Dyed in Crimson: Football, Faith, and Remaking Harvard’s America. University of Illinois Press, 2023. Pp. 290. Acknowledgments, bibliography, conclusion, index, introduction, notes. $28 paperback.

Reviewed by Bob D’Angelo

Anti-Semitism in the United States is not new, but it has been bubbling to the surface again with alarming frequency. According to FBI statistics, American Jews account for 2.4% of the U.S. population but were the victims in 63% of reported religiously-motivated hate crimes in 2021. Testimony began in late May in the trial of a man accused of fatally shooting 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, the deadliest attack against Jews in US history according to the Anti-Defamation League.

Prejudice remains a stain on the US psyche. 

A century ago, it was prevalent, whether it was the continuation of Jim Crow in the South or the belief that Jews were dangerous revolutionaries or money-grabbing capitalists. And yet, a Jewish athlete starred at Harvard and later became coach during the 1920s, changing the elitist values at the prestigious Ivy League college.

That is what Zev Eleff examines in his latest book, Dyed in Crimson: Football, Faith, and Remaking Harvard’s America. Eleff focuses on the athletic and coaching career of Arnold Horween, who led the undefeated Crimson to its only Rose Bowl victory in 1920 as team captain and later coached at his alma mater from 1926 to 1930. Horween, with Midwestern roots and a Jewish background, was a coach who faced pushback and hurdles from the established Brahmins of Boston’s Back Bay. Eleff also looks at the career of Bill Bingham, a track star at Harvard and later the school’s athletic director who hired Horween as the school’s football coach.

Eleff’s narrative is a fresh look at college football during the 1920s. Casual readers are aware of the exploits of Red Grange, the “Galloping Ghost” at the University of Illinois, or Notre Dame’s “Four Horsemen,” who were immortalized in October 1924 by Grantland Rice of the New York Herald-Tribune. Horween and Harvard athletic director Bill Bingham may not have received the same kind of accolades by sportswriters outside of Boston, but their contributions were equally important from a cultural standpoint.

Eleff, president of Gratz College in Melrose Park, Pennsylvania, brings the story of Horween and Bingham to life. Eleff was previously the chief academic officer of the Hebrew Theological College and vice provost of Touro College in Skokie, Illinois. He is also a professor of American Jewish history. Eleff’s latest book is part of the series Sport and Society, edited by Aram Goudsouzian and Jaime Schultz.

His expertise is in religion. He has published five books about Judaism, including a pair in 2016: Modern Orthodox Judaism: A Documentary History and Who Rules the Synagogue?: Religious Authority and the Formation of American Judaism. He followed up with 2017’s A Century at the Center: Orthodox Judaism & The Jewish Center and 2020’s Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life in 2020. Eleff also wrote about the National Conference of Synagogue Youth in his 2009 book, Living from Convention to Convention: A History of the NCSY, 1954-1980.

Sports presented a different challenge. “I know how to write about American religion, I knew how to write about Jewish studies,” Eleff told an audience in Pennsylvania earlier this year. “I wasn’t so comfortable writing about the history of American sports in relation to American religion.”

Eleff tackled it anyway as he examined Harvard, the venerable Ivy League school that comprised the “Big Three” with Yale and Princeton. Harvard was a major hub of college sports and elitist culture as the 20^th century dawned. It struggled with the belief that while sports were played with a “gentlemanly disposition,” victory was still important. “Yale celebrated winning and did much of it at Harvard’s expense,” Eleff writes (pg. 9).

And while famed college football coach Walter Camp once noted that “American people worshipped success,” Horween was astute enough to realize that fans looked at football not only as a war game, but also as an avenue to teach “good American economics and its attendant virtues.” (pg. 41). Horween and Bingham helped change the culture at the university. The changes were not always evident in the win-loss column, but Eleff asserts that “a pluralistic culture and spirit of fairness” was crucial to democratizing football at Harvard.

Bingham, the son of Irish immigrants, was a high school track star who excelled in the half-mile. Eleff traces Bingham’s track duels with Ted Meredith of the University of Pennsylvania. They were keen competitors, and while Meredith won most of their head-to-head races, it spurred Bingham to try harder. He won the AAU indoor title in the 600-yard event in 1916. “For Bill Bingham, Ted Meredith was the football equivalent of Yale,” Eleff writes (pg. 114).

