The Athletic Crusade: Sport and American Cultural Imperialism (review)

In 1914, a Chinese Hawaiian baseball team not only beat a squad from Occidental College, but also taunted the umpire and their opponents, and then enjoyed a banquet in Los Angeles's Chinatown. This small incident illustrates a larger dynamic elucidated in The Athletic Crusade. After baseball's introduction by Christian missionaries, plantation owners had promoted the sport among Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese, Filipino, and Korean workers to instill teamwork and discipline. Yet in the context of anti-Chinese racism in Hawaii and the mainland, the athletes employed baseball to resist an American ideology rooted in religious and racial superiority. In multiple contexts around the globe, Gerald Gems argues that "sport became a political tool of accommodation or resistance to the dominant power or a means to greater nationalistic identity" (150).

Gems first investigates China and Japan, where American cultural imperialism failed to take firm root. By 1910, the YMCA had staged a national athletic championship in Nanking. But the YMCA rarely reached the rural peasantry, and resentment of white racism hindered the spread of American sport. As in Japan, nationalism trumped a wholesale adoption of Western sport. The Japanese embraced baseball, of course, but used it to bolster national pride and reject white assumptions of cultural superiority. Baseball triumphs reflected Japan's rising status within Asia, and the maintenance of the bushido code suggested an adaptation of Western sport to Japanese ends.

Given the longstanding presence of United States military and business interests, American sport infiltrated the Philippines and Hawaii. "Baseball has done more to 'civilize' Filipinos than anything else," bragged General Franklin Bell, commander of U.S. forces in Manila (49). Hawaiian plantations and canneries supplied workers with sports equipment and facilities. Yet native people forged national identities through sport. Filipinos favored Tagalog over English, Catholicism over Protestantism, basketball over baseball. Hawaiians not only revived traditional practices such as canoe racing, but also exported cultural practices such as surfing.

Gems further explores different adaptations of sport within Latin America. In annexed and occupied Puerto Rico, sport provided not only a connection to the United States, but also a forum for national self-identification. In Fidel Castro's Cuba, by contrast, baseball embodied resistance to the United States. There the sport "has nurtured a nationalistic spirit, reconstructed a fragmented culture, exhibited machismo in times of oppression, and restored dignity and pride to the Cuban people" (98).

One wishes Gems applied his nuanced understanding of sport's political applications to the larger process of empire. In his telling, racism and exploitation seem an exclusive province of villainous Americans, and all forms of anti-colonial adaptation or resistance deserve equal commendation. The American Crusade nevertheless lends an important contribution to our understanding of the international ramifications of American sports.