Inventing the Boston Game: Football, Soccer, and the Origins of a National Myth, with Kevin Tallec Marston and Mike Cronin (episode 340)

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Jake:
[0:04] Welcome to Hub History, where we go far beyond the freedom trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the hub of the universe.

Introduction to the Boston Game

Jake:
[0:14] This is episode 340, Inventing the Boston Game, with Mike Cronin and Kevin Tellick Marston. Hi, I’m Jake. In just a few moments, I’m going to be joined by Mike Cronin and Kevin Tallec Marston, who’ve just published a new book called, Inventing the Boston Game, Football, Soccer, and the Origins of a National Myth. We’re coming up on Thanksgiving, and nothing says Thanksgiving quite like football. At least, for most people, or so I’m told. I must not have gotten the gene for caring about football, because there’s no football in my house on Thanksgiving. The last time I remember seeing a game was a Super Bowl about 10 or 12 years ago. I remember that the Patriots were in it, but I’m not sure who they were playing and who won. If this book can get me to be interested in the early history of football, it’s going to be able to do it for anybody. Inventing the Boston Game follows the story of a group of upper-class Boston private school boys who called themselves the Unita Football Club. Thank you.

Jake:
[1:24] During the height of the Civil War in 1862, they started playing a ball game on Boston Common. Since then, generations have argued about whether their Boston game was some of the first soccer in America or the first organized American football team. Especially after they placed a stone monument to themselves on Boston Common a hundred years ago this week, it was clear that they deliberately inserted themselves into American sports history. A century later, though, it’s hard to tell how much of their shared mythology is true history.

Thank You to Supporters

Jake:
[2:01] But before we talk about the first organized football, or possibly soccer team, in the U.S., I just want to pause and say a big thank you to the listener supporters who make it possible for me to make Hub History. Most recently, Terry R. sent a nice one-time contribution on Patreon. I knew his name looked familiar when I got the notification, and when I went back and looked, it was at least his third or fourth time sending one-time support for the show. We’ve exchanged emails a few times in the past, especially after our two-part episode about Joshua Slocum’s solo circumnavigation of the globe, which made Terry yearn for new adventures.

Jake:
[2:43] He’s a great example of the different ways to support the show. If you have the means for a monthly commitment, you can sign up for our Patreon for as little as $2 a month. And if you’re not up for an ongoing commitment, you can follow Terry’s lead and throw a few bucks our way when it makes sense for you. So to everybody who’s already supporting the show, thank you. If you’re not yet supporting the show and you’d like to start, it’s easy. Just go to patreon.com slash hubhistory or visit hubhistory.com and click on the support us link. And thanks again to all our new and returning sponsors.

Meet the Historians: Mike and Kevin

Jake:
[3:24] And now, let’s get on with the show. I’m joined now by sports historians Mike Cronin and Kevin Tallec Marston. Mike Cronin is the academic director of Boston College in Ireland and a professor of history in the Irish Studies program at Boston College. He’s published books on everything from the history of St. Patrick’s Day to soccer in Ireland. Kevin is a research fellow at the International Center for Sports Studies, or CIES, to use the French acronym. And he’s also a visiting researcher and lecturer at the International Center for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University. He’s written about the evolution of FIFA rules, corruption in professional sports, and many other topics at the intersection of history and athletics. Together, they’re responsible for the new book, Inventing the Boston Game, Football, Soccer, and the Origins of a National Myth. One quick production note before I welcome Kevin and Mike. I recorded this episode, well, I won’t say where, but it was not in my usual home studio space, and it was not using my usual studio microphone, so if I sound different, that’s why. So with that out of the way, Kevin and Mike, welcome to the show.

Jake (interview):
[4:49] Kevin Tallec Marston and Mike Cronin are the co-authors of a new book titled Inventing the Boston Game, Football, Soccer, and the Origins of a National Myth. Mike and Kevin, welcome to the show.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[5:01] Thanks so much, Jake.

Jake (interview):
[5:02] Your new book, Inventing the Boston Game, is a book about sports,

The Oneida Monument

Jake (interview):
[5:07] but it’s also about monuments and memory. And the reason our listeners are hearing this episode, this conversation at this moment, is because this month, November 2025, marks the centennial of a monument that was placed on Boston Common in November 1925. So let’s start with the monument itself. If someone’s walking across Boston Common, where should they look to find what’s called the Oneida Football Club Memorial or Oneida Football Club Monument? And what does that monument look like?

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[5:39] If you walk along the top end, the north end of Boston Common, in between the northwest corner and Flagstaff Hill, there is one of the many sidewalk paths that crosses diagonally the common. And there is a small, nondescript, rectangular with a small, triangular-shaped top monument, stone tablet, you would really say, that sits along one of the walking paths towards the northwest corner, which is traditionally where a lot of sports were played, baseball and other sports as well, over the course of the 20th and 19th centuries.

Unpacking the Boston Game

Jake (interview):
[6:16] We’ll talk about this group of bostonians who called themselves the oneidas but they’ve been seen at different times as predecessors or originators of either american gridiron football or soccer association football but do we know were they kicking the ball carrying the ball throwing the ball was it some combination how much do we know about that.

Mike Cronin:
[6:42] You’re asking the impossible question, Jake.

Jake (interview):
[6:45] Well, talk also about why it’s so hard to know that.

Mike Cronin:
[6:48] Within a sort of sports history setting, you do have some sports around the world that we can say are invented. Somebody’s literally sat down with a piece of paper written down and gives us a game. So James Naismith with basketball would be one of the very clear-cut examples.

Mike Cronin:
[7:05] Most sports are this messy, long evolution that takes decades. And American football again if we kind of think about contemporary modern American football we run backwards and we find Walter Camp at Yale who’s always the father of modern football and that’s his title and he owns it and he but then the question is well what happened before that.

Mike Cronin:
[7:25] And so you have that kind of messy route of in the late 1870s early 1880s you have the various challenge matches between the elite universities of the northeast of the U.S. And then we take a jump back and we’re in a civil war where people are fighting for the future of the union and their own lives and then there’s this group of school boys in boston 1862 to 1865 who on the monument that kevin um described we actually let’s be honest it looks like a headstone it’s like somebody’s buried there um but the monument critically said that this was the first organized football team in the united states so that’s great they’re a team they’re organized whatever that means and they’re playing football whatever that means so the interesting thing is the way these these boys they are boys are all kind of 16 17 18 that kind of age they’re at diswell school which is a school just off the common and they’re basically being educated to take their harvard entrance exam so they’re you know wannabe harvard boys um they’re playing school football so they’re playing against other schools we know that from very brief reports in the newspapers of the time but what are they playing so they actually we’ll talk about this later they begin a process into the 20th century when they’re obviously old men by that point are memorializing and historicizing what they did as young men.

Mike Cronin:
[8:47] And they write a book about all their different kinds of sporting and social activities called Old Boston Boys and the Games They Played. And it describes various different games and sports they took on as youngsters. And there’s a few pages on this game of football. Quite interesting when you kind of think, for any of us or any of the listeners, if I said to you, go back in your mind and tell me what you were doing when you were 17.

Origins of the Boston Game

Mike Cronin:
[9:09] And you said, oh, yeah, I was playing football. And obviously, is that soccer? Is it American football? What is it? we can clearly quickly delineate what it is, what you were doing. Whereas these old men, you read the description, we couldn’t go out now and kind of replay the game because the description is so hazy. They were definitely, as you mentioned, playing some kind of kicking game, some kind of handling game. What already exists by the 1860s coming over from the UK, from Britain, definitely soccer’s just having its first rules emerge. Rugby. The handling game, those rules are definitely there. So the boys are picking up all kinds of different practices and putting together as their game. So it’s very difficult to say what they’re playing. I mean, Kevin, you’re good on the descriptions. I mean, they describe different skills and aspects that different players have. Which means people on the same pitch could be playing a different game in their head. I mean, it’s so confused.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[10:10] And that’s one of the confusing parts is the testimonies that we get, which come from memory and oral history in that sense, space out over the course of about 20 year period in the early 20th century. And the first records, and Mike alluded to the book Old Boston Boys, which you can still find a rare copy of in the used bookstores in Boston. But the book describes a certain set of memories. So kicking, some handling, they even use words like lurking, which doesn’t really make a lot of sense to a modern American reader. What is lurking? Well, it’s what we would understand today is offside in a different way, right? And it talks about fair play and it talks about the spirit of the game. It talks about scoring goals, but not touchdowns. It talks about kicking for scoring. It does talk about babying the ball, which we understand is carrying the ball. But you could only do that, as far as we understand, if you were being chased by an opponent. The moment you were no longer chased by an opponent, you would have to put the ball down and you would have to kick it again. So we have this hybrid version of what we cannot understand today as football, soccer, rugby. It’s something else in that sense.

