Memorializing at the : Collegiate Gothic Architecture and Institutional Identity Author(s): Sherry C. M. Lindquist Source: Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 1-24 Published by: The University of Press on behalf of the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/665045 . Accessed: 05/11/2013 20:06

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This content downloaded from 35.8.11.3 on Tue, 5 Nov 2013 20:06:57 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Memorializing Knute Rockne at the University of Notre Dame

Collegiate Gothic Architecture and Institutional Identity

Sherry C. M. Lindquist

This article explores how the neo-Gothic building that was eventually built to commemorate Knute Rockne expresses a key moment in which the University of Notre Dame shaped its identity; it considers how the Knute Rockne Memorial Fieldhouse accordingly embodied and negotiated contradictory strains of manliness and civilization, populism and elitism, democracy and authority.

HEN LEGENDARY Notre Dame foot- two canine football mascots associated with Rockne, ball coach Knute Rockne died tragi- and a chapel in was dedicated to the cally in a plane crash in 1931, President Norwegian St. Olaf in honor of Rockne.3 But plans W 1 Hoover called his loss a “national disaster.” The for a more magnificent monument were swiftly put king of Rockne’s native Norway knighted him into motion, evident in a proposed rendering included posthumously and sent a delegation to his funeral, in a 1931 fund-raising brochure (fig. 2).4 A newly which was attended by tens of thousands of people formed Memorial Association convened a publicity and broadcast on live radio in the committee that invited prominent citizens to lend and Europe. Children in Hilbigville, Texas, voted their names to the cause and promised potential to change their town’snameto“Rockne,” and it donors that they would be recorded in the “Book was done.2 Tributes were added to two neo-Gothic of Memory” planned for the entrance hall. The list dorms completed that year at Notre Dame: Alumni of invitees included Admiral Richard E. Byrd, Hall sports a small portrait of Rockne (fig. 1), and Calvin Coolidge, William Randolph Hearst, Charles

3 Clipping, “Dillon Opens This Week,” Notre Dame Scholastic 67 Sherry C. M. Lindquist is an independent scholar and the (October 1931), 10-Di-1 Dillon Hall, PNDP. (Unless otherwise editor of Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). noted, archival references are to the University of Notre Dame Ar- The author would like to thank Dennis Doordan, Karl Fugelso, chives [UNDA]. Abbreviations for the collections I consulted there Glenn Hendler, Joanne Mack, Kevin Murphy, Nina Rowe, and are as follows: CWLK [Frank C. Walker Papers, manuscripts]; Elisabeth Perry for lively exchanges that have shaped her thinking GWLK [Frank C. Walker Papers, graphics]; PNDP [Notre Dame Printed]; UPCO [President] Rev. Charles L. O’Donnell, CSC, on this subject. Special thanks are due to Dennis Doordan for his warm 1928–34 encouragement and for pointing the author to relevant material in the ; PFLN [Paul Fenlon Papers]; CJWC [ John W. Cavanaugh Notre Dame Archives. The author would also like to thank the staff of Papers]; and UPWL [President] Rev. Matthew J. Walsh, CSC, 1922–28.) There is a plaque commemorating Rockne in the chapel. the Boston Public Library and the staff of the University of Notre Dame “ Archives, especially Wendy Schlereth and Charles Lamb. She is grateful A write-up on the chapel in the Ecclesiastical Art Review states that like to two anonymous readers for their perceptive comments and sugges- the sterling character of the illustrious football coach to whose mem- ory it is dedicated, this artistic shrine reveals its fundamental excel- tions, which greatly improved the article. ” 1 ’ lence in terms of modest simplicity (undated clipping, Ecclesiastical See the account of Rockne s funeral by John Cavanaugh Art Review, Maginnis and Walsh Collection, Commission 731, Fine (Knute Rockne with John Cavanaugh, The Autobiography of Knute K. Arts Department, Boston Public Library). Rockne, limited Notre Dame ed., ed. Bonnie Skiles Rockne [India- 4 “ ” napolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931], 248–51). Kickoff of the Million Dollar Rockne Memorial Fund, bro- chure, “Knute Rockne Memorial Fundraising, 1931–1938,” CWLK 2 This is commemorated on a plaque in front of the memorial 112/04. It is not clear who authored the sketch, which was also in- field house. cludedinamorelavishpublicationproducedbytheendofthe B 2012 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, year, “Rockne of Notre Dame” (South Bend, IN: Knute Rockne Me- Inc. All rights reserved. 0084-0416/2012/4601-0001$10.00 morial Association, 1931), 30–31.

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Fig. 1. Knute Rockne, Alumni Hall, University of Notre Dame, Maginnis and Walsh, architects, 1931. (Photos by Sherry Lindquist unless otherwise noted.)

Lindbergh, Andrew Mellon, General Douglas Knute Rockne after his death. What was it that mo- MacArthur, Will Rogers, and Theodore Roosevelt bilized such an array of forces to memorialize Jr., as well as the mayors of several major cities, the Rockne with a remarkably ambitious building pro- presidents of NBC, CBS, the Rotary Club, Kiwanis, jected to cost a million dollars (a huge sum at the and the Boy Scouts, the International News Service, time and one that was envisaged even in the darkest and the Associated Press.5 By the end of 1931,itwas days of the Great Depression)? This article explores estimated that the Knute Rockne Memorial had how the neo-Gothic building that was eventually been the subject of 15,000 news articles, including built to commemorate Knute Rockne expresses a one from every state of the union, and an impres- key moment in which the University of Notre Dame sive number of radio broadcasts as well.6 By all ac- shaped its identity; it considers how the Knute counts, Knute Rockne was a charismatic speaker, a Rockne Memorial Fieldhouse accordingly embodied tireless, humorous, tough, clean-living, and opti- and negotiated contradictory strains of manliness and mistic character who was an amazingly success- civilization, populism and elitism, democracy and ful football coach.7 Even so, every such admirable church authority.8 person does not merit or receive the type of atten- The decision to build a monument in Knute tion and commemoration lavished on the figure of Rockne’s honor acknowledged the scale of public grief upon Rockne’s death, which staggered even 5 Proposed Advisory Committee of Rockne Memorial Associa- Rockne’s greatest supporters, who labored to find tion, July, 27, 1931, UPCO 7/56. satisfactory explanations. In his funeral sermon, 6 Report of the Publicity Committee, December 8, 1931, the president of Notre Dame, Father Charles Rockne Memorial Association, UPCO 7/72. ’ 7 There is no dearth of biographical material on Rockne; it O Donnell, commented on the torrent of sympathy tends to be celebratory while also situating him in the context of expressed by the media, dignitaries, civic bodies, Notre Dame history and the way football is now played. See John and ordinary citizens, asking, “Was he perhaps a Dennis McCallum and Paul Castner, We Remember Rockne (Hunting- ton, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 1975); Michael R. Steele, Knute Rockne, martyr who died for some great cause, a patriot aBio-Bibliography(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983); Robert M. who laid down his life for his country, a statesman, Quackenbush, Mike Bynum, and Knute Rockne, Knute Rockne, a soldier, an admiral of the fleet, some heaven-born His Life and Legend: Based on the Unfinished Autobiography of Knute Rockne ([United States]: October Football, 1988); Knute Rockne and John Heisler, Quotable Rockne: Words of Wit, Wisdom and Motiva- tion by and about Knute Rockne, Legendary Notre Dame Football Coach 8 For the phrase “manliness and civilization,” see Gail Bederman, (Nashville: TowleHouse, 2001); Ray Robinson, Rockne of Notre Dame: Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the The Making of a Football Legend (New York: Oxford University Press, United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 1995).

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Fig. 2. “The Rockne Memorial,” 1931. From “Kickoff of the Million Dollar Rockne Memorial Fund” brochure, CWLK 112/04. (University of Notre Dame Archives.) artist, an inventor, a captain of industry or finance? of boys,” a “man builder.” This latter moniker No, he was Knute Rockne, director of athletics and seems to have first appeared in the introduction football coach at Notre Dame.”9 Although O’Donnell to Rockne’s posthumous autobiography; it was then goes on to say that “when we say simply, he was a repeated in subsequent publications with the per- great American, we shall go far towards satisfying sistence of a talking point.11 The Literary Digest, a many, for all of us recognize and love the attributes mass-circulation magazine that eventually merged of the true American character”; in the end he ad- with Time, noted, “Not since the death of Rudolph mits, “I do not know the answer. I would not dare Valentino has there been such a high tide of post- the irreverence of guessing.”10 Actually, there was mortem hero worship, and in this case it is the mas- a fair amount of consensus among contemporary culinity of the nation which has been stirred to its commentators about what it was that distinguished depth.”12 The Detroit News reported that “the es- Knute Rockne enough to justify the extraordinary sence of Rockne’s character was its complete mas- outpouring of sorrow that greeted his death: not culinity, a circumstance calculated to set him only was he an ideal of American manhood, but apartinanagewhichhassomehowlosttheedge he made it his mission to help boys and young of an earlier national virility. He was a man’s man, men fit the mold. He was a “manly man,” an “idol and particularly a boy’s man, with a remarkable in- sight into the aspirations and tendencies of youth,

9 Charles O’Donnell, “‘The Everlasting Arms’: Rockne Funeral Sermon by the Rev. Charles L. O’Donnell, C.S.C,” Notre Dame Scho- lastic 47 (1931): 725, 743. Compare “Is it too much to say that no 11 Cavanaugh, Autobiography of Knute K. Rockne, 284. Man Builder man in all the history of the world was ever honored with such a was the subtitle of a book written by one of Rockne’s more famous large acreage of printed publicity? … Go down the highways and players, , and was published the year of Rockne’s byways of history, from the days of Hammurabi and Abraham past death. Harry Stuhldreher, Knute Rockne: Man Builder (Philadelphia: the giant figures that have glorified or desolated the human race, Smith, 1931). A poster of this title was also issued in 1931,see andnowherewillyoufindonewhosedeathprovokedsomuch PFLN 1/01. That he was “primarily a builder of men” is part of a printed eulogy. Perhaps the explanation lies in the fact that these tributary poem by Ralph Cannon conserved in PNDP 3013-02L. A great figures moved and achieved in war or empire building or the booklet issued by the Knute Rockne Memorial Association calls him production of immortal literature or works of art; while Rockne “a real builder of American manhood for American life” (“Rockne touched the imagination and the emotions of men only” (Cavanaugh, of Notre Dame,” 5). 290–91 12 Autobiography of Knute K. Rockne, ). “Rockne: Maker of Men, Idol of Boys,” Literary Digest 109,no.3 10 O’Donnell, “Everlasting Arms,” 743. (April 18, 1931): 20–34,quoteon29.

