Athletics and the American Way:
Creating “Proper” Men and Women in the Industrial Era
History is Central—May 19,2007
Today’s Tentative Agenda
• Give a quick overview of the period and
some ways to conceptualize it.
• Focus discussion on smaller number of
issues regarding sports, and bring
readings into the conversation.
• Set the stage for teaching discussions by
highlighting primary sources/illustrative
quotes.
• Just FYI—you’ll get copies of this
presentation, so don’t worry about getting
all of the quotes, etc.
Our Big Questions:
1) How are today’s sports “modern,” and
how did they get that way?
2) What are the ideologies behind the
creation of leisure spaces and organized
sports, particularly school sports?
3) What were the different lessons sports
were intended to teach to different
groups?
What do your students talk about?
What topics interest them?
How Do You Teach this Era?
• Does the State give you any direction?
Industrialization and Its Discontents
Scale of It All
New Immigrants
Urbanization
Gilded Age
Contrasts
Breakers and Tenement
The “New Woman”
Jim Crow
The Promise of Progressivism
Two Thoughts:
1) Can overwhelm students with narrative of
“Massive Changes”
2) This is the creation of the world they
know—the “massive changes” don’t
seem radical
Our Challenge is to Personalize
Three ways to do this (at least)
1) Primary sources related to traditional ways of
telling the story
--images of tenement houses
--Hull House Maps
--letters
2) Get better grasp of traditional narratives
--More anecdotes in your arsenal
--Local history: Getting beyond textbook
--Use fiction to help tell story (Upton
Sinclair’s The Flivver King)
3) Relate the “Big Stories” to
Students’ Existing Interests
a) Dating
b) Sports/Leisure
c) The World Around Them
Your Reactions to, and Thoughts
About, the Readings?
(What do you want to be sure we
discuss?)
“Era of Organized Sport, 1890-1950”
• By looking at sporting development can
teach about all of the topics we’ve
identified:
– Wiebe’s “Search for Order”
– The “New Woman”
– Changing Racial Patterns
– Bureaucracies and Organizations
– Regionalism
– Chandler’s “Visible Hand”
– Urbanization, Industrialization, Immigration
– Commercialization and Distribution
Characteristics of Modern Sport (and Society)
Examples?
• Secularism
• Equality
• Specialization
• Rationalism
• Bureaucratic Organization
• Quantification
• Record Keeping
Modern Sports as Urban Games
--From Stephen Hardy’s How Boston Played
“Simplified, [the argument] suggests that as
cities grew in size, population, and density,
their inhabitants felt a longing for the
outdoor life and recreational pastimes that
were being swallowed up by the stultifying
regime of the machine age.”
Hardy Continues . . .
“Just as things appeared bleakest, however,
urban economic, technological, and
demographic conditions formed the
foundation for an arena of new leisure
forms, adapted to the pace and lifestyle of
American cities.”
T. H. Benton, “City Activities with Dance Hall”
Parks, Amusement Parks, and
Playgrounds
--How are they different?
--What are their purposes?
--Why are they located in specific places?
Ideals of Parks in late 1800s
• Parks were to be the “lungs of the
city.”
• 1876 Boston proponent claimed
that parks were “reservoirs of
oxygen and fresh air. They
produce atmospheric currents
which sweep through and purify
the streets.”
• AND “oxygen promoted virtue,
‘as surely as sunlight paints the
flowers and ripens the fruits of
our gardens.’”
Early Central Park Map
What did designers want people to
do in parks?
• Be inspired and refreshed by nature.
--Especially (hopefully) the working class
– The model was “receptive recreation.”
– According to Olmstead, should be no
“harangues or loud outcries,” or parades,
marching, music, or games
If Parks represented an elite ideal,
Then Playgrounds represented urban
political pressure
– Workers didn’t want to spend day off traveling
across the city to be inspired by nature
– Ethnic groups, neighborhood associations,
city councilmen and others demanded local
playgrounds
Ideologies of Architecture and
Public Space
Kasson writes that the White City was
intended to be the “Embodiment of public
order, cultural unity, and civic virtue, and
animating vision of American cultural
achievement for an age of disorder, strife,
and vulgarity.” (18)
The Midway was something completely
different . . . It was the inspiration for
Coney Island.
“Entirely new model of
democratic urban recreation.”