Jake (interview):
[11:23] I know a couple of years ago, I did a show about the Red Stockings team of 1874 or five that did the World Baseball Tour. And that sort of let me talk about how both baseball and cricket came from games like rounders, these old sort of British folk games. Is there that kind of common ancestor to rugby, soccer, gridiron football, all the sort of kicking and running games that we have?

Mike Cronin:
[11:47] No, they tend to be very localized. So if you think about rugby school in the town of Rugby and the peculiarity of their handling game, they have a local leather worker who then becomes a ball manufacturer, and he’s making oval-shaped balls which are designed to be handled. So in a way, the technology relies on a handling code. When you look at the sort of first explosion of working-class men’s soccer in the UK.

Mike Cronin:
[12:15] That follows a bit later 1850s and the 1860s we are talking about vulcanized rubber balls which can be kicked for a long time without exploding or bursting so some of its technology some of its local tradition what we know about the boston games is you see press reports when i say press report i don’t mean a big long i mean literally a score is recorded but you get the idea these inter-school challenges are definitely there in the 1860s they’re definitely there in the 1850s and they’re being played on the common so this game by the time the uniders are playing during the civil war it probably has a lineage we can really kind of factually say something was happening of maybe sort of 10 20 years so it’s definitely a tradition of school boys in the northeast coming together school versus school or combinations of schools for the bragging rights and clearly whatever it is they are playing is common enough to the various schools to understand when they get to the field of play, what they’re going to do. They’re not standing there for 20 minutes arguing what kind of sport they’re

The Boys Behind the Game

Mike Cronin:
[13:18] playing. Are we playing handling? Are we playing kicking? And the generic term you see that emerges to sort of define it is the Boston game. Which is obviously going to be very different, but also important in a debate that will lead to then American football.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[13:32] And very similar. I mean, Jake, you mentioned the early baseball tours and baseball games, the Red Stockings and all that. You have in baseball’s early history, you have a New York game, you have a Massachusetts game, you have different localized rules. We see the exact same phenomenon happening here with foot space ball in that sense. So it’s football, but it’s not in one word because we’re playing with our feet, but we have a ball, but we also have these more flexible rules. And they are all very localized. And we see that different schools have their traditions. I mean, there are archival records that date across different areas of the eastern seaboard of the U.S., which with schools going down to the south up in Vermont, in New England, across Rhode Island, Connecticut, where schools and teams and clubs, even firemen, for example, would be playing games that would be reported. In the press as football, but we don’t have a definitive set of rules that appears in a codified sense until after the period in which our Oneida boys play, which is part of the problem of it reinterpreting retrospectively what they were doing.

Jake (interview):
[14:41] Well, let’s come back to the Oneida boys a little bit and the world they lived in. You talked a little bit about how they were all, or almost all at least, going to the Dixwell School and sort of coming from a similar world and background. But let’s talk about what that world is. It doesn’t really sound like the Oneidas were the sons of recent Irish immigrants or old working class Boston Yankees. They were from a pretty specific set of

The World of the Oneida Boys

Jake (interview):
[15:09] neighborhoods, schools, and a pretty set Boston class. What was the world of the Oneida Boys like?

Mike Cronin:
[15:16] It’s a very specific world. I mean, if you think about where the common is, many of the boys live on Beacon Hill. Many of the boys live in those kind of country suburbs of kind of Milton, et cetera, that they are from wealth. I mean, it’s a simple thing we have to remember about the vast majority of them, that their parents are industrialists, bankers. They’re people who, you know, made their money out of railways. They’re the people who will make even more money out of the Civil War. So, you look at their background, they are, you know, if we want to use a quick handle, you know, they are the children of a fiscal elite. They are millionaires. they are going to Dixwell’s school which again if you go through in Massachusetts in the MHS you go through the class list these are just the names of Boston’s elite these are old families old money they’re Brahmins so they’re kind of mixing with each other they’re going to enter Harvard with each other and clearly at Dixwell’s they are playing their football together and if again when you look at the sort of the longest team list that the United’s eventually create where they claim to have had 52 players on their roster, the number of kind of intermarriages between these elite families that they’re playing with their first cousins, their brothers, etc., etc. It’s an incredibly small world. And I think in a sporting sense, that’s also important in terms of understanding the development of sports.

Mike Cronin:
[16:41] This is a day school. I think if you look at the UK model, particularly the debate about rugby school, and then you look at the debate around the evolution of soccer, the big tick point there is always the Cambridge University rules. Where those Cambridge University young men played their football. They played them in elite public schools like Winchester. Therefore, in the English public school model, there’s a kind of residency. You are literally living as boys, Harry Potter style, in your houses. And the games evolve over a few decades, house versus house competition. We don’t have that in Boston because everything’s transitory. They’re literally at the end of the school day. They’re going back home where they’ve got to play a role in their family life. They’ve got to take part in discussions about the civil war during this period, all those things that those day-to-day concerns that don’t impact on their colleagues in an English public school setting. In Boston, they’re kind of carving out their sporting time on a much more infrequent basis.

Jake (interview):
[17:42] And not as isolated, it sounds like, where the boarding school model, again, could evolve very differently because generations of students were isolated on this campus and not playing really against kids from another campus.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[17:56] And it becomes a school tradition. The importance of this, you would consider an invention tradition in that sense, but you have an idea in these public school models where the boys are building their own identity through a school affiliation, through house affiliation. And we simply don’t have that in the New England model because the New England boarding school that everybody’s familiar with today didn’t really begin until after the Civil War period. And so actually, it’s these boys and their larger networks who will start to fund, create and build these New England boarding campuses in the second half of the 19th century, which then become kind of an American educational model based largely on the British school model and very much on the rugby school model that Mike alluded to earlier. But that’s just not the day-to-day reality that these boys live in in the 1860s. And we haven’t even gotten into the context of growing up in the middle of the Civil War.

Jake (interview):
[18:53] Yeah, let’s pivot to the wider picture a little bit. Their coming of age in this Boston that you describe as being steeped in heritage, aware of sort of the charge from Winthrop to be as a city upon a hill, but also in this era of sort of tumultuous change in Boston with landmaking, annexation,

Growing Up in Civil War Boston

Jake (interview):
[19:17] mass immigration, sort of reshaping Boston around them. How do all those factors together, the change that’s happening demographically and physically in Boston, the background of the bloodiest war in American history, what does that do to these kids who become remembered as the Oneidas?

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[19:36] Perhaps geography is a great place to begin, you mentioned, Jake, because the place that they’re playing on Boston Common at that point in the 1860s is just the edge of the city. The Charles River Basin sits essentially at the end of what is now the public garden. And so they’re on what was 15, 20 years before cow pasture. They had only outlawed grazing, I think, in the early 1800s, around 1810, 1820, something like that. And it starts to begin to become a public park only during this period and so over this period they are building the back bay it’s a it’s a project you know everyone takes for granted today the fact that the back bay exists it’s you know one of boston’s um iconic places and yet this was something that simply did not exist yet in the way that it was um that it does now and so when they were playing these games they’re playing on a you know not at all in the in this wonderful pristine central park that is part of the city. They’re simply playing in their backyard, if you will.

The Impact of the Civil War

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[20:37] This is a period of transformational change. You are in the midst of a civil war. Boston itself is certainly not touched in the same way that the cities down further south are burned and invaded. Exactly.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[20:49] And yet, all of the families are certainly involved because hundreds and hundreds and thousands of New England men serve in this. Many, many of the New England elite continue to serve and it becomes almost a point of importance in Boston elite society to gain support publicly and in popular terms for the war, well, you almost need to have some of the Boston Brahmin sons serve in this. Largely, obviously, in a superior capacity as officers and in honor of which there are a number of monuments that are on Boston Common, right? And we’ll come back to the monument and the commemoration question later. But this is a city and transformational change, a country and transformational change that has only within the last 30, 40, 50 years become completely untethered from its revolutionary identity and saying we are completely separate from the British. We are our own people. We’re our own country, our own city. And Boston has – there’s a great history book that makes a wonderful case for Boston as a city-state. The Mark Peterson book. Exactly. And that’s something that is the background and the context that really sets up our boys for the world that they’re living in.

