Negotiating the "folk highway" of the nation: sport, public culture and American identity, 1870-1940.

The emergent American state summoned new traditions and symbols to create a unified national culture.(1) This process was driven by an erratic period in capitalist development, which witnessed massive waves of immigration, the rise of a nationally organized working class, the emergence of a modern feminist movement, and the foundation of a regulatory, corporatist economic system.(2) The nation's developing role as a global power, combined with the continual recomposition of the working class, elevated patriotism, sexism, and racism to new heights. Led by elites whose fate was increasingly tied to global markets, a newly-transformed conception of American nationalism was forged through the creation of historical myths, values and institutions.

By World War I, many Americans thought that organized sports provided the social glue for a nation of diverse classes, regions, ethnic and racial groups, and competing loyalties. As calls for "Americanization" reached a crescendo after World War I, dean of American football Walter Camp illuminated the relation between sport and the national life. Camp characterized sport as "the folk highway" of the nation. "More people march together and contentedly and in democratic spirit along the highway," he maintained, "than along any other of the roads trod by human kind." With increasing frequency, social commentators identified sport as an integral cultural activity in the production of a national cultural identity.(3)

Several years ago, Thomas Bender proposed "public culture" as an organizing principle that could usefully incorporate the fragmented social, cultural, intellectual, and political histories. As Bender succinctly explained, the "public culture" of a society is "a forum where power in its various forms is elaborated and made authoritative."(4) Unlike their British peers and sociology colleagues,(5) American sport historians have not systematically investigated their subject within the class relations of capitalism.(6) Most historians have, instead, charted the institutional continuities and discontinuities reflecting sport's transformation from "traditional" to a "modern" phenomenon.(7) American sport historians could usefully cast their impressive, growing body of scholarship into a new paradigm centered on "public culture," the problematical nature of the "nation," and the myriad fluid struggles among classes, social groups, sexes, and ideas for cultural authority.(8)

The study of sport offers a window into a larger, ongoing historical process where men and women, social classes, and racial and ethnic groups struggle over different versions of how to live, how to work and play, and what to value.(9) Critical engagement with the theoretical concept "cultural hegemony" clarifies the complex and often contradictory ways dominant groups and ideas come to permeate society, and thereby legitimate particular class and political structures.(10) Raymond Williams emphasized that "a lived hegemony" is always a process, which must be continually renewed, recreated, defended and modified. This process manifests itself in three principal forms: conflict, negotiation, and exhibition. Historically, the fundamental measures of power manifested through sport have been the capacity to establish selective sports traditions; to define "legitimate" sports and appropriate meanings associated with them; and to institutionalize such preferences in rules and organizations.(11) Conflicts are rooted in social structures and, thus, are shaped by wide spectrum of class and political interests that collectively resist, challenge, and alter the hegemonic culture.(12) The negotiated struggles appear consensual when exhibited through popular commemorations, rituals, and metaphors but which usually resonate with the concerns of the socially dominant classes and groups.(13)

Exhibition

Since the late nineteenth century, sporting activity has been infused with dramatic, ritualistic practices. Surrounded by elaborate pageantry, ceremony, politicians, military bands, and national anthems, patriotic sporting culture has focused Americans' attention on national symbols in a manner designed to invoke their loyalty, and thereby package power and society in preferred ways.(14)

Sports have regularly been used to dramatize "American" ideals. Appropriated as patriotic carriers, commercialized sport increasingly eclipsed traditional modes of national holiday celebration.(15) The emergence of the Thanksgiving Day Game in the 1880s coincided with the popularization of the holiday in American cultural life, and by the following decade evolved into the showpiece of nineteenth-century collegiate sport. After a few decades of more modest claims for the positive virtues of courage, endurance, obedience, self-control, and alertness which football supposedly promoted, Protestant ministers, journalists, social reformers, and politicians, turned to the rhetoric of national self interest.(16) The Thanksgiving sporting tradition had truly become a national passion. In 1893, a four-hour Thanksgiving parade went up New York City's Fifth Avenue and wove through Harlem to the Polo Grounds where 40,000 spectators watched Princeton beat Yale. The following week Richard Harding Davis wrote that the Thanksgiving Day game had become "the greatest sporting event and spectacle combined this country has to show." Davis discovered, for instance, that ministers convened church services an hour earlier than usual in order to allow "the worshippers to make an early start for Manhattan Field," or face a greatly diminished congregation. Observing the widespread enthusiasm for the annual tradition throughout civil society, Davis concluded that both "Church and State recognize the national importance of the Thanksgiving Day game."(17) The early twentieth-century Army-Navy Thanksgiving rivalry further fused sport, civil religion, national identity, and the state, as well as popularized a sport which had previously been confined to bourgeois America.(18) By the 1920s, the Game had become so popular throughout the country that one writer described it as an event which "satisfies a normal and healthy craving for a thing without which American life would be the poorer ... |namely~ the natural human instinct for rivalry, achievement, and acclaim."(19) Both football and the Pilgrim experience dramatized the importance of adaptability, discipline, cooperation, physical prowess, and a sense of corporate community. As a sporting tradition, the Thanksgiving Day game became a powerful medium for national communitas.

