response of view:The Quest for Subcommunities and the Rise of American Sport

The Quest for Subcommunities and the Rise of American Sport Author(s): Benjamin G. Rader Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Autumn, 1977), pp. 355-369 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2712364 . Accessed: 23/06/2014 11:35

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THE QUEST FOR SUBCOMMUNITIES AND

THE RISE OF AMERICAN SPORT

BENJAMIN G. RADER

University of Nebraska, Lincoln

ONE OF THE MOST INTRIGUING PROBLEMS FOR THE SPORT HISTORIAN IS TO

account for the relationship between the American social structure and the "take-off" stage of organized sport in the United States.' We still know little about why sport arose in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Equally obscure are the relationships of sport to groups and individuals within American society. What social functions, either latent or manifest, did sport perform during the take-off stage? This essay contends that a quest for subcommunities in the nineteenth century furnishes an important key to understanding the rise of American sport. As earlier communities based on small geographic areas-typically agricultural villages-declined

1 Little progress has been made in analyzing the relationship between the sport "take- off" and the American social structure since Frederick L. Paxson's "The Rise of Sport," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 4 (Sept. 1917), 144-68. Paxson's main argument was that sport provided a new social safety valve which replaced the one closed by the frontier. Recent historical treatments of the sport revolution tend to accept this thesis. See for example, Dale A. Somers, The Rise of Sports in New Orleans, 1850-1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1972), 275-76, and John R. Betts, America's Sporting Heritage, 1850-1950 (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1974), 178. Neither author elaborates on Paxson's article, although Somers suggests several other relation- ships between sport and society. Paul Hoch, in his neo-Marxian appraisal of contempo- rary American sport, Rip Ofl the Big Game: The Exploitation of Sports by the Power Elite (Garden City, N. Y.: Anchor Books, 1972), provides a version of the safety valve thesis by arguing that a "power elite" made sport into an opiate of the masses. See also the analysis of Joel H. Spring in "Mass Culture and School Sports," History of Educa- tion Quarterly, 14 (Winter 1974), 483-500. Spring found that at the turn of the century, proponents of organized sport in the schools believed that athletics was a useful means of social control. This may in part account for Paxson's formulation of the thesis and its continued acceptance.

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356 American Quarterly

or were undermined, Americans turned to new forms of community. Sport clubs, as one type of voluntary association, became one of the basic means by which certain groups sought to establish subcommunities within the larger society.

As early as the 1 830s voluntary associations had become a striking feature of American society. Tocqueville observed that "In no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used or applied to a greater multitude of objects than in America. "2 A contemporary of Tocqueville believed that since Americans had destroyed "classes, and corporate bodies of every kind, and come to simple direct individualism," the vacuum had been filled by the "production of volun- tary associations to an immense extent." Although many of the organiza- tions of the 1830s were temporary, designed to accomplish only a specific purpose, they provided a "noble and expansive feeling which identifies self with community."3 Max Weber summed up the transcendent im- portance of voluntary organizations to American society. "In the past and up to the very present," wrote Weber, "it has been a characteristic precisely of the specifically American democracy that it did not constitute a formless sand heap of individuals, but rather a buzzing complex of strictly exclusive, yet voluntary associations."4 The clubs could sort out persons according to any criteria they chose: it might be common interests, sex, ethnicity, occupation, religion, status, or a combination thereof. Like-minded men found in voluntary organizations a milieu in which they could counter the impersonality of the burgeoning cities.

The voluntary association became one of several means by which Amer- icans sought to replace the old village community with new subcommunities. In addition to voluntary societies, important considerations for determining the membership of a subcommunity could be living in a particular neighbor- hood, belonging to a certain religious denomination, and attending specific

2 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Phillips Bradley, ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), Vol. 2, 191.

3Quoted in Walter S. Glazer, "Participation and Power: Voluntary Associations and the Functional Organization in Cincinnati in 1840," Historical Methods Newsletter, 5 (Sept. 1972), 153.

4 H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, trans. and eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958), 310. Another important dimension of the quest for subcommunities was the formation of fraternal organizations in the nineteenth century. See Charles W. Ferguson, Fifty Million Brothers: A Panorama of American Lodges and Clubs (New York: Farrar and Rhinehart, 1937), and Noel P. Gist, Secret Societies: A Cultural Study of Fraternalism in the United States (Columbia, Mo.: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1940). Fraternal organizations did not normally promote sport. Perhaps the most popular voluntary organizations of all were American churches, many of which eventually promoted some form of sport. For a general treatment, see Sidney E. Mead, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1963).

