2019 Pauley Lecture

Department of History Author

10/23/2019 Added

4 Plays

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The Department of History's 2019 Pauley Lecture, featuring Dr. Bruce Pauley. Dr. Pauley also received History's inaugural Distinguished Alumni Award

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[00:00:12.343]Well good afternoon, everyone.
[00:00:14.800]Thanks so much for being here, welcome.
[00:00:18.190]My name is Mark Button.
[00:00:19.290]Can you hear me?
[00:00:22.070]My name is Mark Button.
[00:00:23.140]I'm the new Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences here
[00:00:27.294]in the university, at the University
[00:00:28.948]of Nebraska, Lincoln.
[00:00:29.937]And it's really my pleasure and honor
[00:00:31.930]to be able to introduce to you today Dr. Bruce Pauley,
[00:00:35.660]Professor Emeritus of History at the University
[00:00:38.230]of Central Florida, but an alum,
[00:00:41.000]longtime Nebraskan and a loyal Corn Husker.
[00:00:44.875]And I'm sure he doesn't really need much
[00:00:47.190]of an introduction from me.
[00:00:48.140]But let me just tell you a few things here.
[00:00:51.270]Dr. Pauley was born and raised here
[00:00:53.720]in Lincoln, Nebraska.
[00:00:55.360]Attended public schools here.
[00:00:57.120]He holds degrees from Cornell College,
[00:00:59.180]the University of Nebraska,
[00:01:01.090]and the University of Rochester.
[00:01:03.680]He has taught at the College of Wooster in Ohio,
[00:01:07.280]the University of Nebraska, Lincoln,
[00:01:09.260]the University of Wyoming, and then for 35 years,
[00:01:12.790]the University of Central Florida.
[00:01:15.310]As many of you know, he's written numerous works,
[00:01:18.880]six books, three of which have been translated into German.
[00:01:22.960]He's the author of "Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini,
[00:01:26.027]"Totalitarianism in the 20th Century"
[00:01:29.200]and "From Prejudice to Persecution, The History
[00:01:31.517]"of Austrian Antisemitism", the latter of which
[00:01:34.550]won two national book awards.
[00:01:37.390]He's written numerous other works.
[00:01:38.720]His most recent book I just saw as we were walking in.
[00:01:42.060]We'll encourage you to take a look at that.
[00:01:44.387]"Pioneering History on Two Continents, an Autobiography"
[00:01:48.690]was published in 2014 by the University of Nebraska Press.
[00:01:52.590]He's an amazingly decorated and awarded historian.
[00:01:56.370]He's received the Highest Award for Scholarship
[00:01:58.840]of the Austrian Ambassador of the United States in 2010.
[00:02:02.740]His other honors include numerous awards
[00:02:06.100]for his research and teaching awards,
[00:02:08.580]both university and college awards,
[00:02:10.940]19 teaching and research grants including a Fulbright.
[00:02:15.320]He's earned a lifetime achievement award
[00:02:17.310]from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln and Grinnell.
[00:02:20.310]And he's the member of numerous of associations here
[00:02:23.110]honoring his support, his great commitment
[00:02:25.220]for this wonderful university and the History Department
[00:02:28.070]including the President's Club, the Chancellor's Club,
[00:02:30.430]the Alumni Advisory Council and the Department of History.
[00:02:32.770]On homecoming weekend, it's wonderful
[00:02:34.310]to be able to celebrate your great generosity.
[00:02:37.230]It's also so apropos to have Dr. Bruce Pauley here,
[00:02:41.030]the Founder of the Pauley Lecture Series
[00:02:42.770]to give the Pauley Lecture Series,
[00:02:44.440]so we're so thrilled by that.
[00:02:46.320]And we have one more award to present to Dr. Pauley.
[00:02:51.470]It's really a pleasure (laughs) to present you
[00:02:58.120]with the History Department's first
[00:02:59.530]Distinguished Alumni Award in the department.
[00:03:04.354]Thank you very much.
[00:03:05.903]Appreciate it, (muffled speaking) thank you very much.
[00:03:09.517]I'll put this back over here where it doesn't get lost.
[00:03:14.415](muffled speaking)
[00:03:17.039]And Dean Button has a busy schedule this evening,
[00:03:19.990]so he's probably not gonna be able to stay very long
[00:03:22.330]'cause he's gonna go to the country club.
[00:03:24.726]Another event, another event.
[00:03:26.870]So we just have him for a second.
[00:03:28.030]But I wanted to just say one more thing.
[00:03:31.369]As you know, historians have very special DNA
[00:03:37.080]which makes us sensitive to thinking about how
[00:03:40.880]to commemorate particular events.
[00:03:43.010]This year is the 150 anniversary
[00:03:46.550]of the University of Nebraska.
[00:03:47.880]So about a year ago, my colleagues and I
[00:03:51.400]were thinking about how we could best celebrate
[00:03:54.250]the 150th anniversary.
[00:03:56.650]So we thought that we would do, also theoretical
[00:03:59.520]so we wanted to do what we call a meta Pauley,
[00:04:03.670]a Pauley Pauley, right, to have this be the event tonight.
[00:04:09.970]And as you just heard, we've just given Bruce
[00:04:12.770]our first honorary, our first Distinguished Alumni award.
[00:04:16.800]But he doesn't know this, and I've been nagging him forever
[00:04:20.820]for photographs because our department's also starting
[00:04:24.760]a new tradition in awarding these awards,
[00:04:29.410]but also to make our department aware
[00:04:32.100]of his generous contributions to the Department of History
[00:04:34.600]because he founded the Caroll R Pauley Symposium
[00:04:37.750]and Lecture Series for us some 20 years ago.
[00:04:40.830]It's the greatest speaker series we have
[00:04:44.270]in our department and one of the most important
[00:04:46.070]in the university.
[00:04:47.350]So we decided that we're gonna make a plaque for him.
[00:04:49.930]This one you don't get to keep.
[00:04:52.460]Darn.
[00:04:53.293]This is for us because we're gonna mount this
[00:04:56.080]to our wall.
[00:04:57.520]We're gonna create kind of a series of plaques
[00:04:59.653]for people who've made significant contributions
[00:05:02.060]to our department.
[00:05:02.893]So on behalf of the Department of History,
[00:05:04.670]it's a huge pleasure to kind of let you see this.
[00:05:09.100]Do I get to touch it?
[00:05:10.779](laughing)
[00:05:12.797]Thank you, Bruce.
[00:05:13.718]Thank you very much.
[00:05:15.141]And thank you so much. (muffled speaking)
[00:05:17.555](audience applauding)
[00:05:21.560]Without further ado, I will have Bruce, Dr. Pauley
[00:05:25.273]give his talk entitled, Husker Football
[00:05:28.280]in the Age of Reform and Progress, 1890 to 1920.
[00:05:32.430]Dr. Pauley.
[00:05:33.263]Thank you.
[00:05:35.040]I hope you won't be disappointed that this not going
[00:05:37.700]to be just about Husker football,
[00:05:40.310]although there will be plenty to talk about there.
[00:05:42.650]But I will be, I will be getting to it.
[00:05:45.480]Let me give you a couple of anecdotes first of all
[00:05:49.240]to say why I became interested in this history.
[00:05:53.618]In part it's, I have to admit because I really got tired
[00:05:56.890]of researching the antisemites and the Nazis and war
[00:06:04.650]and decided I'd really like to go on
[00:06:06.450]to something a little more pleasant than that.