The 1908 Olympics proved another model context for dramatizing American national ideals.(20) As the United States challenged Britain for the political, economic, and athletic domination of the world, the 1908 London Games simplified the larger political struggle in terms easily understood by both the American and British public.(21) Cultural characteristics were invented and made ideologically-hegemonic by journalists and other sports-minded commentators. Distinguished associate editor of Collier's, Arthur Ruhl, described U.S. Olympic performances in track and field as "American achievements"--due to a "particular make-up" of a "large amount of immediately available nervous energy and the alert power of concentration" which he maintained was "characteristically American."(22) The dominant version of American athleticism heralded by an alliance of journalists, politicians, Olympic leaders, and fans was ritualistically displayed on the streets of New York City. Despite the fact that Britain handily surpassed the American squad in total medals, the American media claimed victory based solely on the track and field competition. Amidst profuse national bunting and the sound of patriotic hymns, a quarter of a million people participated in what the New York Times characterized as "the greatest ovation in the history of athletics." The nationalistic orgy culminated in a rousing speech delivered by Mayor James McGowan, who, on behalf of "the people of the United States" congratulated "those of our countrymen who have won victories in athletic sports against the world." For a moment, Americans chauvinistically equated Olympic success with national superiority.(23)

Sport events occasionally dramatized central social tensions in the national culture. One of the most publicized events in American sport history was the September 23, 1926 bout between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney for the world heavyweight title. Prominently staged at the nation's Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia before 125,000 spectators, the fight was the subject of seventy-five New York Times articles during August and September alone. Tunney's handsome features, social eloquence, and honorable military service represented middle-class respectability. Dempsey, in stark contrast, barely literate with shady underworld associations, emerged from the rough and tumble working-class environs of West Virginia coal country. Historian Elliott Gorn writes that Dempsey's early life "evoked the discord of poverty, labor violence, and exploitation"--social issues which resonated lived reality for many boxing fans. These social contrasts became part of the national folklore. The significance of the fight in the national psyche was not lost on the New York Times, which ran a three-tiered front page headline the following day, and devoted nearly nine full pages to the contest.(24)

Conflict

Diverse, multifaceted disputes developed around the homogenizing public culture effort. Nineteenth-century American boxing was a classic case of a sport whose character was shaped as a result of class conflict, but for whom bourgeois hegemony remained limited and incomplete. In contrast to baseball, working-class (and petit bourgeois) control over boxing persisted until the end of the nineteenth century. The sport provided an important vehicle for the urban counterculture to challenge Victorian sensibilities. Elliott Gorn eloquently suggests that early boxing epitomized a lower-class cultural style of raucous play that affirmed working-class virtues of prowess, bravery, honor, and physical culture--all of which brought condemnation from middle-class critics who thought that the ring subverted republican virtue, threatened human progress, destroyed the spirit of industry, and mocked evangelical piety. For its largely Irish, marginalized working-class advocates, boxing legitimized the American Dream of personal achievement and unlimited individual opportunity, and as such, represented a proxy battleground for the definition of meritocratic values central to the national identity.(25)

Social class conflict manifested itself more forcefully in nineteenth-century professional baseball. Between 1870 and 1900 player-workers struggled against an emerging cadre of non-playing managers, owners, league officials, and administrators, who insisted on the separation of management from play, and introduced contractual relationships to sustain their position.(26) Aided by a legislative system that sanctioned their monopoly control over players, baseball magnates, like their colleagues in industry, appealed to "American" ideals to legitimize the reserve clause, and were routinely depicted by their publisher peers as selfless, civic-minded businessmen who merely sought to safeguard the national pastime. Opponents of the clause saw in it an intolerable restraint of players' pursuit of the American Dream--imbued with notions of individual freedom, mobility, and meritocracy--and characterized such contractual infringements as "tyrannical," "barbaric," "un-American," and the "creator of a special class of slaves."(27) Despite resistance, however, baseball leaders and their allies exploited the game as a cultural paradigm to promote their virtues of discipline, hierarchy, individualism and nationalism--values consonant with an evolving brand of American corporate capitalism.(28)

Conflict often materialized over which sports were most suitable to the dominant national culture. Ethnic groups responded to capitalists' and social reformers' use of sport for assimilation by maintaining European sporting traditions which challenged WASP conventions, such as Sunday sport and alcohol-accompanied athletic contests. Non-"American" sports like soccer, cricket, hurling, Gaelic football, and gymnastics preserved and reinforced ethnic cultural solidarity. German Turners, Czech Sokols, Polish Falcons and other ethnic athletic clubs maintained close ties to the nationalistic objectives of their parent countries, which obstructed assimilation and often clashed with the established social order.(29) Struggles over Old World games, for instance, prompted Walter Camp to create an American game that assimilated ethnic football, even in ethnically diverse places like Pittsburgh and Chicago.(30)

