| Today, college football ranks as a premier southern institution: southern fans are second to none in the passion of their commitment, and they view it as an embodiment of regional identity. Yet southern college football originated as an import from the Northeast. New South boosters embraced it as a privileged symbol of modernity and, especially, of inculcating the habits and attitudes of modern masculinity into elite young southerners. The new sport did not gain immediate acceptance. Traditionalists, including evangelical clergymen, initially viewed it with suspicion and even hostility. Proponents, however, represented football as a modern embodiment of southern traditions and as an inculcator and champion of traditional southern honor.;Causes Won, Not Lost explores the ways in which southerners wove football into the marrow of their culture. From its arrival in the late 1880s, it steadily gained ground at southern universities, winning more popular acceptance with each generation. By the 1920s, football was widely enough accepted as an important training ground for the middle as well as the upper class that it was playing a major role in the mission and financial commitments of universities. I argue that Alabama's Rose Bowl victory in 1926 represents a significant stage in this process. Throughout the South, that victory was widely taken as symbolic revenge for historic humiliations, and the victory secured football's privileged position within southern culture. The 1920s also witnessed a more complete incorporation of the working and agrarian classes into football as both players and fans. This work explores how the football rivalry between the University of Alabama reflected class relations, both between the elite and the masses and within the elite itself.;As head football coach at Alabama from 1958 until 1983, Paul Bryant embodies the symbolic potency of southern college football. His personal charisma, rural roots, and rags-to-riches story made him a symbol of both modern bourgeois values and of traditional southern cultural norms. Bryant's status as a symbol of white supremacy during the early 1960s and, after the desegregation of this team in 1971, as a symbol of the new cultural myth of racial harmony, reveals the plasticity of football's cultural meaning. |
