Drinking

In the 1930s and 1940s, the University struggled with drinking at its football games. While U-M was certainly concerned with the increase of intoxicated fans at sporting events, administrators were all but helpless when it came to preventing fans from drinking. In one University report, it was explained that “it would be folly to expect that we could completely prevent drinking anywhere from 50-80,000 people.”^[1] Still, U-M saw it as its duty to protect young people from the ills of excessive drinking. The majority of patrons at football games, according to U-M, were “abstainers” or had “the decency to do their drinking under circumstances that will not make them nuisances to others.”^[2] U-M wished to protect these folks from the “offensive minority” of heavy drinkers.^[3] To fight this, gatemen were supposed to refuse to admit anyone “obviously under the influence of liquor,” and ushers were supposed to throw out those fans who were “offensively” drunk^[4]. In addition, by the mid-1930s, each football ticket contained the following message, which was signed by Fielding Yost:

“To Our Patrons: Intercollegiate athletics is part and parcel of the University’s educational program. The players you watch on the field are all clean, fine young men. And in the stadium, in your midst, are ten thousand other students, boys and girls in their ‘teens and early twenties. Drinking in any group activity which the university sponsors is inconceivable. We owe these young people a duty to see that excessive drinking does not occur at our football games. Let us not fail in this duty.”^[5]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one thing U-M blamed this drinking on was cold weather. Ralph Aigler, chairman of the Board in Control of Intercollegiate Athletics, commented on excessive drinking at a football game, remarking: “There seem to be a lot of people who proceed on the idea that there is warmth in alcohol.”^[6]