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Subcommunities and the Rise of Sport 357

educational institutions. For example, essential to becoming a member of a high status community might be living in a section of the city with others of a similar income range, sharing a common ethnicity and religious preference (native-born American and Protestant Episcopal), and attend- ing the "right" schools (a New England boarding school and an Ivy League college). Birth into an old family continued to provide a person with advantages in obtaining membership in a status community, but less so than it had in the eighteenth century.

Of special interest for the rise of sport was the quest for two types of subcommunities: ethnic and status. (When prefaced by "status" or "ethnic," the use of the term "subcommunity" is redundant and thus commun- ity" will be substituted.) The ethnic community usually arose from contradictory forces of acceptance and rejection of the immigrant by the majority society. The status community, by contrast, was a product of status equals who wanted to close their ranks from those they con- sidered inferior. Several tests can be applied to determine whether a sport club was integral to the quest for ethnic or status communities: the adop- tion of exclusionary membership policies, the promotion of other activities besides sport, the development of appropriate symbols which facilitated communication between members, and the belief, either implicit or explicit, that sport participation was useful in socializing youth.

Since sport per se was not threatening to deeply held personal beliefs and yet provided a milieu for fellowship and common purpose, the sport club was an attractive alternative to other forms of voluntary associations. Athletic activity, which is necessarily subordinated to rules, encouraged a temporary equality between members. The equality of play strengthened the bonds between members who might be divided by personal values.5 The sport club could be easily transformed into a multifaceted social agency. It could also be an instrument for social exclusion, for the social- ization of youth, and for disciplining the behavior of its members. In short the sport club assumed some of the traditional functions of the church, the state, and the geographic community. Almost incidentally the sport club of the nineteenth century provided a tremendous impetus to the growth of American sport.

* * *

The need of immigrant groups to form separate ethnic communities depended upon a host of variables including their nationality, religious

5For this idea I am indebted to Hugh Dalziel Duncan, Communication and the Social Order (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962), esp. 334-37. See also Michael Novak, The Joy of Sports: End Zones, Bases, Baskets, Balls, and the Consecration of the American Spirit (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 132-41.

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358 American Quarterly

beliefs, language, and status. The majority society of native-born Amer- icans (hereafter referred to as native-Americans) was less likely to dis- criminate against immigrants who were most like themselves. Immigrants from England, Scotland, and Wales tended to assimilate more rapidly than those from other parts of Europe. The history of nineteenth- century sport clubs reflected the process of acculturation by distinctive ethnic groups. The Scottish Caledonian clubs, for example, functioned briefly as an ethnic community. But as Scottish immigration declined and the Scots adopted the native-American culture, the need for an ethnic community subsided. The German Turner societies began as ethnic com- munities, and as the club members assimilated they sometimes became status communities.6

The Scottish Caledonian clubs may have been the most significant ethnic community in encouraging the growth of nineteenth-century American sport. Extending back into the mists of Scottish history, rural communities had held annual track and field games. Beginning in the 1850s these games began to provide one of the bases for organizing Caledonian clubs in America. Wherever a few Scots settled, they usually founded a Cale- donian club; eventually they formed well over 100 clubs. In 1887, for example, the Scottish-American Journal reported that "A Caledonian Club has been organized at Great Falls, Montana, with a membership of 37 enthusiastic Scots."7 The clubs restricted membership to persons of Scottish birth or descent.

Although the evidence is not conclusive, it appears that the Caledonian clubs functioned as a major agency for the formation of a Scottish ethnic community in many American cities. The purposes of the clubs, as one of the founders of the Boston organization put it, was to perpetuate "the manners and customs, literature, the Highland costume and the athletic games of Scotland, as practiced by our forefathers."8 Apart from sport, the clubs sponsored extensive social activities such as dinners, dancing, and bagpipe playing. In short the clubs provided a sense of community in a strange society.

Native-born Americans exhibited an unexpected enthusiasm for the annual Caledonian games. Huge crowds, upwards to 20,000 in New York City, turned out to view competition in footracing, tug o' war,

6 For an example of the transition of a Turner group from an ethnic to a status com- munity, see Noel Iverson, Germania, U.S.A.: Social Change in New Ulm, Minnesota (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1966).

