Football daft II

American fervour

Andrew Hook

The annual conference of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society has just taken place in the Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey. (Not to be confused with Princeton University in the same town.) The conference theme was 'Thomas Reid, William Cullen and Adam Smith: The Science of Mind and Body in the Scottish Enlightenment'. Such a theme illustrates just how far Scottish historiography of the 18th-century has changed in the recent past: not so long ago Scottish historians, if they took any interest in the 18th-century at all, focused exclusively on either the questionable 1707 Treaty of Union, or on the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745. Not any longer.
     Now the Scottish Enlightenment reigns. So almost 100 scholars, mostly from American and Scottish universities, but including others from Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Finland, and Japan, met in Princeton hoping to inform and entertain each other with papers on every aspect of the work of Reid – best known as the leading member of the Scottish common sense school of Scottish philosophy which tried to answer the scepticism of David Hume – Cullen, a famous professor of medicine in the University of Edinburgh, and 'Wealth of Nations' Smith, as well as that of a range of other Scottish literati of the 18th-century.
     My own contribution was on John Maclean, a bright young doctor and chemist who left Glasgow for the United States in 1795. A believer in the cause of political reform at home, Maclean preferred to embrace the political principles of the new republic across the Atlantic rather than endure the increasingly repressive regime holding sway in Scotland in the years following the French Revolution.
     Arriving in Philadelphia, he was directed to Princeton where he soon became the College of New Jersey's first professor of chemistry and thus a pioneer in the introduction of this new subject to American university students. Maclean's son would in due course also become a member of the faculty at the college, finally becoming Princeton's 10th president in the period 1854-68. (I was moved to hold in my hand here in Glasgow a copy of president Maclean's memoir of his father, 'Presented to the University of Glasgow, with the best wishes of the Author', signed and dated 'John Maclean, Princeton N J May 19th, 1885'. For once past and present seemed to be within touching distance of each other.)
     
I have to admit that my account of John Maclean did not set the conference alight. But then I'm not sure that any of the range of papers and lectures on Reid, Cullen, Smith, Witherspoon and the rest did either. To my great surprise, the real buzz throughout the conference had nothing at all to do with the Scottish Enlightenment. Or any other scholarly concern. The whispered conversations between colleagues I was hearing had a single focus: what was happening in the World Cup.
     Now we all know that Americans are not really interested in the game the rest of the world calls football. American football on the other hand is a major sport and the annual Superbowl contest is one of the world's grandest sporting occasions. 'Soccer' may be widely played, by both boys and girls, at high school and college level, but the professional game is largely supported only by immigrant groups.
     So what was going on at the Princeton conference? Could it simply be that the American national team in the tournament, having qualified from the group stage to the first knockout round, was doing better than expected? That could be part of the explanation. (In fact America lost to Ghana in extra time.) But it clearly wasn't the whole story.
     American TV coverage of the World Cup seems to be comprehensive. So much so that Glen Beck, Fox News' right-wing commentator, is complaining that 'soccer' – which he clearly regards as an unAmerican activity – is being forced down American throats. On the other hand, Jon Stewart's hugely popular – and satirical – 'The Daily Show' on 30 June devoted its whole programme to the World Cup. At the mid-programme advertisement break, Stewart munched on orange segments, while the second half involved interviews with the American team coach Bob Bradley and star player Landon Donovan.
     In any event, on the afternoon the conference ended, I had arranged to meet a young student friend from New York. We had lunch in the taproom of Princeton's Nassau Inn. Not having met for some time, we had much to talk about, but as I was munching on my crab cakes I could not help noticing that Nell was interested in what was showing on the bar's large TV screens: the game between Argentina and Mexico.
     It turned out she was a World Cup enthusiast. Living in Brooklyn, she said the bars there were packed for every game. I suggested this could be because Brooklyn was a cosmopolitan melting-pot of different ethnic groups and immigrants from around the world. Yes, said Nell, that had been her own thought. But the previous weekend she had been in the Hamptons on Long Island – a much more popular, up-market, sea-side area – and the sports bars were just as packed with enthusiastic World Cup fans.
     As I stood in the long check-in queue at Newark airport for my flight back to Glasgow, others in the queue were using their cell-phones to keep up with the score in Spain v. Portugal. So who knows? Perhaps World Cup fever will finally give the beautiful game a new and enduring status in the USA.

Andrew Hook is a former professor of English literature at
Glasgow University