[00:06:09.090]Can you all hear me by the way?
[00:06:10.623](muffled speaking)
[00:06:12.127]Is the mic up?
[00:06:13.812]I don't know if the mic's actually on, good?
[00:06:19.417]How 'bout that, any better?
[00:06:21.660]There we go.
[00:06:22.540]Okay, you have to get really close to this then.
[00:06:26.780]I hope I'm gonna have a place, my legs will stand,
[00:06:31.160]will work for about an hour, and then after that
[00:06:33.780]I might be on the floor or someplace.
[00:06:37.640]Okay, thank you.
[00:06:40.619]In addition to sort of rebelling against some
[00:06:43.560]of the topics that I've previously worked on,
[00:06:46.680]there are a couple of little anecdotes
[00:06:48.240]that I'd like to mention that have influenced me.
[00:06:51.960]A few weeks ago I drove from here to Grinnell, Iowa
[00:07:02.060]to accept an alumni award there.
[00:07:05.530]And I went through the most horrendous rain
[00:07:08.600]to get there.
[00:07:10.370]And I recall that when I was a student there starting
[00:07:14.590]in 1955 and up to the time I graduated in 1959,
[00:07:19.270]I could go to the Rock Island Depot on Oak Street,
[00:07:23.590]get on a train, get off in Grinnell
[00:07:27.070]and walk four blocks to my dormitory.
[00:07:30.380]It was the easiest thing you could possibly do.
[00:07:33.850]But when I went this past year, I went through
[00:07:35.880]a terrible rainstorm, it was very dangerous.
[00:07:41.540]Another anecdote is when my parents used to visit
[00:07:46.610]Marianne and me when we were in Laramie, Wyoming,
[00:07:50.290]it was a little more difficult then
[00:07:51.760]but you could go to Omaha and actually find
[00:07:55.670]a good restaurant to eat in.
[00:07:57.030]You couldn't in Lincoln in those days.
[00:07:59.240]But then they could go to the depot there
[00:08:01.240]in Omaha, get on sleeping car.
[00:08:04.150]It would be picked up at midnight
[00:08:06.380]by the Union Pacific coming through.
[00:08:08.540]They'd wake up in Cheyenne the next morning,
[00:08:11.620]have breakfast on the train going to Laramie
[00:08:16.130]and arrive fresh and sound about nine o'clock
[00:08:20.580]in the morning.
[00:08:21.720]You can't do those things anymore.
[00:08:24.773]And a hundred years ago, it's hard to imagine,
[00:08:27.670]we had the best public transportation system
[00:08:31.480]in the world bar none.
[00:08:35.320]And now we've got one of the worst I think
[00:08:38.380]of developed countries.
[00:08:40.730]Nobody says any longer getting there is half the fun.
[00:08:46.100]It's usually a horror.
[00:08:49.060]And first we have, you know a hundred years ago
[00:08:53.310]you could literally go to the smallest town
[00:08:56.060]in Nebraska, any number of times the same day.
[00:09:01.970]If it was big enough to have a name
[00:09:04.400]on a map, you could get there.
[00:09:08.180]Well, then the trains started cutting back
[00:09:12.690]and then they were of course replaced
[00:09:15.000]by interstate highways.
[00:09:16.270]So if you weren't on an interstate highway,
[00:09:18.220]you were in terrible shape.
[00:09:20.980]And now we've come to the age of the airplane.
[00:09:24.670]And if you don't live near Lincoln or Omaha,
[00:09:28.030]you're in bad shape.
[00:09:31.730]And when I see pictures on TV of Los Angeles
[00:09:36.350]or Chicago or almost any major American city
[00:09:39.300]in the United States and their eight lanes
[00:09:41.750]in both directions, I have to ask myself,
[00:09:45.510]isn't there a better way that we can get
[00:09:48.310]from point A to point B?
[00:09:51.200]Why is it possible we've gone so far backwards?
[00:09:55.170]In 1940, you could go from New York City
[00:10:00.170]to Chicago in 16 hours.
[00:10:04.820]Now you can go, how long do you think?
[00:10:09.330]16 hours, since 1940 we've no progress there.
[00:10:16.420]And then another incident that kinda inspired me
[00:10:19.180]to do this topic was Marianne and I were walking around
[00:10:23.930]an old neighborhood in Fort Collins
[00:10:26.330]near we which we live in the summer and fall.
[00:10:29.560]And we stood in front of this very old house,
[00:10:33.730]well not terribly old but a little over a hundred years old.
[00:10:38.180]We looked up and saw a lady who looked to be I guess
[00:10:42.960]about the age I am now, something like that.
[00:10:45.650]I'm 82, almost.
[00:10:48.180]And we said that's a nice house you have there.
[00:10:51.170]She said, "Yes, I was born here 100 years ago."
[00:10:56.720]And my mouth dropped open.
[00:10:58.400]I said, "Do you mind if I bring a colleague of mine
[00:11:02.377]"from Colorado State University and interview you?"
[00:11:06.720]And she was delighted to do that.
[00:11:08.410]So we went back the next day.
[00:11:10.210]And we had about an hour and a half long conversation
[00:11:14.570]at the end of which I ask her, "Do you think people today
[00:11:19.847]"are any happier than they were when you were young?"
[00:11:24.290]She could remember the sinking of the Titanic.
[00:11:26.870]So I think she was born probably about 1905.
[00:11:30.810]Her answer was at first, an emphatic no,
[00:11:36.500]we're no happier today than when she was young.
[00:11:39.350]But then she thought a little bit
[00:11:41.990]and she said, "But I do like the automatic washing machine."
[00:11:46.710](laughing)
[00:11:48.650]There's a good reason why Mondays used
[00:11:51.490]to be called wash days, because it took the whole day.
[00:11:56.460]And Tuesday was ironing day.
[00:12:00.300]So that got me to thinking, what progress have we made
[00:12:05.482]over the last hundred years?
[00:12:08.400]In some areas I think we definitely have made progress.
[00:12:12.964]But in other areas we've gone backwards.
[00:12:16.440]And transportation is just one of them.
[00:12:20.360]So anyway, that's what I wanna talk about
[00:12:22.890]to begin with before I get to Nebraska football
[00:12:27.670]because this is the story about progress and reform.
[00:12:34.920]Sometimes I think we take two steps forward
[00:12:38.650]and then not just one step backward
[00:12:41.530]but a step and a half backwards.
[00:12:43.263]More recently I think we're going three steps backwards.
[00:12:47.820]So I'd like to try to mention some things
[00:12:52.440]that were going on between 1920, or 1890 and 1920.
[00:12:59.810]Because those three decades I think were absolutely amazing
[00:13:05.340]at how many important changes were going on
[00:13:08.740]at that time.
[00:13:10.390]You had the 16th Amendment which brought in
[00:13:16.520]the progressive income tax.
[00:13:19.410]That by the way had quite a lot to do with Prohibition
[00:13:24.400]because with the income tax, you no longer needed
[00:13:27.130]the tax on alcohol, which had supported the government
[00:13:31.870]to a large extent.
[00:13:34.740]The 17th Amendment, the direct election of senators.
[00:13:38.620]The 18th Amendment, Prohibition.
[00:13:42.400]We think of that as all of a sudden that took place
[00:13:46.230]in whatever year it was, I think 1920.
[00:13:51.330]Actually two-thirds of the states
[00:13:55.760]in the United States already had Prohibition.
[00:13:58.100]It didn't happen all at once.
