In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Progressive Era Appropriation of Children's Play
  • Allen Guttmann (bio)

Click for larger view
View full resolution

William Merritt Chase (1849–1916). The Lake for Miniature Yachts, ca. 1888. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Terian Collection of American Art

[Begin Page 147]

Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the wholesale intervention of adults utterly transformed the informal world of traditional children's play. Activities such as skipping rope, shooting marbles, playing hopscotch, and galloping about on imaginary horses in order to ambush a band of equally imaginary Indians were replaced—although never entirely—by games organized by adult-sponsored sports leagues. Four paintings, one by Winslow Homer, a second by William Merritt Chase, a third by Maurice Prendergast, and a fourth by Norman Rockwell, can be read as evidence for the momentous transition in children's play from traditional games to adult-sponsored sports.

I

Early evidence of this ludic transformation came in the form of New York's Outdoor Recreation League, founded in 1898 by Jacob Riis, Lillian Wald, and other Progressive Era reformers. The Playground Association of America (PGA), established in 1906, answered F. D. Boynton's rhetorical question: "The country boy roams the hills and has free access to 'God's first temples.' What can we offer to the city boy in exchange for paradise lost? His only road to paradise regained is [through] the gymnasium, the athletic field, and the playground."1 In emulation of Robert S. Baden-Powell's paramilitary organization for British boys, the Boy Scouts of America were mustered in 1910 by YMCA worker E. M. Robinson. At the time Marxist critics saw these reforms as "regimentation" of children to "the iron cage of military and industrial disciplines,"2 but Progressive proponents of adult-sponsored children's play candidly acknowledged a desire to curb—quite literally—unruly immigrant children running wild amid the pushcarts and vendors' stands of crowded city streets.

Joseph Tomlin formed a children's football league in 1929 and named it after Glenn Scobey ("Pop") Warner (1871–1964), the famed coach of the Carlisle [End Page 147] Indian School. Tomlin's initiative was overshadowed in 1939 when Carl Stotz of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, organized what eventually became Little League Baseball. Like the PGA, which was consciously intended as a reformist institution designed to alter the values and behavior of the children involved, Pop Warner Football and Little League Baseball were meant to inculcate the twin virtues of cooperation and competition that were presumed to be characteristic of properly socialized American boys. Ironically, the neatly uniformed middle-class children engaged in adult-sponsored team games were subjected to stricter discipline than the ragged lower-class children who were left, most of the time, to amuse themselves on the slides, swings, and teeter-totters of innercity parks and playgrounds.


Click for larger view
View full resolution
Figure 1.

Winslow Homer (1836–1910). Snap the Whip, 1872. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Christian A. Zabriskie, 1950 (5041).

Credit: Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

II

Homer's Snap the Whip (1872) (fig. 1) is a nostalgic evocation of the world of traditional games that he knew as a boy. On a field dotted with wild flowers, against the background of a wooded hill, a group of barefoot schoolboys are engaged in a game so old that Pieter Breughel painted a version of it in the sixteenth century. Three boys at one end of the "whip" strain to pull backward while those in the middle hold fast and those at the end are flung to the ground by the force of their movement. Beyond the boys, a pair of girls can be discerned. The girls are not involved in the rough game, but one of them seems to hold a hoop, an emblem of less rambunctious play. There is no teacher present to supervise the children, [End Page 148] but the open door of the one-room rural school tells us clearly that the exciting escape from "sivilisation" (Huck Finn's spelling) is temporary.

Pointing to his pictures of urban parks, art historian William Gerdts suggests that Chase deserves credit for "the earliest pictorial manifestation of Impressionism to take...

pdf

Share