This alternative ethnic sporting tradition was even more radically accentuated by organized labor groups, socialists and communists. Early twentieth-century American socialists sponsored baseball leagues, staged track and field competitions, and incorporated a wide range of sports into politically-charged picnics and party fundraisers. The nation's leading socialist daily paper, The New York Call, featured impressive sports coverage, which rivaled and regularly surpassed mainstream, commercial newspapers. Beginning in 1928, the Communist Party organ, Young Worker featured a regular sports-page, a practice followed by the Party's chief paper, Daily Worker in 1936. Communist sports coverage was characterized by a bold denunciation of bourgeois sport in all its Y.M.C.A., A.A.U., N.C.A.A., and I.O.C. guises. "Bourgeois sport," according to Communist sportsmen, was controlled by capitalists to whet imperialistic appetites and divert attention away from social and political problems. Following their European comrades,(31) American Communists staged sport festivals to draw attention to black equality in sport and against the international sport blockade of the Soviet Union. The most noteworthy of these was the 1932 Chicago Counter-Olympic Games, a protest against the Los Angeles Games and the prolonged imprisonment of Party activist Tom Mooney.(32) The marginal results of such alternative sport spectacles hinted at the dilemma of the Communist Party in relation to the politics of sport. Historian William Baker has observed that to cater to the immigrant core of the Party was to stick with track and field, soccer, and gymnastics, activities that had scant appeal for mainstream Americans in the era of Babe Ruth, Bronko Nagurski, and Frank Luisetti.(33) To turn to baseball, football, and basketball, Baker shrewdly concludes, was to "plunge headlong into problems of cash nexus and class consciousness."(34)

As demands for conformity to "American" norms increased, immigrant groups demonstrated the compatibility of their ethnocultures with national ideals. Ethnic symbols and rituals (including sport forms) were carefully revised to meet the test of acceptability imposed by the dominant group, while at the same time protecting the core values of the minority culture.(35) As Peter Levine persuasively documents, immigrant athletes who played "American" games embraced and affirmed their place in the American community.(36) Even though dominant sport traditions were designed to assimilate immigrants into the American mainstream, that process was actively contested. Ideological challenges to the dominant American sport culture, however, were circumscribed. Even though many radicals accepted standard sport forms, hoping to exploit them for progressive ends, by the 1930s such efforts were ultimately overshadowed by the All-American tandem of public school and company-sponsored sports programs.

Negotiation

The evolution of a national identity unified dominant groups and fragmented subordinate ones. The national sporting culture, defined in strictly white, masculine terms, contributed to bourgeois hegemony by situating subordinate groups within a unified social formation. Since colonial times, sports participation was a major vehicle through which gender and racial divisions were reproduced. Yet to explain this tendency merely in terms of white male social control over women's and African-American sport is overly simplistic. Cultural hegemony is more subtle. Male hegemony historically structured the where, when, and how of women and black sports participation. Although relegated to a circumscribed receiving end, however, subordinate social groups have negotiated the terms of their sporting experience.(37)

"Negotiation" characterized early female involvement in organized sport. Prominent white men with national connections shaped sporting culture in masculine terms, consistent with the larger national identity.(38) Male sports hegemony, however, was never absolute, but had to be constantly renegotiated as the "new woman" emerged in turn-of the-century American society.(39) Women were neither fully manipulated nor victimized through their involvement in sport. Rather, women's early participation in sport was determined by social class relations.(40) Between 1880-1920, middle-class women consented to the ideology and practice of sports patriarchy, while they simultaneously used the space allotted to them to challenge and negotiate the terms of their subordination.(41) The principal site where women shaped and negotiated a feminine sporting identity was within the collegiate physical education environment.

The single-sex structure of separate male and female physical education departments provided women physical educators substantial freedom to promote their own system of sporting values. Beginning in the 1890s, the newly-invented game of basketball quickly became the most popular women's sport, and served as an important catalyst for female physical educators to gain greater control over collegiate athletic experiences. Female physical educators modified basketball so as to remain safely within the separate "women's sphere" of socially acceptable female behavior by purging the game of any objectionable, "unladylike" features. Clad in flannel skirts, confined to distinct court zones, contemporary views about female physiology restricted women from excessive running, close guarding, ball-snatching, arm movement, and perspiration.(42) Middle-class sportswomen hedged their strategies so as not to challenge prevailing masculine-dominated social norms too radically. To do so threatened women's limited autonomy over the game itself.(43)

If culture is always a process of negotiation, we begin to see the utility of hegemony to our understanding of gender and race, as well as class. Negotiation aptly encapsulates most African-American struggles against institutionalized sports--a history which confirmed the concept "double consciousness" espoused by W.E.B. Dubois. As David Wiggins has observed, these tensions were expressed through a one-way process in which black athletes struggled for access into the American sport establishment, but only at the expense of compromising their own African-American identity. The general literature documents African-American exclusion from white organized sport, but as yet, fails to sufficiently analyze the negotiated outcomes between blacks and whites in sport, as well as the ways in which black athletes were differentiated among themselves by color, class, religion, and political orientations.(44)