[00:14:01.070]And then you had the 19th Amendment
[00:14:03.250]which was Women's Suffrage.
[00:14:04.650]And that was the same kind of thing,
[00:14:06.780]maybe not quite like Prohibition,
[00:14:09.720]but 13 states unfortunately not including Nebraska,
[00:14:14.700]but all of them in the West had already
[00:14:17.930]full Suffrage for women.
[00:14:21.701]And many states had partial Suffrage
[00:14:24.710]where women could vote for a school board
[00:14:26.840]or something like that or maybe for a mayor,
[00:14:31.170]but they couldn't vote for the president.
[00:14:34.390]So those things all took place.
[00:14:37.480]So lots of important changes.
[00:14:40.350]Life expectancy grew enormously during this time,
[00:14:44.880]1890 to 1920, but not necessarily for the reasons
[00:14:49.650]that you think.
[00:14:51.840]It wasn't, it had very little to do
[00:14:54.160]with medicine surprisingly.
[00:14:56.810]What it had to do was the drastic decline
[00:15:00.964]in infant mortality.
[00:15:03.870]You can go to almost any cemetery,
[00:15:07.280]and I'm sure the one here in Lincoln,
[00:15:10.650]if you go to the older parts, you will see
[00:15:14.350]that the parents buried and then next to them
[00:15:17.560]two or three little lambs that are honoring
[00:15:22.740]the babies that never made it past the first anniversary
[00:15:27.880]of their birth or the third anniversary
[00:15:30.230]or something like that.
[00:15:33.950]The population, but medicine had very little to do
[00:15:38.660]with it during that period.
[00:15:41.040]But clean water, clean running water had a lot
[00:15:47.730]to do with it, as well as learning
[00:15:50.160]about the germ theory of disease.
[00:15:53.220]Which by the way you would think, oh well,
[00:15:55.770]everybody accepted that right off the bat.
[00:15:59.300]This is a wonderful thing.
[00:16:01.270]No, there were physicians who would go
[00:16:05.550]to a conference involving, that included
[00:16:11.580]among other things the germ theory of disease
[00:16:14.680]and they would walk out rather than listen
[00:16:17.670]to this nonsense about how could a microscopic object
[00:16:23.900]like a germ cause people to get a disease and die.
[00:16:29.430]So resistance to change and unwillingness to believe
[00:16:35.500]what other scientists have almost universally confirmed
[00:16:41.910]is not something that is brand new in the year 2019.
[00:16:46.360]There's always been a resistance to major change.
[00:16:55.660]Well I won't bother to talk about the presidents
[00:17:00.010]of that period, but I do wanna mention one thing,
[00:17:04.230]that William Jennings Bryan, whose statue
[00:17:07.260]of course is in front of the statue,
[00:17:10.100]our state capital, was one of the three
[00:17:13.890]most important people of this period, 1890 to 1920,
[00:17:19.290]the whole period.
[00:17:21.410]He came to Lincoln in 1890.
[00:17:25.220]He ran for president three times.
[00:17:28.660]If there had been a radio in his day,
[00:17:32.790]many historians think that he would have been elected
[00:17:35.900]because he was just an absolutely barn-burner
[00:17:41.684]of a speaker and he had a beautiful voice
[00:17:46.770]and a powerful voice, which aided him
[00:17:49.900]in the time of before microphones.
[00:17:53.750]But he didn't have the radio.
[00:17:55.630]He was however, the first politician to whistle stop,
[00:18:00.490]to actually go all over the country,
[00:18:04.750]almost every state, delivering political speeches
[00:18:09.360]from the back of the train.
[00:18:11.980]The last time that was done I think was
[00:18:13.740]by Harry Truman in 1952 if I remember correctly.
[00:18:19.000]So he was a very, very important figure.
[00:18:24.960]Here are some of the things that happened
[00:18:29.620]during the, during this period
[00:18:33.160]that I think you can identify with,
[00:18:36.320]and immediately understand their importance.
[00:18:39.690]Universal compulsory education came about
[00:18:44.270]in the 19th century, not in every state
[00:18:47.560]at the same time.
[00:18:49.850]Mississippi was the last holdout.
[00:18:54.350]The only problem was, and well there were many problems
[00:18:57.050]I guess, but it didn't mean that the kids
[00:19:02.300]actually went to school.
[00:19:04.320]So even though there was a law that you were supposed
[00:19:07.400]to through, it wasn't always very well-enforced.
[00:19:10.190]Many parents objected to it because they thought their kids
[00:19:14.040]needed to stay at home and work,
[00:19:16.010]particularly if they were farmers.
[00:19:19.290]But it did open up of course, lots and lots
[00:19:22.220]of jobs for women.
[00:19:24.990]Previously teaching had done primarily by men.
[00:19:30.210]Of course they weren't paid like men.
[00:19:33.520]My grandfather graduated first in his class
[00:19:38.030]from Harvard High School.
[00:19:41.780]It's not as impressive as it sounds
[00:19:43.580]because there were only 17 people in his class.
[00:19:47.300]But he was, and school was only 10 years long.
[00:19:52.340]So he graduated with his fellow 16-year-olds
[00:19:59.536]and was immediately offered a job,
[00:20:02.670]although he turned it down in order
[00:20:04.850]to enter the lumbar business at which it turned out
[00:20:07.768]to be pretty successful.
[00:20:11.640]Another thing was that was invented,
[00:20:13.610]it turned out to be very important, was the typewriter.
[00:20:18.040]Incidentally most of the things I'm gonna mention,
[00:20:20.280]benefited women, at least to a considerable degree.
[00:20:26.250]Let me ask you this question, see how smart you are.
[00:20:29.610]What did you call somebody who typed?
[00:20:34.540]What did you call such a person?
[00:20:37.039]A typist.
[00:20:37.912]A typewriter.
[00:20:38.745]A typewriter, that's right.
[00:20:40.800]They were a typewriter.
[00:20:42.210]And in Washington, DC, there were lots of,
[00:20:44.880]I read in one Lincoln newspaper,
[00:20:47.170]lots of pretty typewriters.
[00:20:50.040]Never thought of a typewriter as being pretty,
[00:20:52.250]but if you typed, then you were a pretty typewriter.
[00:20:55.882]Do you have a question, yeah, shoot.
[00:20:58.160]Oh, you agree with it, okay.
[00:21:01.540]You've seen lots of pretty typewriters.
[00:21:03.466](laughs)
[00:21:05.900]This is the age of the department stores
[00:21:08.470]were coming about.
[00:21:10.375]And there were jobs for women in that respect too.
[00:21:15.050]This thanks in large part to Carnegie, Carnegie,
[00:21:19.550]you had lots of new libraries, some of which
[00:21:22.120]are still functioning as libraries to this very day.
[00:21:27.460]Nursing was becoming professionalized.
[00:21:33.320]Beginning about 1890, it was safer to go
[00:21:40.760]to a hospital than it was to stay at home.
[00:21:44.460]Hospitals were places if you went to at all,
[00:21:47.550]they were places to die, not to get better.
[00:21:51.270]But with anesthesia coming on and antiseptic surgery,
[00:21:57.310]it was now safer to go to a hospital than not.
[00:22:03.050]Although it wasn't until 1950 or so
[00:22:07.610]that more babies were born in hospitals
[00:22:10.110]than were born at home.
[00:22:13.130]Of course nursing became much more prevalent.
[00:22:18.120]Clothing for women became much more practical
[00:22:21.100]than it had been.