7 Quoted in Gerald Redmond, The Caledonian Games in Nineteenth-Century Amer- ica (Rutherford, N. J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1971), 45. On the clubs also see Rowland Tappan Berthoff, British Immigrants in Industrial America, 1790- 1950 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1953), 151-52, 167-68, 179.

8 Quoted in Redmond, The Caledonian Games, 39.

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Subcommunities and the Rise of Sport 359

hurdling, jumping, pole vaulting, hammer throwing, and shot-putting. The clubs quickly recognized the potential for financial gain. They opened competition to all athletes regardless of nationality or race, charged admission, and offered lucrative prizes to winners. From the 1850s to the mid-1870s the Caledonians were the most important promoters of track and field in the country. The success of the games helped to stimu- late the formation of the native-American athletic clubs (in this era "athletic" was synonymous with track and field) and the growth of inter- collegiate track and field. In fact, by the 1880s the wealthy native-Amer- ican clubs had seized basic control of American track and field from the Caledonians. The Caledonians then began to decline rapidly as promoters of sport, but they continued to serve as the focal point of Scottish com- munities. With the slackening of Scottish immigration and the rapid assimilation of Scots into American society, most of the clubs disappeared by the turn of the twentieth century. Most of the Scots no longer felt a compelling need for a distinctive ethnic community.

Unlike the Scottish Caledonian clubs, the Turner societies had first been organized in their native land. In reaction to the rule of Napoleon, the power of the German aristocracy, and the disunity of the German states, Friederick Ludwig Jahn formed the first Turner society in Berlin in 1811. From the start, the Turners had a strong ideological cast. By establishing universal education and a systematic program of gymnastics (the latter modeled after the ancient Greeks), Jahn hoped to create a united Germany ruled by the people. Young men of the middle class-petty officials, intel- lectuals, journalists, and students-flocked to Jahn's new society. The Revolution of 1848 brought disaster for the Turners in Germany; many of them emigrated to the United States.9

The Turner immigrants faced a different challenge in America, since the Americans had already achieved several of the Turner goals. The United States had no hereditary aristocracy to combat, and a representa- tive democracy was accepted as the ideal political form. Yet the Turners were utopian, free-thinking, and socialistic. They sought an organic community. American individualism ran counter to their deepest social instincts. They also arrived during the heyday of the Know-Nothing movement. Though the nativists directed their energies primarily at the Catholic Church and Irish immigrants, the Turners bore the brunt of mob action in several American cities. Perhaps even more crucial in driving the Turners together was the fierce antagonism they experienced from the "church" Germans. The haughty anticlericalism and superior cultural

9 See esp. A. E. Zucker, ed., The Forty-Eighters: Political Refugees of the German Revolution of 1848 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1950).

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360 American Quarterly

achievements of the Turners made it impossible for them to find refuge in the larger German ethnic communities. Consequently, the Turner societies formed distinctive subcommunities in many American cities, sharply separated from those Germans whose lives centered around their churches.

Even prior to the immigration of the Forty-Eighters, the Turners had begun to influence American thinking about the human body and the rela- tionship of the body to the rest of man's being. The Turners initiated America's first physical training programs. In 1826, Carl Follen, who was called to teach German literature at Harvard, organized the first college gymnasium modeled after the Jahn system. A year earlier Francis Lieber, the famous encyclopedist, was appointed as the first director of the Tremont Gymnasium in Boston. And Carl Beck, a Latin teacher, founded a gym- nastics program at Round Hill School.

Shortly after their arrival in the New World the Forty-Eighters began to organize Turner societies. Friedrich Hecker, a hero of the Revolution in Baden, erected a gymnasium in Cincinnati in 1849 to cultivate "rational training, both physical and intellectual." The Turner halls provided a complete social center with lectures, libraries, and usually a bar. Here the Turners tried to preserve the speech, songs, and customs of the Father- land, often forming separate militia companies. In 1851 the Turners held a national gymnastics festival in Philadelphia. This competitive event became an annual affair, with gymnasts from over 150 societies partici- pating. After the Civil War the Turners abandoned most of their radical political program and assimilated rapidly into the host society, but they continued to agitate for their physical training program. One of the strik- ing features of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 was a mass exercise performed by 4,000 German-American members of the national Turner- bund. In 1898 the United States Commissioner of Education declared that the introduction of school gymnastics in Chicago, Kansas City, Cleveland, Denver, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, St. Paul, and San Francisco was due to the Turners and that "the directors of physical education [in these cities] are graduates of the Seminary or Normal School of the North American Turnerbund."'10