Horween, along with his older brother, Ralph, were stars with the Crimson. They taught the Brahmins “a new respect for the Jewish athlete,” Morris Weiner would write in his Nov. 8, 1940, column, “Jews in Sports,” which appeared in The Southern Jewish Weekly. “Arnie” was a first-team All-America selection in 1920. The Horweens were the athletic ancestors for future Jewish baseball stars like Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax and Boston Celtics coach Arnold “Red” Auerbach.

The road to hiring Arnold Horween as coach was paved when Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell named Bingham as athletic director. By the mid-1920s, Bingham had transformed into “a proper Brahmin,” at least by reputation, due to his successful business acumen (pg. 181). By hiring Horween, Bingham bucked the sentiments of some “traditional” Harvard men. One, who had attended the Harvard-Yale game in 1925, wrote that he was struck by how “Hebrewized” the school had become (pg. 184). “Far less bigoted people in this historical moment also would have used race to describe Jews as something different from the American mainstream,” Eleff writes (pg. 185).

Sure, Horween was a beloved player and captain. But that was temporary. Being named coach was more permanent and could last many years. Horween was Jewish and an outsider because his football background was more attuned to Midwestern football. His hiring was indeed “seismic” in the minds of Harvard traditionalists. He might bring the huddle system to the school, they fretted. Or make the forward pass a more integral part of Harvard’s offense. Plus he was an outsider from Chicago, despite his ties to Harvard.

Horween’s success came not from the results on the field––Harvard went 20-17-3 during his five years as coach––but by impressing on his players the idea that football was a “virile game” that emphasized their manliness. In the coach’s view, hard work was a means to character, Eleff writes (pg. 205). “He is a man who knows what he wants to accomplish and how to get it done,” George Owen Jr., a former All-American fullback for the Crimson, told The Boston Globe after Horween was hired.

Traditionalists were not appeased, waiting for “a blunder on the football team” to make a sectarian issue of the “Jewish problem,” Eleff writes (pg. 215). It certainly did not happen in 1928, when Harvard posted a 5-2-1 record, which included a 17-0 victory against archrival Yale in “The Game.” Harvard also expanded its reach in football, scheduling schools like Michigan and Florida and, for a time, dropping Princeton.

By the time Horween left after the 1930 season, it was on his own terms. “I’ve been playing hooky from our leather business long enough to coach,” Horween told The Associated Press upon announcing his resignation. The Horween brothers returned to run the tannery business founded in 1905 by their father, Isadore Horween, “a self-made man” and an “example of the American dream.” (pg. 65). Horween Leather would supply the leather for Wilson’s NFL footballs beginning in 1949.

When Arnold Horween died in August 1985, his obituary was carried as a brief written by The Associated Press. It noted that he was a star athlete at Harvard who changed his name to play in the NFL for the Chicago Cardinals before taking the Harvard job. When Bingham died in September 1971, The New York Times noted in a four-paragraph brief that he had been Harvard’s athletic director, a member of the National Intercollegiate Football Rules Committee from 1932 to 1950, and served as chairman of the U.S. Olympic track committee for the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin.

Surprisingly, little else was written. That does not diminish the achievements of either man. Their stories were about change. “The periphery does have the opportunity to influence the mainstream,” Eleff tells his audience.

Eleff notes that Dyed in Crimson “offers much to consider about outsiders and insiders in American life.” (Pg. 11). And he is correct. He told the Jewish Journal in May that the book “begins like a punch line: a working class Protestant, a Catholic and a Jew walk into a football field.” “But it ends with something I think a lot more pronounced, which is, it’s a story about change,” he notes. “As a historian, I study change, particularly in American Judaism, broadly in American religion and Jewish studies. Change is the best asset that a historian has to study.”

As for his comfort level writing about the history of American sports as it related to religion, Eleff certainly overcame his initial trepidation. His well-researched examination of the changes that Horween and Bingham brought to Harvard in the 1920s is an uplifting story that is needed as Americans grapple with the latest wave of anti-Semitism.

---

Bob D’Angelo was a sports journalist and sports copy editor for more than three decades and is currently a digital national content editor for Cox Media Group. He received his master’s degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University in May 2018. He is the author of Never Fear: The Life & Times of Forest K. Ferguson Jr. (2015), reviews books on his blog, Bob D’Angelo’s Books & Blogs, and hosts a sports podcast channel on the New Books Network.