Prior to formal integration, African-American sports stardom flourished in patriotic contexts. Through Jesse Owens's track achievements in the 1936 Berlin Olympics the American Dream and American patriotism received a fresh breath of life. Owens symbolized American racial tolerance in stark contrast to Aryan supremacy. His conservative political views, moreover, prevented him from elevating racial pride over national identity.(45)

As the Third Reich moved against its weak neighbors, a young African-American boxer from Detroit negotiated an entrenched color line established by boxers and promoters after Jack Johnson's controversial 1910 heavyweight victory.(46) German fascism forced white society to question its own moral integrity. Joe Louis's much celebrated victory over German Max Schmeling in 1938 was interpreted in strictly nationalistic terms. Louis's appeal as an American sport hero reflected his ability to threaten neither race, which unwittingly nurtured the dominant national culture. As Dominic Capeci and Martha Wilkerson wrote, Louis pleased various segments in American society who "played on his prestige as a means to manipulate public behavior": black newspaper editors "desiring democratic advances without rebellion, southern newsmen taking aim at Hitler without hitting Jim Crow targets, government officials seeking racial peace without social justice, white liberals wanting moral integrity without societal changes and white citizens striving for respectability without recognizing black grievances." Louis would occasionally challenge racial discrimination, but only in military life and only very tentatively.(47) Similar to Jackie Robinson, whose negotiation with the white professional baseball establishment precluded vocal opposition to the status quo in sport, Louis's "multifarious hero" status rested tenaciously on his tacit acceptance of the dominant society.

Conclusion

Now in its adolescence, the field of sport history has abundant reasons to take pride in its accomplishments. The foregoing examples are representative of the numerous historical case studies which illuminate the multifaceted relationship between sport and the shaping of a national cultural identity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Collectively they suggest the usefulness of casting the valuable and proliferating body of sport history into a paradigm that emphasizes the relations among class, gender, race, ethnicity, and the construction of national identity in a nondeterministic manner.(48) Such a task, however, needs a center, a point of orientation for the various parts and a focus for narrative energy.(49)

Sports have never been merely instruments of social harmony, a means of self-expression, or a vehicle for satisfying societal needs. All such interpretations ignore the class divisions and conflicts, and the inequalities of power in societies, registered in sports. Nor can their social role be explained simply as a means whereby the masses are manipulated into conformity with the social order, for to do so is to regard people as passive dupes, ignoring their capacity to resist control and to stamp sports with their own culture.(50)

Social historians need to reconceptualize American sport history along three lines. First, we should strive toward a more nuanced understanding of the concepts "culture" and "ideology" and the relationship between them; second, we should appreciate the centrality of sport in the whole culture and its specific appeal as a cultural form in capitalist society; and third, sport must be understood historically, as integral to the social development of industrial capitalism, and therefore as a product of the interplay between material and cultural forms and between dominant and subordinate groups.(51) Analyzing sports as social practices shifts our attention from cause and effect to the process whereby meaning is constructed and power is appropriated by competing groups and individuals. Within their daily work and leisure activities individuals create the conditions and social relations that shape their lives. Thus, the meanings expressed through sporting practices may be those "received" from the way society is organized but they can also be constructed into unique patterns, given particular slants, even on occasion usurped by the activation of meanings other than those which are socially "approved."(52)

Between the 1870s and the 1940s, sport became the most pervasive popular cultural activity in American society. During these years, which one writer characterized as the "cusp between America's Century of Work and its Century of Play," basketball was invented; college football became a mass spectator sport; baseball was hailed as the "national pastime"; a recreation movement blossomed on the nation's playgrounds; and sport was prominently integrated into the educational curriculum. Simultaneously, the maturation of capitalism and the rise of nationalism fractured American society along class, race, ethnic and gender lines. Infused with ritual, ceremony, and pageantry, sport was readily identified by many Americans as a trans-class mechanism for packaging power and society in preferred ways.

The widespread popularity of institutionalized sport not only provided central reference points of daily conversation, but also helped popularize an interlocking set of cultural ideas about America and its relationship with the world. America's quest for national greatness, its attitudes toward other "races," and the "acceptable" forms of social and political change became folk wisdom through both sport discourse and people's lived experience on the playgrounds and ball fields. More than mere amusement, sport as both metaphorical activity and class drama helped dominant social groups promote social cohesion, sustain particular relations of authority, and inculcate dominant values. Sport also provided the grist for emergent groups to challenge and at times, alter those forms and meanings.

The concepts "hegemony" and "public culture" clarify the complex sport-power relation. Explored in tandem, these terms illuminate the problematical nature of Walter Camp's assessment. Sport is an object of struggle among groups and individuals, as well as the "broad folk highway" of the nation.

ENDNOTES

I am grateful to William Baker, Peter Stearns, Stephen Hardy, and Melvin Adelman for their perceptive comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay.

