The 1920s

The 1920s brought collegiate rowing to the center of American sports culture, even as the sport’s prestige and resources remained unevenly distributed. Regattas drew immense crowds and national press attention, while western programs fought to be taken seriously against established eastern schools. For Royal Brougham, the growing prominence of the Washington crew offered a way to raise the standing of Seattle rowing and labor-conflict city; for the crews themselves, recognition came through hard races against institutions with longer traditions and greater means.

A national spectacle

In the 1920s, collegiate crew often ranked alongside baseball and college football in press coverage and crowds. Oarsmen could become national celebrities even in an era dominated by famous baseball players, and prominent sportswriters covered the major regattas. Millions followed crews through their training and racing seasons. In the East, the interest could be so intense that a coxswain’s sore throat made the news; devoted fans even collected trading cards of their favorite crews.

The sport’s public scale was especially visible at the Intercollegiate Rowing Association regatta at Poughkeepsie. Its history stretched back well before the decade: the 1824 New York Harbor race between American watermen and British sailors had drawn an estimated fifty thousand to one hundred thousand spectators, while the Harvard–Yale contest of 1852 became the first collegiate crew race in the country. By 1929, as many as 125,000 people came to Poughkeepsie to watch the annual regatta, with millions more listening by radio. The event had become a national sporting attraction comparable to the Kentucky Derby, the Rose Bowl, and the World Series.

Eastern tradition and western rivalry

The immense audience did not mean that the sport’s opportunities were evenly shared. Eastern private schools modeled rowing on elite British institutions such as Eton College, and their oarsmen moved on to prestigious universities including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Meanwhile, the established center of American collegiate rowing remained in the East. Western coaches earned much less than their eastern counterparts, and neither the University of California, Berkeley nor the University of Washington had recruitment funds or well-heeled patrons.

Western interest nevertheless grew around the rivalry between the two public universities, which dated to 1903. Their annual April races drew tens of thousands of students, alumni, and local spectators. The University of California, Berkeley had won Olympic gold twice, and crews from both schools had achieved occasional success against eastern competitors. But western programs still mostly raced one another, while the costs of travel and equipment made eastern competition difficult. Royal Brougham saw a chance to shift rowing’s center of attention westward, ideally to Seattle, but knew California might claim that distinction instead.

Poughkeepsie and a western breakthrough

The western crews’ path to recognition had been difficult. Stanford’s first appearance at Poughkeepsie, in 1912, ended in a distant sixth place. In 1913, Hiram Conibear brought a Washington varsity crew east for the first time; the team finished third, surprising eastern spectators and the press. Stanford’s second-place finish in 1915 also unsettled expectations, though western crews returned only occasionally in the following decade. Transporting athletes and fragile racing shells across the country was expensive, and western rowers encountered condescension as well as curiosity. Their working-class backgrounds set them apart from the sons of senators, governors, industrialists, and presidents whom eastern audiences were accustomed to seeing in the boats.

Washington’s 1923 return to Poughkeepsie produced a decisive reversal. On a rainy June evening, its varsity crew drew level with an elite Navy crew in the home stretch. With the crowd drowning out his commands, Washington coxswain Don Grant raised a red flag cut from a Cornell banner to signal the final effort. Stroke oar Dow Walling, rowing with a leg grotesquely inflamed by three enormous boils, raised the rate above forty strokes per minute. Washington edged ahead for the West’s first Intercollegiate Rowing Association victory. After the finish, the crew lifted Walling carefully from the shell and sent him to the hospital. The astonished crowd asked whether the University of Washington was in the District of Columbia, where Seattle was, and whether the rowers were really lumberjacks. The boys answered with little explanation, handing out miniature totem poles instead.

Work, class, and the decade’s afterlife

The decade’s sporting culture was bound to changing work and family conditions as well as to university rivalries. In 1922 and 1923, Harry and Thula Rantz had two sons together. By then Harry was spending weekdays at a gold mine in Idaho, driving 140 miles over twisting mountain roads to return to Spokane on weekends. The steady work used his mechanical skills, but left Thula alone through long weeks with three young boys, including her guarded stepson Joe. The contrast between the sport’s celebrated gentlemanly image and the insecurity of working life was part of the world from which western crews emerged.

That contrast persisted beyond the decade. The book’s account of later Olympic preparations shows that Washington’s rowers still lacked the private resources available to more privileged programs: in 1936, the crew’s place in Berlin depended on an emergency public fundraising campaign. Read against the 1920s, the crisis makes clear that the 1923 victory had changed western rowing’s reputation more rapidly than it changed the economic conditions under which its athletes competed. The decade made collegiate crew a mass spectacle, but access to its opportunities and prestige remained shaped by class, geography, and money.