Chicago sports in 1918
Despite World War I and Spanish flu, Cubs dodged fate and Halas flourished
If living without sports and other forms of entertainment during the coronavirus pandemic seems alien, it pales compared with the upheaval of 1918.
World War I dominated daily life, the Cubs and Red Sox staged a brief World Series mutiny and in the backdrop was the growing threat of the Spanish flu that public health officials at the time underestimated.
“It’s a bad flu right from the beginning, but when it comes back to America in late August 1918, it’s a killer,” said Randy Roberts, a Purdue University history professor and author of “War Fever: Boston, Baseball and America in the Shadow of the Great War.”
The pandemic killed at least 50 million people worldwide and about 675,000 in the United States.
It came in four waves — the second of which made for a deadly fall in 1918 — until finally petering out in December 1920.
The disease — also known as “the blue death” because of how patients’ oxygendepleted blood, or cyanosis, tinted their skin — sometimes attacked with such swiftness that someone could feel well in the morning and be dead by evening.
The War Department and some states issued travel restrictions and bans on public gatherings, but those orders weren’t always followed to the letter.
Influenza was a big enough challenge for sports to overcome, but the war effort siphoned many able-bodied young men from athletics. Many college campuses, including Northwestern and the University of Chicago, hosted Army camps.
Army camps and Navy bases fielded football teams; Bears greats George Halas and Paddy Driscoll played on one.
The War Department had a say in major decisions about the college football schedule. Could you picture one of today’s power-conference coaches taking marching orders from the Pentagon about his team’s schedule?
The Cubs and Red Sox faced off in the World Series in early September — before the virus exploded in Chicago and Boston.
Sports leagues of all levels had temporary shutdowns, but they were anything but universal. A high school game in one Illinois town could be canceled while a game in a nearby town played on.
By the end of 1918, Chicago had an excess death rate — the rate above normal that most likely would be attributed to influenza — of 373.2 out of 100,000, according to J. Alex Navarro, medical historian at the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan.
“That gives you roughly 10,000 deaths in Chicago for just the fall wave,” said Navarro, who co-authored a Journal of the American Medical Association paper on U.S. cities’ handling of the 1918 pandemic that has been incorporated into the modern-day guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Looking at it through Chicago’s lens, here’s how war and pestilence touched different facets of the city’s sports world.
College football’s loss may have been Halas’ gain
It’s a minor miracle the virus didn’t spread through the college football ranks, given the close association between military service teams and traditional campus “elevens,” as teams often were called back then.
Student Army Training Corps (SATC), established on college campuses, were part of a military network that shipped many of the same young men overseas to fight in Europe and back again.
The Army and Navy had football teams that played against each other and traditional college teams. Because of volunteerism and the draft, service teams such as Naval Station Great Lakes and Chicago Naval Reserve (aka Municipal Pier) had athletic talent to rival Pittsburgh and other college powers.
The first reported cases of the Spanish flu in the United States occurred in spring 1918, and they were regarded as “mild” in news reports.
But influenza spread throughout Europe, and as soldiers and sailors traveled back and forth, a second wave of the outbreak hit the U.S. with a vengeance in the fall, striking many military bases first.
That was the case with the North Shore’s Naval Station Great Lakes, where the first outbreak in the Chicago area occurred.
“Chicago grew to a bustling metropolis of 2.7 million by the time influenza arrived on September 8, 1918, when a few sailors at the nearby Great Lakes Naval Training Station fell ill with the disease,” Alex Navarro wrote. “A week later, seven Army cadets from the Northwestern University SATC unit came down with influenza.”
Influenza spread so quickly at Great Lakes, where 100 sailors died in a day, that in late September sailors were banned from weekend liberty to keep them out of downtown Chicago. Alderman W.O. Nance dismissed the outbreak as a recurrence of the 1890 Russian flu: “It’s just an old friend, or enemy, rather, traveling under a new alias,” the doctor said, according to the Chicago Daily Tribune.
