The American Dream and the National Game

Introduction

INTRODUCTION WRITING FROM PARIS IN MAY OF 1910, HENRY ADAMS GLOOMILY PRE· dicted the end of the usefulness of human intellectual activity. He sought to explain to Barrett Wendell the purpose of his A Letter to American Teachers ofHistory, a volume he had recently sent to fellow members of the American Historical Association. He seemed to feel that the end of an era was at hand; "we have arrived. Nothing remains but to simmer out and to stop the appearance of boiling-of motion. There is no more motion, and can be none, except to recognise the fact." The Letter to Teachers was, for Adams, simply that; "a letter to Teachers ... to teach teachers how to teach. . .. It is a scientific demonstration that Socialism, Collectivism, Humanitarianism, Universalism, Philanthropism, and every other ism, has come, and is the End, and there is nothing possible beyond, and they [American teachers of history] can all go play, and, on the whole, baseball is best."! Adams, according to this image, saw baseball as a symbol of a world irrevelant to that in which he was used to living. He does not seem to have been alone in doing this. Originally a gentleman's sport, played by the upper and middle classes during their leisure time, between 1870 and 1910 baseball had evolved into a profes1 2 sional sport, providing entertainment for a large urban audience and a possible ladder to success for athletic young men who were inclined to use it as such. This evolution resulted in a public image which has been characterized by David Quentin Voigt as "schizoid, for while it was being idolized by some, it was being villainized by others.,,2 Baseball's sins were seen to result from the conditions of urban life, and the chief habits of ball players as presented in the daily newspapers were drinking and gambling.3 According to Chief Meyers, onetime catcher for the New York Giants, baseball "was not well thought of. . . . Ball players were considered a rowdy bunch. We weren't admitted to hotels, that is first-class hotels. Like the sailors in Boston, on the Commons-'No Sailors Allowed.' We were in that class. We were just second-class citizens, even worse.',4 The wife of a Methodist clergyman, discouraging her son's ambition to become a baseball player, characterized baseball as "not a serious occupation." And her husband, the Reverend Jonathan Townley Crane, in his book Popular Amusements, "prophesied that baseball was in decline because so many vices cluster around the ballground that 'everyone connected with it seems to be regarded with a degree of suspicion.' ,,5 The point of view that baseball is irrelevant if not immoral conflicted with another which was also forcefully presented during these years. Many players were able to build respectable middle class careers on the side and the sport as a whole could be seen rather differently than Adams saw it. Appropriately enough Mark Twain expressed this point of view when he described baseball as "the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century.,,6 Baseball here becomes a symbol of the dynamic element in American life. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court too, baseball appears as one of the modern blessings Hank Morgan confers on the middle ages. He speaks of "a project of mine to replace the tournament with something which might furnish an escape from the extra steam of the chivalry, keep those bucks entertained and out of mischief, and at the same time preserve the best thing in them, which was their hardy spirit of emulation. . . . This experiment was baseball."7 Neither of these images, that of baseball as immoral and irrelevant or as the very symbol of the new forces changing 3 American life, dominates at present though. A new image of baseball and of professional sports in general has appeared since then.8 During the 1966 World Series, James Reston of the New York Times found time in one of his columns to meditate on the relation of sports to modern American life. "Sports in America," he suggests, "are an antidote to many of the trends of our time." The complexities of life in twentieth century America, he finds, "make it impossible to identify the point of decision in our national life." Life, in other words, is chaotic...