At the Dawn of Professional Football. by Keith Here, Keith Mcclellan's

392 Indiana Magazine of History The Sunday Game: At the Dawn of Professional Football. By Keith McClellan. (Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 1998. Pp. 520. Illustrations, index. Clothbound, $39.95; paperbound, $19.95.) Sports historians have been good to professional baseball in the past three decades, turning out numerous biographies of legendary players and accounts of great teams and their seasons. But aside from the members of the Professional Football Researchers Associ- ation writing for other members, the historians, lay and academic alike, have given scant attention to professional football, a newcom- er on the American sports scene, devoid of baseball’s mystique. Now appearing, though, are several useful books on the game, including a biography of Red Grange, two comprehensive encyclopedias, a history of the origins and early development of the game, a study of professional teams in the Ohio Valley in the 1920s, and the work reviewed here, Keith McClellan’s The Sunday Game: At the Dawn of Profes- sional Football. McClellan opens his study with four chapters on the state of independent football, the game played by adults without collegiate affiliation, early in the twentieth century. He notes the blue collar sup- port for it, the gambling and use of ringers associated with it, and the class prejudice against it. Using exhaustive research in newspapers, he then chronicles-game-by-game, score by-score-the play of twenty independent teams in the upper Midwest from 1915 to 1917. He sees 1915 as a benchmark because organizers of independent clubs, heretofore facing anarchic conditions in recruiting players, who switched teams week-by-week, and in arranging solid schedules, began to play interstate rivals regularly, to commit players to longer contracts, and to consider creation of leagues governing conditions of competition. America’s entry into World War I halted progress, but the independents, McClellan asserts, laid the foundation for the National Football League. He closes with an excellent analysis of the role professional football played in giving sons of working class fam- ilies opportunities to break down social barriers, a view of “stars”in the game, and a summary of the substance of promotion and financ- ing of the game. McClellan sees a linear movement from the growing profes- sionalism of 1915-1917 to the day that proprietors of the independents met in 1920 to organize the American Professional Football Associ- ation, which became the NFL in 1922. But the founding fathers still faced some of the same problems-players jumping from one team to another and schedules in shambles. As one historian has put it, professional football remained a “catch as-catch-can operation” (Harold Claassen, The History of Professional Football, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963, p. 32). Darkness yet awaited the dawn. Readers interested in specific teams will find The Sunday Game useful, because it offers encyclopedic detail on the twenty indepen- Book Reviews 393 dents. The detail, however, becomes cumbersome because of McClel- lan’s organization of his material. In his chapter on the Dayton Tri- angles, for instance, he uses a full page (p. 124) to describe a game between the Triangles and Detroit Heralds played in 1916. Then in the chapter on the Heralds, he spends nearly a full page (p. 147) on the same game. Similar repetition occurs throughout the middle chapters. The mass of detail on games and scores inevitably invites errors. On page 92, for example, the Columbus Panhandles led the Toledo Maroons 7-6 but won 23-0. In the appendix (pp. 415 and 4531, the Panhandles won 23-7. Other such discrepancies appear else- where. Despite the doubtfulness of his principal argument and orga- nizational problems, McClellan has made a substantial contribution to the literature on professional football. No other work deals with the game in the second decade of the twentieth century in such a comprehensive way, and no other work is likely to supplant it. CARLM. BECKERis professor emeritus of history at Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio. An Archaeology of the Soul: North American Indian Belief and Rit- ual. By Robert L. Hall. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Pp. xiv, 222. Illustrations, notes, references, index. Clothbound, $49.95; paperbound, $24.95). Robert Hall’s fascinating and provocative book is the sort of work that indulges in speculation and creatively crosses disciplinary boundaries. Although the book is written by an archaeologist with a deep knowledge of native North American cultural history, nonspe- cialists can read it with great interest, even if not equipped to fully grasp all the fine points. The title effectively expresses Hall’s late-career turn “away from conventional field archaeology toward a more human- istic, noninvasive archaeology emphasizing Native American spiri- tuality” (p. x). The fact that his maternal ancestors include Mohicans, Menominees, and Ottawas grounds the book in a personal sense of connection to his materials and enhances its expressive as well as its scholarly quality. To do “noninvasive archaeology” is to work with museum and documentary collections. The archaeologist “reads” them as one would read texts: to elucidate the stories that they can tell. One can do amazing things with what lies in museums, archives, and libraries, or is embedded in native languages and vocabularies, without hav- ing to dig and destroy more sites, or remove still more heirlooms from native communities. This is Hall’s moral and methodological double message: take seriously and analyze deeply what is already at hand. The content of the book is remarkably rich. Hall’s starting point is the Calumet ceremony or the rites surrounding the pipe and the long pipestem. He analyzes meanings through archaeological, his- .

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