to a close and the game we enjoy today the distinctively american game was born. violence in football didn't and. the sport solve this problem and improve his quality of the same time but nobody speaks of prohibiting football any more. anymore. many influential people did and theodore roosevelt stepped in and played an unheralded but critical role in the sports development and preservation. i think is a general rule we don't want our politicians thrusting themselves into our sports. the only thing that can make the championship series worse is congressional oversight, right? but, the example of roosevelt does show that a skillful leader

ken use a light touch to solve a vexing problem and with the nfl season threatened by a blackout and maybe even cancellation this year, who doesn't wish that football had a teddy roosevelt today? decades after roosevelt's involvement and football, bill read the havard coach hailed his role. except for the chain events there might now be no such thing as american football as we know it he wrote. u.s. mayweather president theodore roosevelt helped save the game? i can tell you that he did. theodore roosevelt took on many rolls in american life. war hero, trustbuster, canal builder, dig stick wielding diplomat but he deserves another title as well. he may have been football's most indispensable fan. thank you. [applause] >> i know john will take

questions from you. it is interesting to hear roosevelt with a light touch. surprisingly. i also thought immediately in the beginning of your detroit lions discussion that they epitomize the definition of insanity as i always understood it. just keep doing the same thing but expecting a different result. the redskins are getting close. if you do have any questions for john please raise your hand. the microphone will come to you in if you will be so kind as to state your name and affiliation if you would like him, it would be appreciated. lessons from the football audience? >> thank you very much. my name is bill. you mentioned that the ncaa was born out of this meeting? >> yes. >> excuse me, i'm sorry. the other sports, long afterwards? >> so, so, so football is governed by a rules committee for many years. robert camp helped organize and dominated through the 1880s

and 1990s and it was a rule of committee that had representatives from the major schools and they would every winter -- they would meet and they would tweak the rules and develop the sport basically. well, in 1905, bill reed decided that, with some other figures in higher education, they decided you know, this rules committee is not going to change anything about football. they are not going to do what needs to be done so they created a separate organization and try to sign up other, a number of colleges to join it so briefly there were two organizations competing for members and so on. reed got havard to join. harper joining with the help of roosevelt too was critical to its so it became the dominant organization. a few years later, it renamed itself the ncaa and overtime it

there is a lot of ongoing research in this area, debates about equipment and tweaking the rules. the nfl just changed its kickoff rules. they are going to kick off from the 30-yard line. they move to five yards. there'll be more touchbacks in fewer kick returns in kick returns are famously dangerous place. so they are doing things like that and there are controversies about, what was the organization that criticize super bowl for domestic violence increasing on super bowl sunday? i think that was shown to be not

true or at least unproven but football does come under attack. there are people who don't care for it, and that they are not going to stop football the way these progressive era prohibitionists tried to do and may have succeeded in doing if it hadn't been for these innovations. >> do we have another question? if not, any final comments other than i will sell the book for you? we do have copies of the book available in the lobby. i know john would be glad to sign them and talk to you further about this topic. thank you for your attention and we hope to see you again here at heritage. [applause] >> for more information visit the author's web site, hey

miller.com. >> booktv wants to know. >> i'm reading ulysses by james joyce. i started that on january 1. it is aimed new year's resolution of mine to plow through that book. by june 16. that is the date the whole bilk is both around. bloom is the central character. at the chapter to go. i don't recommend it. it is a classic but it is impenetrable, very hard to read but i will get it done. also, the summer i will be reading founders which is a book about those who are part of the american revolution. not a lot of new ground plowed but very interesting story so looks good to me. two books by patrick o'brian, master of commander in the far side of the earth, which is what was put together to make the master and commander movie starring russell crowe. i loved the movie and want to read the books now. the other book i will be reading is called sword an honor which

is a compilation of military stories, some commission some written about the time of 19th century 19th century battles in the napoleonic wars, the zulu wars in the civil war so i will be reading this summer. >> visit booktv.org to see this another summer reading lists. >> if you had walked on the streets of philadelphia, if you walk down the streets of new york in the 1850s and asked somebody what is the most pressing problem facing america at this time they would have told you it is the sectarian complex, the fact that catholics are trying to take over. they're trying to take over america. and there was a rumor that the pope was going to come and establish headquarters in cincinnati. [laughter] now why cincinnati i don't know. at the same the pope would have better sense than that but nevertheless, this was the rumor and he was going to establish its headquarters at the jewish hospital in cincinnati. [laughter] and you get this connection as a

conspiracy and americans love conspiracies. this was part of the conspiracy. so, so far we have nothing about slavery, right? i mean these guys are bent on destroying the roman catholic church and there is one minister who said exterminating roman catholics. so, thomas nath, the german protestant immigrant came over and he was one of the great political cartoonists of the day in the 1850s, 1860s. he gave a santa claus. he gave us the democratic donkey and the republican elephant and here he has a cartoon. of course many people couldn't read in those days but they could in fact understand cartoons. here he has a cartoon which shows, you may think these are crocodiles coming ashore but actually they are -- of the

roman catholic church and they're coming to take her children. in the background is not the white house but st. peter's cathedral. although you can't see it, appear it says timothy hall and tammany hall is the democratic party organization of new york, and thomas nast was a republican. republican party was the first major evangelical party in america. it was founded in 1854 and it rocked together the anti-catholic wing of the party with the anti-slavery wing. and here is the anti-catholic wing of the party. the american patriots. it was a party newspaper for the american party which eventually folded into the republican party. they are opposed to pebble -- papal aggression. they are posted foreigners holding office, opposed to none

or a aries and the jesuits. opposed to secret foreign orders and so on. they wanted to restrict immigration but particularly restrict the rights of roman catholics to vote and to hold office. now, the republican party was the offspring of these two strains, the anti-slavery strain and the anti-catholic strain. when i say antislavery, keep in mind that the republican party, most of the people in the republican party did not care about slavery where it already existed. they wanted to keep the territories light. they wanted to keep the slaves out of the territories, so white men could have opportunity there because they believed that anyplace where slaves go, whites cannot compete obviously because slaves don't take wages. so the republican party held

itself and billed itself as the white man's party. here you have abraham lincoln and he is debating steven douglas in that famous 1858 senatorial campaign. the republican party's slogan that year was vanquished the twin despotisms, catholicism and slavery. again, going hand-in-hand. now i should tell you in full disclosure that abraham lincoln was not a religious ticket. went back to hated religious bigotry that but he swallowed the republican party line, because it was very effective among the republican party base. if you know you have heard politics, get out the base, get out the base. the republican party base were partisan workingmen and the cities and they were prophets in the small towns and farms across the northeast new england and the midwest. this resonated to this

constituency and anti-catholicism. linking campaigns lincoln campaigned under that slogan and 1858. >> you can watch this and other programs on line at booktv.org. >> we asked, what are you reading this summer? here is what you had to say.