The examples of the Caledonian clubs and the Turner societies by no means exhaust the involvement of ethnic communities in sport. Both the

10 Quoted in ibid., 109. Equally interesting as sport organizations that promoted ethnic communities were the Czech Sokols. Eventually some 184 Sokols were organized in the United States. Most had buildings in which calisthenics, gymnastics, athletic contests, singing, and other activities took place. Training in the Sokol system included the Czech youth and women as well as men. See Panorama: A Historical Review of Czechs and Slovaks in the United States of A merica (Cicero, Ill.: Czechoslovak National Council of America, 1970), 133-52.

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Subcommnunities and the Rise of Sport 361

Irish parishes and Irish volunteer fire departments sponsored and pro- moted athletics. Ironically, as late as the 1920s a French-Canadian faction in Woonsocket, Rhode Island "resorted to the archetypical American game [baseball]" as a means of preserving their community from the forces of assimilation." While sport should not be considered a neces- sary precondition for the existence of any of the nineteenth-century ethnic communities, it often helped coalesce and preserve traditional cultural patterns. Sport seemed to assist in blurring economic and ideological differences within the community. In turn, of course, the ethnic communi- ties encouraged the rise of sport. In the cases of both the Caledonians and the Turners, native-Americans eventually took over the immigrants' sports and transformed them to meet their own needs.

* * *

Many native-American groups in the nineteenth century tried to cope with the new urban-industrial society by forming subcommunities based on status. The socially exclusive club became the main agency of status ascription. As automatic social deference declined in the nineteenth century, the number of private clubs ballooned. These clubs capitalized on the indefinite social differentiations of American society; they tried to promote a specific style of life that would exclude outsiders. The style usually included a code of honor, a proper mode of dress and speech, education at the "right" schools, pursuit of the appropriate sports, and a host of in-group behavioral nuances. The exclusive club, then, provided "an intricate web of primary group milieux which [gave] . . . form and structure to an otherwise impersonal urban society composed of secondary groups."'2

The private clubs served as accurate barometers of different levels of nineteenth-century status communities. At the apex of the status structure in large American cities were the metropolitan men's clubs, such as the Philadelphia Club founded in 1835, the Union (1836) and the Century Clubs (1847) in New York, and the Somerset in Boston (1851). The members of these clubs came to dominate the social and economic life of their respective cities. Usually composed of older men, these clubs did not promote sport. After the Civil War the Union Leagues, centers of

11 Richard Sorrel, "Sports and Franco-Americans in Woonsocket, 1870-1930," Rhode Island History, 31 (Fall 1972), 112. Sorrel believes that sport both encouraged and discouraged the acculturation of the French Canadians in Woonsocket.

12 E. Digby Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class (New York: Free Press, 1958), 335.

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362 American Quarterly

Republican respectability, and the University clubs, composed of the graduates of prestigious colleges, ranked slightly below the patrician metropolitan clubs. Neither the University clubs nor Union Leagues con- sidered sport an important part of club life. On the third rung of the upper status layer of the American club structure were the athletic clubs organized in the late nineteenth century. These clubs originated with younger men who shared a common interest in sports. In due time the athletic, cricket (in Philadelphia), racquet, and yacht clubs became im- portant instruments of status ascription and sometimes served as stepping stones to membership in the metropolitan clubs.'3

Yacht clubs were one of the first voluntary sport organizations to be formed by an upper-status group. John C. Stevens, scion of a wealthy New York family and former president of the prestigious Union Club, founded the New York Yacht Club in 1844. A "succession of gentlemen ranking high in the social and financial circles" of the city soon joined the club.14 Among them was William R. Travers, later the leading pro- moter of the New York Athletic Club. The club erected an elaborate facility at the Elysian Fields, a part of Stevens' estate at Hoboken, New Jersey. Each year the clubs sponsored a regatta off the clubhouse promontory. Apart from owning plush yachts, club members had to pay dues of $40 the first year and $25 thereafter. The club prescribed expensive uniforms for members and sponsored regular balls and social cruises to Newport, Rhode Island, Bar Harbor, Maine, and other nearby wealthy summer resorts. In 1851 Stevens, with his yacht America, defeated 18 British yachts at the Isle of Wight, to win a coveted cup donated by the Royal Yacht Squadron; in 1857 he gave the cup to the New York Yacht Club on the condition that it would be "a perpetual challenge cup for friendly competition between foreign countries." By 1893 six interna- tional matches had been held for the America's Cup, all incidentally won