1. The best single volume surveys of this process of national cultural integration are Wilbur Zelinsky, Nation Into State: The Shifting Symbolic Foundations of American Nationalism (Chapel Hill, 1988); and Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991). See also David Glassberg's fine work, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 1990); and John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 1992), 36-7. John Higham surveyed some of the contours of this general process nearly three decades ago in "The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s," in John Weiss, ed., The Origins of Modern Consciousness (Detroit, 1965), 25-44.

My view of nationalism has been most profoundly influenced by Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983); and Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (New York, 1990). Also useful are recent studies by Etienne Ballbar "The Nation Form: History and Ideology," Fernand Braudel Center Review 13 (1990); and John Ehrenreich, "Socialism, Nationalism, and Capitalist Development," Review of Radical Political Economics 15 (1983): 1-42.

2. The transition from industrial to monopoly capitalism and its effect on the American working class is cogently discussed in Mike Davis, "Why the U.S. Working Class Is Different" New Left Review 123 (1980): 5-48; Sean Wilentz, "Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement, 1790-1920," International Labor and Working Class History 26 (1984): 1-24; David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (New York, 1987). A comprehensive analysis of the formation of a corporate capitalist regulatory state can be found in Martin Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism: The Market, the Law, and Politics (New York, 1988). Alan Dawley's excellent synthesis of this period integrates the new workers with the rise of the "new woman." See his Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge, 1991), esp. 63-97. The turn toward feminism is brilliantly illuminated in Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, 1987).

3. Walter Camp, "The Broad Folk Highway of American Sport," American Scandinavian Review 9 (1921): 257.

4. Thomas Bender, "Wholes and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History," Journal of American History 73 (1986): 126.

5. John Hargreaves, Sport, Power and Culture: A Social and Historical Analysis of Popular Sports in Britain (New York, 1986); Eric Hobsbawm, "Mass Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870-1914," in Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983); Richard Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford, 1989); Stephen G. Jones, Sport, Politics and the Working Class: Organised Labour and Sport in Inter-War Britain (Manchester, 1988); and J. A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism (London, 1988).

6. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, several scholars broached the issue of class and power as it applied to the struggle for "social control" in early twentieth-century America. For these historians, sport represented a tool of the ruling class (and its middle-class allies) imposed on workers and immigrants to divert or sublimate any feelings of class consciousness. See Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge, 1978); Dominick Cavallo, Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880-1920 (Philadelphia, 1981); Cary Goodman, Choosing Sides: Playground and Street Life on the Lower East Side (New York, 1979); David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and at Play (New York, 1986); and most recently, Steven A. Riess, City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports (Urbana, 1989). For a critical review of this literature, see Stephen Hardy and Alan Ingham, "Games, Structures and Agency: Historians on the American Play Movement," Journal of Social History 17 (1983): 285-302.

7. See David L. Andrews, "Welsh Indigenous! and British Imperial?--Welsh Rugby, Culture, and Society, 1890-1914," Journal of Sport History 18 (1991): 335-49, for a recent effort in this vein, This neglect drives from the dominance of a progressive-liberal-modernist historiographical tradition, and the absence of a strong Marxist tradition. See Ian Tyrrell, The Absent Marx: Class Analysis and Liberal History in Twentieth-Century America (Westport, CT, 1986). During the 1980s, the majority of sport history monographs continued in the modernist vein. Prominent among these were William J. Baker, Sports in the Western World (Urbana, 1988); Allen Guttmann, A Whole New Ball Game: An Interpretation of American Sports (Chapel Hill, 1988); Melvin Adelman, A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics, 1820-70 (Urbana, 1986); Richard Mandell, Sport: A Cultural History (New York, 1984); and Benjamin Rader, American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Spectators (Englewood Cliffs, 1983).

Allen Guttmann established the modernist framework with his important From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports (New York, 1978). For a sympathetic summary of Guttmann's scholarship, see William J. Baker, "Touching All the Bases: The Record and Ritual of Allen Guttmann," International Journal of the History of Sport 8 (1991): 408-16; for a critique of Guttmann, see Richard Gruneau, "Freedom and Constraint: The Paradoxes of Play, Game and Sports," Journal of Sport History 7 (1980): 68-86; and especially his "Modernization or Hegemony: Two Views of Sport and Social Development," in Jean Harvey and Hart Cantelon, eds. Not Just a Game: Essays in Canadian Sport Sociology (Ottawa, 1988).

Two exemplary works which have dealt with American sport and class are Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, 1986); and Warren Goldstein, Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball (Ithaca, 1989). Although he deals with "leisure" rather than sports, Roy Rosenzweig's Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1879-1920 (Cambridge, 1983) is very useful for directing attention to the class and ethnic struggle over nonworking hours.

8. Gruneau has astutely sketched the contours of this relationship in "Modernization or Hegemony," and, therefore, is "must" reading for all social historians of American sport.