This content downloaded from 35.8.11.3 on Tue, 5 Nov 2013 20:06:57 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 4 Winterthur Portfolio 46:1 and an almost unique capacity for inducing the ad- olescent character to realize its full stature and strength.”13 Such praises in the media of Rockne’s manliness and his importance as an inspiration for boys can be multiplied practically ad infinitum. The university acted quickly to fuse its identity with the memory of this enormously popular per- sonality. The Autobiography of Knute K. Rockne was one of a flurry of commemorative publications and films that the University of Notre Dame sup- ported after Rockne’s death (fig. 3).14 It was Father John Cavanaugh, president of Notre Dame during part of Rockne’s tenure, who shaped some of Rockne’s unfinished writings into a narrative in the autobiography that embedded Rockne within the history of the university. There is no neater illus- tration of the university’s attempt to envelope Knute Rockne’s personality than the use of an aerial view of the newly expanding campus on the endpapers enclosing the story of Rockne’s life (fig. 4). The im- mensity of the then brand-new football stadium in the photo—so out of proportion with the rest of the campus buildings—is a telltale indicator not only of Rockne’s influence but of the perceived importance of college athletics as part of the university’s identity. After several years of fund-raising, the university had collected enough money to authorize its supervising architects, Charles Maginnis and Timothy Walsh, to go forward with their design for a memorial in the form of a field house that eventually opened to the Fig. 3. Front dust jacket. From Cavanaugh, Autobiography student body in 1937 (fig. 5). This building retains of Knute K. Rockne. some characteristics of the initial proposal, espe- cially its massive, blocky rectangles and central building on the campus of the University of Notre porch. Maginnis and Walsh minimized ornamental Dame, we need to understand the broader cultural details, introduced a unifying arcade across the context of college sports. facade, and expanded the porch to two stories, add- ing an overlarge, slightly pointed arched window as focal point. This neo-Gothic building was embel- Gender, Race, and Class on the Gridiron lished with sculptures of athletes representing differ- ent sports, a series of coats of arms, a prominent An increasing emphasis on athletics at Notre Dame trumeau statue of St. Christopher, and relief busts was symptomatic of larger national currents, and of La Salle and Pottawatomie Chief Pokagon. To Knute Rockne played a unique role in this all- make sense of what these seemingly incongruous de- important arena. Cultural historians like Gail tails meant when integrated into a Gothic revival Bederman and Michael Oriard point to the key role of sports in negotiating shifting and competing

13 notions of manhood in the late nineteenth and early Quoted in ibid., 29. 15 14 twentieth centuries. The national fixation on man- In addition to taking charge of the Autobiography of Knute K. Rockne, the Knute Rockne Memorial Association distributed liness was a response to what seemed the bewilder- 105,000 four-page leaflets, 10,000 copies of the booklet “Rockne ing economic changes and feminist challenges of of Notre Dame,” 30,000 copies of the “alumni series,” and 37,000 broadsides titled “A National Tribute to a Great American.” They received a percentage of the receipts from Metro Golden Mayer’s film of a Notre Dame/University of Southern California 15 Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, esp. 10–11;Michael game and made an agreement with the International Recording Oriard, Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Company to produce a memorial film using six of Rockne’s instruc- Spectacle, Cultural Studies of the United States (Chapel Hill: Univer- tional films. See December 8, 1931, publicity report, UPCO 7/72. sity of North Carolina Press, 1993).

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Fig. 4. Endpapers showing aerial view of the University of Notre Dame. From Cavanaugh, Autobiography of Knute K. Rockne. the time; furthermore, this discourse was inelucta- dependents. Self-mastery was understood as the key bly tied to claims about class and race.16 What some to manliness, which led to worldly success. The historians have called a “crisis of masculinity,”“virility dominant elite in the later nineteenth century ar- impulse,” or “obsession with manhood” pervaded gued that white male supremacy and its corollary the public sphere.17 It operated in discussions not of white female refinement were the result of a only about sports but also about other issues, such white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) “civilization” as women’s suffrage, trade unionism, education, that had evolved more highly than its rivals.19 How- psychology, and religion. Although these narratives ever, economic uncertainties fueled by industriali- were often quite complex and contradictory, his- zation and an influx of immigrants threatened a torians of gender recognize important general man’s ability to claim a direct connection between themes.18 The patriarchal US society associated his character and his worldly status. Feminists who power and authority with male identity and male fought for suffrage also threatened what were nor- bodies. The managerial and professional classes mative ideas of middle-class male identity by chal- differentiated themselves in general by claims to lenging male domination of the political sphere. gentility and refinement: “womanly” women were As a result of these pressures, there arose a great pious and virtuous in the domestic realm; “manly” anxiety that upper- and middle-class men were be- men possessed strength of character that allowed coming so restrained, refined, and intellectualized them to discipline their passions and protect their that they were weakening as a class. This weaken- ing, even medicalized by the term “neurasthenia,” was thought to be an alarming evolutionary process 16 The literature on this subject is quite large; in addition to not yet suffered by more “savage” nonwhites who Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, see Joe L. Dubbert, AMan’s Place: Masculinity in Transition (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, had not evolved the self-restraint that enabled them 1979); Elizabeth Hafkin Pleck and Joseph H. Pleck, eds., The Amer- to be manly men. The ensuing ideological crisis, ex- 1980 ican Man (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, ); Eileen Boris acerbated by the burgeoning immigrant groups and Angélique Janssens, Complicating Categories: Gender, Class, Race, and Ethnicity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Mark and their growing influence, led to more insistent C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen, Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of performances of masculine identity. As a result, Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago athletic contests such as boxing and football played Press, 1990). 17 Joe L. Dubbert, “Progressivism and the Masculinity Crisis,” an increasingly urgent symbolic role in public in Pleck and Pleck, American Man, 305–19;JamesR.McGovern, discourse—discourse that materialized at Notre “David Graham Philips and the Virility Impulse of the Progressives,” Dame in the Knute Rockne Memorial. New England Quarterly 39 (1966): 334–55; Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 11. 18 For the sketch below, I have relied on Bederman, Manliness 19 This is what Bederman calls “a Darwinist version of Protestant and Civilization. See also the sources cited in n. 16. millennialism” (ibid., 25).

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Fig. 5. Maginnis and Walsh, architects, south facade, Knute Rockne Memo- rial, University of Notre Dame, 1937.

Michael Oriard charts the importance of foot- destiny, which offers a context in which to under- ball as a cultural text between 1876 and World stand the “fighting Irish” and the prominent repre- War I, showing that it involved “relationships of in- sentations of Chief Pokagon in full headdress, La dividual and team, coach and player, brain and Salle, and St. Christopher on the Knute Rockne brawn, roughness and brutality, aggression and re- Memorial to be discussed below. Notions of racial straint, work and play, and all of these to ideas destiny were highlighted when the football team about race, class, and gender.”20 At the turn of from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Penn- the century, football was associated with the Ivy sylvania began to play against schools like Harvard. League and claimed by the upper classes as a suit- A particularly bald expression of this appeared in a able forum in which to develop and exhibit white Harper’s Weekly column by Casper Whitney: “If the American manliness. Gentlemen’smagazinesdif- present Carlisle team, which is composed of veter- ferentiated football from its working-class rival, ans of long experience, had the strategy and the ca- prizefighting, by emphasizing its collegiate context pacity for quickly meeting emergencies, it would and its requirements of strategy and restraint. Un- challenge the very leaders of the season. But it is like prizefighting, they claimed, football was more a question of race. The Indian has not an alert “manly,” for it distinguished between “necessary mind, the white man has, and whenever the two roughness” and brutality. The more popular press are otherwise evenly matched, the latter is sure to tended to conflate prizefighting and football and to win. It is destiny.”22 The reporting on Carlisle’s sensationalize the increasing numbers of serious in- games displayed a mix of condescension and racial juries and deaths from the game. In the wake of stereotyping that included admiration for the In- some well-publicized football deaths, prominent dians’ noble savagery. When predominantly white universities disbanded their football teams, and sports teams adopted Indian mascots, they drew the survival of the sport was in jeopardy. The con- on this discourse in order to claim for themselves troversy came to a head in 1905 when “rough rider” the “instinct” and “savage power” that they attributed President Theodore Roosevelt brokered a compro- to indigenous peoples. mise that mitigated the violence of the game, while Knute Rockne appeared on the scene immedi- preserving a certain roughness believed necessary ately after the period that Oriard writes about, and, for its man-building qualities. As Michael Oriard I argue, he shifted the narrative somewhat through puts it, “the outcry against football brutality was the force of his rhetoric and of his own personal story. great, but concern over the possibility of an emas- When Rockne spoke and wrote about football—and culated American manhood greater.”21 he was a talented and active promoter—he empha- Oriard repeatedly demonstrates the connection sized the sport’s “manliness,” which required the between dominant notions of manliness and racial players to have qualities that the Victorians associated

20 279 22 Oriard, Reading Football, . Caspar Whitney, “Amateur Sport,” Harper’s Weekly (Novem- 21 Ibid., 191. ber 25, 1899), 1194, cited in Oriard, Reading Football, 245.