“The unofficial capital of the new mass culture”
Stella,
Battle of
Lights,
Coney
Island
Original
Size: 6 ft 4 in
x 7 ft 1/4 in
Reginald Marsh, George C. Tilyou’s Steeplechase Park (1936)
Marsh—“made the eroticism of Coney Island explicit in a way that
the photographer could not. . . Delight[ing] most in the fleshy
character of the scene” (94)
Legacy of Coney Island
• Kasson suggests “the egalitarian spirit it fostered
paradoxically served to reconcile visitors to the
inequalities of society at large” (109)
• “Beneath the air of liberation, its pressures were
profoundly conformist.” (105)
• “A harbinger of the new mass culture, Coney Island lost
its distinctiveness by the very triumph of its values.”
(112)
• Was Kasson right to use this as a case study? What
might scholars in the future examine to learn about us?
Other topics to explore re: urban
athletics (if we have the time later)
• Baseball as an urban game
• Boxing as an immigrant/ethnic story
Using School Sports to Explore
Important Issues
Three reasons to focus on school sports:
1) Advocates left written records of their
thoughts and purposes
2) Doing so highlights nicely other tensions
in the era (esp. gender, race, class)
3) Easier to relate to students’ lives and
experiences
Masculinity and School Sports
The basic narrative:
Based on Oxbridge model
--so crew was first real intercollegiate sport
--Harvard-Yale, 1852 (Harvard won)
By 1859, had a mini-conference
--Yale devoted more resources, trying to
show that was a peer to the more
prestigious Harvard (this pattern repeated)
--as many as 15,000 spectators at races
Baseball was next intercollegiate sport
--1859—first game, connected to a regatta
--led to controversies over amateurism
--students earning money on the side as
pros
1893—UVA team
Track and Field became an intercollegiate
sport by 1870s
--again, tried to improve schools’ and
national reputation by competing against
Oxford and Cambridge
Football
• First game in 1869
• Yale was dominant early on, led by Walter Camp
as player and then alumni/advisor
• Camp is the father of modern football
-- Suggested marking lines on field (gridiron)
– First downs, scrimmage lines,
– Allowed blocking
– Allowed tackling below waist
• By 1890s, Yale football was seeing annual
profits of more than $50,000
Maturation/Modernization of the
game
• Faculty committees replaced student
control (1880s—1910s)
• Formalized rules (and committees to write
them)
• Athletic Conferences
• Professional coaches (with high salaries
and expectations)
Debates about the value of Football
• Social Darwinists liked it, especially
considering the student population at most
schools:
– Univ. of Wisconsin President, “[football
develops] those characteristics that have
made the Anglo-Saxon race pre-eminent.”
– Side note—if you want to discuss the
intersection of race and athletics—you
must talk about the Jack Johnson-Jim
Jeffries fight on July 4, 1910
Connecting Football and “The
Strenuous Life”
• Countered effects of a sedentary,
bureaucratic life.
• Addressed a generation’s fears that they
could never match fathers who fought in
the Civil War
• Countered Victorian restrictions and
“feminization” of culture
TR’s Essays: Chicago, 1899
“I wish to preach, not the doctrine of
ignoble ease, but the doctrine of
the strenuous life, the life of toil
and effort, of labor and strife; to
preach that highest form of
success which comes, not to the
man who desires mere easy
peace, but to the man who does
not shrink from danger, from
hardship, or from bitter toil, and
who out of these wins the
splendid triumph.”
“The timid man, the lazy man, the man who
distrusts his country, the over-civilized
man, who has lost the great fighting,
masterful virtues, the ignorant man, and
the man of dull mind . . . All these, of
course, shrink from seeing the nation
undertake its new duties; shrink from
seeing us build a navy and an army
adequate to our needs . . . These are the
men who fear the strenuous life, who fear
the only national life which is really worth
living.”
TR and College Football
• What does his essay on “professional
sports” tell us about TR’s attitudes toward
college athletics?
Critics of Football
• Detracted from educational mission
(Frederick Jackson Turner made this
argument)
• Too commercialized
• Too brutal and violent
– Was unfavorably compared to boxing,
because the “right people” were being
corrupted by college football
1905
• 18 players killed in football games (3
collegians)
• 88 serious collegiate injuries
• Several schools dropped football
(Columbia, Stanford, California)
• Lots of critical press—including photos of
mangled players
TR Gets Involved
• Invited Yale, Harvard, Princeton to White
House to discuss reform
• Other meetings  creation of NCAA
• Rule changes  opening up the game
– Liberalized forward pass rules
– Needed to get 10 yards, not 5 for first down
Enormous Popularity and
Perceived Values Trump Concerns
• 1903-Harvard spent $250,000 to build 38,000
seat stadium
• 1913—Yale Bowl spent $400,000 to seat 67,000
• 1920s saw seven more stadia seating 70,000
completed on college campuses
Women’s Athletic Options: Inside
and Outside of Schools
Bicycling
• Several bicycle crazes in the
1800s, the most important
was in the 1890s
• 1880s: “Safety” bicycle had
air-filled tires, ball bearings,
and seat between the tires:
weighed less than 35 pounds
• Production soared:
– 1890: 27 Manufacturers made
about 40,000
– 1896: 250 Manufacturers made
more than 1,000,000
• Had special frames for women, and many
uses:
• According to 1896 Boston Herald
– Matrons hoping to lose weight wearing
sweater “so warm that it really makes one hot
to see it.”