[00:22:22.900]It no longer had to reach the instep of their foot.
[00:22:29.920]So all these things were very valuable to women
[00:22:34.577]even though, and even though they were poorly paid,
[00:22:39.840]they were a lot better off than working
[00:22:42.940]in a shirtwaist factory.
[00:22:45.860]And you've probably heard about the shirtwaist factory
[00:22:50.650]in New York City that burned to the ground
[00:22:54.210]in 1911 I think it was, killing 134 women
[00:23:00.310]who worked inside.
[00:23:01.728]And they were locked in so to prevent them
[00:23:07.770]from leaving with some of the clothing I guess.
[00:23:10.530]That changed a lot of things.
[00:23:13.950]In addition, this was really the golden age of trains
[00:23:18.910]in any respect as I mentioned a little while ago.
[00:23:21.070]You could literally go anywhere by train.
[00:23:26.338]The mileage, train mileage throughout the United States
[00:23:31.680]reached its peak in 1919.
[00:23:35.120]Railroad lines just within Nebraska went from 1,869 miles
[00:23:41.160]to 7,879 miles in 1920.
[00:23:45.100]In other words we're talking about a full
[00:23:47.620]four-fold increase in mileage.
[00:23:51.930]The most enthusiastically-received invention
[00:23:55.800]of that time was what, anybody wanna take a guess at that?
[00:24:02.540]The electric light, light bulb.
[00:24:05.490]It was 12 to 15 times more powerful
[00:24:10.100]than a kerosene lamp, and it didn't smell
[00:24:14.130]and didn't have to be cleaned.
[00:24:17.090]So it was very, very enthusiastically received.
[00:24:22.477]You might not have thought of this,
[00:24:24.370]but the elevator was, the electric elevator was invented
[00:24:29.840]in 1887, of course that didn't mean
[00:24:33.180]that in that same year everybody was building skyscrapers
[00:24:36.780]but by 1900 or so, and increasingly thereafter,
[00:24:41.510]skyscrapers were being built.
[00:24:44.220]Modern advertising, you look at the newspapers
[00:24:48.650]of this period and going back as early as 1890,
[00:24:51.037]and it looks just like we used to have
[00:24:54.100]advertisements in newspapers.
[00:24:56.640]The fact that advertisers don't advertise
[00:25:02.270]in newspapers any longer, or very few do,
[00:25:05.652]has had a disastrous impact on newspapers.
[00:25:09.600]That's why they have shrunk in size.
[00:25:12.520]They average family in 1900 subscribed
[00:25:17.990]to three different newspapers.
[00:25:21.320]They were really well-informed, and not just local news.
[00:25:25.414]They were getting international news.
[00:25:28.860]When it came to football, the biggest headlines were
[00:25:34.400]for Yale versus Princeton or something of that kind,
[00:25:39.840]considered really important and drawing huge crowds
[00:25:43.440]already at that time.
[00:25:48.010]Mass circulation newspapers, magazines rather.
[00:25:51.500]I can remember when going to my grandparent's house
[00:25:54.920]in the 1950s and my grandmother, my grandfather had died
[00:25:58.880]by that time, but my grandmother subscribed
[00:26:01.470]to Life Magazine, Colliers, the Saturday Evening Post
[00:26:07.670]and Look I think.
[00:26:09.150]So I could read those magazines forever.
[00:26:15.100]Front porches, they've just about disappeared now.
[00:26:19.460]But this was the golden age of front porches
[00:26:22.460]partly because, now get this, this is hard
[00:26:25.090]to understand, people actually walked in those days.
[00:26:29.420]They went for walks and when they did,
[00:26:32.720]they'd go past people's front porch
[00:26:35.827]and their friends would be there
[00:26:37.690]and they could have a nice conversation.
[00:26:40.960]Nowadays we can go in our cars with our tinted glass
[00:26:46.390]and with our remote we can open the garage door
[00:26:50.630]without even to bother and get out
[00:26:53.550]and lift it ourselves.
[00:26:56.037]And we never have to see or speak to a neighbor.
[00:27:02.200]We have become way less social as a society
[00:27:07.370]than we were a hundred years ago.
[00:27:10.470]And it's partly because we don't have,
[00:27:11.840]if we have any porch at all, it's in the backyard,
[00:27:15.390]facing the back, not the front yard.
[00:27:17.910]If it face, every now and then you see a porch
[00:27:20.670]that's in the front.
[00:27:21.820]Most of the time it's decorative.
[00:27:24.210]It's a place where you can put some cutesy little chair
[00:27:28.800]that nobody actually sits in.
[00:27:31.200]It's not intended for that, and maybe there are
[00:27:33.610]a few potted plants to make it look all right,
[00:27:36.660]but it's not actually used the way
[00:27:38.570]porches used to be used.
[00:27:40.210]Of course part of that was, if you didn't have
[00:27:42.450]air conditioning, the best thing was
[00:27:44.300]to have a front porch.
[00:27:47.810]And children could play there.
[00:27:51.640]Street cars, oh my goodness, street cars.
[00:27:56.226]The first electric street car started
[00:28:00.860]in Richmond, Virginia.
[00:28:05.350]The first big city to have street cars was Berlin.
[00:28:09.830]It came suddenly to Lincoln in 1890
[00:28:14.290]and it meant that you could get
[00:28:15.450]from downtown Lincoln to College View in no time at all.
[00:28:22.300]And the whole city was covered with them.
[00:28:28.760]Automobiles of course came along about 10 years
[00:28:32.840]after the street cars did.
[00:28:35.200]When I look at a picture of Lincoln Street
[00:28:38.540]or Washington, DC or Vienna in about 1900,
[00:28:44.900]I feel so envious because there are all these street cars
[00:28:49.460]one after another.
[00:28:52.070]And they're are no electric lights there.
[00:28:55.180]There don't need to be.
[00:28:56.980]There's no crosswalk because they don't need to be.
[00:29:00.580]You could cross anywhere you want.
[00:29:02.230]You do have to be a little bit concerned
[00:29:03.800]about the street cars, but other than that,
[00:29:05.970]there are no cars to worry about.
[00:29:11.060]Interestingly enough, I ran across an article
[00:29:13.480]that was published about 1905 in a Lincoln paper online
[00:29:20.810]and several doctors were discussing the advantages
[00:29:28.120]or disadvantages of owning an automobile.
[00:29:32.700]Most of them were in favor of it,
[00:29:34.540]thought it was a good idea.
[00:29:35.850]Of course they didn't have to worry about
[00:29:37.870]too many other cars getting in their way.
[00:29:40.460]There was one person however, who preferred
[00:29:44.030]a horse and buggy.
[00:29:45.820]Now let's see how many horse people there are out there
[00:29:49.020]who can guess why anyone would prefer a horse and buggy
[00:29:54.720]to an automobile.
[00:29:56.920]Anybody know the answer to that?
[00:29:59.810]I asked a person that we know in Colorado,
[00:30:04.620]an old friend of my wife's, she knew the answer immediately
[00:30:10.550]because she was good with horses.
[00:30:13.010]This doctor could get in his buggy
[00:30:15.730]and tell the horse to go home and it would on its own
[00:30:21.120]and he could go to sleep in the meantime.
[00:30:23.400]So you know it wasn't quite as cut and dry
[00:30:27.310]as you might think.
[00:30:31.030]Bicycles, bicycles in the 1890s looked almost exactly
[00:30:37.470]like bicycles today.