13 The "muscular" Christianity movement appears to have prepared the way for the increased interest of the upper status communities in sport. The movement fought the traditional Puritan attitudes toward sport and provided a rationale for participation in athletics. Most of the advocates of muscular Christianity were Protestant Episcopal clerics; not coincidentally, a disproportionate percentage of those who belonged to the status elite were members of the Protestant Episcopal Church. See Guy Lewis, "The Muscular Christianity Movement," Journal of Health, Physical Education and Recrea- tion, 37 (May 1966), 27-28, 42, and John A. Lucas, "A Prelude to the Rise of Sport: Ante-Bellum America, 1850-1860," Quest, 11 (Dec. 1968), 50-57.

14 Charles A. Peverelly, The Book of American Pastimes: Containing a History of the Principal Base Ball, Cricket, Rowing, and Yachting Clubs of the United States (New York: pub. by author, 1866), 19. Prior to the Civil War, Stevens was a pioneer in many early sporting ventures. See National Cyclopedia of American Biography, Vol. 1 (New York: James T. White, 1893), 447.

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Subcommunities and the Rise of Sport 363

by American yachts. By the 1890s every major eastern seaboard city had its exclusive yacht club.

The first baseball clubs occupied a position somewhere near the bottom of the upper status structure, ranking below the status achieved by the yacht clubs or the metropolitan athletic clubs. The membership of the New York Knickerbocker baseball club, organized in 1845, included young professionals, merchants, and white collar workers. As Harold Seymour noted, they were not simply interested in playing baseball. "They were primarily a social club with a distinctly exclusive flavor-somewhat similar to what country clubs represented in the 1920s and 1930s. . . ."15 Membership was limited to forty, applicants could be blackballed, and the club insisted on strict rules of proper conduct. Since the club held contests every Monday and Thursday, those without a substantial amount of leisure time were automatically excluded. Players who failed to appear for the contests could be fined. The club held a large banquet after each game and sponsored festive social affairs in the off season. Club members, Seymour wrote, "were more expert with the knife and fork at post-game banquets than with bat and ball on the diamond."16 The Knickerbocker baseball club provided both a means by which its members could distinguish themselves from the urban masses and a setting for close interpersonal relations between men of similar tastes and social standing.

The early clubs which imitated the Knickerbockers tried to prevent baseball from becoming a mass commercial spectacle. In 1858 they organized the National Association of Baseball Players to stop the creeping commercialism which was invading the sport. By 1860 about 60 clubs had joined the Association, which "clung to the notion that baseball ought to be a gentleman's game. For this reason amateurism was applauded, and participants were expected to be persons of means and local standing."17 The clubs scheduled outside contests only with teams that enjoyed equal social stature. Influenced by the English notion that sport should be an exclusive prerogative of gentlemen, club members were supposed to be magnanimous in victory and friendly in defeat. After contests the home club usually gave a large banquet for the visitors.

Baseball clubs survived only briefly as effective agencies of status com-

15 Harold Seymour, Baseball: The Early Years (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960), 15. Seymour found that "among some fifty-odd names on their roster from 1845 to 1860 were 17 merchants, 12 clerks, 5 brokers, 4 professional men, 2 insurance men, a bank teller, a 'Segar Dealer,' one hatter, a cooperage owner, a stationer, a United States Marshall, and several 'gentlemen.'"

16 Ibid. 17 David Quentin Voigt, American Baseball: From Gentleman's Sport to the Com-

missioner System (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1966), 9.

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364 American Quarterly

munities. Since baseball could be played relatively quickly in any open space, and since it required inexpensive equipment, from the 1850s on it became a favorite sport of the lower and middle classes. Seymour found that in the decade of the 1 850s in New York City there were clubs composed exclusively of fire companies, policemen, barkeepers, dairymen, school teachers, physicians, and even clergymen. The social decorum of the game changed dramatically. The clubs began to charge admission and divide the receipts among their best players. Betting, cheering, and general rowdyism (sometimes leading to riots) became commonplace. The "founding" clubs either folded or sometimes took up another sport. Baseball would never again be suited for the needs of those who were striving to form high status communities. The sport did, however, serve as a mechanism for the perpetuation of occupa- tional identities.