– Young girl courting, in a “divided skirt and
white waist”
– The serious “scorcher” who “much prefers to
wear bloomers that resemble as nearly as
possible the attire of the sterner sex, and who
dotes on riding a diamond framed safety with
the speed of a racing man.”
• There were even publicized races for women
With used bicycles still costing at
least $15, working class women
were largely excluded from this
athletic endeavor.
Basketball, however,
was another story.
Based on our readings, what
seems important to discuss re:
women’s basketball?
• From Cahn?
• From Primary Sources
1900s: Women’s Basketball and
Varsity Athletics are Flourishing
Debates over the
Merits and Dangers of
Women’s Athletics
Dudley Sargent’s “Are
Athletics Making Girls
Masculine?” Ladies
Home Journal (March
1912).
1900– University of Nebraska
--Played a different game in a different
gymnasium (court below = before 1938)
--See “Women’s Basketball” Primary Source
Anti-Competition Movement
Early 1920s, a national movement, led by
women, shut down almost all women’s
competitive school and collegiate athletic
programs.
--Was a reaction to contemporary
developments in men’s and women’s
intercollegiate athletics AND in women’s
industrial athletics.
--Wanted Controlled Athletics for Women:
– Controlled by Whom?
– Which women need most protection?
Gertrude Ederle after Crossing English Chanel, 1926
Let’s look closely at the Resolutions
of the NAAF’s Women’s Division:
Defining Feminine
Characteristics—1920s
“Speaking bluntly, one of the most precious
qualities of girls’ characters is endangered.
. . . Games like basketball and baseball
are combative sports. They develop ugly
muscles—muscles ugly in girls—as well
as scowling faces and the competitive
spirit. As an inevitable consequence your
girls may find it more difficult to attract the
most worthy fathers for their children.”
Alice Sefton, early 1930s
“It is usually when they are exceeding their
powers that women appear unlovely. When a
woman sets her jaw in grim determination to
win at any cost, or plays so long that lines of
fatigue draw her face into contortions, and she
loses control of her coordinations, then she
sacrifices some of her beauty because she is
violating principles of health. . . That look of
ghastly strain, that awkwardness and lack of
equilibrium and that breathlessness should not
be chalked against the sport itself but must be
prevented.”
Play Days
• Intercollegiate participation, but NOT
competition
Some ways to earn points for Women’s
Athletic letters under anti-competitive
systems
Maryville College (TN)
• Sleep “from “time lights cut out until 6 a.m.,
during any 23 days out of 30” with the windows
open “top to bottom.”
• Bathe daily in water not “too hot or too cold.”
• Dietary restrictions: “no coco cola is allowed at
any time.”
• Students should “evacuate” themselves daily “at
regular time, if possible preferably after
breakfast.”
• Change underwear daily
• CAN ANYONE EXPLAIN THESE RULES?
Outside the Orthodoxy: African
American Women’s College
Programs
The Challenge to the Orthodoxy
• Context for the “Concerning Competition”
document
– Gladys Palmer at Ohio State
– Student pressure and Faculty desires
– Great political document—they tread very
carefully
• We agree on same principles
• Can only make this suggestion because
organizations have done such a fantastic job
training people, etc.
Different Versions of “Democratic”
Sport
• “Girl for every game, and a game for every
girl” with no special accommodations for,
or attention to, better athletes
Vs.
“It is impossible to legislate out of a person
the instinctive urge to compete.”
Elizabeth Halsey’s (Iowa
University) Response
• “It is obvious that intercollegiate athletic
competition at the present time has the
same practical objective that it has for
years; i.e., to determine winners and to
make money.”
These aren’t small stakes. . .
• OSU “is promoting an intensification of
competition at a time when our society is in such
great need of better techniques of cooperation. I
believe that democracy can adapt to rapidly
changing economic and social conditions. It
must, however, move away from the cutthroat
competition of unregulated individualism toward
acceptance of disciplined self-regulation and
cooperative planning.” WOW!!
• Wants true “democratic” athletics, and not
“athletic aristocracy.”
The Golf Tournament
The Legacy . . . Title IX
Concluding Thoughts?