[00:30:38.900]Now this is one encouraging thing that is positive.
[00:30:42.953]I may sound awfully negative about some things,
[00:30:46.570]but bicycles have really made a comeback.
[00:30:51.010]When I was going to Lincoln High School
[00:30:55.260]from 19, what it would it be, '52 to '55,
[00:30:59.030]you wouldn't catch a Lincoln High person
[00:31:01.777]riding a bicycle for anything.
[00:31:04.770]That would have been total humiliation I guess.
[00:31:07.600]The idea was to have some beat-up jalopy
[00:31:12.770]to get you to school or if you were absolutely forced,
[00:31:15.740]you'd take a school bus.
[00:31:17.500]But bicycle, absolutely no way.
[00:31:22.060]And fortunately more and more cities, including Lincoln,
[00:31:25.500]are building actual special paths for them.
[00:31:29.380]I'm not very impressed when a city paints a white line
[00:31:35.080]in the street and says okay, to the right side of that,
[00:31:38.220]that's your bicycle path.
[00:31:40.040]I wouldn't feel terribly secure about that.
[00:31:42.620]But we are starting to build such streets.
[00:31:48.690]Movies of course, movies now which were non-existent
[00:31:53.270]in 1900, were by 1920 second only to Vaudeville.
[00:31:59.930]And in 1911, a movie house called a palace,
[00:32:06.510]that's what they were called then,
[00:32:08.820]built the first big movie theater
[00:32:11.000]that could hold a thousand people.
[00:32:13.870]So that's huge.
[00:32:17.080]Rural free delivery began in 1901
[00:32:21.510]which had a huge impact on people living on farms.
[00:32:25.430]It was almost like having Amazon.
[00:32:28.130]You could get a catalog that would be
[00:32:30.860]like five inches thick and would have,
[00:32:34.630]put out by Sears Roebuck, and I think another company.
[00:32:37.980]And you could get anything under the sun.
[00:32:43.302]You could order it by mail.
[00:32:45.890]You could give a check to the mailman
[00:32:48.080]who would post it, and a few days later,
[00:32:51.180]you would get what you wanted.
[00:32:52.510]So that was extremely important,
[00:32:55.620]particularly for people in the rural areas.
[00:33:01.710]Mass-produced cameras.
[00:33:03.990]Now Kodak came out with a camera
[00:33:06.170]that you didn't have to be a genius
[00:33:07.837]in order to use it.
[00:33:09.210]So people started taking pictures.
[00:33:10.920]They were very small pictures, but very simple to operate.
[00:33:20.500]And, I shouldn't forget this, but it's probably
[00:33:24.740]the least, the least good, if that's the right expression,
[00:33:31.560]development in this period was for the first time
[00:33:35.790]the mass production of cigarettes.
[00:33:40.410]You'd had cigarettes before but you had
[00:33:42.650]to put them together yourself,
[00:33:45.110]so it was messy, it took a long time and it was costly.
[00:33:50.430]And most men if they smoked, they smoked cigars or pipes.
[00:33:55.230]But now almost anybody could afford cigarettes.
[00:34:01.690]And of course they were advertised like crazy.
[00:34:05.780]You go back and you look at magazines
[00:34:08.130]from the 1940s, you will see, you might see one
[00:34:13.770]with Ronald Reagan long before he was a president
[00:34:17.730]saying, "I give cartons of cigarettes to all my friends."
[00:34:22.600]He must have felt really good about that later on.
[00:34:26.410]So that was important.
[00:34:31.350]Immigration of course was taking place in large numbers
[00:34:38.240]between 1820, 1890 and not 1920 so much
[00:34:44.130]because it really died down seriously during the war years.
[00:34:47.510]But 1890 to 1914 was probably the biggest era
[00:34:57.580]in terms of numbers of immigration in our history.
[00:35:02.742]And what of course was important was that
[00:35:07.630]they were no longer coming from the traditional areas
[00:35:11.860]of Western and Northern Europe.
[00:35:14.070]Now they were coming from Eastern and Southern Europe.
[00:35:19.074]And it was now very easy to do so.
[00:35:23.430]I did quite a bit of work on the history
[00:35:25.950]of immigration to study what my ancestors went through.
[00:35:33.580]I wondered why did they come to Pennsylvania?
[00:35:37.110]They came from the very same area of Southwestern Germany
[00:35:40.130]called the Palatinate, as those people
[00:35:44.370]in earlier decades starting about 1683 came from
[00:35:49.080]who went to Pennsylvania, the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch.
[00:35:53.660]And of course that's just a mispronunciation of Deutsche.
[00:35:59.740]But there was a book written, I'm afraid
[00:36:03.420]I've forgotten his name at the moment,
[00:36:08.140]who had spent four years in Pennsylvania
[00:36:11.840]and he described the horror of getting there.
[00:36:16.270]He liked Pennsylvania once he got there.
[00:36:18.400]He liked Americans.
[00:36:19.340]He got along with them just fine.
[00:36:21.630]But you had to go down the Rhine river,
[00:36:23.960]and this was at a time when it was,
[00:36:26.397]it bordered on literally dozens of principalities,
[00:36:31.250]each one of which charged you for going down the river.
[00:36:35.350]And then when you got to Rotterdam,
[00:36:37.883]you had to wait several days to get on the ship
[00:36:41.290]because ships didn't go on, didn't have schedules.
[00:36:45.730]They went the winds were favorable
[00:36:47.850]and when they were full.
[00:36:50.460]And in the meantime, local people could charge them
[00:36:53.050]anything they want.
[00:36:54.780]So when Catherine the Great came along in 1783,
[00:36:58.350]she said come to us and we'll give you free land.
[00:37:02.490]We'll pay your way there.
[00:37:04.020]There will be tools provided for you once you get
[00:37:08.780]to the lower Volga.
[00:37:12.830]You and your descendants for all time
[00:37:15.830]will not be forced to serve in the Russian army.
[00:37:22.060]I mean, boy did that ever sound like a deal.
[00:37:25.380]And so my ancestors took that, but in 1788,
[00:37:31.150]I'm sorry in 1878, they came to the United States.
[00:37:38.730]But by that time, things had changed.
[00:37:42.890]You know if you came over in the 17th century,
[00:37:45.890]early 18th century, if you were lucky,
[00:37:49.980]really, really lucky, once you got on the ship
[00:37:54.060]it would take you six weeks.
[00:37:57.010]If you were unlucky it could take you six months
[00:38:00.450]if the winds were in the wrong direction.
[00:38:03.670]The mortality rate was 20%.
[00:38:07.820]In one year, it was 1733 or something like that,
[00:38:11.460]it was over 30%.
[00:38:14.370]If you had a child seven years or younger,
[00:38:18.350]that child would almost certainly die on the voyage.
[00:38:23.330]And so you had to be really, really serious
[00:38:26.450]if you wanted to come to the United States
[00:38:28.270]or else a criminal who had the choice
[00:38:30.390]of either being executed or going to the colonies.
[00:38:35.620]And there were some people who preferred the colonies
[00:38:37.700]to being executed for some reason.
[00:38:40.440]But the time, by 1878, you now had
[00:38:44.232]what kind of transportation?
[00:38:48.180]What kind of ships?
[00:38:51.060]You had steam ships.
[00:38:52.750]Actually they were, most of them were hybrids.
[00:38:55.320]They also had sails that they could use
[00:38:58.760]in favorable weather.
[00:39:00.070]Anyway, don't wanna get too detailed here.