Seemingly untouched by the epidemic were future Pro Football Hall of Famers George Halas, Paddy Driscoll and Jimmy Conzelman, who played for Great Lakes before helping establish two of the NFL’s first teams: the Decatur Staleys, the forefather of the Bears, and the Chicago Cardinals.
“They had put their football team in separate barracks, so those guys were quarantined from everybody else,” said Timothy P. Brown, author of “Fields of Friendly Strife: The Doughboys and Sailors of the WWI Rose Bowls.”
Brown contended that those conditions — war, quarantine and playing football — created bonds that Halas used to establish what became the NFL: “I think for him, it was a huge deal.”
“The war generally created this network of football players who got to know one other,” Brown said. “Up to that point, the college game was the only thing that mattered. … But the wartime military teams was the first time all-star teams of current and former college players could get together, compete and get a lot of attention. They got a lot of press coverage.”
Halas’ future Bears connections from the military extended beyond his Great Lakes teammates. Former University of Illinois teammate and Bears co-founder Dutch Sternaman was drafted in the Army and assigned to Camp Funston in Fort Riley, Kan. Hall of Fame Bears center George Trafton was assigned to Camp Grant in Rockford. Former Northwestern fullback Bob Koehler captained the powerful Chicago Naval Reserveteam stationed at Municipal Pier (now Navy Pier) and in later years played for Halas’ Decatur Staleys and the Chicago Cardinals.
However, it wasn’t all smooth sailing for Halas and his college football colleagues.
Before the fall, college football officials considered abandoning the season because of the challenges the war effort presented. In September, the Big Ten, also known then as the Western Conference, handed control of athletics to the War Department, which later ruled the conference could carry on with its schedule. But the department restricted travel in October so players, many of them committed to SATC units, could remain close to campus. Military officials also wanted to reduce their exposure to influenza.
Walter Eckersall, a Tribune sports columnist and namesake of Eckersall Park on the South Side, wrote about a “rough year for football”: “Instead of the coach having the first say in football matters, he is now secondary. The commandant of the Student Army Training Corps unit is the boss.”
The Big Ten tweaked its schedule for October and November, but then state and local shutdowns for the Spanish flu left coaches scrambling to make last-minute changes or forced them to miss games altogether.
The Spanish flu had been on the rise in the Chicago area since September, and on Oct. 16, the Illinois Influenza Advisory Commission banned all nonessential activities.
“Athletic contests attracting crowds, whether indoors or out of doors, will be prohibited,” the Daily Tribune reported.
Great Lakes had four games canceled during the 1918 season.
“They went up to Pittsburgh to play Pitt, which was the top team in the country at the time,” Brown said, “(and) they arrived and then the game got canceled by the public health authorities.”
Here’s a snapshot of how complicated scheduling football could be.
Days before Great Lakes’ Oct. 12 game in Urbana, Illinois filed a “professionalism” objection based on the fact Driscoll played for both the Hammond Clabbys (football) and the Cubs (baseball) in 1917. Driscoll would have played his senior season at Northwestern in 1918 had he not joined the Navy. He went on to play a starring role in the Bluejackets’ 7-0 win over the Illini.
Great Lakes missed the next week’s scheduled matchup against the University of Chicago at Stagg Field, which the joint board of health called off. That same weekend of Oct. 19, Chicago Naval Reserve traveled to South Bend, Ind., to play Notre Dame but had its game canceled “at the 11th hour” by the SATC commandant, Capt. William P. Murray, who had arrived on campus the month before.
Great Lakes’ Oct. 26 game against Kalamazoo Normal and Northwestern’s game versus Michigan State (then called Michigan Agricultural College) were canceled after state officials in Michigan shut down its borders because of the pandemic. And Naval Reserve’s game against Illinois in Urbana was cast into doubt because of the state of Illinois’ recent ban on public gatherings.
So Naval Reserve challenged local rival Great Lakes to a game, and the Bluejackets quickly accepted. But then Naval Reserve withdrew once the Illini approved a game behind closed gates. Fortunately for Great Lakes, Northwestern coach Fred Murphy contacted Great Lakes athletics officer Cmdr. J.B. Kauffman to set up a game with two days’ notice.