9. Early studies which highlighted the materialist foundations of sport were deterministic in their methodology and analysis. See, in particular, Paul Hoch, Rip Off the Big Game (New York, 1972); and Jean Marie Brohm, Sport: A Prison of Measured Time (London, 1978). A concise, critical summary of these early neo-Marxist forays is provided in Gruneau, "Modernization or Hegemony," 23-6. A more sophisticated, and ultimately influential debate between Gruneau and Rob Beamish is ably reviewed by Stephen Hardy and Alan Ingham, "Sport, Structuration, Subjugation and Hegemony," Theory, Culture, and Society 2 (1984); and more recently, William J. Morgan," Labor, Sport, and Critical Theory: A Response to Beamish," Sociology of Sport Journal 3 (1986): 68-91.

The turning points in the relationship between sports and power networks have occurred when a threat to the established social order has manifested itself, and, in the words of John Hargreaves, "when the consequent interaction between dominant and subordinate groups has implicated sports," Sport, Power and Culture, 209. Hargreaves has written the most comprehensive and theoretically innovative monograph on sport and hegemony yet published. See his summary statements about sport and cultural power, 1-15, 205-23.

10. Essential readings on hegemony include: Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, eds., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York 1971)--quotes, 199; Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory," New Left Review 82 (1973); Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York, 1977); T. J. Jackson Lears, "The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities," American Historical Review 90 (1985): 567-93; Chantal Mouffe, ed., Gramsci and Marxist Theory (London, 1979); Tony Bennett, "Introduction: 'The Turn to Gramsci,'" in Bennett, Colin Mercer, and Janet Woolacott, eds., Popular Culture and Social Relations (London, 1986); and Perry Anderson, "The Antimonies of Antonio Gramsci," New Left Review 100 (1976-77).

11. For more elaboration on these themes, see Gruneau, "Modernization or Hegemony," 21-2.

12. See Raymond Williams's brilliant and stimulating discussion of counter-hegemonic formation in Marxism and Literature, 108-27.

13. Bodnar grapples with public culture and popular memory in his excellent new work, Remaking America. See also the articles on "Memory and American History," in the Journal of American History 75 (1989): 1117-1280; and Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory.

14. See Hargreaves, Sport, Power, and Culture, passim, esp., 8-14.

15. Steven W. Pope, "God, Games, and National Glory: Thanksgiving and the Ritual of Sport in American Culture, 1876-1926," in the International Journal of the History of Sport 10 (August 1993), 242-49. See also, Leigh Eric Schmidt, "The Commercialization of the Calendar: American Holidays and the Culture of Consumption, 1870-1930," Journal of American History 78 (1991): 887-916.

16. Pope, "God, Games, and National Glory."

17. New York Herald, November 30, 1893, 6; and Davis, "The Thanksgiving Game," Harper's Weekly 37 (1893): 117. A number of other accounts were strikingly similar in wording and tone, such as the editorial in Young Men's Era 18 (1892): 1012.

18. Hobsbawm, "Mass-Producing Traditions," 299-300.

19. "The Fall War Game," The Outlook, November 2, 1927, 269.

20. See Steven W. Pope, "American Muscles and Minds: Public Discourse and the Shaping of National Identity During Early Olympiads, 1896-1920," Journal of American Culture 15 (Winter 1992): 69-80 for an extended discussion.

21. See George R. Matthews, "The Controversial Olympic Games of 1908 as Viewed by the New York Times and the Times (London)," Journal of Sport History 7 (1980): 40-53; and John Lucas, The Modern Olympic Games (New York, 1980), 55-63 for more on the 1908 Games.

22. Ruhl, "The Men Who Set the Marks," Outing 52 (1908): 389.

23. "Thousands Cheer Victors of the Olympic Games," New York Times, August 30, 1908, 1.

24. Gorn, "The Manassa Mauler and the Fighting Marine: An Interpretation of the Dempsey-Tunney Fights," Journal of American Studies 19 (1985): 27-47; and the New York Times, September 24, 1926, 1-9. See also, Randy Roberts, Jack Dempsey: The Manassa Mauler (Baton Rouge, 1979).

25. Gorn, The Manly Art, 66; passim, esp. 248-52.

26. Goldstein, Playing for Keeps, passim; Adelman, A Sporting Time, 121-83; Steven M. Gelber, "Working at Playing: The Culture of the Work Place and the Rise of Baseball," Journal of Sport History 16 (1983); and Adelman's spirited response, "Baseball, Business and the Work Place: Gelber's Thesis Reexamined," Journal of Social History 23 (1989): 285-300. Classic overviews of the struggle over the "reserve clause" can be found in Harold Seymour, Baseball: The Early Years (New York, 1960); and David Q. Voigt, Baseball: From Gentleman's Sport to the Commissioner System (Norman, 1966).

27. For representative condemnations, see Seymour, 111-13.

28. The life of baseball's most powerful statesman is superbly presented by Peter Levine in, A. G. Spalding and the Rise of Baseball: The Promise of American Sport (New York, 1985).

