The ‘Boston Game’
They were an accomplished band of friends, successful in family, business, and civic life, and many of them held a place of prestige and power in 19th- and early 20th-century Boston Brahmin society.
But for all their achievements as adults, their collective identity was fixed in a period from their teenage days, as reflected by their group correspondence and its “Dear Teammates” salutation.
Such were the golden years for the members of the Oneida Football Club, which made an important contribution to American sports history—or, as others have suggested, perpetrated a myth-making hoax.
A new book authored by Boston College Ireland Academic Director Mike Cronin and international sports historian Kevin Tallec Marston tells the full story of the Oneidas, who claimed to be the first organized American football club, having played the game on Boston Common in the early 1860s—well before other milestone events in the sport’s history. So convincing was their assertion, made through a campaign of memoirs, commemorative events, and artifact donations, that in 1925 a monument was erected on the Common to venerate the club’s self-proclaimed achievement.
Decades later, the club’s legacy, as represented by the monument, would be the subject of a tug-of-war between differing viewpoints as to which sport the Oneidas had in fact helped pioneer.
But Inventing the Boston Game: Football, Soccer, and the Origins of a National Myth is about more than sports and Boston history, say Cronin and Tallec Marston, whose research materials included correspondence by the Oneidas from a historical archive: The book also is an examination of memory and memorialization, and of the desire to create origin stories and narratives that reinforce individuals’ elite status amidst social and economic change.
BC Ireland Academic Director Mike Cronin
“It’s not a history of the origins of football; it’s a history of the history,” explained Cronin, a part-time faculty member in the Woods College of Advancing Studies. “We take a look at the Oneidas, the nature of their claim to be the forefathers of American football, and how they continued to promote it over time. We also set their story against the backdrop of a changing Boston, and a changing America, in which the Oneidas’ status is no longer what it was.
“At the center of it all is the Oneidas, who numbered at least 52, and their deep, lasting friendships and ties. Eighty percent of them went to Harvard. Two-thirds would end up living within six blocks of each other. They would marry one another’s sisters, sometimes even one another’s daughters. They were well to do—almost a dozen of them became millionaires—and served on numerous civic and cultural boards, committees, and societies.
“But it seemed very important to them that, when they died, they be remembered as ‘members of the first American football club.’ There’s a poignancy to that.”
The Oneidas’ story is complicated, say Cronin and Tallec Marston, because the origins of American football are complicated.
From the early 19th century on, various iterations of “football”—often chaotic, sometimes violent—were common in the United States, noted Cronin. “Schoolboys played ‘football’ on Boston Common for ages. You chose up teams, then agreed on the rules and started playing.”
But Gerrit Smith Miller, a student at Boston’s Epes S. Dixwell School—an archetype of 19th-century upscale “training schools” that prepared boys for college—decided to create a more formalized version of football, and in 1862 organized a team of classmates to play on the Boston Common against a squad comprising other students from Dixwell as well as Boston English and Boston Latin. He called his team the “Oneida Football Club of Boston,” named for the lake near his home in upstate New York.
Over the next three years, the club would score victories in a series of matches with other local schoolboy teams, including one in November of 1863 that was considered the “Boston game” championship. After 1865, with most of its members having moved on to college, the team essentially disbanded. But as the book explains, the Oneidas became something of a cross between fraternity and alumni association, championing themselves as the inaugural American football club.
Interest in football began to grow regionally, then nationally. In the 1870s and ’80s, Walter Camp, a college football player and later coach, proposed a series of rule changes that codified many aspects of the game as it is now played. These and other subsequent innovations helped make football more popular among the general public, and colleges across the United States began fielding teams. Camp was, and still is, widely referred to as the “Father of American Football”—although the Wikipedia page for Miller refers to him as “the father of football in the United States.”
Meanwhile, the Oneidas grew older, most of them occupying positions of wealth and influence in Gilded Age Boston, as chronicled by Cronin and Tallec Marston: “It was a world in which most of them were entirely comfortable and content to live. They understood networking and how to use and preserve power.” As American football flourished, Miller and his fellow Oneidas continued to stake their claim as the sport’s pioneers, and their message found resonance in the local media as well as among their peers in business and social circles—but not so much at a national level.
The world that the Oneidas had known began to change toward the end of the 19th century approached, as other cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago began to surpass Boston in wealth, influence, and population, and massive immigration affected the city’s demographics.
With the ebbing of the Gilded Age, Brahmins sought to affirm their contributions to Boston and American history, heritage, and culture: The construction of the memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment at the edge of Boston Common was a prominent example.
One Oneida, James D’Wolf Lovett, published a book in 1906, Old Boston Boys and The Games They Played, a nostalgic look at popular childhood games and activities during the mid-19th century. He described the 1863 Boston Common match, but made no mention of the Oneidas nor their claim as the first organized football team; this absence may be explained by Lovett’s personal modesty, Cronin and Tallec Marston speculate, or that the team’s history might have been outside the scope of Old Boston Boys.
Inventing the Boston Game describes, in often granular detail, the dilemmas, challenges, and uncertainties surrounding the Oneidas’ efforts to advocate for their legacy, culminating in the unveiling of the Boston Common monument when only six of the team remained. One source of contention is whether the ball the Oneidas donated to a historical society was the same one used in the 1863 “championship” game as they had claimed. Even the exact membership of the team was imprecise for many years until the six survivors sat down and tried to define who was a member and who was not.
The monument itself became a source of controversy. When soccer began gaining popularity in the U.S. during the 1980s, a national Soccer Hall of Fame that opened in upstate New York included a photo of the Oneida ball—which was round, as were most sports and recreational spheroids of the era—but its caption described the team as “the first organized soccer club in America” and thus put Boston in the limelight when the World Cup came to the U.S. in 1994. The ball depicted in the Oneida monument, however, was oval-shaped, like the modern American football, thus precipitating a campaign in 1996 to renovate and rededicate the monument—which wound up sparking a counter campaign to restore the marker as it had been.
“There are some overarching themes here: What is it that’s remembered, and who decides?” said Cronin, who last year published a book on the critical years of 1913-1923 in Irish history. “Do we know exactly what game the Oneidas played? Perhaps not as such. Did they stretch the truth a little, perhaps? Maybe. But they also have some evidence on their side. Perhaps the thing to do is simply appreciate what they did, and the bond they shared.”