“It was actually the only game (Great Lakes) played on base that year,” said Jennifer Steinhardt, archivist of the National Museum of the American Sailor. “Our field was so muddy that neither team could score any points whatsoever. There wasn’t a football field on base at that time, so it really was just a field. And they weren’t expecting that many people to show up, but I think 15,000 did, which obviously did not help the mud situation.”
Great Lakes went on to tie Notre Dame 7-7 on Nov. 9, breaking a 39-game home winning streak dating to 1907 in what was the Irish’s only home game that year. Then the Bluejackets beat Navy.
“It was actually a really weird story,” Steinhardt said. “The Naval Academy was winning until the very end when they fumbled, and (Harry) ‘Dizzy’ Eielson looked like he was going to score when a sub from the Naval Academy jumped off the bench and tackled him.”
The referee issued a penalty and planned to set up the Bluejackets at half the distance to the goal, but the academy superintendent said, “No, they would’ve scored a touchdown, so they deserve a touchdown,” according to Steinhardt.
“And he forced the ref to give Great Lakes a touchdown,” Steinhardt said. “And they scored the extra point and won the game.”
The University of Chicago Maroons, coached by football visionary Amos Alonzo Stagg, had more problems beyond navigating state restrictions on public gatherings.
During the previous spring, the Tribune declared “prospects on the Midway are not gloomy — they are worse,” as Stagg already had lost several players to military duty.
At the beginning of October, his players were sworn in as soldiers under the control of SATC commandant Maj. Henry S. Wygant, according to Tribune archives. Stagg, like other coaches, had to deal with abbreviated practice hours set by the War Department and lean on younger, unseasoned players (freshmen were allowed to play in the Big Ten for the first time since 1905). Around the same time as the mid-October ban, the Maroons lost five football stars to officer training camps, including end Herb “Fritz” Crisler and halfback/quarter back Bobbie Cole.
The next week, 30 cases of influenza broke out among mechanics trainees on campus. On Oct. 26, the quarterback and coach’s son, Amos Alonzo Stagg Jr., aka “Young Stagg,” broke his collarbone against Loyola Academy a week before the Big Ten opener against Purdue and was lost for the season.
The Maroons finished 0-5 in the Big Ten. Northwestern wasn’t immune to the topsy-turvy nature of the 1918 season either.
The Purple (as they were called until the switch to Wildcats in 1925) got the OK from Evanston’s health commissioner to play Ohio State on Nov. 2, but Ohio’s military and health authorities held the Buckeyes back from traveling to Evanston, so Murphy scrambled to book Chicago Naval Reserve.
In a Nov. 9 game that was moved back a month because of the quarantine, Northwestern pummeled Knox, of Galesburg, Ill., 47-7. “About 300 watched the game and were stingy with cheers,” the Tribune wrote.
Meanwhile in Chicago, city health commissioner John Dill Robertson declared in a letter to the Chicago Association of Commerce: “All bans are off.”
The next week, Northwestern beat the University of Chicago 21-6. According to Tribune archives, “the field was sloppy, and the rain and fog obscured the play, but it was a gala ‘homecoming day’ for the … Purple students and alumni, and the drizzle of the weather could not quench the sizzle of their enthusiasm.”
Halas’ Great Lakes team finished the season 6-0-2, then beat the Mare Island Marines 17-0 in the Rose Bowl on Jan. 1, 1919. Halas was named MVP.
“He still holds the record for longest interception return (77 yards) in Rose Bowl history that wasn’t a touchdown,” said John Prue, Great Lakes’ morale, welfare and recreation director.
Notable: A former University of Chicago baseball player, Pvt. Phillip W. Hartzell, died in battle in France in September 1918. … Hiram H. Wheeler, backup quarterback for the 1904 Illinois team and one of the university’s first two African American letter winners, “died from pneumonia (on Oct. 16) just as he was to leave for France as a YMCA army secretary with Negro regiments.”