On October 18 the University of Illinois inaugurated its brand-new football stadium with a contest against its archrival, Michigan, which was undefeated over the last three seasons. The game started well for Illinois as the halfback Harold (“Red”) Grange returned the opening kickoff ninety-five yards for a touchdown.
In those days a team that was scored upon often chose to kick off instead of receiving, the idea being to bottle up the opponents in their own end (the ball was kicked from the fifty-yard line). The visiting Wolverines elected this option, and this time they managed to tackle Grange at the Illinois twenty. The Illini quickly punted, but a short time later they recovered a Michigan fumble at their own thirty-three. From there Grange ran sixty-seven yards from scrimmage for his second touchdown.
Again Michigan kicked off, this time securing a touchback. On second down Grange proved himself mortal by gaining only five yards, and the Wolverines could cautiously hope that they had the situation under control. The illusion did not last long. An exchange of punts gave Illinois the ball at its own forty-four, and two plays later Grange ran fifty-six yards for touchdown number three. And he wasn’t finished. Another Michigan kickoff resulted in another touchback, and the Wolverines fumbled away Illinois’s ensuing punt. To no one’s surprise, Grange got the ball once again and scampered forty-four yards for his fourth touchdown, making the score 27 to 0.
With the game only twelve minutes old, Illinois’s coach, Bob Zuppke, gave the shell-shocked Wolverines a break by benching Grange. He returned in the second half with less spectacular results, though he did score his fifth touchdown on a twelve-yard run and pass eighteen yards for a sixth. The final score was Illinois 39, Michigan 14—the most points any team had scored against Michigan since the turn of the century. By the next morning Red Grange’s twelve incredible minutes had made him the most famous football player in America.
On the same day, at the Polo Grounds in New York City, Notre Dame defeated Army 13-7 before a crowd of fifty-five thousand fans. The game was nowhere near as spectacular as the Illinois-Michigan contest, yet today it is just as well known. The reason is Grant-land Rice’s story, written for the next day’s New York Herald Tribune, which began with the most famous and perhaps most overwrought lead in the history of American sportswriting: “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction, and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley, and Layden.”
The game was not nearly as one-sided as Rice’s lead suggests. The Horsemen’s vaunted heroics, which were mainly confined to the second and third quarters, yielded only two touchdowns. By comparison, in five previous Notre Dame-Army games since World War I, the Fighting Irish had averaged sixteen points despite a scoreless tie in 1922. But even though the game was far from apocalyptic, Rice had carried the embryo of the stirring lead in his head for a year, and he seems to have been determined to use it no matter what.
At the previous year’s Army-Notre Dame game, which the Irish won 13-0, two of the as yet unnamed Horsemen had finished a spectacular play by leaping over a kneeling Rice, who was watching on the sidelines. The shaken sportswriter remarked to his companion: “It’s worse than a cavalry charge. They’re like a wild horse stampede.” At some point during the ensuing year Rice apparently thought of the title of Vicente Blasco Ibâñez’s best-selling 1916 novel The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (a reference to the sixth chapter of the Book of Revelation), and something clicked.
Rice’s Herald Tribune story abandoned the Horsemen theme after its first few sentences, subsequently likening the Irish backfield to a cyclone. Nonetheless, the tag stuck, and the foursome were much more famous for being dubbed Horsemen than for their team’s undefeated season, which was capped with a Rose Bowl victory. And while sportswriters’ words usually perish as soon as it’s time to clean the birdcage, Rice’s grandiloquence has endured. Even six decades later, in 1986, the headlines on Jim Crowley’s obituaries inevitably described him as “Final Member of Four Horsemen.”
Elsewhere in this issue Roger Kahn discusses what Grantland Rice and his colleagues wrought.
1774Two Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
Think Continentally, Act Locally
In October, as the Continental Congress was meeting in Philadelphia, local patriots up and down the Atlantic Coast did what they could to keep the heat on the British government. In Maryland and North Carolina, tea parties were the chosen method. Maryland’s party began on October 14, when the brig Peggy Stewart arrived in Annapolis. Anthony Stewart, a co-owner of the ship, unwisely paid the hated tax on a consignment of tea it contained. A few hours later the outraged citizens of Annapolis convened a town meeting to decide how to deal with him.
Some favored burning the tea immediately, but instead it was decided to wait five days before taking action, or, as Stewart later complained, “’til the sense of the County could be taken at large, or in other Words ‘til the Mob might be gathered from all quarters.” Indeed, when the meeting reconvened, on the nineteenth, radicals from neighboring counties took over. Stewart offered to destroy the tea, and the meeting accepted his proposal by a large majority. The radicals, however, threatened direct action against Stewart and James Dick, his father-in-law and co-owner, unless the ship was burned as well. Fearing for the safety of their houses and families (including Stewart’s wife, who was about to give birth), they reluctantly agreed. Later that day the Peggy Stewart, along with her despised contents, was set afire before a large crowd.
On October 25 the women of Edenton, North Carolina, held a tea party of their own. Led by the spirited Penelope Barker, who would later horse-whip a British officer who tried to steal her horses, the fifty-one women in attendance resolved “not to conform to that pernicious practice of drinking tea, or ... wear of any manufacture from England, until such time that all acts which tend to enslave this our native country shall be repealed.” The women’s foray into politics inspired great mockery in England, but it remains a source of pride in Edenton, where a bronze teapot mounted on a Revolutionary cannon still stands as a memorial to the Ladies’ Tea Party.
In Massachusetts, meanwhile, a new provincial congress met in Concord (later moving to Cambridge) on October 11 to fill the void left by the breakdown of royal authority after the Boston Tea Party. Its main order of business was to provide for the colony’s defense. To that end, after arranging for the collection of taxes, the congress appropriated ninety thousand dollars, which bought 4 mortars, 20 fieldpieces, 20 tons of ammunition, 5,000 muskets and bayonets, 75,000 flints, 350 spades and pickaxes, 1,000 wooden mess bowls, and some peas and flour. Four generals and a committee of public safety were also appointed.
The congress’s most memorable act came on October 26, when it directed each county to establish a new militia, distinct from the old, royally appointed one. A third of each militia’s members would be organized in groups capable of assembling rapidly under arms—on a minute’s notice, as the popular exaggeration had it. These were the famous minutemen, companies of which had already been established in several Massachusetts counties. The system was later copied in New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maryland, and North Carolina. Minutemen were indispensable in the Revolution’s early days, providing much of the resistance to the redcoats at Lexington and Concord. Connecticut minutemen opposed Col. William Tryon’s Danbury raid in April 1777. As the war spread, however, the Continental Army replaced local militias as the patriots’ main fighting force.