[00:39:03.730]But the hardest part of the trip
[00:39:05.020]for my ancestors was getting from their little town
[00:39:07.690]called Norka to the town of Seratoff.
[00:39:11.920]which was 30 miles away but it took them
[00:39:14.070]two days to get there.
[00:39:15.900]The rest of the way they could go by train
[00:39:18.470]and they had what amounted to a through ticket
[00:39:23.410]because once they got to New York,
[00:39:27.290]the trip could continue almost automatically.
[00:39:30.730]It wasn't very comfortable.
[00:39:31.900]They were usually pulled by a freight car
[00:39:34.360]and the cars the immigrants went in
[00:39:36.660]were pretty miserable.
[00:39:38.010]But you could go all the way to Nebraska.
[00:39:41.920]You got no help from the government.
[00:39:44.360]But you did have, and this is what's relevant
[00:39:46.500]I think nowadays, you had really chain migration.
[00:39:52.270]We've heard a lot about chain migration.
[00:39:54.880]That's what you had then.
[00:39:56.690]But the chain was friends and relatives
[00:40:01.120]already in the United States who would loan you the money
[00:40:05.150]or buy you the through ticket all the way
[00:40:08.000]from you hometown to where you were going.
[00:40:12.920]But what also changed now, not so much
[00:40:15.760]for the Volga Germans because most of them stayed settled.
[00:40:19.040]They had no desire to go back to Russia.
[00:40:23.021]But if you were from Italy, Greece
[00:40:27.770]or you were Russian or especially a Jewish Russian,
[00:40:35.588]you wouldn't necessarily come here
[00:40:38.000]with the idea of staying forever.
[00:40:39.860]In fact I just reviewed a book about Austria
[00:40:43.650]mostly not German-speaking Austria Hungarians
[00:40:49.203]from about 2/3 planned or did return
[00:40:54.430]to their country of origin.
[00:40:57.818]This you don't read about in American schools.
[00:41:02.580]We're supposed to be a success story
[00:41:06.130]in which you make up your mind
[00:41:08.690]to go to the United States and everything
[00:41:10.700]is just hunky dory from then all out.
[00:41:14.250]I think when discussing immigration nowadays
[00:41:17.840]as a political subject, we should keep in mind
[00:41:21.700]that everybody who comes to the United States
[00:41:24.380]doesn't necessarily wanna stay here their whole life.
[00:41:28.982]And it's not because they hate the
[00:41:32.340]United States necessarily.
[00:41:35.010]In most of the cases they probably don't.
[00:41:36.970]But many people, as they get older, get homesick
[00:41:43.660]for their, what was their homeland.
[00:41:45.530]They wanna go back and visit them.
[00:41:48.270]And we should think twice I think
[00:41:51.010]about locking them in, fencing them in
[00:41:54.620]and saying no, if you leave, if somehow you
[00:41:57.890]leave the country, we're not gonna let you back in.
[00:42:01.160]We're gonna build a fence and make sure
[00:42:02.716]that because you're undocumented, you can't come back in.
[00:42:07.480]So that immigration story is interesting.
[00:42:11.010]Now the Volga Germans regarded themselves as Germans
[00:42:15.920]but not in the sense of adherence to Bismark
[00:42:20.280]or Kaiserville in the second.
[00:42:22.570]They had some notion that they were like Germans,
[00:42:25.680]similar to Germans.
[00:42:27.150]They had no use for Russians at all.
[00:42:32.011]But Lincolnites saw them as being Southern
[00:42:38.700]or Eastern Europeans, as part of this mass migration
[00:42:44.600]of people who couldn't be counted on
[00:42:47.350]to stay here forever, and who seemed very different
[00:42:50.960]from people who had immigrated earlier.
[00:42:55.109]And they were called dirty Russians or dumb Russians.
[00:43:02.640]You know why they were regarded as dirty?
[00:43:04.570]I just found this out from a colleague recently.
[00:43:07.280]Because they worked in beet fields.
[00:43:10.460]In Western Nebraska, they take special trains out
[00:43:13.100]in April and work in the beet fields
[00:43:14.560]and they got stained by the beets.
[00:43:17.090]So their hands looked dirty.
[00:43:19.950]And if their children seemed dumb, it was because
[00:43:22.960]they were with their parents from the last month
[00:43:27.460]of the school year through the first month
[00:43:30.580]of the new year.
[00:43:31.700]So they were obviously well behind.
[00:43:34.812]So that's worth exploring.
[00:43:37.530]Anyway, I hope I haven't used up all my time.
[00:43:39.580]Now I'm finally to get around to Nebraska football,
[00:43:42.770]and I hope I haven't bored you too much
[00:43:44.570]with this other business.
[00:43:49.070]I'm not very good at higher mathematics,
[00:43:52.100]but I'm pretty good at arithmetic.
[00:43:55.330]And I did a little bit of investigating
[00:43:57.850]to try to figure out if arithmetic would help me
[00:44:01.930]understand the incredible success
[00:44:06.700]that the university had in football in the early days.
[00:44:12.670]And it came down to a couple things
[00:44:15.000]the most important of which there was
[00:44:19.160]from the beginning, as there is today,
[00:44:23.000]only one state university.
[00:44:27.820]There's no Nebraska A and M.
[00:44:31.600]There's no Nebraska State University.
[00:44:34.610]There's just the University of Nebraska.
[00:44:37.740]And only one major one major football team.
[00:44:42.220]So this is different from Iowa
[00:44:45.560]and it's different from Kansas.
[00:44:48.220]It's different from Colorado and any number
[00:44:51.690]of other states.
[00:44:52.523]So that's one thing, very important.
[00:44:54.690]The other thing was that from the beginning,
[00:44:58.700]the university was located in a capital city
[00:45:04.690]which meant an increased population.
[00:45:08.420]If you compare the population of Lincoln
[00:45:12.360]with Manhattan, Kansas or Lawrence, Kansas
[00:45:15.850]or Ames, Iowa, and I won't bother you
[00:45:19.290]with statistics right now.
[00:45:21.100]But you will find that Lincoln was a much bigger city,
[00:45:27.739]by several times, three or four times.
[00:45:30.230]Manhattan, when they first played Nebraska,
[00:45:33.160]they had like 3,500 people at a time
[00:45:37.630]when Lincoln had over 40,000.
[00:45:41.580]And in the first six games we played with them,
[00:45:46.650]uh let's see, we won all six, scored 189 points
[00:45:53.470]to their 12, give you some idea.
[00:45:56.880]And I just can go right down the list.
[00:45:59.819]When we had, when we had 43,000,
[00:46:06.510]KU, I mean Lawrence had 9,000.
[00:46:13.010]Ames had 10,000 and so on down the line.
[00:46:18.380]There was one team however we played regularly
[00:46:21.230]and they beat the tar out of us almost every time.
[00:46:25.200]You know what that team that was?
[00:46:30.240]Minnesota, now think about it.
[00:46:32.570]Where's the University of Minnesota?
[00:46:34.960]Minneapolis St. Paul.
[00:46:37.330]So where we had 43,000 people, just Minneapolis,
[00:46:42.350]not counting St. Paul, but Minneapolis alone
[00:46:46.250]had 203,000 people.
[00:46:49.890]And if I'm not mistaken, for many years
[00:46:53.850]until Arizona State and UCF passed it up,
[00:46:57.960]UCF, where I taught for 35 years, now has 68,000 students
[00:47:04.080]and a metropolitan area of two million.
