GDG- Football and the Moral Equivalent of War

[Smith David]

Jim Epperson is right, by my understanding.  The Civil War generation,
those who survived unscathed, perceived tremendous value attached to
their experiences that the next generation of young people didn't have.
The camaraderie, the experience of combat, the fear, the digging down to
the depth of your personal resources, the uniting for a common goal -
these were the qualities and experiences they were afraid the next
generation didn't have and couldn't understand.  Many Civil War
officers, like Lee, ended up involved in education or running
universities.  But no one wished for another deadly conflict to teach
those experiences, and in the late 19th century a pacifist movement was
growing, in response to the horrors of war.  So they looked for other
ways in which some of those lessons and qualities might be built.
William James called it "the Moral Equivalent of War" in his essay (his
philosophy supposedly became the basis of national service
organizations).  In a wonderful quote, Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke of
his wartime experiences thusly:  
 
"We have shared the incommunicable experience of war.  We have felt - we
still feel - the passion of life to its top. In our youths our lives
were touched by fire." (Arlington Cemetery web site).  
 
Both Holmes and James were New England Brahmins, but I think the feeling
was widespread. I can't point to one individual who advocated college
football as "the moral equivalent of war," but my understanding was that
it emerged from this ethos, and some hoped that athletic competition and
team work could instill some of the lessons of war without killing a
million Americans.
 
David G. Smith