The Chicago city council wants the Army-Navy football game next year to be played in its new municipal stadium. Secretaries Wilbur and Weeks are being solicited to obtain the necessary governmental consent. If Chicago gets its wish, another tradition will have bitten the dust, and a new precedent will be established whose end none can foresee.
The lusty young West is coming to have no respect at all for the established order. Long ago they carried the center of population across the Alleghenies. So delinquent have they grown in respect for their elders, that when an Easterner talks about New York, some Westerner interposes Southern California. If the East boasts possession of the capital of the nation, the West is sure to drag in Kansas City, the heart of the continent". The West has long demanded, if not a President, at least a Vice-president from its ranks. Even in football they have tried to snatch glory from the East by setting up the Big Ten Conference to outshine the Big Three. And now, not content with all these usurpations, they want the Navy's annual classic with the Army.
The curiosity of inland folk to see the navy is natural enough. Up to a short while ago, it was customary to keep the navy near the water. If tars became landlubbers for a day in order to show the army its place in football, the contest was held near the seaboard in some such town as New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore. Never have they made an inland excursion. Only of late, since the navy has taken to flying about over the country, have Westerners made bold to ask it for a football game.
If the request is granted, it will be the beginning of the end to deprive the East of its distinctions.
If one can believe the patriotic utterances of Western college presidents, true education is no longer obtainable elsewhere than on a Western campus. Chicago has long been recognized as the year-round home of the Muses. A few decades more of this general hegira, and all that will remain East of the Alleghenies will be Plymouth Rock, Cleopatra's Needle, and the World's Series.
