In 1876 and the years that followed, Roosevelt watched a game that resembled rugby more than the sport on display in the 21st century. There were no quarterbacks, wide receivers, or dazzling end-zone receptions. Football always has prized size, strength, and power, but this was especially true in its early years. Quirks in the rules compressed the game’s action into a small space, rather than spread it across a large field. Big men pushed and shoved their way through and around masses of bodies that clashed and grappled for the ball without the benefit of protective gear.

The era of the leatherheads lay in the future: Nobody wore helmets, facemasks, or shoulder pads. During the frequent pileups, hidden from the view of referees, players would wrestle for advantage by throwing punches and jabbing elbows. The most unsporting participants would even attempt to gouge the eyes of their opponents. Bruises, sprains, and other minor injuries were taken for granted. More serious impairments, such as cracked bones and concussions, were causes of greater concern but also generally accepted as the unfortunate byproducts of a demanding and entertaining sport.

Worst of all were the deaths. They were not freak accidents as much as the inevitable toll of an activity that encouraged strong men to crash into each other, again and again, over the course of a long afternoon. An ordinary tackle can become a life-threatening calamity if the hard-thrusting knee of a ball carrier strikes the head of a defenseman. In 1905, a year of momentous importance for football and its future, 18 people died playing the sport.

Horrified by the slaughter, a group of activists crusaded against football. They wanted not merely to remove violence from the sport, but to ban football as an activity. At the dawn of the Progressive era, the prohibition of football became a social and political movement whose most outspoken proponents recoiled from the sport. Their ranks included the renowned Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, frontier scholar Frederick Jackson Turner, aging Confederate general John Mosby, and muckraking journalists.

The Nation, an influential magazine of news and opinion, worried that colleges were becoming “huge training grounds for young gladiators, around whom as many spectators roar as roared in the [Roman] amphitheatre.” After watching a Yale–Harvard match in 1903, one writer condemned the game: “The dirty players in football are the thugs of society, and the disgrace of the university that tolerates their presence on the team.” The New York Times, which had played a role in the sport’s rising popularity, worried about football’s trend toward “mayhem and homicide.” About two weeks after printing these words, the Times ran a new editorial. The headline was “Two Curable Evils.” The first evil it addressed was the lynching of blacks. The second was football.

If football was going to survive, it would have to change. The tale of how it evolved into America’s most popular sport features a colorful cast of characters from the turn of the 20th century. Many were football’s founding fathers. Legendary coach Walter Camp, who was a player in the 1876 Harvard–Yale game that Roosevelt watched, began to turn the game away from its rugby-like origins and popularized it for the masses.

When Camp’s influence waned, Notre Dame’s Knute Rockne perfected innovations that allowed football to take full advantage of its untapped potential. John Heisman, Amos Alonzo Stagg, Pop Warner, and Fielding Yost contributed as well. Other figures less associated with the sport also helped shape it, or at least were witnesses to its shaping: professor-turned-president Woodrow Wilson, the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the writer Charles Francis Adams, the editor E. L. Godkin, economist Thorstein Veblen, the grand-nephew of Edgar Allan Poe, the artist Frederic Remington, the war hero Leonard Wood, West Point cadet Dwight Eisenhower, and the front-line correspondent Richard Harding Davis.

Theodore Roosevelt was not as important to the development of football as Camp or several other men of that generation. He never played on its fields or coached from its sidelines. Instead, he enjoyed the sport as a spectator. Yet he also played a vital role during its greatest crisis. Due in part to his encouragement, football took steps to correct its violent excesses while also preserving its physical demands and competitive spirit. It is possible that without his presidential intervention, football might not even exist today. Even if it had survived this period, it might look quite different from the game that now packs millions of fans into stadiums under Friday-night lights and on fall weekends and draws tens of millions more who watch the sport on television.

The drive to prohibit football failed, of course. At the time, however, its failure was anything but certain. Even if the movement had come short of outlawing the sport, it might have succeeded in marginalizing the game — and condemning it to a future of limited appeal, along the lines of a second-tier pastime such as hockey or lacrosse. The story of what happened is a unique tale of American culture, politics, and sports. It is also virtually untold.

The story continues in The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football, published this week by Harper.

NRO runs excerpts from The Big Scrum this week.

YESTERDAY: Teddy Roosevelt attends his first football game

TOMORROW: The Progressives who tried to ban football

FRIDAY: The football fights of 2011

— John J. Miller is national correspondent for National Review and the author of The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football, published this week by Harper.