God in the Stadium by Higgs Robert J.;

Author:Higgs, Robert J.; [Higgs Robert J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

10

Builders of Character and the YMCA

Because of the YMCA connection, Springfield, Massachusetts, is our American Jerusalem, the site common and sacred to three of our major “religions,” football, basketball, and baseball. At one time or another their three founding fathers, Amos Alonzo Stagg, James Naismith, and A.G. Spalding, either taught there or held workshops there or used the town as a base from which to civilize and/or convert, or at least to impress, the wild Celts in the hinterland and the hordes of poor Catholics and Jews with strange-sounding names streaming into the cities through Ellis Island.

The YMCA made its most significant inroads on American campuses during the period following the Civil War, when both military training and sports became dominant. The colleges began to stress “citizenship” and the development of “character” as goals in addition to the more traditional goals of education (Nash 50). These two words, citizenship and character, reverberate throughout YMCA doctrine; indeed, they lie at the heart of its fourfold program. Under the influence of William Earl Dodge, a philanthropist and merchant, the program expanded in 1866 to include the word physical Thus the object of the association became “the improvement of the spiritual, mental, social and physical condition of young men” (Hopkins 107). “Onward Christian Soldiers” was published the year before.

Condition is another name for character. C. Howard Hopkins’s monumental study of the YMCA, published at the middle of this century, repeatedly illustrates this. For example, in 1897 the Athletic League of the YMCA, under the direction of Luther Gulick Jr., worked out “the idea that Christ’s kingdom should include the athletic world, that the influence of athletics upon character must be on the side of Christian courtesy” (ibid., 265). In the 1880s and 1890s “the YMCA was completely immersed in the task of explicating the fourfold program, which seemed to be the answer to all problems. Its all-round activities were expected to develop good citizenship as well as Christian character.” This was not, as the study points out, such an admirable goal. During this period, the YMCA “leadership was so completely identified with the cult of material success that any suggestion that its goals might be questioned would have been regarded as communism, then, as later, a bad word. . . . this blindness to the tragic circumstances in which millions of young men in the American working classes were caught was also the result of institutional myopia” (393).

What was true for the leadership of the YMCA was also true for the leadership of military education. In 1908 Charles W. Larned, a general and graduate of West Point, wrote in Education from a Military Viewpoint: “Throughout the whole system there looms the dominant and controlling purpose of character development for citizenship.” Larned had no difficulty whatever in relating the education of the Greeks to the teachings of Christ. “There is but one system of character-education in which the methods and results are perfect; that is the one founded by the Master of Nazareth. That

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