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In an essay called “Football— been particularly keen for athletics, but I do appre- aMan’s Game,” he wrote that “to be a good football ciate that under Coach Brown it has qualities for player a man must have brains, speedy intelligence, character development.”25 Higgins, inspired, then speedy physique, self-restraint, nervous energy gets the knee operation, throws the touchdown [what sufferers of neurasthenia lacked], courage pass allowing Dulac to beat State, graduates, and and, what is most important, unselfishness.”23 takes a position in the coach’sfriend’slawoffice And while these code words must retain the conno- and also the position of assistant coach of the Dulac tations of class and racial destiny that had gathered team at “a good salary.”“The coaching work won’t to them over the previous century—and that con- interfere with my law work in any way,” Elmer en- tinued to appeal to a certain elite contingent thuses just before he gets the girl. Thus, the faculty among football’s constituency—they still sounded of Dulac collaborates with the football coach to different coming from Knute Rockne. Rockne him- transform a rather ordinary, even an initially disap- self was a Norwegian immigrant who worked his way pointing, young man into a successful manly man. through Notre Dame, which at the time was not a In fact, in his autobiography, Rockne explicitly very prestigious university. He saw himself, his ridicules what he calls “caste implications” at elite players, and the University of Notre Dame, too, as schools.26 scrappy underdogs who could triumph through wits Rockne unsettled football’s role in the discourse and hard work. In short, he wove the popular Horatio about class, and he also shifted football’s role in the Alger myth into a more aristocratic manly ideal in the discourse about racial destiny, partly through his context of the gridiron, where the WASPish Ivy strong connection to a Catholic university where League had historically prevailed. the issue of character was more linked to religious Knute Rockne is largely credited with populariz- values and practices than to popular evolutionary ing the passing game, with far-ranging consequences theorizing. All racial groups that accepted Catholi- that Rockne himself summarizes as follows: “The cism were theoretically equal before God, and con- opened up the game, made it spectacu- version narratives made character more a matter lar, placed a premium on speed and brains as against of “correct” choices than of racial destiny. Knute stamina and sheer physical weight. It changed the Rockne, who converted to Catholicism from Lu- whole geographical dominance in football. It theranism in 1925, was an exemplar of this sort of brought the Mid-West and Far West to the fore as character, which university officials were keen to contenders for championship honors and intro- commend. For example, it was Father Cavanaugh duced complicated strategy with limitless variations who was expansive about Rockne’s faith in Rockne’s of plays through threats, deceptions and wide run- autobiography and not Knute Rockne, who scarcely ning that raised suspense by placing the power of mentioned religion at all.27 Cavanaugh insisted surprise in the hands of the coach with weaker ma- that Rockne “was faithful to all his obligations as a terial.”24 Thus, Rockne promised to take “weaker” Catholic” (272). He praised Rockne’s “pious and human material and use football to build strong devout” Catholic wife and conveys Rockne’s admi- teams and manly men. Rockne dramatized his ration for the faith of his players and colleagues claims in a novel aimed at a young audience, which (267, 272–73); details his baptism, First Commu- chronicled the toughening and moral growth of a nion, and Catholic funeral ceremony (269–72, football player who attended a university called 249); and notes that he always had a prayer book “Dulac”—an obvious reference to Notre Dame’s in his hand and that he died clasping a older, more complete name, the University of (273). Father Cavanaugh relates anecdotes to show Notre Dame du Lac. In case readers did not recog- that Rockne was knowledgeable about theological nize Rockne in “Coach Brown,” the illustrations in debates within the church (270), and he connects the book appear to be publicity stills of Rockne Rockne’s profession to his own when he writes that training his players. At the turning point of the novel, “there was almost something sacramental about the young football player Elmer Higgins gets a stern influenceRockneexercisedinnearandremote lecture from a beloved professor: “Ihavenever 25 Knute Rockne, The Four Winners: The Head, the Hands, the Foot, 23 1925 2005 Knute Rockne, “Football—aMan’s Game,” Notre Dame vs. the Ball ( ; repr., Falls Church, VA: Once and Future, ), 139 Pittsburgh, October 25, 1930, 11–12, 38, 62, Football Programs, . UNDA. In his autobiography, Rockne wrote that “no boy who puts 26 Cavanaugh, Autobiography of Knute K. Rockne, 187–90. ” 27 on a football suit and goes out to try for the varsity lacks manliness Rockne’s faith is also emphasized in the University’s centen- 107 (Cavanaugh, Autobiography of Knute K. Rockne, ). nial publication, Arthur J. Hope, Notre Dame, One Hundred Years 24 Rockne, “Football—aMan’s Game,” 38. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1943), 422–29.

This content downloaded from 35.8.11.3 on Tue, 5 Nov 2013 20:06:57 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 8 Winterthur Portfolio 46:1 places among the great and the little” (285–86). He school which he had come to know intimately quotes a “New York journalist” who wrote: “aman and love ardently.”31 Cavanaugh’s identification like Rockne did more spiritual good than a thou- with Indians as underdogs, exaggerated and prob- sand professional evangelists” (287). Cavanaugh lematic in too many ways to enumerate here, never- concluded by giving a distinct Catholic character theless expressed his frustration with the very real to the traditional traits of “manliness”: “It hap- anti-Catholic sentiment that characterized the pened that mortification, self-restraint, the scourg- times. There may be a point of comparison, in fact, ing of desire by the will—all these things are between the public response to the Notre Dame involved in athletic training such as Rockne gave. and the Carlisle teams. Oriard notices that there All these things are equally involved in the making was an impulse to adopt Carlisle as a “favorite un- of Men” (291). The Memorial Association’sbro- derdog” whom the more popular audience for foot- chure asserts that religion is “not something for ball liked to see win over the ruling class scions on the sanctimonious and the weak but for full- the Ivy League teams.32 Such an impulse might also blooded men. Manliness and religion have gone correspond to the popularity of the Notre Dame hand in hand in Notre Dame tradition from team, whose “Fighting Irish” evoked a Catholic [founder] Father Sorin on down to the present ethnic group that was historically the object of generation.”28 In fact, “Rockne was Sorin without discrimination. cassock and breviary.”29 Through Rockne, Notre Even so, the dominant narrative imprinted in Dame emphasized the Catholic role in building both iconographic motifs and architecture at the the manly men of the nation. university emphasized Catholics as missionaries to This idealistic message was perhaps more ur- the New World and indigenous peoples as submis- gent to Notre Dame in light of the fact that the sive converts. This narrative was meant to stress the university’s increasingly prominent place in the na- antiquity and of the in tional limelight drew not only positive attention: it America, and it could not fail to underscore racial also made the university a target of anti-Catholic and cultural distinctions between the Europeans hate groups. When the held a massive and the natives. Such an account is especially evi- rally in South Bend in 1924, there were repeated dent in the murals of the Main Building painted clashes with Notre Dame students, and at one point in 1884 by , a Vatican portrait artist Knute Rockne was called on to make a speech urg- hired by Father Sorin, founder of the university.33 ing the students to refrain from further violence.30 These murals constructed a hagiographic pictorial Interestingly, Father Cavanaugh did not hesitate to of ’s arrival in America. In compare discrimination on the grounds of race one picture, Columbus stands in front of a massive with that made on the grounds of religion in the cross, while kneeling Indians look on (fig. 6); in context of football, complaining that “Midwest another, Columbus presents Native Americans to football coaches seemed to resent the winning of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella while a host a game by Notre Dame, or even our intrusion into of priests wait in the wings to baptize the heathens. intercollegiate contest. … It is an interesting cir- Gregori elides these scenes of the discovery of cumstance that as our government’streatmentof America with Notre Dame’s missionary history by the Indians drove them into what is now Oklahoma outfitting the natives with costumes and artifacts and ultimately made millionaires out of so many of of the Plains Indians, whom the first Catholic mis- them, so the contemptuous attitude of many men sionaries found in Indiana, and not those of the and institutions in the Middle West by forcing Caribbean peoples Columbus encountered.34 An- Notre Dame to play the Army and the Navy and other of Gregori’smurals,forSt.Edward’s Hall, Georgia Tech and the California institutions, for commemorated an episode that supposedly hap- example, was really the means of fixing national at- pened just after Sorin’s arrival, in which fourteen tention on Notre Dame games and contributing to their general reputation. Rockne had observed and in his manly way had resented such slurs on the 31 Cavanaugh, Autobiography of Knute K. Rockne, 268–69. 32 Oriard, Reading Football, 241–43. 33 What follows draws from the brochure written by an interde- 28 “ ” Rockne Memorial Association, Rockne of Notre Dame, partmental faculty committee at Notre Dame (Kathleen Cannon, 22–23 . chair, [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre 29 Ibid., 22. Dame, 1997]). 30 Todd Tucker, Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish 34 Thomas Schlereth, “Columbia, Columbus, and Columbian- Defeated the Ku Klux Klan (Chicago: Loyola, 2004). ism,” Journal of American History 79, no. 3 (1992): 937–68, 951–52.

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Fig. 6. Luigi Gregori, Taking Possession of the New World (Columbus Coming Ashore), Main Build- ing, University of Notre Dame, 1884. (Photo, University of Notre Dame Archives.)

Native Americans requested baptism and then re- ball, and university identity were linked both to the paid him with seven rings.35 person of Knute Rockne and to the architectural The ideological content of these murals illus- program at Notre Dame and how they laid the ideo- trates Notre Dame’s adherence to “Columbianism,” logical foundations for the character of the Knute a movement that used Christopher Columbus as a Rockne Memorial. symbol to bind together the civil and religious iden- tities of Catholics in America.36 Columbianism was a Catholic response to the Protestant elite’sbelief The “Character” of the Collegiate Gothic that Catholics were subject to a foreign despot, at Notre Dame the , whose influence they saw as a threat to the independence of US institutions. In response, the The collegiate Gothic in the nineteenth and twen- University of Notre Dame promoted its patriotism tieth centuries was an attractive and flexible style by endorsing a Catholic version of the discovery that visually connected American universities with and settlement of this country. The “Sketch of the venerable European institutions, especially Cam- University of Notre Dame” included in the football bridge and Oxford, which loomed large in the game programs juxtaposed a summary of the uni- imaginary of American higher education.38 By calling versity’s missionary activity on the Indiana frontier to mind these predecessors, American universities with an architectural tour that extolled the Gothic style of campus buildings, thus evoking the European 38 The first use of the term “collegiate Gothic” has been traced heritage of the university’s founders.37 Thus, we be- to architect Alexander Jackson Davis. See Paul Venable Turner, Campus: An American Planning Tradition, 2nd ed. (New York: Archi- gin to see how issues of masculinity, class, race, foot- tectural History Foundation, 1995), 24 n. 69. His chap. 5, “The Mo- nastic Quadrangle and Collegiate Ideals,” is a classic account of the 214–48 35 genesis of the style ( ). See also Alex Duke, Importing Ox- Thomas Schlereth, The University of Notre Dame: A Portrait of Its bridge: English Residential Colleges and American Universities (New History and Campus (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame 1996 1976 10–11 Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ). For case studies that exam- Press, ), . ine how connotations of the collegiate Gothic were adapted to par- 36 The literature on the ideological contest over Columbus is vast; ticular circumstances, see Ilene Forsyth, TheUsesofArt:Medieval Schlereth gives a cogent history for the nineteenth and early twentieth Metaphor in the Michigan Law Quadrangle (Ann Arbor: University “ ” centuries in his Columbia, Columbus, and Columbianism. of Michigan Press, 1993); Annabel Wharton, “Gender, Architec- 37 “Sketch of the University of Notre Dame,” Notre Dame vs. ture and Institutional Self-Presentation: The Case of Duke Univer- Pittsburgh, October 25, 1930, 26, Football Programs, UNDA. sity,” South Atlantic Quarterly 90, no. 1 (1991): 175–217.

