ANTIQUES

Magazine Antiques, August, 2001

Our pleasure likewise is, Our good people be not disturbed, letted, or discouraged from any lawful recreation, Such as dancing, either of men or women, Archery for men, leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmlesse, Recreation, nor from having of May Games, Whitson Ales, and Morris-dances, and the setting up of Maypoles, and other sports.

King James I, Book of Sports, 1618

The Puritans who migrated to New England responded that the very recreations the king praised led away from God to sin and wickedness. They enforced their pious Sabbath and banned as corrupt and pagan the festivals and saints' days of the Catholic and Anglican calendars. Unlike the Puritans, the southern colonists did not think an extravagant life was incompatible with Christian behavior. Early Virginia was disproportionately settled by men, and a boom in tobacco growing gave the colony the raucous tone of a mining camp. Drinking, gambling, and the more brutal sports of old England flourished. Common pastimes were bearbaiting (banned in New England, as Thomas Babington Macaulay later hinted, "not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators"), cockfighting, and ratting (wagering on how long it would take a dog to kill a pit full of rats).

During the revolutionary era, the Continental Congress outlawed games, sports, and the theater as unfit for a virtuous people embarking on independence. In the nineteenth century Victorian capitalists and Evangelicals (often the same people) feared idleness, craved regularity, practiced self-control, and idealized usefulness. All leisure activities were thought to risk fostering drinking, gambling, swearing, and Sabbath breaking. As late as 1827 the editor of the American Farmer had to argue that hunting, fishing, and other outdoor sports were beneficial to health and morals even if they were also fun.

Yet the Victorian ethic of hard work and self-control gave rise to criticism of Americans' lamentable physical condition. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. sounded the alarm in the Atlantic Monthly in 1858, writing: "I am satisfied that such a set of black-coated, stiff-jointed, soft-muscled, paste-complexioned youth as we can boast in our Atlantic cities never before sprang from loins of Anglo-Saxon lineage." And like Horace Mann, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman, Holmes called for vigorous exercise for American youth.

Linking athletic activity to the Victorian Protestant middle-class values of discipline, self-reliance, and human perfectibility these "muscular Christians" justified the explosion of sport around mid-century as a moral force. The urban rich formed sporting clubs that set them apart from the masses. John Cox Stevens, a wealthy socialite, founded the New York Yacht Club in 1844. When Stevens's yacht America defeated eighteen British rivals in the first America's Cup race in 1851, other cities organized their own yacht clubs. The New York Athletic Club was founded in 1866. and the Westchester Polo Club in the late 1870s.

By the end of the nineteenth century the age of spectator sports had arrived with sports' heroes, famous teams, and big-time promoters. On September 23, 1926, a world championship boxing match in Philadelphia drew an estimated 125,000 spectators in addition to those who listened to the thud of the fighters' gloves over the radio. The admissions totaled $1,895,000 of which Jack Dempsey, who lost to Gene Tunney, collected $700,000. Thus was celebrated the 150th year of American independence.

wendell Garrett