Notes
NOTES INTRODUCTION 1. Boston City Council, Report of the Proceedings (1898), 619; Philadelphia, Annual Report (1897), 150. 2. Watkins, Dancing with Strangers, 127–29. 3. By “northern United States” I mean the northeast quadrant of the country, roughly bounded by Washington, D.C., St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Boston. 4. Nasaw, Going Out, 2; Kasson, Amusing the Million, 4. See also Peiss, Cheap Amusements. 5. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, 4. 6. Matthew Pratt Guterl identifies a corresponding intellectual and cultural shift in the urban North. Building on thework of Matthew Jacobson, he argues that northerners reconstructed their notions of race along rigid black-white lines during the 1920s and 1930s. Early in the twentieth century, most northern whites perceived black Americans to be one among many different “races.” After World War I, however, they began to reconceive race along a biracial, black-white, raceas -skin-color division. See Guterl, Color of Race in America. 7. John Higham makes a similar argument about the cultural agency of the working classes in his seminal essay “The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s,” esp. 86–87. 8. National Recreation Association, Leisure Hours of 5,000 People, 9. 9. Fox and Lears, Culture of Consumption, x; Leach, Land of Desire, xv. See also Cross, An All-Consuming Century. CHAPTER ONE 1. “Almost a Riot: An Attack by Roughs on the Down-town Free Bath-House,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, June 25, 1884, 6. 2. For an institutional history of public baths in nineteenth-century America, see M. Williams, Washing “The Great Unwashed.” 3. Boston, By-Laws and Town-Orders, 74–75, in Altherr, Sports in North America, 21. 4. New York, Laws and Ordinances, 4, in Altherr, Sports in North America, 34. 5. Boston Columbian Sentinel, September 6, 1820, in Altherr, Sports in North America, 60–61. 6. Daniels, Puritans at Play, 174. 7. “Justis Runnin’ Wilde,” Milwaukee Sentinel, September 3, 1878, 8. 8. Milwaukee Sentinel, July 9, 1878, 2. 9. “Cherry Hill Swimmers: What Spring Means to Pier-Haunting East Side Boys,” New York Times, May 27, 1900, 8. 10. Milwaukee Sentinel, July 7, 1860, 1. 11. On the lax enforcement of municipal ordinances during the nineteenth century, see Hantzmon, “Forestalling.” 12. “Bathing within the City Limits,” Milwaukee Sentinel, June 25, 1858, 1. 13. Ibid. 14. On Victorian culture, see Howe, “American Victorianism as a Culture,” 507–32. Years after this first public debate about the swimming and bathing ordinance, an unnamed citizen wrote to the Sentinel a sardonic critique of the Victorian sensibilities that made such a law necessary. “The ordinance is made and enforced for the express accommodation of a parcel of weak, unwomanly, pinchedwaisted abortions of what might have been women, but who are nothing but walking dummies to exhibit dry goods upon; who never have children themselves , and do all they can to check health, happiness, and life in others. These are the namby-pamby, wishy-washy, poor excuses of poodle-dog fondling feminines , who are neither fish, flesh, nor good red herrings, but who float along in the scum of upper-tendom. Some of these, who pretend to be wives, but are not, complain to their male partners, who ought to be men and fathers but are not, that the sight of naked boys in the water, or on the beach, half a mile off, offends their sense of decency; and an ordinance prohibiting bathing is the consequence .” Implicit in this caricature of the men and women who favored the ban as being feminine, sterile, and morose was a serious critique of the Victorian moral order. The author praised the masculine, irreverent, and pleasurecentered behavior of the swimmers and denigrated the restrained culture of the middle class. In essence, he flipped the prevailing moral order on its head. See “Wash and Be Clean,” Milwaukee Sentinel, June 27, 1874, 3. 15. Milwaukee Sentinel, June 29, 1858, 1. 16. Milwaukee Sentinel, July 3, 1860, 1. 17. “Where Shall the Boys Swim?,” Milwaukee Sentinel, July 3, 1860, 1. 18. Milwaukee Sentinel, July 7, 1860, 1. 19. “Where Shall We Expose Ourselves?,” Milwaukee Sentinel, July 7, 1860, 1. 20. See Howe, Victorian America; Stevenson, Victorian Homefront. 21. “Where Shall We Expose Ourselves?,” 1. 22. Milwaukee Sentinel, June 25, 1858, 1. 23. Ryan, Women in Public, 58–94. 24. There were a few famous exceptions, most notably Benjamin Franklin and John Quincy Addams, but they were unusual among their contemporaries. The vast majority of early Americans did not know how to swim and rarely, if...
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