Organized in the post-Civil War era, the metropolitan athletic clubs were far more socially prestigious than the early baseball clubs.18 The founders of the athletic clubs were usually wealthy young men who enjoyed track and field competition. At first they did not conceive of their clubs in terms of social exclusiveness but in terms of the common congeniality and sporting interests of the members. Professional athletes, gamblers, and "rowdies" tended to dominate the existing world of track and field. Drawing upon the English sporting heritage, the clubs began to draw rigid distinctions between amateur and professional athletes by the mid-1880s. By becoming champions of the amateur code of athletics, they, in effect, were able to bar lower-income persons from participation in the track and field competition which they sponsored.19

The athletic clubs provided the major stimulus to the growth of ama- teur athletics. The New York Athletic Club (NYAC), the first and most

18 See especially Joe D. Willis and Richard G. Wettan, "Social Stratification in New York City Athletic Clubs, 1865-1915," Journal of Sport History, 3 (Spring 1976), 45-63 and Somers, The Rise of Sport in New Orleans, chap. 11.

19 As an introduction to the topic of the amateur code see Arnold Flath, A History of Relations Between the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States, 1905-1963 (Champaign, Ill.: Stipes, 1964) and Robert Korsgaard, "A History of the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States," Ed.D. project, Teachers College, Columbia Univ., 1952. Accusations that the amateur code discriminated against working class athletes exasperated Caspar Whitney, the dignified sports editor of Harper's Weekly. "And what drivelling talk is all this that prates of ignoring the poor 'laborer,'" wrote Whitney, ". . . and wants to drag him into our sport, putting him under restrictions with which he has no sympathy, and paying him for the time he may lose from his trade! What sporting 'Coxeyism' is this that has neither rhyme nor reason to warrant it serious consideration by intelligent mankind?" Caspar W. Whitney, A Sporting Pilgrimage (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1895), 208.

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Subcommunities and the Rise of Sport 365

prestigious of the clubs, began sponsoring open track and field meets in 1868. By special invitation the New York Caledonian Club participated, allegedly making it an "international match-America against Scotland."20 In the 1870s NYAC expanded its activities by building the first cinder track in the country at Mott Haven and sponsoring the first national ama- teur championships in track and field (1876), swimming (1877), boxing (1878), and wrestling (1878). In 1879, eight of the exclusive clubs formed the National Association of Amateur Athletes of America, to which NYAC transferred the annual track and field championships. By 1883 there were some 150 athletic clubs in the United States and each usually held at least one annual competition. In 1888 the National Asso- ciation foundered on attempts to define and enforce the amateur code. A few of the affiliated clubs formed the Amateur Athletic Union. Composed of the most exclusive clubs, the union claimed jurisdiction over more than 40 sports and rigorously enforced the amateur code in the contests that it sponsored. Until the formation of the National Collegiate Athletic Asso- ciation in 1905, the union and its collegiate affiliates dominated all amateur sport of championship quality.

Metropolitan athletic clubs became an important link in a web of associations that constituted elite status communities. For example, William R. Travers, long-time president of the New York Athletic Club, belonged to 27 social clubs including New York's two most prestigious men's clubs. The athletic clubs excluded from membership all except those near the top of the social hierarchy. Ironically, as the clubs became more effective agencies of community formation, they tended to lose their emphasis on sport. Usually they opened their doors to the entire family, they built special facilities for women, and they began to sponsor dazzling balls and banquets. By the 1880s and 1890s only a few of the members were top-flight athletes; most of the members either were too old to play, were occasional athletes, or did not engage in competition at all. Frederick W. Janssen, a member of the Staten Island Athletic Club and an active athlete, rued the tendency of the clubs to become social centers:

The social element in clubs is like 'dry rot' and eats into the vitals of athletic clubs, and soon causes them to fail in the purpose for which they were organ- ized. . . Palatial club houses are erected at great cost and money is spent in adorning them that, if used to beautify athletic grounds and improve tracks, would cause a wide-spread interest in athletic sports and further the develop- ment of the wind and muscles of American youth.21

20 Frederick W. Janssen, History of American Amateur Athletics (New York: Charles R. Bourne, 1885), 35.

21 Quoted in Willis and Wettan, "Social Stratification," 53.

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366 American Quarterly

The tendency noted by Janssen was irreversible, for the social functions performed by the clubs had become more important to the members than athletic competition.