Mike Cronin:
[22:03] Yeah, I mean, as you know, Jake, I mean, obviously, Boston, early 19th century, it’s relatively speaking, although it’s obviously the gateway to America in terms of sea traffic, the way, as it were, the city stops at the end of the public garden, it’s also a relatively small space. That homogenousness is threatened or challenged by the big waves of particularly Irish immigration, as you know, from the Irish famine onwards. So by the time the boys are playing their football, we’ve had 20 years of the Irish arriving. Boston Common, I think, is a really important geographical marker between the kind of North End, South End, the docks, downtown, then the common, and then you’ve got kind of Beacon Hill as sort of where the rich people live. So you have that kind of idea that, yes, they come down from Beacon Hill into the common to play their games, but they’re not going further than that. They’re not mixing with this kind of immigrant group. One of the – and I’d avoid remember later in his memoirs about kind of particularly snowball fights against boys from poorer districts for control of the common. And he writes how that, you know, they always fight valiantly, but usually lose due to the other side having superior numbers. So I think it is this important marker. So I think that whole idea of the transitions within Boston as a kind of mercantile immigrant city is profound to these boys.

Mike Cronin:
[23:20] You also have that launch into a civil war, which is very much a kind of Boston abolitionist cause the kind of parents of these boys i mean a lot of the parents of the boys are very very involved in the abolitionist campaign uh the self-styled captain of the team gary smith miller is obviously very involved in the abolition movement from peterborough up in new york so it’s part of their dna when you go into the kind of memoirs of the boys you look at the kind of notes that dixwell their headmaster makes they’re all alert to the fact that yes their late teenage boys are doing their Harvard exam, but this conflagration is going on that threatens the future of their union. And they talk about the fact of watching soldiers go off to war who are being transported through Boston and then they parade on the common.

Mike Cronin:
[24:08] They watch Boston infantry drilling before they go off to war. They drill themselves. The school makes them drill. So they’re living this kind of pseudo-military life within school, ready if they have to go to war. And yet in the middle of all that, and I think that’s a really important thing about the dates on the monument that you mentioned, They played their game between 1862 and 1865, and not once was their line crossed. So it’s almost as if in the monument, are they kind of positioning themselves as too young to go to war, most of them?

Mike Cronin:
[24:39] But they fought almost their valiant fights during that period, and they won. Their line was not crossed. In a way, the kind of Union line as far north as Boston wasn’t crossed. Many of them have brothers who go off to fight in a war. Some die, some don’t. But critically, one of the players within the team is Huntington Wolcott. And he does go off towards the end of the war, fights, writes terrified letters back home. A young man, he’d gone off to war against his mother’s wishes. Contracts disease comes home dies in milton uh and again there’s a lot of the oneida boys write in their sort of later memoirs or the diaries at the time about that at that point the team had ceased to exist they’d gone off on their way to harvard but they go to the walcott family home and they stand around huntington’s open coffin and this idea that it’s one of their number one of the boys they played with their hero this guy who was insanely good looking a skillful player, a great teammate, all these kind of almost Victorian values he had led him to fight in the war. And now he’s gone. And Walcott’s mother writes a letter, which the boys know about. She never wants a son to go to war. He went and he died because of that war. And she writes that she hopes they serve something better in their lives, that the war is futile. They should spend their lives doing good, be statesmen, be leaders.

Mike Cronin:
[26:05] Set down the morals for your country. So I think the idea that at one level, most of them are inculcated from the war, then they’re not old enough to go. Their families are rich enough to pay the fee to send somebody else. So therefore, they have within a context of war, civil war, Boston, they have a normal life. They can go to school and they can do something as frivolous as playing football. And yet they know because they’re that generation that when it comes to their

The Oneida Football Club’s Legacy

Mike Cronin:
[26:32] time to be adults, they’ve got to do something better. And I think it really does fill and inform not only their own life, but then when they get to their own memorialization in the 1920s, part and part of what they’re trying to do with the Oneidas story.

Jake (interview):
[26:46] If the Unitas were mostly from the Beacon Hill neighborhood or maybe commuting from Milton and other privileged suburbs to the Dixwell School, who did they play the Boston game against? Were the kids from Boston Latin or Dorchester High or Boston English playing the same game or a close enough game that they could find an opponent?

Mike Cronin:
[27:09] This is where the whole thing actually revolves around a point of complete ridiculousness. If I say I am the first organized football team in the U.S., That denotes I’ve got nobody else to play with until the second team turns up. And if you’re actually both on the pitch at the same time, then there’s two firsts. So the claim in a way proves how ridiculous the whole nature of sports history, football history is. But Kevin will give us a real answer.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[27:35] Well, it is the funny part of it all, I suppose, is that it sets up everything for the claim. Perhaps in their defense, what they create is a group of people playing a similar game. And key to that, what is odd is that almost everyone on that list of 52 people that is in the club, the Oneida Football Club, all goes to the same school. But not all. There’s a few kids that go to, as you mentioned, Boston Public Latin. There’s a couple at English. And then they do play recorded games in the press. Again, as Mike said, these are not games that get a whole column’s worth of match reporting. What it is, is on a page in the Boston Evening transcript, which covers all of the developments of the Civil War that day, you’ll get one line or a paragraph that says, Today on Boston Common, an interesting game of football was played between the boys of Roxbury or, you know, Dorchester or Public Latin against the Oneida Football Club. And that’s all you get. What that does tell us is that the schools are, again, around Boston Common in that area of the city, we’re all playing games. And they’re all playing similar games. And they agreed on a common set of rules, which we call now today the Boston game in that localized tradition.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[28:55] But they can’t fully be the first. What they do claim is that we were the first club. Because what they say is we played against schools. And so we were the first inter-school team. So it’s a kind of nuanced understanding of how they can position themselves as the first organized club,

The Name “Oneida” Explained

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[29:12] which is clearly what they say on the monument. But that’s part of the myth-making and the fun story of how they play with their own history later on during the commemorative process.

Jake (interview):
[29:23] You know, that sort of sparks a question I probably should have asked earlier. Where does the name the Oneida Football Club come from? Why were they the Oneidas?

Mike Cronin:
[29:31] There’s two schools of thought, one of which is the traditional Boston sporting sense of itself as a city and the key role that Harvard plays. If you think about these boys and the Oneidas, they’ve all got their sights on entering Harvard. Football is this amorphous soup of football DNA at this point. But the one sport that has really established itself in a decade and a half before as the college sport is rowing.

Mike Cronin:
[29:54] And the kind of Harvard-Yale rowing contest like anything Harvard-Yale in sport is critical. But these are hugely popular events at the time. And the first legendary Harvard boat is the Oneida boat. So have they got one eye on that sporting tradition? The other thing is in their historicizing of themselves, they always point to the fact that their captain, their leader is Gerrit Smith Miller. Who’s from Peterborough, New York, which is near the Oneida Lake. So again, are they folding in not a Harvard story, but a story from Miller’s own background? In all the records they spew out on there are many, the Oneidas, they never really nail down which way. They leave it, they mention both. But they never say, look, Miller came from near Oneida, that’s why the team’s what it is. My sense of it always is, yes, there is the Miller link, but given the Harvard of Lincoln, sort of the importance of rowing, and it’s where they’re going. And the idea of the Oneida in the 1860s would have a real resonance for Boston readers who would know about Yale and Harvard rowing. They talk about the fact that they wore red bandanas to identify themselves as their team. So again, it goes back to this organized team idea that if you look at the different newspaper reports, they have a moment before 1862 when the scores are listed in the Boston newspapers, they are Dixwell School.