29. Gerald R. Gems, "Sport and Cultural Formation in Chicago, 1890-1940," (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1989), and his "Not Just a Game," Chicago History 17 (1989): 4-21; Riess, City Games, 93-126, and Riess, "The Jewish-American Boxing Experience, 1890-1940," American Jewish History 74 (1985): 223-54; Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will; Rader, "The Quest for Subcommunities"; Gerald Redmond, The Caledonian Games in 19th Century America (Rutherford, 1971); Michael T. Isenberg, John L. Sullivan and His America (Urbana, 1988); Roberta Park, "German Associational and Sporting Life in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area, 1850-1900," Journal of the West 26 (1987): 47-64; Ralf Wagner, "Turner Societies and the Socialist Tradition," in Hartmut Kell, ed., German Workers' Culture in the United States, 1850-1920 (Washington, D.C., 1988); Gary Ross Mormino, "The Playing Fields of St. Louis: Italian Immigrants and Sport, 1925-1941," Journal of Sport History 9 (1982); George Eisen, "Sport, Recreation and Gender: Jewish Immigrant Women in Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920," Journal of Sport History 18 (1991): 103-21; and most recently, Peter Levine, Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American Jewish Experience (New York, 1992).

30. For an overview of the Americanization of European rugby, see Ronald A. Smith, Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics (New York, 1988), 67-98.

31. See Jones, Sport, Politics and the Working Class; and Robert Wheeler, "Organized Sport and Organized Labor: The Workers' Sports Movement," Journal of Contemporary History 13 (1978): 191-210. A succinct, sophisticated overview of immigrant socialism can be found in Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States (London, 1988), 19-57.

32. David A. Steinberg, "The Workers' Sport Internationals 1920-28," Journal of Contemporary History 13 (1978): 233-51. For the American story, see Mark Naison, "Lefties and Righties: The Communist Party and Sport During the Great Depression," Radical America 13 (1979): 47-59; and William J. Baker, "Muscular Marxism and the Chicago Counter-Olympic Games of 1932," International Journal of the History of Sport 9 (December 1992): 397-410.

33. Andrei Markovits explores the "un-American" appeal of soccer in "The 'Other American Exceptionalism': Why is There No Soccer in the United States?" International Journal of the History of Sport 7 (1990): 130-64.

34. Baker, "Muscular Marxism and the Chicago Counter-Olympic Games of 1932," 406.

35. See Kathleen Neils Conzen, David A. Gerber, Eva Morawska, George E. Pozzetta, and Rudolph I. Vecoli, "The Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective from the U.S.A.," Journal of American Ethnic History 12 (Fall 1992): 3-41. Also helpful on this point are James R. Barrett, "Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States, 1880-1930," Journal of American History 79 (December 1992): 996-1020; David Montgomery, "Nationalism, American Patriotism, and Class Consciousness Among Immigrant Workers in the Epoch of World War I," in Dirk Hoerder, ed., "Struggle a Hard Battle": Essays on Working Class Immigrants (De Kalb, 1987), 327-51; and John Bodnar, The Transplanted, passim.

36. Levine, Ellis Island to Ebbets Field, passim.

37. This "negotiated" aspect of the struggle for national hegemony is the least investigated one, and should, no doubt, provide the impetus for much future scholarship. This dynamic relationship between hegemony and contestation has not only moved to the center of "cultural studies" generally, but over the past decade or so, a significant array of American historians (not to mention European scholars) have incorporated this paradigm into their work. The early theoreticalization was introduced by Stuart Hall in "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms," Media, Culture, and Society 2 (1980): 57-72; and "Notes on Deconstructing the 'Popular,'" in Raphael Samuel, ed., People's History and Socialist Theory (London, 1981). Recent efforts by American historians to deal with these issues include: Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, 1986); Lizabeth Cohen, "Encountering Mass Culture at the Grassroots: The Experience of Chicago Workers in the 1920s," American Quarterly 41 (1989): 6-33; George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis, 1990); Michael Denning, "The End of Mass Culture," International Labor and Working-Class History 37 (1990), 4-18; and most recently, Lawrence W. Levine, "The Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and Its Audiences," American Historical Review 97 (1992): 1369-99. The responses to Levine's article by Robin D. G. Kelley, Natalie Zemon Davis, and T. J. Jackson Lears, 1400-1426, are important statements as well.

38. Michael S. Kimmel, "Baseball and the Reconstitution of American Masculinity, 1880-1920," in Michael A. Messner and Donald Sabo, eds., Sport, Men, and the Gender Order: Critical Feminist Perspectives (Champaign, 1990), 65. See also Bruce Kidd, "Sport and Masculinity," in Michael Kaufman, ed., Beyond Patriarchy: Essays by Men on Pleasure, Power, and Change (New York, 1987), 250-65. For a useful overview of the social history of American masculinity, see Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen, eds., Meanings of Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago, 1990).