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Fig. 7. Ralph Adams Cram, architect, South Dining Hall, University of Notre Dame, 1927. could not but evoke the values attributed to the tence of those in the fold.”40 Ralph Adams Cram style by the most famous promoter and architect certainly wished to cultivate Catholic patrons, in- of Gothic revival architecture at the time, Ralph cluding Notre Dame. In 1921 he even sent a copy Adams Cram. Indeed, the architecture of the Knute of one of his articles to the university’spresident, Rockne Memorial in particular must be under- who wrote him a gracious acknowledgment.41 He stood in the context of Cram’stheoriesbecause also forged a strong connection to the future archi- we know that the architect of the memorial, Charles tect of the Knute Rockne Memorial, his Boston col- Maginnis, was greatly influenced by Cram, so much league Charles Maginnis, who was the “best known so that he has been called one of Cram’s “most gift- Catholic architect of the time.”42 ed disciples” and “Cram’s leading follower.”39 Cram Cram’s connection to Maginnis was a factor in theorized the neo-Gothic as a style that brought to- securing Cram’s commission of the South Dining gether art and life, fused individualism with com- Hall at Notre Dame (1927), understood to set the munal and religious values, and represented a style for the buildings, like the Knute Rockne Me- “great epoch” in Western European history. Al- morial, which followed it on the South Quadrangle though he was a High Church Anglican, Cram (fig. 7).43 In 1924 the University of Notre Dame had a great respect for Roman Catholicism and cul- tivated common ground that was both ideological and aesthetic. He drew attention to himself in Cath- 40 Ralph Adams Cram, “On the Contemporary Architecture of the — Catholic Church,” Catholic World 58 (1894): 644–54,quoteon645. olic circles by publishing a very influential article 41 8 1921 — Ralph Adams Cram to Fr. John Cavanaugh, August , , practically a manifesto in a widely read Catholic CJWC 2/8. See also Fr. Charles O’Donnell to Ralph Adams Cram, publication called Catholic World.Init,heexcori- May 17, 1930,UPCO2/53. An account of the commissioning of the ’ ated the state of modern Catholic architecture as South Dining Hall at Notre Dame does not figure in Shand-Tucci s “ ” magisterial architectural biography of Cram, although the records a hindrance to spiritual progress ; he encouraged certainly support his conclusions about Cram’s “quest” for ecume- Catholics to recognize that “the most seemly and nism laid out in the last quarter of Shand-Tucci’s second volume. decorous circumstances are needed today to sup- 42 Maginnis was a founding member of the Liturgical Arts So- ” ciety, which, like Cram’s article in Catholic World, encouraged the port our public worship ; he also urged them not improvement of Catholic art and architecture. Cram was an enthu- to hesitate to hire non-Catholic architects, for it is siastic member of this Catholic society, although some of the Catho- surely “better to glorify the Almighty by the hands lics were ambivalent about his participation and politely denied him a leading role. See Susan White, “The Liturgical Arts Society, of unbelievers than to wrong him by the incompe- 1927–1972: Art and Architecture in the Agenda of the American Roman Catholic Liturgical Renewal” (PhD diss., University of Notre 39 1987 31 430–31 See Charles Maginnis, “Ralph Adams Cram, an Appreciation Dame, ), ff.; Shand-Tucci, Four Quests, . by an Old Friend,” Commonweal 37 (1942): 162–64;Douglass 43 As Maginnis wrote in a letter to Notre Dame President Shand-Tucci, An Architect’s Four Quests, vol. 2 of Ralph Adams Cram: O’Donnell, “We should greatly prefer, on principle, to accept the Life and Architecture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, note of the Dining Hall, representing, as it does, an important item 2005), 249, 381. of the newer work of the University” (Maginnis to Fr. O’Donnell,

This content downloaded from 35.8.11.3 on Tue, 5 Nov 2013 20:06:57 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Memorializing Knute Rockne at the University of Notre Dame 11 awarded Charles Maginnis the , a some controversy, as Cram’s biographer, Douglass prestigious honor that the University grants an- Shand-Tucci, connects the architect’s aesthetic nually to a prominent Catholic. In the same year, choices to his sexuality, which Shand-Tucci argues thepresidentofNotreDameawardedCraman was on the homosexual end of Kinsey’s continuum. honorary degree, stating, “We have, of course, long He goes so far as to endorse equating “Cram Gothic” watched with interest the wonderful work that you with “gay Gothic.”49 While Shand-Tucci makes a have been doing, and feel that this year, when your good case that Cram’s aesthetic sensibility and his friend, Mr. Maginnis has been singled out as the sexuality may have been intertwined, this is not a Laetare Medalist, it would be quite proper for us meaning that Cram, his colleagues, or his patrons to show our appreciation for your work.”44 Clearly articulated for his architecture. The qualities they there was a warm and personal relationship be- discerned in Cram’s Gothic buildings asserted the tween Ralph Adams Cram and Notre Dame offi- heroic masculinity that many among the elite classes cials, who appeared to be thoroughly familiar feared eluded the modern character. According to with and approving of the architect’s ideas.45 The Cram,theMiddleAgesofferedamodelfor,among visit in 1924 led directly to Cram being asked to sub- other things, “racial and national self-consciousness,” mit a design for the elaborate dining hall.46 Upon leading to “a sane, consistent, and character-building accepting the commission, Cram used the issue of civilization.”50 He complains that nineteenth-century character to emphasize the alignment of the evolutionary theories were used as “scientific jus- missions of university and architect. “When I was at tification for the supposedly ‘democratic’ principle Notre Dame, I conceived a rather unusual admira- of free immigration and free mating.”51 If educa- tion not only for the physical possibilities of the Uni- tion and environment were determinative and the versity, but also, and still more, for the character—a qualities resulting from them inheritable, as much quality so brilliantly in evidence amongst the faculty nineteenth-century theory had it, then “Mongol and students. To be associated in any capacity with and Slovak, Malay and Hottentot stand on the same this great and constructive force is a source of the plane with and Saxon and Celt.”52 For Cram, most profound gratification to me.”47 true democracy is not freedom for miscegenation In fact, character was a key plank in Cram’sme- but rather the kind of “democracy” that he saw dievalist platform, and as with football, it was fur- in the Western Middle Ages, where he believed ther linked to issues of gender, class, and racial racially pure groups operated communally in destiny. Indeed, Cram applied gendered terms to human-scaled institutions like the monastery, par- his architecture when he urged the Catholic Church ish, and guild. Cram believed that we should “de- to improve its church buildings and ornaments, feat the Huns of modernism—imperialistic, barren, specifying that “effeminate furnishings are not and mechanistic—and concentrate on the ‘great asked for.”48 Cram’sstylehasbeenthesubjectof

49 1881–1900 1 13 1929 5 83 Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, , vol. of Ralph December , ,UPCO / ).Maginnis,however,didnot Adams Cram: Life and Architecture (Amherst: University of Massachu- want to “accept the note” of the brick color, which he points out 1996 72 243–44 ’ setts Press, ), , and Four Quests, . Cram may even have was a compromise of Cram s original intention of dark red. lost the commission for the First Church in Cambridge at Harvard 44 18 1924 Fr. Matthew Walsh to Ralph Adams Cram, April , , Square because of his connection with aestheticism—at the time 6 12 UPWL / . This folder contains a series of letters working out often a code word for homosexuality—for Harvard President ’ the details of Cram s visit. Charles Eliot, known to have despised “aestheticism,” refused him 45 In a letter to O’Donnell, Cram wrote: “I hope you under- the job even though he won the anonymous design competition, stand how deeply I appreciate your approval of what I have written” saying that Cram had “peculiar ideas” (Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, (Cram to O’Donnell, September 16, 1929, UPCO 2/53). On an- 239). For a recent view of Cram and his architecture that diverges other occasion, O’Donnell wrote to Cram, “I have reread your ar- from that of Shand-Tucci, see Ethan Anthony, The Architecture of Ralph gument, and found it more powerfully impressive than ever. I Adams Cram and His Office (New York: Norton, 2007). believe that Belloc somewhat misses the point. While it is perfectly 50 “The new-found art of mediaevalism has revealed to the true that saving the Faith saves everything that belongs to it, I think world the possibilities and the significance of art at its highest; it he overlooks the contributory help which art may give to the saving has led us back to the discovery of the comprehensive, stimulating, ” ’ 17 1930 2 53 of the Faith (O Donnell to Cram, May , ,UPCO / ). and character-building culture behind it” (Ralph Adams Cram, Six 46 See the letter from Fr. Walsh to Cram on May 6, 1925, invit- Lectures on Architecture [Chicago: University of Chicago Press for the ing Cram to come and discuss the “messhall.” He wrote, “ any word Art Institute of Chicago, 1917], 62; see also 28, 36). from you will be greatly appreciated, as your name has so often been 51 Ralph Adams Cram, The Nemesis of Mediocrity (Boston: Jones, mentioned when the question of planning the Notre Dame of the 1917), 36. ” 6 1925 future has been up for discussion (Fr. Walsh to Cram, May , , 52 36 6 12 Ibid., . Cram continued in this vein, saying that in spite of UPWL / ). twentieth-century advances in science, “we still continue debauch- 47 4 1925 6 12 Cram to Walsh, November , ,UPWL, / .For ing race by free movement of peoples through immigration, and by ’ 7 6 Walsh s letter to Cram, see UPWL / . unrestrained mating amongst men and women of alien racial qual- 48 Cram, “Contemporary Architecture,” 653. ities” (38).