[00:47:10.610]So Minneapolis with St. Paul had probably
[00:47:15.010]four or 500,000 people and almost certainly the largest
[00:47:22.800]university in the country.
[00:47:24.420]I haven't been able to chase that down.
[00:47:30.010]But that's gotta do something from the fact
[00:47:32.610]that the first time we played them,
[00:47:34.930]they won 10 and we won two.
[00:47:41.810]What is very interesting about this study I've done is
[00:47:49.090]how much it was concerned about injuries.
[00:47:53.850]And this is part of why this belongs
[00:47:56.797]in this larger picture of progress and reform
[00:48:04.060]because football needed reform.
[00:48:08.440]There were a lot of injuries.
[00:48:11.370]And this was at a time by the way,
[00:48:13.910]that we didn't know anything about strokes.
[00:48:16.470]There's never a mention about strokes
[00:48:19.860]when they're talking about injuries.
[00:48:21.670]They're talking about broken arms and legs
[00:48:26.740]and missing teeth and things of that kind.
[00:48:31.850]And maybe 13 or 15 fatalities, most of which
[00:48:38.340]by the way were of high school students.
[00:48:42.240]Only two or three per year would be
[00:48:44.520]of a university student.
[00:48:47.490]But you know how they came about?
[00:48:51.250]One writer I saw described it this way.
[00:48:57.850]It was like two trains colliding head on
[00:49:02.190]against each other.
[00:49:04.030]You had these mass formations that would clash.
[00:49:13.556]And then there'd be this huge pile
[00:49:18.130]and if you could pull your teammate
[00:49:23.840]who had the ball, by some strap,
[00:49:27.270]you could do that.
[00:49:28.590]So the pile would keep getting larger and larger,
[00:49:32.370]and that's where most of the injuries occurred.
[00:49:37.790]I recall, and you probably do too.
[00:49:41.480]It was either two years ago or four years ago
[00:49:43.900]that Northwestern University came here
[00:49:47.760]and we won the game with a hail Mary pass,
[00:49:51.630]the very last play of the game
[00:49:53.850]as time was running out.
[00:49:56.310]And there was this huge pile up
[00:49:59.260]on top of the poor fellow who caught the ball.
[00:50:03.740]And the smartest guy on the field
[00:50:06.480]was the quarterback who ran in the opposite direction,
[00:50:11.460]who could get away from any pile up
[00:50:14.293]as quickly, as thoroughly as he possibly could.
[00:50:19.560]Well the solution, well part of the problem was
[00:50:26.215]if keeping all these reforms straight is not easy.
[00:50:31.420]But it began with the notion that you had
[00:50:35.870]three downs to make five yards.
[00:50:39.250]That's what it was until something like 1905.
[00:50:44.650]So that means you only have to gain about
[00:50:48.910]five feet per play.
[00:50:52.940]Which meant if you could just grinding it out,
[00:50:56.270]grinding it out, grinding it out,
[00:50:58.060]you'll get one first down after another.
[00:51:02.370]I don't think we would put up for that.
[00:51:03.900]I mean football was regarded as very popular then.
[00:51:08.130]I mean there's no question about a lack of popularity.
[00:51:12.060]But it's hard for us to imagine
[00:51:14.350]the game like that continuing.
[00:51:16.660]It was hard to even see the ball.
[00:51:19.250]And it was made harder by the fact that it was legal
[00:51:22.250]to take the ball and tuck it under your jersey until 1960.
[00:51:27.100]So you had no idea who even had the ball.
[00:51:32.360]But then there was a reform.
[00:51:34.120]Again, I'm not gonna search through my notes
[00:51:36.200]and look for the exact year.
[00:51:38.010]I think it was 1906 actually.
[00:51:40.490]Teddy Roosevelt was very concerned
[00:51:42.840]about the injuries.
[00:51:46.680]Some people think that he was on verge
[00:51:50.030]of banning football.
[00:51:53.470]Preachers by the way were often very much opposed
[00:51:59.270]to football, thought it was just a brutal sport.
[00:52:02.450]It was worse than prize fighting.
[00:52:05.840]There's no chance I think that Roosevelt was
[00:52:10.100]in favor of abolishing the game because he was the president
[00:52:14.330]who was all in favor of vigor, you know training,
[00:52:19.170]being strong, so there's no way that he
[00:52:24.100]would have done that.
[00:52:24.933]But he did wanna reform football
[00:52:27.930]so there wouldn't be so many injuries.
[00:52:32.160]And so one of the things that was done was
[00:52:34.490]instead of five years in three plays,
[00:52:37.627]you had to do 10 yards in four plays,
[00:52:43.860]which increased by 50% the number of yards you needed.
[00:52:50.400]Instead of gaining five feet in three plays,
[00:52:55.570]you had to gain 7-1/2 feet, or 50% more in four plays.
[00:53:03.350]So that brings into question can you keep up
[00:53:07.050]this just grinding out, grinding out.
[00:53:09.640]It's not gonna be so easy to get a first down any longer.
[00:53:13.040]And by the way, the teams that won in those days,
[00:53:15.920]especially before the four down business came along,
[00:53:20.050]were almost always the heavier team,
[00:53:24.510]almost always the newspaper would say,
[00:53:27.033]thus and such a time outweighs us by 20 pounds per man
[00:53:31.950]or 10 pounds per man, or we out them
[00:53:34.340]by such and such a figure, taking the
[00:53:36.530]whole team into account.
[00:53:38.700]And by the way, although there were huge disparities
[00:53:42.510]from one football to another, there were figures
[00:53:46.950]from one particular year in which the smallest player
[00:53:51.290]weighed for Nebraska, 139 pounds.
[00:53:55.400]And the heaviest player weighed 178 pounds.
[00:53:59.330]That's almost hard to even imagine,
[00:54:02.240]even for a high school team any longer.
[00:54:05.860]And we had a black player by the name of Flippin
[00:54:11.779]who was the captain.
[00:54:14.402]And he was regarded as huge because he weighed 200 pounds.
[00:54:21.210]So that was just beyond belief.
[00:54:24.700]And the newspapers, they talked about beef.
[00:54:29.550]They love the, maybe it's because there's a lot
[00:54:32.070]of beef in Nebraska.
[00:54:33.250]But you know, how much beef does this other team have?
[00:54:36.950]Well beef didn't become quite so important any longer.
[00:54:40.700]How were you going to get those 10 yards in four plays?
[00:54:45.410]The answer seemed to be through passing.
[00:54:50.480]Some coaches by the way, not all of 'em,
[00:54:52.850]but some coaches were very leery about that.
[00:54:56.670]They thought this is too much like basketball.
[00:55:00.940]Some of the early coaches, nine out of our first 10 coaches
[00:55:06.400]came from ivy league schools.
[00:55:09.280]The first three or so just were coaching
[00:55:12.990]for the fun of it I guess, because they didn't get paid.
[00:55:16.820]When they finally got paid, they had to do basketball
[00:55:22.000]as well as football, and maybe some other sport as well.
[00:55:28.200]But anyway, some coaches thought that passing
[00:55:30.910]was kind of for sissies.
[00:55:34.500]And a running game that was only running,
[00:55:38.030]that was called straight football.
[00:55:41.060]So anything else was kind of crooked.
[00:55:45.010]Ben, now I'm gonna ask you a question,
[00:55:48.160]since we have an audience, an expert in the audience.
