Dyed in Crimson: Football, Faith, and Remaking Harvard's America

by Zev Eleff

In 1926, Harvard athletic director Bill Bingham chose former Crimson All-American Arnold Horween as coach of the university’s moribund football team. The pair instilled a fresh culture, one based on merit rather than social status, and in the virtues of honor and courage over mere winning. Yet their success challenged entrenched ideas about who belonged at Harvard and, by extension, who deserved to lay claim to the American dream. Zev Eleff tells the story of two immigrants’ sons shaped by a vision of an America that rewarded any person of virtue. As a player, the Chicago-born Horween had led Harvard to its 1920 Rose Bowl victory. As a coach, he faced intractable opposition from powerful East Coast alumni because of his values and Midwestern, Jewish background. Eleff traces Bingham and Horween’s careers as student-athletes and their campaign to wrest control of the football program from alumni. He also looks at how Horween undermined stereotypes of Jewish masculinity and dealt with the resurgent antisemitism of the 1920s.

304 pages, Hardcover

Published February 28, 2023

Reviews

[Amir · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dyed in Crimson is a fascinating story that weaves together the histories of college football, Harvard University and American Jewish life in the early 20th century. Even a century ago, Harvard was the pinnacle of American cultural elitism, and admission and success at that institution was the ultimate "heksher" that a person had arrived and thrived in America. At the same time as Harvard's President and the ruling elite of its board imposed quotas to keep undesirables such as Jews out of the institution, two immigrants were changing the way football was played at Harvard by extension at all colleges.

Its athletics director Bill Bingham had his own fascinating immigrant story as an Irishman who distinguished himself on the track field and in the arena of morality, while Chicago-born Arnold Horween was a Jew who became the football coach and pushed forth a new vision that combined sportsmanship with winning.

At times the book could feel a bit academic, and I personally am not enough of a sportsman to care about play by play statistics of a game that happened yesterday much less 100 years ago. And yet, I found the book to be a quick read that provided a fascinating perspective of what it was like to be Jewish in pre-Depression America and showed how the lives of specific men and their attitudes shaped the institutions that continue to dominate the imagination of Americans today.