Lee McClung
Encyclopedia
American football
American football is a sport played between two teams of eleven with the objective of scoring points by advancing the ball into the opposing team's end zone. Known in the United States simply as football, it may also be referred to informally as gridiron football. The ball can be advanced by...
player who later served as the 22nd Treasurer of the United States
Treasurer of the United States
The Treasurer of the United States is an official in the United States Department of the Treasury that was originally charged with the receipt and custody of government funds, though many of these functions have been taken over by different bureaus of the Department of the Treasury...
.
McClung was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. His father was Frank H. McClung, a merchant, and he was related to Albert Sidney Johnston
Albert Sidney Johnston
Albert Sidney Johnston served as a general in three different armies: the Texas Army, the United States Army, and the Confederate States Army...
and John Marshall
John Marshall
John Marshall was the Chief Justice of the United States whose court opinions helped lay the basis for American constitutional law and made the Supreme Court of the United States a coequal branch of government along with the legislative and executive branches...
. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy is a private secondary school located in Exeter, New Hampshire, in the United States.Exeter is noted for its application of Harkness education, a system based on a conference format of teacher and student interaction, similar to the Socratic method of learning through asking...
and went on to Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
, where he was class leader, received the largest number of votes as its most popular member in his senior year, and was a member of Skull and Bones
Skull and Bones
Skull and Bones is an undergraduate senior or secret society at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. It is a traditional peer society to Scroll and Key and Wolf's Head, as the three senior class 'landed societies' at Yale....
. He was chairman of his class's Junior Promenade Committee. McClung, who was always known as Lee from his college days onward, was perhaps the best-known football player in the country while at Yale. In his athletic prime he stood 5'10", weighed between 165 and 180 lbs., was on the varsity baseball
Baseball
Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The aim is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot diamond...
team, and played in every football season from 1888 to 1891 on teams that compiled a 54-2 record and a 2269-49 point total. (It was unusual to make the team as a freshman at the time, but McClung did, being the only freshman to play on the noted 1888 team.) He himself was credited with scoring 176 points in 1889 and 494 in his career. He was captain of the unscored-upon Yale football team of 1891 (13-0 record, 488-0 point record), graduating the following year with a B.A.
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
He never left a game during injury, despite football being considerably rougher at the time. On November 21, 1891, his famous team of eleven defeated Harvard 10-0, avenging their hard-fought loss of the year before. He played his last college game against Princeton
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
five days later, on Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving Day is a holiday celebrated primarily in the United States and Canada. Thanksgiving is celebrated each year on the second Monday of October in Canada and on the fourth Thursday of November in the United States. In Canada, Thanksgiving falls on the same day as Columbus Day in the...
, with the very same eleven Yale players defeating the Tigers 19-0. He is thought to have designed the cutback play
Cutback (football move)
A cutback in football generally refers to a move a running back makes when a run play is designed to go one way but the back sees opportunity for gain elsewhere...
. McClung returned to New Haven in the fall for many years to assist in coaching. His reputation was long-lasting on the gridiron, and in 1941, even Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine was still referring to "a turtlenecked Yale man of the Bum McClung era." He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame
College Football Hall of Fame
The College Football Hall of Fame is a hall of fame and museum devoted to college football. Located in South Bend, Indiana, it is connected to a convention center and situated in the city's renovated downtown district, two miles south of the University of Notre Dame campus. It is slated to move...
in 1963.
McClung spent the year after graduation traveling in Europe and California, where he became the first coach at the University of California
University of California
The University of California is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the California State University...
. He then entered the service of the St. Paul & Duluth Railroad Company
St. Paul and Duluth Railroad
The St. Paul and Duluth Railroad was reorganized from the Lake Superior and Mississippi Railroad in 1877. It was bought by the Northern Pacific in 1900...
at St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1899 he joined the Southern Railway Company
Southern Railway (US)
The Southern Railway is a former United States railroad. It was the product of nearly 150 predecessor lines that were combined, reorganized and recombined beginning in the 1830s, formally becoming the Southern Railway in 1894...
and remained with it until 1901, when he became assistant to the second vice president of the company. McClung became assistant freight traffic manager of the company in 1902, and retained this position until 1904, when he was appointed Treasurer of Yale University, assuming that office on December 15, 1904. While in this position, he drew fire for writing satirically about the sale of the defunct Ingham University
Ingham University
Ingham University in Le Roy, New York, was the first women's college in New York State and the first chartered women's university in the United States. It was originally founded in 1835 as the Le Roy Female Seminary by Mariette and Emily E. Ingham. The school was chartered on April 6, 1852 as the...