Mike Cronin:
[31:11] And then they have this brief three-year hiatus where they are the Oneidas, and then they become Dixfels again. These aren’t teenage boys, not 14. These are 17 and 18-year-olds. They’ve got the connections. Boston’s a small city. They know which person’s typing in the… Football scores or is giving the football scores to the Boston transcript. Hey, mister, next time you report on us, we’re the Oneiders. We’re not just Dixwells. They’re almost as a group. They self-create this identity system for themselves. None of the other schools seem to do it. Every other school matches only refer to the schools. So the Oneiders clearly in that sense are organizing themselves slightly differently.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[31:48] And there’s a wider association culture that is at play here, I think as well, which is interesting is that a lot of these boys were not they didn’t only play football they also played baseball and baseball as we know is a booming booming sport during the civil war precisely during this period and baseball is very established by this time and some of the key members of of the oneida club miller himself james de wolf love it who also left us a tremendous amount of historical material.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[32:18] Across different cultural institutions in Boston. And they were all very, very well involved with baseball clubs and setting up a number of baseball teams. The Lowell Baseball Club was one of their – they were the sort of youth founders. I mean, it was largely supported by an older gentleman named of the Lowell family who sponsored them. But the boys were the ones who set up the club, and they had an organization to the club with a president, a secretary, a treasurer, et cetera. And even if we don’t have any written documents left over from the Oneida Football Club, we know that there was a certain structure to how they approached their baseball activity. So it’s not a stretch in that sense to understand their sporting activity in the football sphere as analogous to what they were doing in baseball and what their older brothers and uncles had done at Harvard with rowing, with baseball, etc. So there’s a wider sporting associational culture that is giving them the structure to call themselves a club and not just boys who go out and play games on Saturday afternoon.

Harvard’s Ban on Football

Jake (interview):
[33:24] Building on those connections that you both just mentioned to Harvard and how large Harvard loomed in these kids’ minds, it seems like the Oneida team, at least in the attention they got, benefited from a ban on football at Harvard that I think started in 1860 or 1861. What was football at Harvard before that ban, and why was it banned?

Mike Cronin:
[33:48] It was just a fight, Jake. It was a fight. Yeah i mean it’s interesting i think if you look at that idea of games growing up in regional isolation if you look at the history of college again inverted commas football clearly there are different things happening on different college campuses harvard’s bloody monday is a game games i don’t think we can use that term but you know is a fixture which is played at the beginning of the year and it basically seems to be freshmen versus everybody else and the freshmen are basically just beaten up for a period of play or time and there’s a ball loosely engaged so i mean i think to call it a sport is very difficult but i think the critical thing is that what happens around 1860 all the different college campuses do across a 12 18 month period close down their football games um harvard’s ban is introduced in 1860 and i think it’s to do with the fact that young men are getting very badly injured during these games the games are not necessarily played on playing fields or pitches, they’re being played on the edge of kind of buildings and streets, properties being damaged. Obviously, drink is a huge part of these games. Fights within the game and allied to the game and next to the game, windows are broken. It becomes almost a public order crisis. In a way, college football, if you read the history of college football, there’s this break in 1860 where the colleges collectively and individually ban these football games. You then have the Civil War.

Mike Cronin:
[35:16] And really, only football starts back at the colleges at the end of the 1860s. So there’s a 10-year gap in that normal development. And I think that’s why the Oneida schoolboy games and the other schoolboy games in Boston and across the Northeast are critically important because they offer a continuum of a game being developed without the drinking, the hazing, the fighting, and the property damage. These are simply boys playing a game. And I think when you actually see then the debates that will lead to the organization of modern collegiate football, as we understand it, in the early 1870s, you get many kind of Harvard men who are involved in that evolution of modern collegiate football, who write about the fact that during the gap of the bans… The Boston boys, not just the Uniders, but more generally, were still on the common. They were still developing and playing their game. So I think whatever about the Uniders’ claims to being the first organized team is to being true or false. The fact that the games go on in Civil War, Boston and beyond, when the colleges are not doing sport, it’s hugely important to informing those debates which will produce modern collegiate football.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[36:30] And part of the regulation of that space, as we were saying, you know, this is a period when the common itself is being turned into a public park over the end of the 1850s and into the 1860s. Football and a lot of sports are banned on the public garden at this point. And the newspaper, the newspapers regularly print public ordinance that reminds the citizens of Boston that football is banned on the public garden. However, what we do have is on the common, we have the ability to use the common with an authorization, if you will. And so one of the wonderful little pieces we have from James DeWolf Lovett’s scrapbook is he has a city allowance, if you will, that’s signed by the city that gives the – this is the baseball club, not the United Football Club. It gives the baseball club the ability to practice at a certain time of day, on certain days of the week, and they had authorized access to the park. So this is the beginning of a sort of regulation of playing space and leisure space that allows these boys to play, as Mike was saying, a safer sanitized version of youth sport.

The End of the Oneida Club

Jake (interview):
[37:41] That period when the Oneidas had sort of like the sole attention of whoever might be interested in football at the time and access to the common and their organized team members, was surprisingly short. If they were first referring to themselves as the Oneidas in 1862, it seems like the last games were played in 1865. Why did the team sort of evaporate?

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[38:06] Well, at this point, you have all of those boys, as Mike was saying earlier, who are 16, 17, 18, and the oldest, maybe 19, they have all graduated out of Dixwell’s and they have moved on to harvard most of them 37 out of the 52 or so are at harvard and the the most important characters on that whose names are on the monument on boston common all of those boys are the class of essentially 68 69 of harvard and so in 1865 they are all students over on the other side of the charles river and so what that what it what it does is presumably they have continued maybe be playing games informally that are not recounted in the press that we don’t necessarily know anything about. So maybe they continue to play in the late 1860s, but we don’t really know anything about that. But during that period, they are all gone. They are no longer young boys who can play frivolous games on a Saturday afternoon or any afternoon whenever they’re free. They are studying to be the new leaders of their post-Civil War world, trying to build what then becomes essentially the Gilded Age of Boston in the Northeast.

Mike Cronin:
[39:16] I think another thing, Jake, that’s quite important is that Kevin’s absolutely right. The boys themselves have gone. But the name O’Neill in the newspapers not only disappears, but Dixwell’s disappears. Dixwell himself becomes sick and takes about a year, year and a half vacation in Europe. He then comes back to school for two or three years and then finally closes his school. And I think it’s basically an important question. I don’t think there’s any way that these are school teams that are organized by the headmaster in the forms of Dixwell or anybody else. He’s not sitting there and saying, right, boys, the team sheet for this weekend is go Dixwells. He’s not doing that. But I think clearly given that he is of the same class as their parents.

Mike Cronin:
[39:59] It’s a small school. Everybody knows each other. It’s a small space around Boston Common from school to Beacon Hill. I think the absence of Dixwell is clearly important when he takes his sort of sick leave, as it were, that whatever permission he is giving them or encouragement without him in place disappears. And those boys who were there after the Oneidas have gone to Harvard, clearly for some reason are not organizing themselves in the same way and not appearing on Boston Common as far as we know to play games. So I think it’s the Harvard point is critical the boys have just gone on and I think again that that reinforces the important why the Anita identity is so important that it is a club within the school that these boys have given themselves certain markers the Anita club the redneck scarves etc etc that they are a particular moment in time, that it’s not a tradition that goes on year after year. It doesn’t become self-repeating. They were a kind of once-off moment, which is also the one they put on their monument. They become very invested in themselves and their moments.

Jake (interview):
[41:07] They go off to Harvard while Harvard still has a ban on football. And I think football would come back to Harvard in 1871. Did any of the Onidas stay at Harvard long enough to actually play for Harvard?