The metropolitan athletic clubs were forerunners of the great country club movement of the twentieth century. Unlike athletic clubs, country clubs became havens for those seeking to establish status communities in the suburbs and smaller cities. While golf was not the initial reason for forming the first country clubs, it became the most potent agency for the spread of the clubs throughout the nation. Beginning in 1888 with the formation of the St. Andrews Golf Club of Yonkers, New York, golf slowly invaded the wealthy suburban areas of New York, Boston, Phila- delphia, and Chicago. In 1894 both St. Andrews and the Newport Golf Club scheduled national amateur championships; the formation of the Amateur Golf Association of the United States in 1894 eliminated the confusion. With but few exceptions, a reporter wrote in 1898, golf "is a sport restricted to the richer classes in this country."22 Until the 1920s golf continued to have a highly select following.

Sport clubs, such as the country clubs, were far less significant as con- stituents of status communities in England than in the United States. The contrasts between the functions of the clubs were sharply drawn by George Birmingham, an Englishman:

There are also all over England clubs especially devoted to particular objects, golf clubs, yacht clubs, and so forth. In these the members are drawn together by their interest in a common pursuit, and are forced into some kind of acquaintanceship. But these are very different in spirit and intention from the American country club. It exists as a kind of center of the social life of the neighborhood. Sport is encouraged by these clubs for the sake of general sociability. In England sociability is a by-product of an interest in sport.

The country club at Tuxedo [New York] is not perhaps the oldest, but it is one of the oldest institutions of its kind in America. At the proper time of year there are dances, and a debutante acquires, I believe, a certain prestige by 'coming out' at one of them. But the club exists primarily as a social center of Tuxedo. It is in one way the ideal, the perfect country club. It not only fosters, it regulates and governs the social life of the place.23

22 H. L. Fitz Patrick, "Golf and the American Girl," Outing, 33 (Dec. 1898), 294-95. For the golf facilities of the major cities see a series of articles in Outing, 34 (May-Aug. 1899), 129-42, 260-68, 354-65, 443-57.

23 George Birmingham, "The American at Home and in His Club," in Henry Steele Commager, ed., America in Perspective (New York: New American Library, 1947), 175. See also Caspar W. Whitney, "Evolution of the Country Club," in Neil Harris, ed., The Land of Contrasts, 1880-1901 (New York: George Braziller, 1970), 134-46 and Robert Dunn, "The Country Club: A National Expression," Outing, 47 (Nov. 1905), 160-74. Unfortunately no adequate history of American country clubs exists.

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Subcommunities and the Rise of Sport 367

In addition to the early baseball, yacht, metropolitan athletic, and country clubs, several other voluntary sport organizations served as instru- ments of status communities. The Philadelphia cricket clubs and the rac- quet clubs of the large cities were as socially prestigious as the metropolitan athletic clubs. The history of these clubs followed a pattern similar to the athletic clubs. Cricket as a sport in Philadelphia, for example, declined when the clubs assumed larger social functions. For a time, several of the Philadelphia cricket clubs became major centers of lawn tennis. But in the 1920s, when lawn tennis began to move out of the network of the exclusive clubs, the cricket clubs no longer furnished players of champion- ship quality.24

Lawn tennis first flourished in Newport, Rhode Island, a summer resort of the very rich. In Newport, the nation's wealthiest families constructed huge palaces of stone for summer homes and entertained each other lavishly. Dixon Wector has written that "Other than social consciousness, the only bond which drew this summer colony together was sport-which might consist of sailing around Block Island, or having cocktails upon one's steam yacht reached by motor-boat from the landing of the New York Yacht Club, or bathing at Bailey's Beach or the Gooseberry Island Club, or tennis on the Casino courts."25 The posh Newport Casino Club, built by James Gordon Bennett, Jr., publisher of the New York Herald, became the home of the United States National Lawn Tennis Association (1881) and was the site of the national championships until 1913 when the tournament was moved to Forest Hills, New York. Lawn tennis long remained a sport dominated by clubs of impeccably high status aspirations.