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Fig. 9. Eagle, south facade, South Dining Hall, Univer- sity of Notre Dame, 1927. Fig. 8. Indian, south facade, South Dining Hall, Univer- sity of Notre Dame, 1927. though, in Notre Dame President Father Matthew ’”53 “ Walsh, who did not hesitate to have the head of the epochs. Forget the archaeology of Babylonia, Notre Dame Architecture School, Francis Kervick, Crete, Egypt. Realize that the great sequence is and his partner, Vincent Fagan, significantly alter from to , to Byzantium, Gothic, Early ’ ’ 54 Cram s proposed design for the dining hall s plan Renaissance and the Pagan Renaissance.” He also “ “ and elevation with a mind for the greatest possible notes that we can ignore the alien developments in cost reduction, consistent with good architecture.”58 Asia which are wholly outside our own line of racial ”55 Through its consulting architects, Notre Dame may and cultural development. Gothic architecture, have also assured that the South Dining Hall fit the according to Cram, linked us constructively to a more larger architectural and iconographic programs of authentic, more evolved, European “character- ” 56 the university. Indeed, such consistency was a chief building civilization. concern of Francis Kervick, who designed several of The South Dining Hall at Notre Dame drew on the other neo-Gothic buildings on campus.59 venerated Western models like guild halls and mo- On the South Dining Hall, the most prominent nastic refectories in order to create a medievalizing — “ ” carved motifs were of Indian heads and eagles, and democratic community. It is likely, however, that like similar motifs on contemporary coins (such as Cram’s theories were not uncritically adopted but — ’ Indian head pennies and buffalo nickels) they adapted to suit Notre Dame sparticularrequire- functioned as symbols of America (figs. 8 and 9). ments, both material and ideological. Cram was a Here, they expressed Notre Dame’s patriotism as powerful personality and was known to be able to linked to the Columbianist themes expressed else- convince his clients to build different, often more where in the iconography of the campus. In fact, I elaborate and more expensive, buildings than they 57 know of no other instance where Cram had Amer- had intended. He seemed to have met his match, ican Indians represented on his buildings.60 Fur- thermore, these carved motifs did not appear on 53 “ Ralph Adams Cram, The Place of the Fine Arts in Higher Cram’s initial proposal for the Dining Hall.61 The Education,” Bulletin of the College Art Association of America 1, no. 4 (1918): 129–35, quote on 129–30. 54 Ibid., 133–34. Cram was not always consistent on this point, ” however. He also wrote, “there is nothing in certain eras in Egypt, withdraw in favor of some less stubborn architects (cited in Shand- 278 Crete and archaic Greece inferior to more recent civilization” Tucci, Four Quests, ). (Ralph Adams Cram, “Why We Do Not Behave like Human Beings,” 58 Letter from Walsh to the firm of Cram and Ferguson, Feb- in American Mercury Conflict and Controversies [Boston: Jones, 1935], ruary 3, 1926,UPWL6/14. 315 59 cited in Shand-Tucci, Four Quests, . On Kervick’s ideas about campus planning, see his report on 55 Cram, “Place of the Fine Arts,” 134. a submitted plan, UPWL 15/66. See also Dennis P. Doordan, “The 56 ” 100 “We are retracing our steps to the great Christian Middle Golden Chain: The Kervick-Montana Years, in Years of Architec- 1898–1998 Ages, not that we may remain, but that we may achieve an adequate ture at Notre Dame: A History of the School of Architecture, , point of departure” (Cram, cited in Shand-Tucci, Four Quests, 171). ed. Jane A. Devine (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame School 1999 37–47 For Cram’s role in the larger narrative of the adoption of Gothic of Architecture, ), . The desire for a unified program revival architecture, see Duke, Importing Oxbridge, 50–51. that reflected Catholic values may also be a reason why Notre Dame 57 rejected a (no longer extant) plan of the campus allegedly offered This is particularly expressed in this excerpt from Cram to a gratis by Frank Lloyd Wright. See ibid., 39; Schlereth, University of client, “We want to build this church and we want to meet your ideas Notre Dame, 142–44. and express your ideal, but life is too short for us to spend our time 60 doing a thing which we conscientiously believe ought not to be However, it was not unknown for Cram to introduce motifs done. We have to hold to our somewhat definite (shall we say pig- drawn from other cultures, as he did at Rice University, or to use headed) architectural principles. We are glad to adapt these just as motifs particularly associated with America, such as the carvings far as we possibly can to the requirements of a client, but beyond of native plant species at St. John the Divine in New York (see 196 certain points we are undisposed to go. If it seems to you that no com- Shand-Tucci, Four Quests, ). promise is possible, don’t hesitate to tell us, and we will regretfully 61 UPCO 9/53.

This content downloaded from 35.8.11.3 on Tue, 5 Nov 2013 20:06:57 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Memorializing Knute Rockne at the University of Notre Dame 13 record concerning the construction of these build- ings is far from complete, but letters associated with other buildings of the South Quad built around this time show that Notre Dame presidents and faculty involved themselves in determining their iconogra- phy. For example, President O’Donnell suggested that his own family motto be added to a dormitory chapel dedicated to his patron saint, and the law faculty voted on which jurists to include in a carved Tree of Jesse–inspired motif in the law library.62 Ex- tant letters indicate that Maginnis and Walsh, at least, were quite circumspect about getting the pres- ident’s approval and corrections on many details before proceeding.63 It is likely then that sculptures of St. Christopher, Cavalier de La Salle, and Chief Pokagon on the south facade of the Knute Rockne Memorial also were linked deliberately to Columbianist themes that appeared elsewhere in the iconography of the campus (fig. 10). A writer who reported on the cornerstone ceremony noted that La Salle and Chief Pokagon were the two men who “were respon- sible for bringing Christianity to these regions.”64 This shows how quick contemporary viewers were to see these motifs in light of Notre Dame’s mission- ary history. Ironically, although Pokagon was a Catholic convert and in some ways an apologist 10 for assimilation, he was known to have objected to Fig. . Detail of south facade, Knute Rockne Memorial. celebrating the legacy of Columbus in the context of the Columbian exposition in 1893.65 The prominent of Columbus, while they (unsuccessfully) attempted statue of St. Christopher on the trumeau (fig. 11)en- to get Christopher Columbus himself canonized. courages the viewer to make the connection to the The Knights of Columbus were quite visible at Notre Catholic explorer who shared his name, Christopher Dame, and the University had Maginnis and Walsh Columbus, whose story is commemorated under the construct a headquarters for them on the South famous golden dome of the Main Building at Notre Quadrangle, completed in 1931. Dame. Saint Christopher served as a favored saint The differences in the treatment in the carv- for Columbianist organizations such as the Knights ings of the seventeenth-century European explorer Cavalier de La Salle and the nineteenth-century Pottawatomie Chief Simon Pokagon are also reveal- 62 See Charles O’Donnell to Maginnis and Walsh, May 25, 1931, ing. La Salle is shown idealized, with a sharp nose, UPCO 5/86; Charles O’Donnell to Maginnis and Walsh, April 9, wispy mustache, smooth skin, and an elegantly 1930,UPCO5/82. arched eyebrow (fig. 12). Chief Pokagon is shown 63 In a letter to a Fr. Steiner at the Law School, Maginnis and Walsh direct him to a drawing “which locates the various carved with almost caricature-like features: an exaggeratedly spots of ornament both on the exterior and interior of the building deep eye socket, a bulbous nose, furrowed brow, and also gives suggestions for the various symbols and inscriptions and fleshy lips, with veins popping out around his to be used in connection with the above spots of ornament. In the 13 interest of not delaying the progress of the work it is extremely im- mouth and cheek (fig. ). Oddly, Chief Pokagon portant to get Father’s approval of our suggestion or his corrections is depicted with a fierce expression, and in full at the earliest possible moment so that the models for these subjects headdress, when the best known photos of him can be started at once. Would you kindly forward to Father O’Donnell a copy of our drawing #22 dated January 14th, and advise him of the from life show him looking pensive in a Western importance of getting this question settled immediately? We are en- suit and tie (fig. 14). The starkly different treatment 22” closing a blue print copy of drawing # (Maginnis and Walsh to of these faces does not seem accidental; in fact, we Fr. Steiner, January 22, 1930, UPCO 5/82). 64 Joe Perkins, “Intimate Memorial Touches Shown,” Notre know that in the case of St. John the Divine in New Dame Scholastic 72 (, 1938), 8. York, Ralph Adams Cram’s firm once instructed the 65 Schlereth, “Columbia, Columbus, and Columbianism,” 965. sculptor of the portal that the face of Christ “should

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Fig. 12. Cavalier La Salle, south facade, Knute Rockne Memorial.