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[41:21] Of the names that are on the monument, there’s only one of whom, if my memory is correct, Robert Means Lawrence, who is actually still on campus until 1871-72 because he’s at the medical school at this point. But there’s no record of him in harvard’s newspapers and playing or being part of the initial group of boys that create the harvard football club however he’s on campus and he knows them and they’re all in the same social circles they’re all in other clubs together because as we said you know they’re all part of clubs so they’re in the singing club they’re in the hasty pudding club so they’re all in these clubs together and they all know each other but But I think the key moment that shifts there is even if the Anais themselves are no longer on campus after 1870, largely, this is, I think, really the game changing moment for football in the universities across the U.S. In the fall of 1870, Thomas Hughes, who’s a renowned, famous educator from the UK, visits the Northeast. And he comes on a tour and he sees a number of different colleges across the Northeast. Goes to Yale, he goes to Cornell, he goes up to Dartmouth. He visits Boston and he’s also linked to rugby school.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[42:34] And he is the author of a book called Tom Brown’s School Days, which was probably one of the biggest selling children’s books of the 19th century that influenced several generations of boys of this. And we know that from their own memoirs. A number of the Oneidas themselves refer back to this book. And in this book, they actually talk about the game of football at rugby.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[42:57] And so there’s this culture that legitimizes football in the eyes of school administrators, teachers, educators.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[43:04] And Thomas Hughes, who is the kind of embodies this vision of muscular Christianity, which is the late kind of middle, late 19th century vision of the Anglo-American gentlemen is what these these boys are supposed to become. He travels all across the U.S. in 1870 and explains his vision of education and how to build the new man. And that is influential.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[43:28] He even plays football. There’s a couple places at Cornell. He is written in the school newspaper, the famous Thomas Hughes engaged in a game of football with students and staff. And so all of a sudden, in 1870, the game is viewed very differently by the institutions because of this imprimatur that comes from Thomas Hughes,

Changing Views on Football

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[43:49] who is kind of la référence, if you will, in terms of school education, etc. And all of a sudden, schools can say, wait, well, maybe the game, if played in a different way, codified, controlled, regulated, etc., can become an educational tool. And this is where we see the schools across what will become the Ivy League at this point. The students begin negotiating with the faculty, and the faculty says, okay, well, we will provide the balls, right? But it’s going to be a game that’s going to be under the aegis of the school itself and no longer simply this hazing ritual or a completely unorganized mass of public disorder. So that’s this changing moment in 1870 when the Unitas are all, again, they’ve just left. So they’re sort of always just too early or just too late.

Mike Cronin:
[44:37] I think what is important, Jake, to note on that sense that once football starts again at Harvard, given that Kevin’s point, they’re either just too early or just too late. The years we’re operating with are incredibly tight. I mean, it’s not as if it’s decades, it’s one decade from the United’s playing to football re-emerging on college campuses. You do see a number of the United boys’ brothers, cousins, et cetera, in the early years of Harvard football. And given their social network, they know damn well what their cousin, brother, et cetera, did in the 1860s. They’re now doing the new codified organized version on Harvard campuses. So I think there is a direct correlation between the Boston game, the Oneida boys, and then what will emerge and the kind of battles over what football will be is informed by them.

Jake (interview):
[45:22] Because at least at first, it sounds like Harvard was playing a different game then a lot of the rest of what becomes the Ivy League, Princeton and Rutgers, Yale, aren’t playing exactly the same rules. So I wondered if you could see the Oneida’s fingerprints on the Harvard rules.

Mike Cronin:
[45:40] It’s part of the standard history of the invention or emergence of American football. Obviously, the rules of the Football Association, soccer as we know it, 1863. So by the time the Civil War is over and football re-emerges on the college campuses, soccer is there as a game. You don’t have to invent it. And I think if you look, Yale particularly seemed to favor during those early years the kicking game. So the essence is they’re playing soccer. Whereas Harvard becomes maybe this Boston game tradition that goes back to the Oneidas. Are much more invested in the handling game so when they play their great famous match against mcgill which is half the rules of rugby which mcgill bring to the table and a half which is a boston game clearly rugby is a superior form of the handling game because it’s been codified for three decades by that point so harvard once it’s played mcgill returns to boston.

Mike Cronin:
[46:33] And in modern contemporary terms what they’ve wedded themselves to is rugby so we’re now into a straight split of handling kicking are we going to play soccer are we going to play rugby and if you look at the various conferences and conventions that lead to the birth of an agreed collegiate football i think it’s quite interesting the power of harvard within that debate that yale like the idea of soccer they’ve got some other colleges alongside them but the real draw we understand by this point of any sporting match in the collegiate system is harvard versus yale that’s the box office. That’s the thing that’s going to drive interest, money, press reports. And Harvard initially say, if you want to play your soccer game, away with it. We’re not going to be involved. So I think that second convention, when they sign up to collegiate football, and that’s where the big bang moment, it’s the Harvard version, the handling game, the Boston game, is the one that dominates. And I think if Walter Kemp hadn’t come along, in modern terms, the collegiate football game in the US would have been rugby.

Mike Cronin:
[47:39] It’s just in the US because camp comes along and starts playing with the fugitive rules and then sort of starts saying, well, we need a forward pass, not a back pass, a line of scrimmage and all these other adaptations he makes. America then invents or progresses to its own code, American or collegiate football. But you can see the handprints of Harvard institutionally all over that decision. And what did Harvard inform by? The Anita Boys and schoolboy football of the 1860s. Thank you.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[48:10] And the question of institutional pride here is key because this is a period in which college sports is new, largely. Aside from the rowing contest that goes back to 1852, college sports is a new thing that they are inventing as they go in the 1870s. And what you have at this point, you have a number of attempts to form intercollegiate sporting bodies that are not just

Institutional Rivalry and Sports

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[48:35] football, but rowing tries to have an intercollegiate rowing association. That is that works quite well for a couple of years and then these as mike was saying you know these events become so big the harvard and yale race um at one point in a i think it’s between 1872 and 1874 so we’re exactly in the years when these decisions are made that event becomes an important event that’s held in upstate new york people go by the hundreds and literally up into the thousands of people attend this event they bet on the event okay it becomes a real big deal to the point that um there is there’s one race in which harvard and yale get into it at the end and they one feels that they fouled the other and there is absolute enmity between the two um not just institution between the two people and what’s fascinating is that in the people that were rowing in those two boats.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[49:28] We find some of the founders of the Harvard Football Club and those who are playing at Yale. And so when those two institutions are supposed to meet again to agree on football rules, they can’t sit in the same room together because they were fighting against each other on the river in a Yale boat in a race. And so the idea that institutional rivalry is linked here to interpersonal enmity, it’s only when against those two, three people have moved on that then an institutional thing can materialize that goes beyond the sort of personal reputational, risk there.

Jake (interview):
[50:09] As you point out, by 1876 and the time the sort of new rules are codified, I don’t think there are any Oneidas left as Harvard undergrads, but they start moving out into the world. They’re like a who’s who of the Boston Gilded Age. We have a Sturgis, a Lodge, there’s a Walcott, a Peabody, a Eustace, they’re too big of a hoes.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[50:30] Forbes.

Jake (interview):
[50:31] Forbes. Is there somebody we can use as an example of how their fortunes rise over the decades?

Mike Cronin:
[50:36] It depends where you start. What I mean by this, the Oneidas, once they’re old men, or the people, we call them the monument men, the people who, seven guys who put their memorialization together, they’re incredibly slippy. So if you look at the monument that is now in Boston Common, it has on the back of it the 15 names of the Oneidas. So initially, if we take the monument as gospel, the Oneida team was 15 people. But subsequently to the monument, the Oneidas write their own history. It’s a typescript manuscript. And at that point, they have 52 members. And if you look at who they add from the 15 to the 52, they’re only taking A-listers at that point. If you’re not an A-lister, you’re not added to the team. Most of these guys who are added to the team, in the manuscript are long since dead. But you’re getting the idea that your point’s a good one, who do we look to? But we also got to then say, well, which is the team? Is it the 15 or the 52?

Mike Cronin:
[51:40] Is that the monument men grabbing names from Boston history? Yes, they went to school with them, we know that. But are they put onto the team roster later on when they’re dead, simply because they’re important, rich, wealthy, powerful people? And that’s where the Oneida monument men in the 20s definitely start playing with history and who their friends were many of them not all i mean obviously when they leave harvard they go into family trust they go into banking they go into industry they go into railways they design the first boats that win the america’s cup they go traveling to japan and buy the entire sort of japanese art collection that’s now in mfa downtown etc that these are the men who build boston in terms of when you think about coupling in a back bay they are all over it the outliers i suppose are the interesting ones that when you get to the group of seven monument men within that there’s two or three who in the big terms didn’t make it they’ve done very well for themselves but they’re not the millionaires they’re not archbishop lawrence they’re not governor walcott etc etc and i think that’s the interesting part of the story is the reason they so proactively engage with historicizing and memorializing in the 1920s is because perhaps they didn’t live up, to the dreams of their or the expectations of their generation.

