The Quest for Subcommunities and the Rise of American SportA.docx

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
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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.
2014 11:35:58 AM
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).
2014 11:35:58 AM

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.
2014 11:35:58 AM
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.
2014 11:35:58 AM
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).
2014 11:35:58 AM
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.
2014 11:35:58 AM
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.
2014 11:35:58 AM

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.
2014 11:35:58 AM
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.
2014 11:35:58 AM
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.
2014 11:35:58 AM

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.
2014 11:35:58 AM
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.

2014 11:35:58 AM
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.
2014 11:35:58 AM
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.
2014 11:35:58 AM
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.
2014 11:35:58 AM
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jspArticle
Contentsp. [355]p. 356p. 357p. 358p. 359p. 360p. 361p. 362p.
363p. 364p. 365p. 366p. 367p. 368p. 369Issue Table of
ContentsAmerican Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Autumn, 1977),
pp. 355-453Front Matter [pp. ]The Quest for Subcommunities
and the Rise of American Sport [pp. 355-369]The World a
Department Store: Bradford Peck and the Utopian Endeavor [pp.
370-384]Frontier and Civilization in the Thought of Frederick
Law Olmsted [pp. 385-403]Romanticism, Nationalism, and the
New Economics: Elisha Mulford and the Organic Theory of the
State [pp. 404-421]The New Social History and the Search for
"Community" in Colonial America [pp. 422-443]Review
EssayReassessing Science in Antebellum America [pp. 444-
453]Back Matter [pp. ]

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