The peacemaking Andrew M. Brown
Posted on December 10, 2012 12:14 am
The name of Andrew M. Brown appears prominently on two particular occasions in the early history of soccer in the United States. On both of those occasions, his actions earned him the reputation of a mediator between disputing factions.
The first of those occasions came in 1913. Brown was the president of the American Football Association, the long-established organization that was the closest thing American soccer had to a national governing body, although its influence didn’t extend much beyond the East Coast. In the previous year, a new organization, the American Amateur Football Association, had launched a bid to take over the leading role, and sent a representative, Thomas W. Cahill, to the FIFA Congress in Sweden attempting to gain recognition from FIFA for the AAFA. FIFA rebuffed Cahill and supported the position of the AFA, which was not seeking recognition from FIFA but rather was urging FIFA not to grant recognition too hastily to the AAFA. FIFA urged the two sides to find a way to work together and come back to it with a united application.
Brown, who was born in Scotland and originally trained to be a minister, was the leading voice within the AFA for compromise and accommodation with the new organization. However, he met with considerable opposition on this issue from many of his colleagues in the AFA, which broke off merger negotiations with the AAFA in December 1912. Eventually, Brown talked that opposition into coming around to his viewpoint, and led the way as the AFA joined the AAFA, which by then had been renamed the U.S. Football Association, after the USFA won provisional recognition from FIFA in 1913. In a tribute after Brown’s death 35 years later, Gus Manning, the first president of the USFA, wrote that Brown was “soft of tongue, a patient listener, a pacifier of ugly emotions.”
Brown eventually served as president of the USFA himself, in 1927 and 1928. In the first of those years, he performed the most memorable service of his term as president. Austria and Hungary sought to have the United States punished by FIFA because of the signing by American Soccer League teams of players under contract to Austrian and Hungarian clubs. Brown made an emergency trip to the FIFA Congress in Finland, where he managed to fend off those sanctions and negotiate a settlement that ended the ASL’s raids on European clubs (and earned Brown and the USFA some enemies in the ASL).
Brown, who was 57 years old in 1927, wasn’t completely done with having important effects on American soccer when his term as USFA president ended in 1928. In 1929, he was the United States’ delegate at the FIFA Congress in Spain at which the decision was made to hold the first World Cup the following year in Uruguay, a World Cup in which the United States performed very well.
My new role model.
All in all..considering the eventual demise of Pro Soccer in the USA, Mr. Brown was a complete and utter failure!
Wasn’t there to fully critique his motives and goals for the game in the US..but, he certainly seems to me as someone who couldn’t get parties to work together for the common good of the game.
I can just see Bill Cunningham chewing on him and spitting him out!
The demise of the game in America during a most important heyday needs to point somewhere and Mr. Brown, for whatever good he tried to do for the sport, has to be partly to blame.
With the Great Depression the 30s was an era where a great many thing fell by the wayside, not just soccer as a spectator sport. And while we sometimes look back at the ASL as a heyday, I would suggest that lacrosse has a bigger footprint today than soccer did than. It was “big” in the few markets it was big, but it was definitely a foreign import in many places where assimilation was the order of the day.
I think the historical tides of the era are a much bigger factor at play here than the deeds or misdeeds of any man or group of men.
then/than grrrrrr
Sorry, this is pretty ignorant. Not everybody who involved in a failed enterprise is necessarily to blame for its failure. I’m not sure there is anybody who could have reconciled the diverse interests that made up US soccer at the time.
If you want to pick to blame for the demise of American soccer, at least pick someone a little more prominent – Thomas Cahill, perhaps, or Peter Peel or the above-mentioned Gus Manning – or maybe Archie Stark and Bert Patenaude and Billy Gonsalves are to blame?
Nothing ignorant about it. If you don’t think Gulati would be blamed if US Soccer ends up failing in the MLS experiment, then you may be the ignorant one.
The depression and anti-immigrant sentiment were huge players in the demise of the game..as was the greed and incompetence of people at the top.
If Mr. Brown was in a position of power then try as he might the game still floundered and pretty much disappeared…did he succeed? No..did he fail? Ok, a little yes and maybe not really..?
So let me get this right.
Because someone would be rightly/wrongly blamed for a potential failure today, we should look to assign blame historically based on the same standards?
Really? What the hell man.
I blame Hoover.
If you are going to put the blame for the troubles of American soccer around 1930 on everybody who was involved in American soccer in the 1920s, then obviously, Brown is one of those people. However, if I were going to assign blame for a building burning down, I would look first at the people who set the fire rather than at the people who failed to put it out. So, in the case of this particular fire, I would prefer to blame the people who started the Soccer War, primarily Charles Stoneham and Bill Cunningham.
Not sure what would have been accomplished by Cunningham chewing up Brown and spitting him out. Stoneham and Cunningham did attempt to chew up the USFA in the Soccer War. They succeeded in doing considerable damage to the USFA, but even more damage to themselves. I think that what they spit out was mostly broken teeth. American soccer certainly didn’t do itself any favors in the 1920s with the tremendous amount of vicious political infighting that took place.
In the end, however, I think that Andy is right that the Depression trumps everything.
In this case, an “emergency trip to Finland” would have taken at least a week. Doesn’t exactly have the same cachet as “catching the redeye to Helsinki”.
If the Yom Kippur War had started a depression, then people would blame Lamar Hunt, Al Davis and Pete Rozelle for killing gridiron football.
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