The Rise of Commemoration

Mike Cronin:
[53:02] So it’s all kind of interesting personal stories in there.

Jake (interview):
[53:05] When do you think that process of looking back and trying to remember or maybe invent a shared idea or a shared memory of the games they played on the Common, when does that start?

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[53:22] So that crystallizes about 1904, if you will. We have a clear timeline from 1904 to 1925. Well, I’ll extend up to 1927, which is the last real event of the Oneida Football Club at that point. But in their personal memoirs, we do get a sense that over the end of the 19th century and in these early years around the turn of the 20th, these men who are already starting at that point to be in their 50s, 60s, they still get together. they have meals. And then in particularly one meal in late November of 1904, they get together at Sam Cabot’s house, Cabot of the Cabot Chemistry Company, and they meet and they have this wonderful reminiscing dinner. And during this dinner, Sam Cabot says to James DeWolf, love it. He’s there. He says, well, you should really write all this down.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[54:14] You know, write down our memories. And so So he goes off and for the next about 18 months, he works on a manuscript that finishes as Old Boston Boys, which is then published in 1906 privately. I might stress because it’s a private publication process that is done on subscription. So basically, because of the cost of printing books, they go to their friends and family, say, we’re going to print this book for us and we’d like you to subscribe so that we can pay for the publication costs and you’ll get a copy. They print just over 250 copies and it becomes a personal memoir that is shared among families and friends. And at that point, the book is actually so well received.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[54:55] On the personal side, it gets very, very little coverage in the press. There’s a tiny little bit here and there in the Boston, and there’s one mention in the New York Times, but it’s not until 1907 and 1908 that they release a public edition that is then printed by the Riverside Press, which is a huge public publishing company. They’re traditionally the government printing offices publisher as well. And they publish a publicly accessible version that anyone can purchased at this point. And that’s when the book becomes diffused across not just Boston, but the book is covered. There’s press reports and newspaper coverage about the book all across the country at this point in the 1908, 10, 11 period. And so we’ve got the creation, if you will, of a corpus of artifacts.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[55:44] Memories, official testimony that is beginning to come together. And then after the First World War, of which obviously none of them are connected to, we have the birth of a New England preservationist movement. I think that’s a kind of a key thing to put in context here, because these boys are not just doing this in isolation. They’re doing this, you know, if you think about Paul Revere House in Boston, if you think about Otis House, even places like this. All of the iconic historic landmarks in downtown central Boston, it’s during this period when they are beginning to memorialize that these places are being threatened with destruction so they can build and develop the city. And the old Boston Brahmin class who’ve moved out of Beacon Hill into the Back Bay, they say, no, we’ve got to preserve old Boston. And part of that is creating the New England Society for the Preservation of Historical Antiquities, which is today known as Historic New England.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[56:40] And all of that is being fueled by the collective Brahmin memory, if you will. I would put it in those terms. And the Oneida boys here are simply surfing this wave of commemoration. So they’re donating things to historic New England at the time, the SPNEA. And they’re donating all sorts of things from, you know, the families are in the New England Bulletin and they donate wallpaper. They donate spoons. But they also donate in 1922 an old ball. And it’s a ball that currently still sits in historic New England. And it is, according to the Oneida testimony, it’s the original ball that they played with in 1863. And it’s painted up with some wonderful golden lettering that records their championship match from 60 years before.

The Oneidas and Historical Artifacts

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[57:27] And this becomes a historical artifact that we can ground their first in. Their commemoration begins in about 1904 and goes up into the beginning of the 1920s when they are simply remembering. I think that’s really the key thing is they’re remembering here.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[57:43] And then the first thing they do in 1923, Dixwells, at this point, as Mike mentioned earlier, Dixwells, the school has closed down, but the tradition has merged with another old headmaster from the 1870s. And at this point in the 1920s is Noble and Greenow School, which is probably familiar to a lot of Boston listeners and New Englanders. Noble and Greenow, incidentally, about, I think it’s about six months before in the previous year, they had just moved to their current Denham campus in 1921-22. That’s when they move out there. And these boys, some of their grandchildren go to this school. So Winthrop Scudder, Winn Scudder, his, I believe it’s his grandson at this point, has just graduated from Noble and Greenout. But they’re all connected to the school, even though it’s not exactly their school, it’s the descendant school, if you will. And what they do in 1923 is they decide to have a commemorative moment. They say, oh, well, we should do something for our school. We should sort of remember. We donated our ball. We should do something for this brand new school that has just moved out. They have this beautiful campus with the castle at Wardian Building that’s out there on the campus. And they organize what is essentially a private event for the school community where a number of the old men come together and they give speeches.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[59:00] Bishop Lawrence is there as well. And they talk really about what being a young schoolboy, because remember at this point, these are only boys that are at Novo and Greenau. There are no girls there until 19, I guess it’s in the 1970s when it becomes co-ed. But they have an event that talks about American boyhood and what it is to be an American boy and American man in the 1920s.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[59:22] And they use the example of the Oneida boys from the 1860s as role models to follow. And particularly Garrett Smith Miller, who at this point has been a successful dairy farmer. He’s been he’s up in New York.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[59:38] Quite well off, but he’s not connected to the Boston society. And he is brought back down to Boston to give a kind of testimony to these boys and say, this is, you don’t have to be honest, you have to do, you have to play with fair play and, and respect, you know, be valiant in defeat and all of these wonderful messages that are being passed across to the young future leaders coming through Noble and Greenough. And what they do is they put up a plaque on their, on their school gymnasium at this point to commemorate gareth smith miller now the reason they do this they’re all in actually inspired and this is where we see that that the community of the anglo-american community at this point is so intertwined they’re actually copying what has just been done at rugby school about a couple weeks earlier and they’re aware of of this because rugby is celebrating its centenary anniversary in 1923, which is something that was not lost on American readers, certainly not in Boston, because it gets a lot of press. And the Oneidas say, well, you know, well, they’re celebrating the origins of football and rugby in the UK. But we, I mean, we played in the 1860s. We must be the originators and the first people to play football in the United States, because again, Boston’s first.

Jake (interview):
[1:00:58] By this point, when they’re placing a plaque at the Nobles’ school, are they explicitly saying we are the originators of American football?

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[1:01:06] The plaque is more nuanced than that. The plaque simply recognizes Garrett Smith-Miller as the captain of the first club of organized football. And again, it’s a private event for the school. So it’s not intended as a public statement to say we are the official founders of the game. Because even at this point, everyone still knows that Walter Kemp, who’s still alive in 1923, he’s the father of American football. Everybody knows that. No one kind of contests that really yet. That’s the key moment. Yeah.

Mike Cronin:
[1:01:39] The other thing that’s fascinating, Jake, about this period is you’ve got to think about who some of these men are and what they represent. You look at the names they’re claiming. You know, Bishop Lawrence, he’s an overseer of Harvard.

The Importance of Legacy

Mike Cronin:
[1:01:51] These men sit on the management committees of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Society for Preservation of New England Antiquities. They have power. So if you’re a humble archivist working there in your threadbare gloves sort of putting archives together, if somebody walks in and says we used to play with this ball would you like it you’re going to say yes sir we will you’re not going to do what an archivist would do in the 21st century and say i have to establish the authenticity of this so i mean to me that was the thing i think when kevin sort of told me this story and we started working on it together i think it’s just fascinating the idea that you’ve left school at 1718 and gone to harvard in the middle of a civil war and got on with your life and yet 69 years later you can go here’s my ball i don’t have many things from when i was 17 in my life now let alone a football i kicked once upon a time and this beautifully preserved football as kevin was saying with the lettering with when the moment when the the line goal was crossed a beautiful oneida crest is painted onto it it smells bad If you like, it just, it just doesn’t ring true. Now Goodyear rubber may be perfect and it may actually just sit there beautifully, but it is, it, these kind of grabs and moments, Oh, Noval and Greenhow, that’s a descendant school from Dixwell’s. Some of our relatives are still there. We’re people in the society. Can we have a plaque to our captain?

Mike Cronin:
[1:03:20] Yeah, sure. Work away. And it’s just this kind of self memorializing starts when you look, start putting it all together. You start asking yourselves what’s motivating you.

