The Bowl Game That Changed America

With Alabama’s Rose Bowl victory, The Atlanta Journal  proudly proclaimed that “The Crimson Tide no longer belonged exclusively to Tuscaloosa and the State of Alabama. It belongs to the whole South, just like the Stone Mountain Memorial.”

Among all Southerners, including middle-class and upper-class, the extravagant recognition they draped over the Crimson Tide was, in so many ways, filled with references to the South’s chivalric past. 

Southerners began considering Alabama’s Rose Bowl victory as the renewal of the positive traditions of the “Old South.”

University of Georgia President Sanford stated that Alabama “upheld the tradition and fighting spirit of the Old South.” The Old South was being reborn, with Southerners beginning to develop football, along with activities that evoked the old Southern aristocracy.

But for the majority of Southerners, the core of their celebration of winning the Rose Bowl was more of their long-held desire to gain revenge in regard to the degradations dealt to them by the victorious Yankees and the insults they were receiving from the national press.

However wrong a group of people may think, it is only normal for them to try feeling some kind of pride in who they are. The greatest pride Southerners had, starting in 1926, and are still holding onto today, is the `pride of their football teams.   

While the South still had to ask Washington and Wall Street for help, they had never forgotten how their ancestors had demonstrated their honor on the battlefield. 

The South, before Alabama’s invitation and acceptance to the 1926 Rose Bowl, could easily be compared to a wounded animal, looking for any possible way they could fight back.

The Tide’s presentation of their masculine strength and determination to win in Pasadena was their evidence that their fighting ability and legendary nobility had again risen in their 20th Century world. The “Wounded Animal” had finally found a way to fight back. 

But before going any further, as a man with Southern roots, but who lived the majority of his life in the Midwest, let me hopefully bring some degree of understanding that many may have never known about the South, during the time it was becoming what could only be described as a nation unto itself.

What I say may offend people on both sides, but having become a mixture of both sides, I can only express my views as I see them.

As wrong as the use and treatment of African slaves was worldwide, it was an accepted part of a world trading system that had flourished for hundreds of years. 

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