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1918–1931 · the national institution
Football's deep telling stands in its own files; the institution's share of the Rockne era is the transformation of a small Indiana college into a national constituency. The university's own history states the mechanism plainly: in the nativist 1920s some football teams would not play Notre Dame, allegedly on account of its Catholicism, and the university answered by building a more national schedule; the defiance made Notre Dame a symbol for recent immigrants who faced the same prejudice, and bred the nationwide network of adherents now called the subway alumni. The era's two civic marks stand at documented size. In May 1924, when the Ku Klux Klan attempted a rally in South Bend, some 500 Notre Dame students stormed downtown against it, and the riot ended when President Matthew Walsh ordered the students back to campus — the clash and its whole course stand in this project's Black history record, and Walsh, three years later, approved the nickname "Fighting Irish" for the university's teams as preferable to the derisive names then in use. And the era built in brick: Notre Dame Stadium, designed by the Osborn Engineering Company with Rockne himself playing a key role in its plan and built by the Sollitt Construction Company of South Bend, rose through the spring and summer of 1930 — more than 2,000,000 bricks, 400 tons of steel, a cost exceeding $750,000, an original capacity of 54,000 — and opened on 4 October 1930 with a 20–14 win over Southern Methodist before a crowd far under capacity; the formal dedication followed a week later against Navy. The Irish had played the whole 1929 season on the road to make it possible. Rockne's death on 31 March 1931 closed the era; the stadium and the national constituency remained.
- University of Notre Dame, campus history, "Overcoming prejudice"
- fightingirish.com, Notre Dame Stadium history