Mike Cronin:
[1:03:32] What are you actually trying to achieve? And with each first step, there’s a whole series of steps where they almost get bolder and bolder and bolder. And almost you get the sense of looking around like, has anybody caught us yet? So I think rather than saying they’re being bad or naughty, I think we’ll say they’re being playful. But a lot of it does come from their cultural power that nobody’s saying, well, hold on a minute. Why should we commemorate you? You’re just a bunch of old guys. No they’re a bunch of well connected old guys.

Jake (interview):
[1:04:05] How do we get from these well-connected old guys donating a rubber ball with a possibly dodgy providence and having a plaque dedicated to their former captain to unveiling a stone tablet on Boston Common just a couple of years later? What’s that progression look like?

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[1:04:23] I would sum it up in one word, which is death. In an ironic sense, death and the specter of time, if you will, is what is weighing on all of these men at this point. They’re in their 80s here. As Mike said earlier, when we get to the point of putting a monument together and then depositing a list of names, very few of these men are still alive. The seven in question still are. They are getting to the end of their lives. And what do we do when we get old? We remember.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[1:04:52] We remember good things in the past. But not only their, let’s say, the weight of their imminent mortality is weighing on them, but also the key death of a number of other individuals. And we go into this more in the book, so I won’t kind of elaborate on it. But one key person passes away in 1925, and that is Walter Camp. And it’s a bit of a shock to everyone. And it is national front page news everywhere across the country. And it becomes immediately a call for commemorating the father of collegiate and American football. And this dominates the press over the course of the spring and the summer of 1925.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[1:05:35] News of that comes all the way to Boston. We don’t have a particular piece of evidence that says exactly the Unitas admit that they were doing this because of Walter Camp. But we know that they were aware of it because in their writings, they talk about Walter Camp. The typescript of their own club history actually mentions Walter Camp in it. And so they were very familiar with the Walter Camp story and his importance and the role that he played. Let’s say the commemorative push around Walter Camp, which at this point, you know, what they want to do is they want to build a colonnade around the stadium of the Yale Bowl, which at this point is a massive collegiate stadium. And we have to remember in the 1920s, American collegiate football is a huge, huge thing. It dominates the sports, the media, everyone’s attention. And so what they want to do is they want to name the Yale Bowl after Walter Camp. and they put up this colonnade and the plans. Yale has a wonderful archive with the Walter Camp papers that go into the commemorative projects that they had. And that came to the ears of R. Neideman.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[1:06:39] And fascinatingly, in September, the Oneidas have put in a request to the city of Boston to put up a monument that says, we were the first football club. Now, in a sense, it’s not contesting Walter Camp as the founding father of American football. Well, they’re just saying, where were the first club?

The Oneida Monument

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[1:06:58] And so it’s this wonderful nuance and they say, well, we’ll do that. And again, as Mike said, they’re so well connected in the city in the span of two months. They are able to put together a project with an architect, with the city’s approval, with the Boston Art Commission’s approval, the mayor’s office, all this to have a small tablet monument erected on Boston Common, as we said at the beginning, right next to Spruce Street. It’s Spruce Street is the cross street with Beacon. And they put up the monument in November 21st, 1925, which is, in a sense, it’s also kind of a non-event in many ways. It’s an event that what I would call it a pseudo event. It’s an event that is created in order to be able to talk about it, right, to create media and news around it. And so they have this and they put it out. And this is, again, where, as Mike was saying, they’re beginning to become more and more playful, Mara and I have always, about their own self-memorizing. And so they put up the monument in November of 1925, and the monument goes up, and they are very happy with it, except for the fact that on the top of the monument – maybe this will – I’ll come to your question, I guess. You probably want to get on to that, Jake. Go ahead.

Jake (interview):
[1:08:09] Well, I was shocked to read that there was no football on the monument when it was unveiled.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[1:08:14] Not initially. There was a crown initially. That was the plan, if you will. And this was a big debate between these five men that were really behind the project itself. And the architect was supposed to be putting a laurel wreath, if you will. And the men said, no, no, no, we don’t want it. We want a ball. We want a pigskin, right? An oval football. Now, of course, for obvious reasons compared to the round ball that Mike described before, there’s some historical inaccuracies between what they wanted to put on the monument and the ball they actually donated. But they put up the monument and there’s no ball on it for about a year. And then finally, they convinced the architect through their wonderful city connections to have a ball engraved. But it’s not a ball that looks like the one they played with. It’s a ball that is the famous ball that everyone is using in intercollegiate football, which is the big phenomenon of the day.

Jake (interview):
[1:09:12] It’s a 1920s football, not an 1860s football.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[1:09:15] Exactly.

Mike Cronin:
[1:09:15] And I think that’s the important thing. I mean, I think the whole idea, if they stood there in 1925 and said, look, we invented football. Just after Yale’s passing, everybody would have said, that’s mad stuff. Just go away. Whereas I think what they do really subtly by putting up their monument, you’ve got to remember, they’re the only people, of all the monuments in Boston Common, everything else and everybody else that’s commemorated on Boston Common in statue stone form, they’re dead at the moment of their commemoration. So this is not only the only monument on Boston Common put up to a living people person or people it’s the only one that’s paid for organized and designed by those people themselves as well and.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[1:09:55] Unveiled by them.

Mike Cronin:
[1:09:56] And unveiled by themselves so this is it’s it’s hubris gone mad but I think the important thing is that that little feature the little you know it’s only about that big the ball that’s off the monument the fact they choose an American a contemporary American football not the round ball they played with it is a little dig at Yale I think it’s a Harvard Yale thing it’s a Boston New Haven thing but okay we’ll we’ll give you we’ll give you football Yale and Walter Camp we can’t argue with that but look look at the symbolism we were first,

The Evolution of the Monument

Mike Cronin:
[1:10:31] And I think it is cheeky.

Jake (interview):
[1:10:32] Well, flashing forward several decades, I had no idea that Mayor Tom Menino greenlit a project to re-carve the monument, and that included replacing the oblong American football with a round soccer ball. How did we get to the point of that change, and what does that tell us about how fans or scholars of soccer also claim the United memory?

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[1:10:59] It’s the trick that is then played on the tricksters, if we can say it in that sense, which they can’t predict in any way. I do wonder what they think about it now, looking at it all from above. But at a point in the 1970s and 80s when soccer at this point is a booming sport, it’s the sport of the future. We have the NASL. We have Pele coming to the cosmos in New York. And we have particularly an entire young generation of people across the U.S., which are playing soccer as kids for the first time. And it’s a huge youth participation sport, which is completely changing the sporting landscape of the country. And that sport is regularly looking for a, let’s say, a nationalizing story and a legitimizing story because it is often associated to ethnic clubs and immigrants and minority communities. And it’s not, and it at times is considered as a, not an American game because the American sports are baseball. The American sports are football. The American sports at this point are potentially basketball. Hockey is a complex one because it has a cross border thing with Canada, but it’s not one of those big American sports. And so despite the fact that soccer in America does have a really long history going back to the 1880s as a game of soccer, following the soccer rules, it’s.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[1:12:26] It doesn’t have the institutional legitimacy and cultural legitimacy that other

Soccer’s Claim to History

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[1:12:32] sports have, the big sports, let’s say. And so at this point, as the World Cup is coming to the United States in 1994, one of the projects that is piloted by the National Soccer Hall of Fame at this point is, well, we should clean up the monument.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[1:12:47] In the 1980s, they create an exhibition for the history of the sport of soccer, and they borrow the old Oneida football that was at Historic New England. And they actually have it in their small museum in upstate New York for a long time in the 1980s. And they start to say, well, the Oneida ball is a round ball, so they must have been playing soccer, obviously. I mean, there’s a question around the actual nature because the people there are aware of the complexities of the evolution of sports in the 19th century. But it’s a nice way to say, well, look, we’ve got the original round ball and they played in Boston. And so when the World Cup comes in 1994, they propose to clean up the monument. Because at this point, the monument has cracks in it. The painting, the painted letters, the painting has disappeared. It’s in a state of disrepair. and that is a project that is then put to the city by the national soccer hall of fame saying look we’ve got the world cup coming why don’t we take care of this monument and it’s all very above board so they say look the original ball that these boys were playing was actually round so technically what we’re doing is we’re fixing history right we’re going to go and correct it because it’s wrong none of that was contested it was all very clear and no one had a problem with it and the monument was cleaned and re-carved to fit the ball that was donated. And no one sort of really notices about it. It gets no press coverage. No one talks about it in the 1990s.