Notre Dame, conversions are constructed as con- sensual and mutually beneficial. At Notre Dame, In- dians retain the attributes of their native culture, which are then married to Catholic and American symbols. Their appearance on the Knute Rockne Memorial may even have been an attempt to equate the conversion of Pokagon and the Pottawatomie Fig. 11. St. Christopher, south facade, Knute Rockne Memorial. tribe to that of Knute Rockne. If this compari- son seems unlikely, we might recall that Father Cavanaugh compared intercollegiate snubs of the have a more human appeal than the faces of the ”66 Notre Dame football program to the Trail of pre-Christian figures flanking it. Such a concern Tears. In Father Cavanaugh’s influential portrait implies a conscious attempt to make the carved dec- “ ” of Rockne, he constructed a similar connection be- orations of Cram Gothic illustrate the evolution- tween the conversion of natives by the founding ary progress in humans that the architect believed priests of Notre Dame and the conversion of the culminated in Christianity and reached a high football coach. He stressed the location of Rockne’s point in the Gothic period. baptism in the log cabin chapel in which Notre Racial stereotyping in the sculptures at Notre Dame’s first missionary priests were buried and noted Dame relates both to the savage masculinity attrib- that Rockne’s “venerated dust” lies within a quar- uted to natives discussed above and to the issue of “ ’ ter mile of the Council Oak where La Salle made conversion that lies at the heart of the university s covenant with the Pottawatomie Indians.”68 Com- missionary identity. While conversion and assimila- mentators did, in fact, perceive the architecture tion might rightly be viewed as a sort of annihilation of the memorial as being closely associated with of individuals and cultures, Notre Dame clearly ad- Rockne’s life and personality. One campus publica- dressed the subject differently than Carlisle, for ex- tion claimed that “Mr. Rockne was kept constantly ample, whose founder William Pratt is known for ’ “ in mind by the architects. The structure s massive his infamous pedagogical motto, Kill the Indian, lines will suggest the rugged individuality of the save the man”—a chilling expression of the connec- 67 coach, while the Gothic features of the facade will tion between race and the construct of manliness. be illustrative of the keen mind and warm person- In the pictorial and architectural programs at ality of America’s and Notre Dame’s ideal man.”69 If

66 Shand-Tucci, Four Quests, 297. 68 Cavanaugh, Autobiography of Knute K. Rockne, 251. 67 See Ward Churchill, Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Geno- 69 Perkins, “Intimate Memorial Touches Shown,” 8.Seealso cidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools (San Francisco: City “Kanaley Breaks Ground for Memorial to Rockne This Noon,” Notre Lights, 2004). Dame Scholastic 71 (November 5, 1937), 5; The Dome (yearbook)

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Fig. 13. Chief Simon Pokagon, south facade, Knute Rockne Memorial.

St. Christopher, La Salle, and Pokagon alluded to his conversion to Catholicism and his religiosity, the building itself evoked Rockne’s masculinity. Ideal manliness also manifested itself in the carv- Fig. 14. Simon Pokagon. From Simon Pokagon, O-gi-maw- ings that the memorial fund brochure said were kwe mit-i-gwa-ki (Queen of the Woods) (Hartford, MI: Engle, planned to depict “various sports, symbolical of 1899). the fact that Rockne was a lover of all manly sports” 70 (fig. 15). These personifications forged a visual alludes to the theories of European superiority connection between manliness and Catholicism for which Cram is known: the ship that is part of through symbols sculpted at the base of each relief. the symbol for Hockey denotes “Our Lady of Victory,” Notes by Maginnis and Walsh now at the Boston which, the notes specify, recalls the victory of Chris- Public Library reveal that the firm apparently created tian fleets over the Turks at the Battle of in these cryptic iconographic motifs to associate 1571 (app., no. 8; figs. 19 and 20). Another makes individual sports with patron saints that they se- reference to missionary activity through the Jesuit 71 lected. For example, the notes connect Baseball Saint Francis Xavier, who “went places at the signal to Saint Joseph because his symbol, a carpenter’s (bell) of the missionary call” (app., no. 6; fig. 21). square, “resembled a [baseball] diamond” (figs. 16 This symbol was to accompany the personification 72 and 17). For Swimming, St. Rita was chosen, and a of Running. These notes are instructive because belt and buckle was incorporated into her sym- they show the extent to which Maginnis and Walsh bol because it was “distinctive of Augustinians of were involved in designing an iconographic pro- which order of nuns she was a member” and also gram that was tailored to Notre Dame’s particular “reflective of a lifesaver’s belt” (app., no. 2; fig. 18; Catholic identity. It is remarkable, too, how much see fig. 16). One particularly tortuous association liberty these Catholic architects felt entitled to take with Catholic traditions, going so far as to gener- ate patron saints to suit their purposes. As far as I 1932; clipping, “Launch Drive for Rockne Memorial Funds have been able to discover, there are no patrons Wednesday,” November 3, 1931, 10-Ro-2, PNDP. For the associa- tion of Rockne with the material qualities of the Chapel of St. Olaf, for individual sports in the traditional pantheon of see n. 3 above. Catholic saints—the closest equivalent is perhaps 70 Rockne Memorial Association, “Rockne of Notre Dame,” 30. St. Sebastian, who serves as a patron saint for all ath- 71 See Commission 788, folded drawing bundles 1–3, Rockne letes. In fact, this iconographic innovation in the re- Memorial, Athletic Building, Notre Dame, Maginnis and Walsh Col- lection, Fine Arts Department, Boston Public Library. These notes ligious realm proved to be surprisingly arbitrary, for reveal that Maginnis and Walsh commissioned the Boston firm of it is evident that at some point the symbol that was Irving and Casson, carvers, to sculpt them. devised for Boxing, featuring a scapular of the Sacred 72 To my knowledge, these symbols are unexplained in the lit- Heart of Jesus, was simply transferred unchanged to erature about the Notre Dame campus. Thus, I supply in an appen- 22 19 dix the explanations Maginnis and Walsh provided with their adorn the personification of Golf (fig. ; see fig. , sketches. For Saint Joseph, see appendix, no. 1. app., no. 9).

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Fig. 15. East facade, Knute Rockne Memorial.

It is not clear why Boxing was dropped for Golf— one that surfaces repeatedly in the literature of the perhaps it was just a fortuitous idea inspired by the day—Theodore Roosevelt had even lauded foot- location of the memorial just in front of the Notre ball as the “modern chivalry.”74 The memorial fund Dame golf course; it is a particularly suggestive sub- brochure states about Rockne that “Mothers of sons stitution, however, because of the differing class thought of him as a superb exemplar and inspirer connotations associated with golf and boxing. Golf, of their boys, a despiser of whatever was cheap and like tennis, still retains patrician connotations, and shoddy in character or living, a knight-errant of both personifications are shown in understated but chivalry and honor.”75 elegant contrapposto poses, wearing fashionably The “character” that the University of Notre pressed collegiate clothes.73 We have seen that box- Dame wanted to instill inyoungmendepended ing was an important arena in which issues of man- on a construction of manliness that was predicated liness were negotiated; its associations with the on a corollary construction of femininity, the re- underclass and with brutality may have made it fined “angel in the house,” whom Virginia Woolf seem that the sport was unsuitable to the values had determined to kill in 1931, the very year that and aspirations that the memorial was to embody. The power of the male physique was emphasized 74 T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the instead through the muscular definition on the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, revealing costumes of the swimmer (see fig. 18), dis- 1981), 108. cus thrower, runner, basketball player, and wres- 75 Cavanaugh, Autobiography of Knute K. Rockne, 284–85.Ina tler. These personifications seem to embody an speech at a fund-raiser in Boston, Bill Cunningham of the Boston Post also emphasized Rockne’s wholesome influence by repeating aristocratic ethos of manliness, and it is not coin- this story: “After the Southern California–NotreDamegame, cidental that they are chiseled with northern Euro- Rockne told the men they could break training. And he had picked pean features. The fencing, lacrosse, football, and an ideal spot for turning a football squad loose. The very finest li- quor in Hollywood was at their disposal. Beautiful movies stars had hockey uniforms unmistakably evoke medieval ar- been invited to a party in honor of the Notre Dame men. Knute told mor, and the emblems that accompany each of them to go ahead and break training and then, so they wouldn’t feel the figures contribute to the chivalric effect (fig. 23). constrained, went off and left the boys to their own devices. Four hours later when he returned to collect his boys, he found every The association of athletes with medieval knights is mother’s son of them sitting around reading. The beautiful women had all gone home. They were ignored. The corks were in all of the bottles. They hadn’t touched it. The Rockne influence prevailed even after Rockne himself had told them that training rules were 73 These find counterparts in the athletes represented on the off” (clipping, Bill Cunningham, “High Tribute to Rockne Memory: walls of the Coolidge Room of Randoph Hall at Harvard; see Shand- Gov. Ely, Mayor Curley and Others Speak at Memorial Meeting at the Tucci, Boston Bohemia, fig. 65d. Copley-Plaza,” Boston Post, November 5, 1931, UPCO 7/57).

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Fig. 17. Baseball, Irving and Casson, carvers, south fa- cade, Knute Rockne Memorial.

with Native Americans, it was essential that women appeared to sign on to the ideological model that disenfranchised them. Father Cavanaugh’sre- marks about Bonnie Skiles Rockne as the “happy lit- 16 Fig. . Maginnis and Walsh, sketches of Baseball, tle lady,”“Queen,” and “Angel” of “one of the ideal Swimming, and Wrestling for the Knute Rockne Memo- ” 79 rial. (Maginnis and Walsh Collection, Fine Arts Depart- homes of America make this plain. He goes fur- ment, Boston Public Library; photo, Liora Klepper.) ther to say that women “manifested an intense and reverential interest in Mr. Rockne and his work” and that they “said that Knute Rockne was their ideal the Knute Rockne Memorial Association formed.76 manly man and his team had thrilled them.”80 We Anthropologist Joseph Kett noted that at the end of have seen that even the formal qualities of the Knute the nineteenth century, “the word ‘manliness’ itself Rockne Memorial were perceived as manly and changed its meaning, coming to signify less the op- therefore able to define an exclusively masculine posite of childishness than the opposite of feminin- sphere from which women were to be excluded. ity.”77 And Michael Oriard notes that, indeed, more The tendency to sex neo-Gothic architecture as mas- than anything else, the “champions of manly foot- culine is confirmed by Annabel Wharton’s fascinat- ball” feared appearing effeminate.78 As was the case ing study of Duke University, in which neo-Gothic architecture was associated with masculinity and 76 For the written version of her famous talk, see Virginia Woolf, reserved for the buildings on the men’s campus, in “The Angel in the House,” in The Conscious Reader, ed. Caroline Shrodes (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1995), 130–34. contrast to the Georgian style selected for the 77 Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic, 1977), 173, as cited in Oriard, Reading Foot- ball, 247. 79 Cavanaugh, Autobiography of Knute K. Rockne, 51. 78 Oriard, Reading Football, 247. 80 Ibid., 284.

