Oklahoma, Parrington, and Football

Guest post from Neil Jumonville:

As a faculty member at FSU, of course I'm hoping that FSU beats Oklahoma in football this weekend. But I also have a soft spot for OU. Vernon Parrington, the important American intellectual historian of the 1920s and 1930s who is still recognized as an important pioneer in the field, was once their football coach, as unlikely as that sounds. It’s nice to be reminded what the noted historian Richard Hofstadter had to say about Parrington in his book The Progressive Historians: “Always a good athlete—he had played baseball briefly as a semiprofessional and during his faculty days at Emporia College had occasionally played, under the loose or nonexistent athletic rules of the period, on its football team—he now took over for a few hard-driven years the unsalaried position of coach of the Oklahoma football team, a job which required that he also act as athletic director, manager, trainer, referee, and publicity writer. ‘Everything Parrington touched he seemed to vitalize,’ wrote a later annalist of Oklahoma football. Introducing the powerful cross-blocking he had seen at Harvard, Parrington developed a strong winning team; but after three years of exhausting success he asked to be relieved of his coaching duties.” (pp. 371-72) Here is an example of a worker who refused specialization. It is said that George Lynn Cross, OU's president from 1943 to 1968, once told the Oklahoma State Senate, "I want a university the football team can be proud of."