When thinking of the Rose Bowl most people tend to think of the Pac 10 and the Big 10, even in the BCS era. It's the granddaddy of all bowl games and it has quite a history. It wasn't always the Pac 10 vs the Big 10. Alabama will be playing Texas in the 2010 Rose Bowl BCS game to decide the national championship. It won't be the first time Alabama plays in the Rose Bowl. Unknown to most people the Rose Bowl holds a significant place in the history of the University of Alabama football program and the history of the south in general.
Alabama last played in the Rose Bowl in 1946, besting the USC Trojans 34-14. The game was significant because Alabama handed USC its first loss in a bowl game. Up to then USC had been 10-0 in bowl games. It would also be the last Rose Bowl game featuring schools from the south. After the 1946 game the Rose Bowl entered into an exclusive contract with the Pac 10 and Big 10 that still stands today. Alabama's all time record in Rose Bowl games is 4-1-1.
The most significant game in University of Alabama football and southern football in general is the 1926 Rose Bowl game. Alabama defeated the heavily favored University of Washington 20-19 in a game that is hailed as "The game that changed the South." Alabama was the first football team from the South to be invited to the Rose Bowl. The South was still suffering from being defeated in the Civil War. Poverty was widespread and the region was politically and socially isolated. The South had an inferiority complex. Nationwide it was thought that its football programs were inferior, and by proxy, the South was inferior. Knowing this may give some insight into why SEC fans are so rabid about their football. For them it's about pride, a pride that goes back to the Confederacy.
Alabama was invited to the 1926 Rose Bowl game because Yale, Dartmouth, and Colgate, turned down invitations on the grounds that athletics were becoming more popular than academics. Seeing how things are now, they were probably correct in that opinion. The invite was huge, not just for Alabama, but for the whole South. They had something to prove. Alabama would be playing for the honor of the entire southern states.
By all accounts it was a great game. Washington was up 12-0 at halftime but Alabama scored three touchdowns in the 3rd quarter and held on to win the game 20-19. The team returned to Tuscaloosa to a hero's welcome. Traveling by train, every southern town the team passed through was met by adoring fans and brass bands. Southern pride had been restored.
The victory greatly improved the image of the South and southern colleges. Southern schools would go on to play in 13 of the next 20 Rose Bowl games. The victory was also a boon for recruiting students from other parts of the country. Out of state students paid extra tuition so the incentive to recruit out of state was very high. The University of Alabama used the victory to recruit students from New York which resulted in some strange, unintended consequences.
Anyone reading this blog know that I am a fan of history. Some years ago I picked up a book called Mud on the Stars by William Bradford Huie. My mother was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama and I have always wondered what life was like growing up for her. Mud on the Stars was an autobiographical book that partly covered how life was in Alabama in the 20's, 30's, and 40's, the decades my mother and her siblings were born into, so the book appealed to me. It was from this book that I discovered Alabama's 1926 visit to the Rose Bowl. I grew up less than two miles from the Rose Bowl yet I was completely unaware of its history. To me the most fascinating part of the book was what happened in Alabama after the Rose Bowl victory.
As I mentioned before, the University of Alabama advertised itself in the newspapers of New York city. In the 20's most of the universities in the east had quotas or outright bans for Jewish students. The advertisements for the University of Alabama had no mention of quotas or bans for Jewish students so many Jewish students applied for enrollment at the University of Alabama in 1927. Hundreds of Jewish students were accepted. Most of the incoming freshman class was Jewish.
This caused quite a stir in Alabama. Jewish people were not new to Alabama. The Lehman Brothers (Mayer and Emanuel) came from Alabama. We all know what happened with them. They built their empire on cotton, they were cotton brokers. They moved their business to New York right before the Civil War broke out. Jewish people who had been in Alabama were more southern than they were Jewish. There was actually a lot of friction between the local Jewish people and the Jewish students who came to the University of Alabama. They were "New York Jews". Most people in Alabama had never met a person from New York and New York Jews may as well been aliens from another planet. They were people southerners had only heard about or read about in the magazines and newspapers, and they were Yankees.
The New York mentality and way of day to day living completely clashed with southerners. The South was full of rules and etiquette, mostly based on the appearance of civility and upward mobility. In the South you always wanted to appear better than the social class you were actually in. That's why you didn't want to be known as a redneck, with literally, a redneck from wearing a collarless shirt and bending over all day picking cotton or some other type of hard labor. That was considered low class.
The Jewish people lived many to a dorm or apartment. They cooked in their dorm rooms and apartments on hot plates using lots of garlic. They wore short pants...outside. These was strange and unwanted customs to the students of Alabama. There were many complaints. In the classroom there things were no different. The Jewish students were outspoken, and well armed with ideas about socialism, marxism, and worker's rights. They were considered radicals by their fellow students. They had worldly knowledge of writers, the theater, and geo-global politics. The local students were taken back by the argumentative and in-your-face debating style of the Jewish students.
Not all of the students had issues with the Jewish students. Some were attracted to their particular brand of intellectualism. William Bradford Huie was one of those students. You may have not heard of him or know of him but you certainly may know some of his work as a journalist and writer. Many of his books have been turned into feature films and many of his books deal with significant events in American history. Mud on the Stars was adapted into a 1960 film by Elia Kazan called Wild River, starring Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick. Huie was the journalist who paid Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam $4000 for their version of how they brutally murdered Emmett Till, which was published in Look magazine. Huie and Look magazine received much criticism for paying the murderers for their story. Huie wrote He Slew the Dreamer, an account of the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., based on interviews with James Earl Ray. His book, Three Lives for Mississippi, was a reporters investigation into the slaying of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. In 1967 he wrote, The Klansman, which was an expose of the inner workings of the Klu Klux Klan. For that he was threatened with bodily harm and had a cross burned in his front yard. His best known work is The Execution of Private Slovik, the story of the only American soldier to be executed for desertion in WWII. The book was made into a televised movie starring Martin Sheen. When it aired in 1975 it became the most watched movie in television history.
Wow, how did we get from the 1926 Rose Bowl to the major events of the Civil Rights era and Hollywood movies? That's what I love about books and history. You open up a book and start reading and the world starts to unfold before you, leading you to places you never intended to go but glad that you did. Today we have the internet, and it is a great tool for research, but personally, in the end, I always find myself turning to books to get the best information, to get the depth of knowledge that is required to truly understand something. The history that we know and have been taught in school is generalized and sanitized. I find that true history, real history, is in the details. Just keep that in mind the next time you read a story in the headlines.
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