39. Jennifer Hargreaves, "Gender on the Sports Agenda," International Review of the Sociology of Sport 25 (1990): 296-99. Although somewhat dated, Nancy Struna's historiographical overview, "Beyond Mapping Experience: The Need for Understanding in the History of American Sporting Women," Journal of Sport History 11 (1984): 120-33 is useful. Other recent contributions include Donald Mrozek's intelligent discussion in his Sport and American Mentality, 136-60; the special issue on gender in the Journal of Sport History 18 (1991); and Allen Guttmann, Women's Sports: A History (New York, 1991), 85-153. For a brief discussion of the "new woman" of the late-nineteenth century, see Dawley, Struggles for Justice, 85-96.

40. An increasing volume of feminist research in both Britain and the United States documents how women's access to and support of sport and leisure were determined by class and race. Middle-class women, unlike their working-class sisters, enjoyed the financial resources and free time necessary for sporting participation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. During the 1880-90s, middle-class women moved from croquet to the bicycle craze, to playing golf and tennis with their husbands at country clubs. By the turn of the century, these women readied themselves for regional, national, and shortly thereafter, international athletic competition.

Working-class women's sport awaits research and analysis. Future writing on this subject could fruitfully integrate Kathy Peiss's important contributions in Cheap Amusements.

41. Mary O'Brien broaches this question in "Hegemony and Superstructure: A Feminist Critique of Neo-Marxism," in Roberta Hamilton and Michele Barrett, eds., The Politics of Diversity: Feminism, Marxism, and Nationalism (London, 1986), 255-68.

42. See Steveda Chepko, "The Domestication of Basketball," in Joan S. Hult and Marianna Trekell, eds., A Century of Women's Basketball: From Frailty to Final Four (Reston, 1991). For more on the philosophical discourse, see Roberta J. Park, "Physiology and Anatomy are Destiny!?: Brains, Bodies and Exercise in Nineteenth Century American Thought," and Patricia Vertinsky, "Old Age, Gender and Physical Activity: The Biomedicalization of Aging," Journal of Sport History 18 (1991): 31-63, 64-80.

43. Ibid., 120; also Mrozek, passim; and Hargreaves, Sport, Power and Culture, 72-3. Gwendolyn Captain has recently explored these developments as they applied to African-American women in "Enter Ladies and Gentlemen of Color: Gender, Sport and the Ideal of African-American Manhood and Womanhood During the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries," Journal of Sport History 18 (1991): 81-100. To be sure, few of the early women athletes and physical educators were strident feminists. The majority of women who took up sport did so because it was, according to Kathleen McCrone, "enjoyable, fashionable, or companionable, not because they |explicitly~ rejected patriarchal notions of female frailty and inferiority or because they viewed sports participation as a means of emancipating themselves" from oppressive social norms. See Kathleen McCrone, Playing the Game: Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women, 1870-1914 (Lexington, 1988), 279.

44. David Wiggins, "From Plantation to Playing Field: Historical Writings on the Black Athlete in American Sport," Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 57 (1986): 101-16. The only major social history of African-Americans and sport is Rob Ruck's Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh (Urbana, 1987). Although written in a journalistic style, without endnotes, Nelson George's Elevating the Game: Black Men and Basketball (New York, 1992) is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the development of a distinct black basketball style. Biography has been the favored mode of scholarship, through which much can be learned about the negotiated struggles of African-American athletes. The best include Randy Roberts, Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes (New York, 1983); William J. Baker, Jesse Owens: An American Life (New York, 1986); Jules Tygiel, Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (New York, 1983); and most recently, John M. Carroll, Fritz Pollard: Pioneer in Racial Advancement (Urbana, 1992). Noteworthy articles include: Ronald Smith, "The Paul Robeson-Jackie Robinson Saga and a Political Collision," Journal of Sport History 6 (1979): 5-27; Dominic J. Capeci and Martha Wilkerson, "Maltifarious Hero: Joe Louis, American Society and Race Relations During World Crisis, 1935-1945, "Journal of Sport History 10 (1983): 5-25; and Frederic C. Jaher, "White America Views Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Muhammed Ali," in Donald Spivey, ed., Sport in America (Westport, 1985).

45. Baker, Jesse Owens, passim.

46. Roberts, Jack Dempsey.

47. Capeci and Wilkerson, "Multifarious Hero," 24.

48. Steven W. Pope, ed., The New American Sport History: Recent Approaches and Perspectives (Urbana, 1994), forthcoming.

49. Bender, 122, 136.

50. Hargreaves, Sport, Power, and Culture, 3.

51. The basis of such a framework would synthesize the work of Gruneau and Hargreaves. For a concise summary of sport and industrial capitalism, see Critcher, 335-37. Rosemary Deem has suggested some provocative sociological insights toward a synthesis of sport in society in her perceptive discussion, "'Together We Stand, Divided We Fall': Social Criticism and the Sociology of Sport and Leisure," Sociology of Sport Journal 5 (1988): 352.

52. This argument is made by Clarke and Critcher in their conclusion to The Devil Makes Work: Leisure in Capitalist Britain (Urbana, 1985), 226-27. See also Clarke's essay, "Pessimism Versus Populism: The Problematic Politics of Popular Culture," in Richard Butsch, ed., For Fun and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure into Consumption (Philadelphia, 1990), 27-44.