[00:55:52.020]I keep fearing that I'm gonna say something
[00:55:54.077]and he's gonna jump and say that's not true!
[00:55:57.230]You know, you're way off base.
[00:55:58.910]But fortunately he's a gentleman
[00:56:00.950]and he'll tell me later I'm sure.
[00:56:06.730]But now I've got so carried away
[00:56:08.160]I can't remember what the question was.
[00:56:10.153](laughing)
[00:56:11.340]So it's maybe just as well.
[00:56:13.570]Oh, I know.
[00:56:14.930]What is scientific football?
[00:56:18.250]You know, there was regular football
[00:56:19.840]and then there was scientific football.
[00:56:22.310]And the only thing I can figure out,
[00:56:24.963]it meant that you actually had a play in advance
[00:56:28.710]instead of okay, let's just all rush forward.
[00:56:32.270]But let's kind of stop and figure this out
[00:56:34.520]what we're actually supposed to do.
[00:56:36.620]Is that how you would interpret that term?
[00:56:38.787]I think that's true.
[00:56:39.700]Yeah, okay good.
[00:56:41.080]Good call. (laughing)
[00:56:42.490]If it's not, you can tell me afterwards.
[00:56:46.010]Anyway, so that's kind of fun.
[00:56:47.900]But you know they were very leery
[00:56:50.270]about introducing this new thing called passing.
[00:56:53.790]So they had all sorts of restrictions on it at first.
[00:56:57.990]You could only pass if you move,
[00:57:00.570]if the quarterback moves from where he gets the ball,
[00:57:04.870]five yards either to the right or five yards
[00:57:08.370]to the left.
[00:57:10.140]And so you had lines paralleling the sidelines,
[00:57:15.630]which must have been, this was enforced
[00:57:17.500]for several years, it must have been a nightmare
[00:57:20.130]for umpires to figure out have they moved 4-1/2 yards
[00:57:23.860]or five yards?
[00:57:25.795]So that was one restriction.
[00:57:27.460]And another restriction was, you couldn't throw it
[00:57:29.780]for more than 20 yards.
[00:57:32.570]It's like telling a punter, we want you to punt
[00:57:36.380]but make sure it doesn't go more than 20 yards.
[00:57:39.923]But one reform that really helped a lot was
[00:57:44.360]that you could throw a pass into the end zone
[00:57:47.880]and that would count.
[00:57:50.060]So that opened things up a lot because before that,
[00:57:54.440]you could, if you couldn't do that,
[00:57:56.910]you could bring all of your players right up
[00:57:59.030]to the front and right up to the line of scrimmage
[00:58:01.860]and it would be really hard to get
[00:58:03.670]those last five yards or so.
[00:58:08.530]And now for the first time, speed becomes important.
[00:58:12.410]Beef alone won't do it.
[00:58:14.300]You need to have at least some players who are fast
[00:58:18.520]and can outrun the opposition.
[00:58:21.510]And you made things easier for them
[00:58:24.480]because there was no, you couldn't interfere
[00:58:29.900]with the receiver unless you were trying to intercept it.
[00:58:33.740]You had a rule called roughing the passer.
[00:58:37.480]So you had to be careful about that.
[00:58:40.560]And you also had in 1906 I think, you couldn't,
[00:58:47.380]you couldn't insult the other side, the other team.
[00:58:52.550]You couldn't insult the officials.
[00:58:55.410]So these were all nice things I think.
[00:58:59.940]There was a penalty for roughing the passer as I said.
[00:59:05.590]I wish there were time to talk about the series
[00:59:08.240]with Notre Dame, but we played Notre Dame,
[00:59:14.810]let's see, how many times, 15 times.
[00:59:18.600]There were seven wins and seven losses and one tie.
[00:59:24.959]And those games were sold out.
[00:59:27.493]They were just fanatical.
[00:59:29.870]And Nebraska won the first game 20 to 19
[00:59:33.520]because Notre Dame missed an extra point at the end.
[00:59:36.860]I would love to see that game today
[00:59:39.080]because it sounds very much like what we would still enjoy.
[00:59:44.930]By the way, the two other points I wanna make
[00:59:46.950]before we close.
[00:59:50.480]A whole team, the entire team including substitutes
[00:59:54.390]had about 15 players.
[00:59:57.950]And there were very strict
[00:59:59.250]limitations on substitution.
[01:00:03.040]And so these 15 guys played the whole game,
[01:00:06.940]offense and defense.
[01:00:09.850]But the games didn't last as long.
[01:00:12.790]It was about two hours for the whole thing.
[01:00:15.740]If it was a really long game, maybe 2-1/2 hours.
[01:00:20.800]And it's interesting, in playing Notre Dame 15 times,
[01:00:26.210]all but two of the games were in Lincoln.
[01:00:29.820]And I think it was because Lincoln could draw the crowds.
[01:00:36.416]For the most part, the fans turned out.
[01:00:41.830]After a big game there would be a parade down O Street.
[01:00:47.220]Interestingly enough, there would be a banquet afterwards
[01:00:54.100]including the other team.
[01:00:57.520]And our notion of complimenting the opposing team
[01:01:03.610]goes back to the beginning.
[01:01:06.870]A few years ago, I went to a Nebraska-UCF game.
[01:01:12.100]This was when UCF was just really nothing.
[01:01:21.009]And I was very smart.
[01:01:22.300]I carried a UCF cap in one hand
[01:01:25.130]and a Nebraska cap in the other hand.
[01:01:27.690]So if I would run in to a UCF person
[01:01:30.690]who knew me, I'd quickly put my UCF hat on.
[01:01:33.620]If I ran into a Nebraska fan, I'd hide the UCF cap.
[01:01:40.720]But one guy, a total stranger who saw the UCF cap
[01:01:45.300]I was carrying, and he came up to me
[01:01:47.430]and said, "Oh I'm so glad that you're here.
[01:01:49.307]"We're loving it, hope you have a good time"
[01:01:52.037]and all of that.
[01:01:53.730]And then later that week I happened
[01:01:55.420]to see our president in a restaurant.
[01:02:02.120]And I knew that he went to all of the away games
[01:02:05.220]as well as the home games.
[01:02:07.250]And I ask him, "How do they treat you
[01:02:09.057]"when you're in Lincoln?"
[01:02:11.260]And I'm serious.
[01:02:12.500]I'm quoting word for word.
[01:02:14.717]"I've never been so well-treated as anywhere
[01:02:19.707]"that I've been."
[01:02:22.030]That makes me very proud that we've had
[01:02:25.170]that kind of a tradition that goes back
[01:02:29.130]to the beginning.
[01:02:30.950]And I certainly hope it continues.
[01:02:33.520]And thank you very much for your attention.
[01:02:36.396](audience applauding)
[01:02:45.560]I survived even without a high chair.
[01:02:49.120]Well, I wanna again thank Bruce and his family
[01:02:53.410]who have come here.
[01:02:54.750]Since I've been here for 19 years,
[01:02:56.960]Bruce has been here every year for every talk.
[01:03:00.730]He has been a mainstay for our department.
[01:03:03.220]Our department has been enhanced by your presence.
[01:03:06.240]We really appreciate you, we really do.
[01:03:09.200]And I really want you to know how thankful we are,
[01:03:11.400]and thank you for your time.
[01:03:12.440]I appreciate your appreciation.
[01:03:14.487](laughing)
[01:03:15.821]Thank you, thank you.
[01:03:17.818](audience applauds)

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2019 Pauley Lecture

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