"Take Me Out to the Brawl Game": Sports and Workers in Gilded Age Massachusetts

Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Spring 2009 by Weir, Robert

Editor's Choice: This essay originally appeared in Sports in Massachusetts: Historical Essays, a 1991 publication of HJM's institute for Massachusetts Studies which was edited by Ronald Story. The next few issues will include a selected article from one of HJM's many edited collections. These essays retain their fresh interpretation and broad appeal. Story, who introduces the article, is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Author Robert E. Weir is a freelance writer who currently teaches at UMass (Amherst) and Smith College.

INTRODUCTION

What sort of game was baseball, and what was its connection to the industrial order? Was it, as some have suggested, a largely genteel affair, beloved chiefly by clerks and entrepreneurs, promoted predominantly with an eye to middle-class morality? Was it a device not only for helping rustics adjust to the city, but also for inculcating the bourgeois virtues of teamwork, punctuality, and thrift? Did it, as Albert Spalding asserted, uplift?

No, says Dr. Robert Weir. That may have been an initial tendency. Victorian morality, after all, was a powerful force in the mid-nineteenth century, and it held promoters as well as participants in its grip. But so, he argues, was the culture of American workers, especially in a heavily industrialized state such as Massachusetts, and especially during the 1880s, the heyday of the Knights of Labor.

Nowhere was the working-class presence felt more powerfully than in sports, and most particularly in baseball. As this dramatic study makes clear, baseball . . . became the game it did because American workers willingly and willfully appropriated it for their own uses and filled it with their own values. Warren Goldstein pioneered this argument in Playing for Keeps (1989). Weir goes a step further . . . [The fact ] that baseball became the American game may have been due, by his reading, less to the promotionalism of Albert Spalding than to the vulgar masses - workers, trade unions, and the Knights of Labor.1

In 1874, Scribner's Magazine published an editorial entitled "Good Games" to instruct its readers in proper pastimes for respectable Americans. It recommended wholesome parlor games like "Yes and No," "Authors," "Who Am I?," and "Poets." The following year, Scribner 's advised against "rough games," especially for girls, and advised that social activities, reading clubs, and popular lectures were more appropriate diversions.2

But what of team sports like baseball, a game soon to deemed the "National Pastime"? In 1871, the New York Times reported that baseball was "patronized by the worst classes of the community, of both sexes; and moreover, many of the gatherings have been characterized by the presence of a regular gambling horde, while oaths and obscenity have prevailed." Ten years later the same paper again denounced baseball: "Our experience with the national game of base-ball has been sufficiently thorough to convince us that it was in the beginning a sport unworthy of men, and that it is now, in its fully developed state, unworthy of gentlemen." A subsequent Times editorial predicted baseball's demise.3 Not until 1874 was the Boston Globe's coverage of baseball more extensive than that given to more genteel activities like cricket, swimming, and horse racing. Even Walter Camp, an ardent supporter, admitted that early baseball languished due to the "evils dragged into it by those whose sympathies were only with the gambling and pool-selling classes . . . [and has] a bad odor among respectable communities."4

"Polo" - a rudimentary form of ice hockey played with a ball, not a puck, and lacking the formal rules later adopted by Canadians in 1879 - was equally vilified.5 In 1885, the Haverhill Laborer, a working-class newspaper, recounted the opening of the ice polo season, a rough-andtumble match played on the city's skating rink on the Little River. League play commenced with a 9:00 p.m. battle between Haverhill's two hometown teams: the Stars and the Globes. The Laborer reported:

Every seat was occupied and standing room was not plentiful. The fair sex were out in great numbers, ready to give their applause and allegiance . . . The feud between the Montagues and the Capulets, of the Houses of York and Lancaster. . . all pale into insignificance in comparison with the rivalry between the respective friends of Haverhill's two league polo clubs. ... The authence was about evenly divided, so far as applause was concerned, and each skillful play brought forth a roar of applause which caused the Chinese lanterns around the rink to vibrate.6

What compelled a throng of Haverhill residents to stand or sit by a frozen river on a cold Wednesday night in February? The next morning's work bell would ring early, and the average Haverhill worker faced ten to twelve hours of toil. Why weren't tired workers at home resting? City rivalries aside, polo was an exciting and violent game. The Laborer remarked that the game was "too rough, in fact, for those who prefer polo to the ring, and several exhibitions of temper were shown by individual players." The Haverhill match was less than four minutes old before Wardman of the Globes tossed Bolan of the Stars to the rink, and a fight ensued. Shortly after that, the Globes scored their first goal, and their fans responded with cheers and the blowing of horns.7