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

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1993 by Steven W. Pope

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.