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clear that the university wanted its new suite of Gothic buildings to display a venerable-looking ar- ray of heraldry. In one letter, Maginnis and Walsh regretfully reported to the Notre Dame president that Indiana had no official coat of arms, only a seal; in another, they testified, after an exhaustive search, that the chief justices of the Supreme Court do not have coats of arms.84 A suite of coats of arms were carved in stone above the various doorways of the Knute Rockne Memorial, including those of the United States, France (to commemorate the French origin of the Congregation of the Holy Cross), and Norway (to commemorate Knute Rockne’sbirth- place). The arms of football rivals West Point and the Naval Academy bolster the notion that athletic contests had something in common with medieval tournaments.85 We have seen, especially through the writings of Ralph Adams Cram, that evoking medieval civiliza- tion through neo-Gothic architectural style and other iconographic references also evoked social and racial prejudices that predominated among WASP elites. Jackson Lears persuasively argues that antimodernism among this class at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century was not a declining elite’s expression of reactionary nostalgia but a sometimes unconscious ideological Fig. 18. Swimming, Irving and Casson, carvers, south fa- strategy that helped traditional American elites re- cade, Knute Rockne Memorial. tain and expand their power in the face of social and economic changes.86 The neo-Gothic style, women’scampus.81 The coats of arms that adorned however, was not monolithic in its meaning, and the Knute Rockne Memorial and many other build- it came to signify differently in each constellation ings on the Notre Dame campus convey a chivalric of social relationships that it encompassed. Lears fantasy of knights errant, and, in the popular imag- perceptively commented about Cram that “he re- ination, each Lancelot had his Guinevere. fused to recognize that his patrons may have pre- As Jackson Lears writes, such coats of arms ferred Gothic for reasons different from his own, “merged class-consciousness with racism” and “pro- refused to acknowledge that he often designed pre- vided an upper class under stress with valuable em- modern buildings to house modern institutions. blems of unity and exclusiveness.”82 There is no Clinging to his sacramental self-justification, Cram doubt that ambitious universities find advantages over-looked the indissoluble links between ‘Gothic’ in cultivating the upper classes; indeed, in 1930 institutions and the commercial society he pro- Notre Dame President O’Donnell authorized ar- fessed to despise.”87 After important Ivy League chitects Maginnis and Walsh to commission a her- schools like Yale and Princeton embraced the col- ald from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to design a legiate Gothic, other schools, like Notre Dame, new coat of arms for the university (fig. 24).83 It is also increasingly patronized it, in part to associate

81 Wharton, “Gender, Architecture and Institutional Self- 84 ’ Presentation.” On Indiana, see Maginnis and Walsh to Fr. Charles O Donnell, 20 1930 5 86 82 188 February , ,UPCO / ; on the Supreme Court, see Maginnis Lears, No Place of Grace, . See also Digby Baltzell, The Prot- ’ 18 1930 5 82 estant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America (New York: Ran- and Walsh to Fr. Charles O Donnell, March , ,UPCO / . 85 dom House, 1964), 113–35;DixonWecter,The Saga of American Campus publications identify these heraldic selections; see “ ” 8 Society: A Record of Social Aspiration, 1607–1937 (New York: Scribner, Perkins, Intimate Memorial, . 1937), 387–97, as cited in Lears, No Place of Grace. 86 Lears, No Place of Grace, xviii. 83 For a series of letters regarding the coat of arms between 87 Ibid., 209. In fact, Shand-Tucci goes so far as to argue that Father O’Donnell, Maginnis and Walsh, and the herald, Pierre de Cram advocated not a conservative look backward but an alterna- Chaignon la Rose, all from 1930, see UPCO 5/87–88. tive modernism (see Four Quests, esp. 101–71).

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Fig. 19. Maginnis and Walsh, sketches of Hockey and Boxing for the Knute Rockne Memorial. (Maginnis and Walsh Collection, Fine Arts Department, Boston Public Library; photo, Liora Klepper.) themselves with these prestigious institutions.88 In He said, “What Rockne would love most of all would fact, President O’Donnell even appointed Maginnis be contributions of the type which built the great and Walsh as supervising architects of Notre Dame, cathedrals of the world. The finest tribute and mon- noting, “We understand that Mr. Cram holds a sim- ument, coming of the hands of love and gratitude, ilar position at Princeton.”89 A school like Notre will be if it will remind us of the ideals which he put Dame in the 1920s and 1930s was not trying to re- into our hearts.”90 The notion that Gothic cathe- assure a patrician constituency but to establish drals were built “democratically” viaasharingof one—without at the same time alienating the work- communal values is contradicted by the historical ing- and middle-class Catholic community that was record, as are Cram’s ideas about the “democratic” its mainstay. Masterfully, Father Cavanaugh’s fund- character of medieval guilds and monasteries.91 raising speech for the Knute Rockne Memorial Still, this romanticized model served the univer- merged the seemingly contradictory strains of sity’s ideological purposes. democratic ideals, elitism, and church authority 90 “ by turning to a much-repeated myth about popular As quoted in the clipping Sports and Civic Leaders Pay Tribute to ‘Rock’ at Big Dinner,” Boston Traveler, November 5, 1931,UPCO7/57. participation in the building of Gothic cathedrals. 91 Studies that call into question this model of patronage for Gothic cathedrals include Barbara Abou-El-Haj, “The Urban Set- ting for Late Medieval Church Building: Reims and Its Cathedral 88 47 50 80 Forsyth, Uses of Art, , , , and passim. between 1210 and 1240,” Art History 11 (1998): 17–41; Jane Welch 89 Charles O’Donnell to Maginnis and Walsh, August 19, 1930, Williams, Bread, Wine and Money: The Windows of the Trades at Chartres UPCO5/81. Cathedral (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

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Fig. 20. Hockey, Irving and Casson, carvers, south fa- Fig. 22. Golf, Irving and Casson, carvers, south facade, cade, Knute Rockne Memorial. Knute Rockne Memorial.

Like Knute Rockne, Notre Dame embraced the public and explains a major part of the university’s democratizing idea that “manly” men were not decision to memorialize Rockne in such a way as to born but “built,” that less advantaged youths with present a Roman Catholic version of this quintes- proper guidance could attain the American Dream sentially American ideal. In keeping with Rockne’s through their talents and efforts. This belief has en- legacy, such a building needed to be related to joyed enormous popularity among the American sports—but the university already had a historic field house for its athletes, built in 1899 in the Gothic revival style, as well as a new football stadium. University officials felt that renaming an extant fa- cility, whether field house or stadium, “would repre- sent sacrifice on nobody’s part to do him [Rockne] honor,” and—not to be too cynical—it may have been that they did not want to miss capitalizing on the opportunity presented by Rockne’sdeath to fund a brand new building.92 An open-access

92 The president of Notre Dame at the time, Father Charles O’Donnell, rejected the suggestion that they just name the recently built football stadium for the beloved coach, stating that this idea, although simple and logical, was “the cheapest and least honorable thing we could do. … It was not erected as a memorial to Rockne, and changing its name would represent sacrifice on nobody’s part 21 to do him honor. It would not satisfy the general disposition on the Fig. . Maginnis and Walsh, sketch of Runner for the part of his friends and admirers everywhere to perpetuate his mem- Knute Rockne Memorial. (Maginnis and Walsh Collec- ory worthily” (“Speech to Alumni Banquet,” June 6, 1931, printed tion, Fine Arts Department, Boston Public Library; photo, in “Rockne Memorial to Be a Field House at Notre Dame,” Notre Liora Klepper.) Dame Alumnus 9,no.10 [June 1931], 361).Inthemoreprivate

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Fig. 24. University of Notre Dame coat of arms, Irving and Casson, carvers, Knute Rockne Memorial.

of features of their interiors seem analogous, in- cluding a central lobby with a high ceiling flanked by spaces for rankings and trophies (fig. 25). They both contained courts for racquetball and squash, presumably in imitation of East Coast trends— since these games were not then popular in the Midwest—as well as a pool, gymnasium, and space for weight training.94 That the Knute Rockne Me- morial Fieldhouse replicated some of the interior features of the University of Michigan’s sexy new 23 Fig. . Football, Irving and Casson, carvers, south fa- building indicates that Notre Dame was comparing cade, Knute Rockne Memorial. itself not only to Ivy League Schools but also to state institutions closer to home, with whom it undoubt- ’ ’ field house extended Rockne s and Notre Dame s edly competed for students from the Midwestern commitment to character building through athlet- middle class. ics to all students. Such a recreational facility, now If the Knute Rockne Memorial borrowed cer- 1931 taken for granted, was a novelty in . The first tain ideas and features from Michigan’s innovative such facility was the Intramural Sports Building at field house, the architects at Notre Dame were not the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, opened only interested in copying the state university’s choice of 1927 four years earlier in .ThatlargeRomanesque- the Romanesque style, for the collegiate Gothic was style building, designed by Smith, Hinchman, and coming to have a particular meaning in the context Grylls of Detroit, excited great interest in the pub- of the Catholic university.95 It was the style selected lic, and several open houses were held to allow for the new South Quadrangle, and it was already 93 them to satisfy their curiosity. It seems likely that represented in Cram’s Dining Hall and the five the Knute Rockne Memorial was influenced by this dorms that were among the first collegiate Gothic 175 recent and noteworthy predecessor miles to buildings on campus (Howard, 1924; Lyons, 1925; the northwest of Notre Dame. Indeed, a number Morrissey, 1927;AlumniHall,1931;andDillon Hall, 1931). This style departed from the signature context of the meeting of the Knute Rockne Memorial Association in which the suggestion was brought up, O’Donnell acknowledged 94 On Michigan, see ibid.; on Notre Dame, see Schlereth, Uni- the university’s ideological investment in Rockne and worried that versity of Notre Dame. ’ 95 an unrealized goal might end up lessening Rockne s prestige rather In fact, it is clear that the university saw the Gothic style as than paying tribute. See Rockne Memorial Association Minutes, innovative and “modern” in contrast to the Romanesque. President 26 1931 7 69 May , ,UPCO / . O’Donnell wrote to Magginis that “in the pride of his nervous anat- 93 M. J. Stevenson, J. W. Reznick, and R. W. Pitcher, “First omies, the Gothicist of the 12th Century must have developed a fine Intramural-Recreation Facility Celebrates 50th Year,” Department contempt for the Romanesque ponderosities and have expressed it, of Recreational Sports, University of Michigan, 1978, http://www too, in a considerable literature which is unhappily lost to us” .recsports.umich.edu/facilities/imsbhistory.html. (O’Donnell to Charles Maginnis, March 13, 1933, UPCO 10/112).

