Foreign Names

Dr. Riddick expressed his displeasure with the presence of foreigners at NC State.

Many faculty, administrators, and alumni strongly disagreed with coach Heartley Anderson’s practice of recruiting large amounts of players from the North to be a part of the NC State football team. For some, Northerners just did not belong at NC State, whether their actions reflected positively on the school or not.  One administrator commented that “the thing that bothers me is that if you look at our Honor Roll you will find that these foreign people infest that just as badly as they do the foot-ball teams.” For him, it was important that NC State maintain a collective identity as a Southern school. Accordingly, many members of the NC State community felt that the school’s collective identity was exclusively a Southern one and that they could not be expected to rally around a team that featured a substantial amount of players from the North. In letters to administrators and comments before the Faculty Council, they expressed great concern over the “foreign” names of some football players. Foreign names were those associated with immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, such as Ryneska, Pavlovsky, and Kirschner.

The 1930s were a time of increasing hostility towards immigrants in the United States, especially those from Southern and Eastern Europe. Politicians and the popular press expressed concern that these immigrants could not assimilate into American culture, were more loyal to their countries of origin than to the United States, and were taking jobs from Americans, which was an especially emotional issue in the midst of the Great Depression. This type of xenophobia certainly played a role in the discussions administrators and faculty had about foreigners at NC State. However, they seemed to be more concerned that these players were from the North than they were about the particular countries their families might have immigrated from. Foreigners were often contrasted with North Carolinians or Southerners, but never with Americans. Neither faculty, alumni, nor administrators ever mentioned a national sense of identity. They understood foreigners first and foremost as people who were not from the South.