The sponsorship of tennis and golf by the elite clubs expanded the opportunities for women to participate in sport. Many of the first tennis courts were built specifically for the wives and daughters of club members. During the first decades of the development of American tennis, many observers believed that tennis would remain primarily a sport for women. In the early years the women preferred doubles to singles, possibly because they were encumbered by bustles and full-length skirts. Women held a few tournaments as early as 1881 and in 1887 they scheduled the first women's national tennis championships. The task of breaking the sex barrier in golf was more difficult. In the closing years of the nineteenth century the golf clubs along the Atlantic Coast began reluctantly to set aside the links on certain afternoons for female players. Only 13 women

24 Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen, 358-61 and John A. Lester, ed., A Century of Philadelphia Cricket (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1951).

25 Dixon Wector, The Saga of American Society: A Record of Social Aspiration, 1607-1937 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937), 457.

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368 American Quarterly

participated in the first national tournament held on the Meadowbrook course on Long Island in 1895. In 1898, H. L. Fitz Patrick announced, probably prematurely, that "the American golf girl has arrived!"26 Golfing women helped initiate a more liberated style of dress; by 1898 a few brave ladies were playing without hats and with elbow-length sleeves. But, com- pared to men, the number of women athletes remained exceedingly small. Most of the women engaged only in the social life of the clubs.

Within a limited context and for a short time the collegiate athletic associations represented a quest for subcommunities. In the 1880s, as newly enriched groups sought a college education as a means of achieving a social position commensurate with their wealth, college enrollments spurted upwards. The academic degree, particularly from an Ivy League school, was a passport to polite society. But the new students found them- selves confronted with a large number of strangers, often a boring cur- riculum and uninspired teaching, and few opportunities for social inter- course except through sedate literary and oratorical societies. In response to this unexciting, impersonal academic setting, they formed a vast array of clubs, fraternities, and athletic associations. Athletic associations usually opened their doors to any student who was athletically talented. Because of this membership policy, the associations probably served as less satisfactory subcommunity agencies than did the other collegiate social clubs. At 'any rate, in the 1890s the associations began to collapse as independent student-run clubs. Colleges hired professional coaches, seized control of athletics from the students, and transformed intercol- legiate sports into commercial ventures.27

This essay has focused on voluntary sport organizations which tended to be central to the formation of either ethnic or status communities. Neighborhoods and persons with common occupations or religious prefer- ences formed a host of smaller sport clubs in the nineteenth century. Since

26 Fitz Patrick, "Golf and the American Girl," 294. For a survey of women in nineteenth-century sport see Ellen W. Gerber, et al., The American Woman in Sport (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1974).

27See Harold J. Savage, et al., American College Athletics (New York: Carnegie Educational Foundation, 1929) 3-33, and Guy Maxton Lewis, "The American Inter- collegiate Football Spectacle, 1869-1917," Diss. Univ. of Maryland, 1965. Apparently collegiate football did establish a sense of community among the student body. In 1906 President Hadley of Yale reported that football had taken "hold of the emo- tions of the student body in such a way as to make class distinctions relatively un- important" and had made "the students get together in the old-fashioned democratic way." Arthur Twining Hadley, "Wealth ar.d Democracy in American Colleges," Harper's Monthly, 113 (Aug. 1906), 452. For a similar view, see Eugene L. Richards, "Intercollegiate Athletics and Faculty Control," Outing, 26 (July 1895), 325-28.

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Subcommunities and the Rise of Sport 369

these clubs rarely had elaborate athletic facilities nor seemed to be con- cerned about social activities other than sport, they were apparently not as important as agencies of community formation. Yet they should not be neglected as a dimension of the general nineteenth-century quest for communities. Sport could supplement other institutions or associations that were more vital to the existence of communities. Some of the churches, for example, apparently found that sponsoring an athletic team bound their membership closer together and reinforced common values. Some skilled craftsmen found in sport a means by which they could distinguish themselves more clearly from ordinary workingmen. School sports, par- ticularly in the twentieth century, helped give an identity and common purpose to many neighborhoods, towns, and cities which were otherwise divided by class, race, ethnicity, and religious differences. In a larger, less tangible sense, mass sporting spectacles may have been an aspect of a search for city-wide, regional, or even national communities.

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