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Fig. 25. Interior lobby, Knute Rockne Memorial. classicizing dome of the Main Building, a familiar Notre Dame planned for a monument that situ- form for American government buildings that is as- ated it as a strong, traditional but modern Catholic sociable with secularizing Enlightenment ideals; as institution ready for the challenges of a changing such, it proclaimed the compatibility of Catholic world, and the Knute Rockne Memorial uneasily and American identities. As the football game pro- negotiated the contradictory currents that pulled grams discussed above demonstrate, the Gothic re- at the university. In a changed world, however, vival architecture on campus emphasized the the representations that once seemed politic are university’s Catholic American identity in a differ- now problematic. In light of feminist advances like ent way; it evoked a long history of Catholic Euro- Title IX, the “manly” athletes carved on the sides of pean hegemony, which is linked to the university’s the field house seem at best out of date; at worst, role in settling the frontier and Christianizing the they reinforce damaging stereotypes. The same Pottawatomie Indians. Gothic revival architecture can be said for Chief Pokagon and the Columbian- reinforced the Catholic character of an area of ist themes on the facade and elsewhere on cam- the campus associated with student life, including pus. Indeed, Notre Dame students and faculty have the dormitories and Cram’s dining hall, intended protested the Columbianist murals in the Main to encourage students’ communal life patterned Building, and some have called for their retire- after medieval monasteries. To this was added an- ment.97 A faculty committee produced an informa- other such ideologically charged building: a recre- tive brochure that situates the murals in their ational sports facility in which Coach Rockne’s historical and art historical contexts.98 Perhaps legacy of Catholic character building—with its dis- such a brochure cannot sufficiently counter the im- tinctive blend of assumptions about race, class, gen- pact of these prominently placed works of art, but it der,andwhatitmeanstobeanAmerican—was is an earnest and intelligent intervention that dem- intended to live on.96 onstrates the faculty’s critical engagement in shaping their campus and their university. Like

96 One article in the Notre Dame Scholastic said that Rockne’s one “great wish was to provide a place where young men could improve Center Ready by Spring,” Notre Dame Scholastic 72 [September 22, themselves in all forms of recreation. Where they could build strong 1938], 5). physical bodies capable of and necessary to carrying on active and 97 “ healthful living, both in body and soul. Knute Rockne’s dreams are See clipping, Marilyn Hughes, Columbus Art Hit, De- ” 9 1995 30 becoming a reality. ‘Rock’s’ one great dream is materializing in the fended, South Bend Times, October , , PNDP . form of a memorial—the Rockne Memorial, built and dedicated to 98 Currently published by the University of Notre Dame and the memory of America’sidealsholar[sic], educator and coach” made available near the murals in the Main Building. See Cannon, (JoePerkins,“Rockne’sDreamComesTrueinMemorial:Intra-mural Columbus Murals.

This content downloaded from 35.8.11.3 on Tue, 5 Nov 2013 20:06:57 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Memorializing Knute Rockne at the University of Notre Dame 23 the Gregori murals, the Knute Rockne Memorial tution involves not only being part of a distinguished Fieldhouse projects the cultural values, conflicts, tradition but also, inevitably, an imperfect one that and the insecurities, prejudices, and aspirations encompasses errors and prejudices. This model em- of the university and the broader culture of the powers students to think critically about the books time in which it was made. And although it can that they read and the built environments in which be argued that the ideological message of the me- they read them. It encourages all of us not merely to morial is as out of date and problematic as the adopt the historical identities proffered to us but to murals, it has nevertheless garnered no controversy. analyze and assess them and to work toward consci- It may be that the nonnarrative nature of the pic- entiously reshaping them for future generations. torial program of the memorial prevents it from be- ing legible in the same way as the unsubtle murals. It may be, too, that Knute Rockne is simply not Appendix the lightning rod of controversy that Christopher Columbus has become, and his beloved personality Notes on Maginnis and Walsh Sketches of and comparatively marginal place in history insu- Saints’ Symbols Accompanying Athlete lates the memorial from receiving the same kind Carvings for the Knute Rockne Memorial of negative attention as the murals. Once a well-known national figure, Knute 1. Baseball / Saint’s symbol / St. Joseph / [Captions la- Rockne is becoming more and more local over beling this sketch include:] carpenter’s square (remote resemblance to BB diamond) / Staff blooms into a time, more and more particular to the University 99 of Notre Dame. His legacy is intertwined with the lily 2 “ ” history of the institution in a way that university of- . Swimming / St. Rita / Saint of the impossible / Ac- centuate the thorns / [Captions labeling this sketch ficials clearly orchestrated. They built his legacy of a bee include:] Bee Barberini Urban VIII 10/6/ into the part of the campus that is most intimately 38 / [Captions labeling this saint’s symbol sketch in- connected to student life, deliberately fusing it to clude:] Two thorns (reminiscent of her forehead the collegiate Gothic style to create a powerful aes- wound) / Natural rose / Belt and buckle (reflective ’ thetic that projected what they considered to be of lifesaver s belt) (distinctive of Augustinians of which order of nuns she was a member) Catholic values. Certainly, the meaning of the col- 3. Wrestling / Blessed Virgin Mary / [Captions labeling legiate Gothic is inflected by the different constella- this sketch include:] Tower (allusion to BVM who is a tions of individual personalities and political and tower of strength, as a protectress / Monogram: Inter- social circumstances in which it operates. Never- twined Blessed Virgin Mary theless, the great Gothic revival building boom on 4. Football / Joan of Arc / Jesus Maria / inscription on the campuses of prestigious universities in the first upper part of banner / helmet (medieval military) part of the twentieth century has resulted in mak- Banner of St. Joan / Rows of Fleur de lis alternating ing this style practically a metonymic shortcut to a 5. Basketball / St. Christopher / Palm tree from which certain popular notion of college life. It is notice- hung a lantern with lighted candle in it / part of the able that when universities like Princeton and top of the world [next to a sketch of the top of a sphere] 6 Washington University in St. Louis have elected to . The Runner / St. Francis Xavier / [Captions labeling this sketch include:] Cross with IHS cross insignia of revive the Gothic revival in the twenty-first century, Jesuit Society of which St.Franciswasamember/ it is most often for student residences. The architec- Shell symbol of the traveler / St. Francis went places tural style tacitly promises a college lifestyle as de- at the signal (bell) of the missionary call. picted in popular culture. At the same time, the 7. Tennis / Our Lady of Mount Carmel / convention of collegiate Gothic projects a nostalgic notion of a English rose / tribute to 13 c. S. Simon Stock, English long and putatively venerable history that stretches Carmelite who is responsible for the scapular of our lady of Mt. Carmel. Note: Source portrait on leaflet back to the early twentieth century and continues Carmelite monastery Indianapolis, Ind 1937 / one side backward to the period that this era was nostalgical- of scapular (which is made of wool and has cloth bands ly reviving: the European Middle Ages. This history, looped thru it so that it may be suspended from ones however, has its own rich and complicated history neck) / monogram: Ave Maria Regina / Hail Mary Queen and a disturbing ideological charge that needs to 8. Hockey / Our Lady of Victory / There are several be acknowledged and addressed. The brochure feasts of Our Lady of Victory (intercession of Blessed 7 that the Notre Dame faculty produced about their Virgin Mary) e.g. oct. . O.L. of the Rosary which is an controversial murals is an excellent model for our 99 Slashes indicate spacing between text phrases; parentheses critical engagement with the past. Students should are Maginnis and Walsh’s. Maginnis and Walsh Collection, Com- be made aware that sharing the identity of an insti- mission 788, folded drawings 1–3, Boston Public Library.

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extension of the feast of O.L. of Victory resulting from OSB monks b. 1319 on hill dedicated to Mount of the Battle of Lepanto 1571 /VictoryofChristian Olives in Medal of Notre Dame des Oliviers fleets over the Turks. / There is next the famous O.L. (source: medal obtained at Benzigers Boston) this has of Victory related to a Paris church where the miracu- Sacred Heart on one side. The other was used for lous medal (owes origin to B.L. Cath. Labouré, etc. 19 c) drg. / rest of inscription priez pour nous / description: is a celebrated feast. [Captions labeling this sketch figure of the Virgin is somewhat like the infant of include:] The rosary on the sail / Boat / medal sus- Prague (Madonna) stiff cope covers entire figure pended from keel of boat / 2 hearts one. sacred heart of the mother / similar cope is worn by the infant (crown around it) other. Heart of BV Mary (sword child / pineapple-shaped crown on both mother pierces it) / 12 stars and child and both rest on clouds sprig of olive tree 9 on each side of clouds / [Captions labeling this . Boxing / Sacred heart of Jesus / scapular of SH of 3 J appd etc 1900 PP. Leo XIII / one side bears pictures sketch include:] band of olives / stars of sacred heart / Fleur-de-lis supports ribbon of scap- 11. Fencing / St. Francis Assisi the Lily (symbol of S. F.) / ular used in tribute to St. Margaret Mary (1647–90) Birds (St. F preached to them) / Winged Jerusalem Apostle of devotion to the Sacred Heart canonized Cross on medal (St. F’s great ambition was to preach 1920. [Captions labeling this sketch include:] Halo in the holy lands) 5 rays descend from cross emblem- with cross / Tradition portrait of Christ / on His atic of the stigmata of S F breast the Heart; rays surround it; R. hand points to 12. [no saint identified and no drawing] Symbol of his heart / loop of ribbon St. Philomena = olive branch (model same set be- 10. Lacrosse / Our lady of the Olives cross (Calvary fore these) / 11 schemes sent to Irving & Casson scene simplified) reflective of community of Olivetan Carvers Boston

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