, having called it "a defunct college that we should be very pleased to sell on very low terms to any one making due application... If it may prove an incentive to the consummation of the deal I should be very much pleased to throw in a cemetery which is located on the grounds." He also modernized treasury and accounting methods at the university.
On September 23, 1909, President William Howard Taft
William Howard Taft
William Howard Taft was the 27th President of the United States and later the tenth Chief Justice of the United States...
appointed McClung, a Southern Republican
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
, as Treasurer of the United States. He took office on November 1 of that year. He was paid $
United States dollar
The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....
8,000 annually. On January 8, 1910, he handed his predecessor a cheque for $1,260,134,946.88 ⅔, an acknowledgment of the money and securities in the department as of the day McClung took office; it took a little over two months to count all the assets, as is customary when a Treasurer departs. This was said to have been the largest financial transaction from man to man in world history at the time. During his time in office, he urged that worn, dirty banknotes be withdrawn at a higher rate in order to establish a sanitary currency. McClung served until his resignation of November 14, 1912 became effective a week later. He resigned his post because of a dispute in the Treasury Department
United States Department of the Treasury
The Department of the Treasury is an executive department and the treasury of the United States federal government. It was established by an Act of Congress in 1789 to manage government revenue...
, a so-called "mutiny" led by A. Piatt Andrew
Abram Andrew
Abram Piatt Andrew Jr. was a United States Representative from Massachusetts.-Biography:Born in La Porte, Indiana, he attended the public schools and the Lawrenceville School...
, then Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, who had troubles with Secretary Franklin MacVeagh
Franklin MacVeagh
Franklin MacVeagh was an American banker and Treasury Secretary.Born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, he graduated from Yale University in 1858, where he was a member of Skull and Bones. He graduated from Columbia Law School in 1864. He worked as a wholesale grocer and lawyer...
which involved McClung. Andrew, who resigned on July 3 of that year, criticized MacVeagh's lax business methods and poor administrative skills, naming several Treasury officials as agreeing with him, including McClung. MacVeagh asked McClung to repudiate Andrew's statement concerning him, but he refused, and relations between them became strained. However, President Taft called a truce at the Treasury until after the election
United States presidential election, 1912
The United States presidential election of 1912 was a rare four-way contest. Incumbent President William Howard Taft was renominated by the Republican Party with the support of its conservative wing. After former President Theodore Roosevelt failed to receive the Republican nomination, he called...
that year, with McClung announcing his resignation nine days after Taft's decisive defeat.
After McClung left office, his successor, Carmi A. Thompson, gave him an even bigger cheque on December 4, 1912, amounting to $1,519,285,908.57 ⅔. The day before, he had made a speech in Pittsburgh claiming that "It is physically possible to steal $100,000,000 from the Treasury of the United States."
McClung died in a private hospital in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
after a three-months' illness of typhoid fever
Typhoid fever
Typhoid fever, also known as Typhoid, is a common worldwide bacterial disease, transmitted by the ingestion of food or water contaminated with the feces of an infected person, which contain the bacterium Salmonella enterica, serovar Typhi...
contracted at Frankfurt
Frankfurt
Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...
. His brother C. M. was with him when he died. His body was returned to the United States on board the steamer St. Paul, which left Liverpool on December 26, 1914. His funeral service took place at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, New York
St. Thomas Episcopal Church, New York
Saint Thomas Church, located at the corner of 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue in the borough of Manhattan, New York, New York in the United States, is an Episcopal parish church of the Episcopal Diocese of New York. It is also known as Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue or as Saint Thomas Church in the...
on January 4, 1915; he was buried in Knoxville's Old Gray Cemetery two days later following additional services at his sister's home.
One of his obituaries reminisced: "Ah! A remarkable athlete, a wonderful football player, a lovable classmate, a diligent student, a manly man–a type Yale men idealize for emulation. Such was Lee McClung."
McClung apparently never married. He had two brothers who went to Yale.
McClung was a director of the Phoenix Mutual Life Insurance Company of Hartford, Connecticut
Hartford, Connecticut
Hartford is the capital of the U.S. state of Connecticut. The seat of Hartford County until Connecticut disbanded county government in 1960, it is the second most populous city on New England's largest river, the Connecticut River. As of the 2010 Census, Hartford's population was 124,775, making...
, a director of the Marion Institute of Alabama, a national councilman of the Boy Scouts of America
Boy Scouts of America
The Boy Scouts of America is one of the largest youth organizations in the United States, with over 4.5 million youth members in its age-related divisions...
, and treasurer of the American Association for Highway Improvement. He was a member of the Metropolitan, Riding, and Chevy Chase Clubs of Washington, the University Club of New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, and the Graduates and New Haven Lawn Clubs of New Haven. He was also elected president of the Yale Alumni Association of Washington on December 22, 1910.