Jake (interview):
[1:14:12] I had no idea.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[1:14:13] And probably most Boston citizens who would walk across Boston Common by the monument never noticed for years and years and years.

Jake (interview):
[1:14:19] But it’s a nice way to say, oh, soccer isn’t this foreign introduction. It’s not a game played by european socialists look it was played right here in the cradle of liberty in 1862 right.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[1:14:33] Exactly. In the city of American Firsts.

Jake (interview):
[1:14:35] Right. But then you say that most Bostonians would walk by without noticing a change. Can you tell us a little bit about one Bostonian who did notice the change and went on a long, decades-long quest to have the record re-corrected, I guess you’d say?

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[1:14:52] So one local concerned citizen, Tom McGrath, was teaching at a local institute, I think the Wentworth Institute, had one of his students who at this point, this is in the late 90s, about 1999, I think it was. One of his students was struggling and he gave his students, well, you know, I’m going to try and give you a hand. I’ll give you a subject. What are you interested in? You’re interested in sport. Well, why don’t you go and write a little research paper on this monument on Boston Common, which is a football monument. And so he sends his student out to Boston Common and the student comes back and says, well, I looked there, there, there’s, there’s a monument about sports. There’s only one, but it’s not to football. It’s to soccer. And Tom McGrath says, wait a minute, you know, I’ve been living on, you know, in Boston, downtown Boston for years and years and years. It’s a football monument. I don’t understand what’s going on. What do you mean it’s? And so he goes and inspects it and he uncovers the whole story. He’s confronted with all the historical evidence. And he, he realizes that there is a historical ball that the monument has been changed. He knows a lot about the Oneidas at this point and what they’ve done, but he has a sense that, well, somebody, somebody changed, you know, a piece of city history and we should, we should fix that and put it back to its original state from 1990, 1994 at this point. And so he goes on a, essentially, we could call it almost a city personal crusade to revise the revised version of history.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[1:16:16] And that takes about 17 years, let’s say, because he tries to marshal support from the city, from the Friends of the Public Garden, and a lot of the cultural institutions around Boston and Beacon Hill, etc. And so finally in 2017-16, the monument is re-carved to its original pigskin. So you can still see some of the etchings from the soccer ball that was on that, but it now has its original 1925 form, which is very ironic because you kind of think that the World Cup is coming back to the United States next year. Is someone going to try and re-carve it again? No one really knows.

A Citizen’s Crusade for History

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[1:16:57] But long short of it is that’s the magical history of this monument, which turns 100 on November 21st.

Jake (interview):
[1:17:05] In a lot of ways, it’s a more frivolous monument than, say, the Soldiers and Sailors Monument that’s just up the hill from it, right? But are there lessons that we can take from sort of the contested ways that the Oneida monuments remembered the different claims to its history? Can we apply any of those lessons to other historical monuments where memory and history and myth lead people to different conclusions? Is there a wider lesson to draw?

Mike Cronin:
[1:17:34] I think in sporting terms, there is. I think it’s quite interesting that you think about the, you know, multi-billion dollar business is contemporary sport, the way it’s marketed on TV, the way it’s sold. The idea, you can take quite a simple concept, this memorial in Boston, and say, actually, you know, if the coming sport that’s going to take on the billions of the NFL is soccer, then the first football club means English, European football, soccer, not football, American football and therefore it can be played with and manipulated and I think the same thing I mean Kevin mentioned earlier um the invention of the game of rugby in the town of rugby and that was invented by a boy called William Webb Ellis who famously is a plaque set in rugby picked up the ball and ran with it we know for a fact that never happened the school itself knows it never happened because I have an investigation in the second half of 19th century William Webb Ellis, who eventually went on to be a minor cleric in the southwest of England, never invented or played the game of rugby. And yet, in 1995, when world rugby goes toe-to-toe with world soccer and invents its own World Cup, there’s a beautiful gold trophy. What do they call it? The William Web Ellis Trophy. They named the trophy after something they’ve known for 100 years. Never happened. It’s not true. And I think it’s just a way that foundational moments, once somebody says it’s true.

Mike Cronin:
[1:18:59] First of all, it’s open to manipulation. And secondly, it’s very difficult to shake that truth that definitively the United were not the first organized football club in the United States. I don’t believe that claim. I understand where it comes from. I understand how they manipulate it. I understand how their social wealth and power allows them to pull this off. But the central fact, it ain’t true. And I think you could probably go to many of the monuments on somewhere like Boston common, or you walk to a city like London or Paris or New York. So many of those monuments, obviously in recent years in the US, for the kind of removal of Confederate statues and so on, just the fact that somebody put something up once and said, this is a good thing, it doesn’t mean that 100 years, 200 years, whatever, later, somebody else in a different cultural context is going to either alter it or say, this is now a bad thing. So I think the whole notion of heritage and commemoration versus history as an archival kind of academic undertaking, they’re allied but separate disciplines.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[1:20:03] To build on the question of truth and memory and legend, as truth becomes memory and memory becomes legend. And there’s a wonderful article that describes the William Webber case about how when hearsay is transformed into fact and trivia, given significance. And, you know, the creation of monuments obviously are the materialization of meaning and stories that we are trying to give to the public, to the future. This is always the question of sort of what do you leave for posterity? And I guess the story here for the Oneidas, it illustrates the complexities of memory, the complexity of history, the manipulation in some sense of artifacts and objects and pseudo events. We talked about the idea of creating history just for the purpose that it becomes reported so it becomes history. And all of that is embedded with these wonderful origin myths. If we have origin stories and origin myths, in some sense, it’s to give us a

Friendship and Legacy in Sports

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[1:21:08] sense of meaning, a sense of purpose, sense of direction. And perhaps if there’s one thing that we can take away from the Oneida story is, I think, their human connection, their friendship.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[1:21:19] One of the amazing things in their personal memoirs is how they really underscore their sense of fraternity as this bond of old men who survived the Civil War, who have lived to 80, seen the First World War, the Great Depression at this point. Some of them live past 1929, and they are supporting each other into old age and all the way to the end of their lives. And that is a real driving theme for them. And in many respects, what they’ve done playfully, perhaps manipulating, is essentially an ode to friendship and it’s an ode to childhood and youth friendship.

Jake (interview):
[1:22:00] Well, there is a lot more about not only the evolution of both soccer and football, but about myth and memory and memorialization in the book, Inventing the Boston Game, Football, Soccer, and the Origins of a National Myth. If folks want to find out more about your work or learn more about the book, are there events in the Boston area where people can come out and hear more?

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[1:22:27] So on Tuesday, the 18th of November at Massachusetts Historical Society, Mike and I will be there to present the book and discuss that with Louisa Thomas, who’s going to be moderating the session. And it’s an open event. I think you have to register with MHS. And it will also be a hybrid event will be available as well online. So if you’re across the country and interested in Boston, New England history, you can certainly tune in as well.

Jake (interview):
[1:22:52] Kevin and Mike, I just want to say thank you for being generous with your time today. I know I’ve kept you a little longer than I said I would. And thanks for joining us today.

Kevin Tallec Marston:
[1:22:59] Thank you so much, Jake.

Jake:
[1:23:02] To learn more about the Oneida team who may or may not have invented football, check out this week’s show notes at hubhistory.com slash 340.

Jake:
[1:23:13] I’ll make sure to include a link to buy the book on bookshop.org, where your purchase supports authors, indie bookstores, and this podcast. I’ll also link to the talk that Kevin and David are giving this week at the MHS on Tuesday, November 18th We’ll also have links to the faculty pages for both authors where you can find out more about them and get in touch with them, If you’d rather get in touch with me, you can do that by emailing podcast at hubhistory.com. You can reach out on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram by looking for Hub History, or on Mastodon by searching for at hubhistory at better.boston. My most active social media presence is on Blue Sky, where you can find me by searching for hubhistory.com. To find all the ways to get in touch, just go to hubhistory.com and click on the Contact Us link. While you’re on the site, hit the subscribe link, and be sure that you never miss an episode. If you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, please consider writing us a brief review. If you do, drop me a line, and I’ll send you a Hub History sticker as a token of appreciation. That’s all for now. Stay safe out there, listeners.