The year 1924, when Grantland Rice penned his famous lede—“Outlined against a blue, gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again”—wasn’t the birth of Notre Dame football, but it was the moment when the University learned to leverage its gridiron fame for a greater purpose.
A Hesburgh Libraries multimedia exhibit, Notre Dame Football Kills Prejudice, employs archival materials to explore how University leaders harnessed the unprecedented popularity of the 1924 football team to combat bigotry and promote a more inclusive America.
The University Archives’ senior archivist for graphic materials, Elizabeth Hogan, and Greg Bond, sports archivist and curator of the Joyce Sports Research Collection, teamed up to curate the exhibit.
“Sports is never just about sports; it has always been political,” Bond said. “That may frustrate some people who just want to see the action on the field, but in 1924, Notre Dame recognized that football was an avenue to address bigger issues.”
In the 1920s, surging nativist politics helped prompt a second rising of the Ku Klux Klan, which mythologized its “100% Americanism” ideal of white, male Protestants and denigrated other people who did not fit their restrictive understanding of Americanness—which, besides African Americans, also included Catholics, Jews, and immigrants.
Notre Dame felt the reverberations both on the playing fields and near its campus. Notre Dame football developed a national schedule not by choice, but because closer schools (especially some in the Big Ten) refused to play a Catholic institution. Rev. John W. Cavanaugh, C.S.C., an earlier University president, wrote, “There has been some criticism of the team for doing so much traveling, but it was a stern necessity rather than a preferred policy.”
Just a few months before the season, the Klan tried to hold a rally in May 1924 in South Bend, the most Catholic area in a state fully controlled by the Klan. About 500 Notre Dame students showed their objections by storming downtown and ripping the hoods and robes off surprised Klan members, roughing them up in alleys and stealing their regalia.
The riot was finally stopped when Rev. Matthew Walsh, C.S.C., then Notre Dame’s president, ordered the students back to campus. It was Father Walsh who three years later approved the nickname of Fighting Irish for Notre Dame teams because it was preferable to more derisive monikers in use, such as the Papists or Dirty Irish.
Notre Dame first capitalized on the Four Horsemen story by having its backfield of Crowley, Layden, Stuhldreher, and Miller pose atop horses for a now-iconic photo. The success of the Notre Dame football team became a defiant symbol for many recent immigrants who faced frequent discrimination, spawning a network of what are now called subway alumni across the nation.
“Notre Dame succeeded at this very American thing—college football,” Bond said. “The Fighting Irish’s gridiron success inserted them into the broader contemporary conversations about contested citizenship and what it meant to be an American.”
It wasn’t accidental—the University administration recognized an opportunity to further its mission. In a November 1924 campus Religious Bulletin column titled “Be Not Unworthy of Victory,” Prefect of Religion Rev. John F. O’Hara, C.S.C., wrote, “Notre Dame football is a new crusade: it kills prejudice and stimulates faith.
“It is not the first time that a Notre Dame team has won national recognition, but it is the first time that recognition was so complete. It comes in the midst of a wave of bigotry, in the wake of an election into which was injected much bitterness and fanaticism on the part of people who would deprive us of our constitutional rights as citizens.”
“I hope people understand the questions we’re raising in this exhibit,” Bond said. “Questions about immigration, belonging, inclusion, minority rights, and who’s an American aren’t new. These fundamental debates have echoed throughout American history. Perhaps if we study the past, it can help chart our way forward.”
The exhibit, which was displayed during fall 2024 in the Rare Books and Special Collections room on the first floor of the Hesburgh Library and will soon be available online, contains primary source materials from Knute Rockne and others, printed publications from campus and off-campus observers, and other materials that tell a sports story that isn’t just about sports.
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