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4. Progress and Race: Vitality in Turn-of-the-Century Britain
- University of Minnesota Press
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83 • 4 Progress and Race Vitality in turn-of-the-century Britain imperialism . . . was the discourse which sought to bind the myriad realities of the colonial “power” into a discursive unity. Social Darwinism and other social evolutionary theories in the later-nineteenth century underpinned the supremacist rhetoric, but the spectre of internal degeneration continually haunted it. daniel pick Faces of Degeneration innate qualities are needed to prove the justice— the naturalness and inalterability—of the status quo. nell painter The History of White People The masses were restive. The revolutions of 1848 were sweeping the Continent, threatening to spread across the Channel and disrupt the fragile social order in britain. in february, Karl Marx and friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto. in April, Chartists descended on London to demand suffrage for workingclass men. in July, the young irelanders took up arms. The moment felt like a crisis of capital—if not of civilization—and the middle classes responded with fear, anxiety, and arrogance, urging patience and discipline on the angry crowds. Charles Kingsley—whose writings were foundational to the social, and religious movement later called “Muscular Christianity”—was summoned to quiet the Progress and race 84 • Chartists. Kingsley admonished the impatient masses to “be wise, and then you must be free, for you will be fit to be free.”1 Although the discourse of fitness had many meanings at midcentury , the concept had long been invoked during war, most especially the Napoleonic Wars. Kingsley’s words signified a new moment in England, during which notions of manliness, freedom, fitness, godliness , and knowledge would be deployed to tame and discipline workers in the service of an expanding british empire. Like the Americans , the british became preoccupied with physical culture. The precise meanings of “fitness,” “manliness,” and “freedom” and their relation to scientific knowledge were debated in literary journals , scientific treatises, and churches and fought out in the factories , streets, and fields of empire.2 What were the essential qualities of fitness? Who embodied fitness? And how could it be measured? initially focused on elite bodies, physical culture would, by the end of the century, become more centered on the bodies of the middle and lower classes. The physical culture movement was important to the development of anthropometry in britain, but it would have a different emphasis than in the United States. in addition to its role in physical education, lung capacity measurements in britain gained credibility in the context of the statistical theorizing of francis galton and social debates over race deterioration. To stave off or reverse race deterioration, anthropometric projects would be marshaled to measure, mark, and rank bodily efficiency and fitness. Physical culture at midcentury: from sport and games to gymnastics With the 1859 publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, social analysts across the political spectrum began to articulate new discourses of fitness, degeneration, and the body, and methods for bodily discipline and control were enmeshed in evolutionary theory.3 Working-class bodies were a source of both wealth and disorder that could not be easily contained. Physical education in british schools became a culturally acceptable way to promote social stability. in considering physical education as a historically significant “site of production,” theorist David Kirk writes that “the themes of egalitarianism and social cohesion, consensus and nationalism were reworked and remade within physical education discourse and re-entered the endless cycle of cultural production to be appropriated by particular conditions and interests.”4 in britain as in the United States, the [18.208.172.3] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:03 GMT) Progress and race 85 • tensions of nation-state formation and social class stratification—as well as growing anxieties about labor efficiency—shaped physical culture, the field of physical education that emerged from it, and the technological tools deployed to measure its bodily effects. initially, physical culture was most fully developed at british public schools as sport and games, rather than military drill and gymnastics. Sport and games played a key role in the transformation of the public school system during the nineteenth century, producing the famed “cult of athleticism.”5 Adapting to the rising middle class’s quest for higher social status, and ideologically informed by the manly ideals of muscular Christianity, public school reform began in the 1840s.6 Along with courage and self-reliance, for the muscular Christians, sport and games—supplemented later by gymnastics— imbued young men with self-control, patience, and vigor, while also solidifying their class, racial, and...