They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic by Kenneth Cohen (review)

Like much of American culture, sports have often become overtly politicized terrain in recent years. But as Curator of Early American Culture at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, Kenneth Cohen, shows, the American sporting realm was a site of cultural, social, and political tension long before the National Football League, or even the national anthem, existed.

Interspersing the experiences of individual sportsmen into his examination of early American sporting venues (broadly defined to include taverns, billiard rooms, theatres, and racetracks), Cohen argues that these sites provided opportunities "for contesting and limiting elites' social authority while ultimately supporting their economic and political power" (p. 244). Building on and complicating the work of a generation of historians of early American sports culture, Cohen utilizes an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, including newspapers, letters, and other archival material, in support of his facially paradoxical assertion that sporting culture "simultaneously promoted egalitarianism and hierarchy on the Anglo-American mainland between 1750 and 1860" in sporting venues where "white men's shared right to access and engage made elites seem more like other white men, and thus made differences in wealth and power seem less unnatural and more reflective of superior ability and character" (pp. 3, 10).

In the decades before the American Revolution, wealthy colonists invested in sporting venues in part to "forge a more distinctive, exclusive, unified, and powerful colonial elite" (p. 23). These venues gave prominent colonists an opportunity to strengthen business relationships, flaunt their status, and consolidate political power. However, as tensions with Great Britain heightened in the 1770s, American colonies began banning horse racing, cock fighting, and plays in an attempt to foster cultural solidarity and to "scale back a politicized sporting culture that, by 1774, had gotten away from the gentlemen in Congress and jeopardized their leadership of the patriot movement" (p. 87).

In the aftermath of revolution, many Americans bristled against any whiff of aristocracy, including genteel sporting culture. However, investors in new sporting venues promoted their capacity to benefit all of society even as they pursued a broader goal of "the construction of economic and political systems that espoused competitive opportunism while rooting power among the few men with the assets and connections to control capital flows" (p. 127).

In the Antebellum era, the sporting realm engendered what Cohen calls an early form of mass culture, and survived reformers' efforts to eradicate it. As wealth became more concentrated in the United States, white men across the class spectrum used sport to assert their masculine status and to challenge stereotypes associated with their social class. The antebellum sports culture that embraced an "implied democratic opportunity and meritocracy" ultimately helped to legitimize the notion that the accumulation and preservation of wealth in America was inherently moral (p. 234). Tracking continuity and change within American sporting culture over the course of nearly a century, They Will Have Their Game covers an impressive amount of ground and will be essential reading for scholars of early American society and culture and of American sports history more broadly.