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MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School

Certificate for Approving the Dissertation

We hereby approve the Dissertation

of

Aaron W. Miller

Candidate for the Degree:

Doctor of Philosophy

______Erik N. Jensen, Director

______Andrew Cayton, Reader

______Kimberly Hamlin, Reader

______Kevin Armitage, Graduate School Representative

ABSTRACT

GLORIOUS SUMMER: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY , 1861-1920 by Aaron W. Miller

In the decades after the Civil War, Americans turned baseball, a fad from , into their national obsession. Baseball’s apostles used the game’s Civil War experience to infuse it with militaristic, nationalistic, and patriotic themes. They mythologized the history of the game. Baseball’s explosive growth across the nation came with profound implications. Baseball formed a mass, united culture. Although Civil War soldiers played baseball to escape the dreariness and terror of life during war, the process of militarizing and imbuing the game with patriotic themes started even before the guns fell silent. As the sport spread nationally, it advanced a northern, middle-class vision of masculinity. Baseball shaped gender roles in the late nineteenth century. In the early days of baseball, women were important as spectators, yet the sporting culture lambasted their play. Of course, baseball also excluded racial minorities. Baseball’s promoters saw the game as a restorer of white masculinity, which many believed was atrophying. By the end of the dead-ball era, Americans thought that baseball was essential for national strength. Baseball helped reunify the nation after the sectional crisis. As Americans remembered the war, and baseball, in glorious military terms, they ignored the racial and political issues which drove the nation apart. The myth that , a Union general, invented baseball, would last for generations. Like the tenuous claims that played baseball, the continued the process of giving the national pastime a martial and patriotic ethos. As the marched off to fight , baseball was at its peak in terms of cultural and economic power. This cultural study examines a wide variety of sources. This dissertation examines Civil War diaries and journals for the details of baseball games at the front. It also explores the print media that was so important to the sporting culture during the late nineteenth century. This dissertation also investigates the works of early baseball luminaries such as , and Albert . Baseball’s fascinating early years provide invaluable insight into the story of America during the nineteenth century.

GLORIOUS SUMMER: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY BASEBALL, 1861-1920 A DISSERTATION

Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy History Department

by

Aaron W. Miller Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2012

Dissertation Director: Erik N. Jensen

© Aaron W. Miller 2012

Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 1

I. War Games: Making Meaning of Baseball's Civil War Proliferation, 1857-1870 ...... 17

II. Making Manly Muscle: Defining Gender Roles in Nineteenth-Century Baseball, 1862- 1899...... 38

III. Finding Glory in the Summers of Discontent: Building Baseball’s Warrior Mythos and Restoring the Union ...... 76

Conclusion ...... 111

Annotated Bibliography ...... 119

iii

List of Illustrations

Union Prisoners at Salisbury, N.C...... 29

Jefferson Davis as an Unprotected Female! ...... 44

The Call for Volunteers—1861 ...... 104

iv

For Erin, my sunshine

v

Acknowledgements

This dissertation would not have been possible without the guidance of Erik N. Jensen, a scholar and a true gentleman. I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Erik for his encouragement, patience, thoughtfulness, and insight. Kevin Armitage, Andrew Cayton, and Kimberly Hamlin were dedicated readers that took the time to provide awesome feedback and suggestions for the future of this study. I would also like to express my appreciation to the rest of the Miami University History Department’s faculty and staff.

I would like to thank my friends and family for their love and support. From an early age, my parents, Stan and Jimi Miller, taught me a love of reading, writing and understanding the past. I wish to thank my brothers, Nathaneal and Thaddeus Miller, who stand by me through thick and thin.

Erin, I could not have done this without you and I would not want to. Thank you for your love, your faith in me, and proofreading.

vi

Introduction Research Question One persistent and bold baseball legend highlights the importance of the nineteenth century in the game’s background. The legend takes place in the grim hours after John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln. According to the story, Lincoln, surrounded by grieving government officials and friends, lay dying. The mortally wounded president summoned the strength for his final words. With his dying gasp, Lincoln told Union General Abner Doubleday, the alleged inventor of baseball, “Don’t let baseball die.”1 The story is a complete fabrication; Lincoln said nothing after Booth shot him. The story was probably the invention of Bill Stern, a radio sportscaster during the 1940s.2 Although the story originates during the twentieth century, it underscores the importance of the nineteenth century to the lore of the game. The tale takes place in the waning days of the Civil War and inserts Abraham Lincoln into the history of the game. It also emphasizes Abner Doubleday’s mythical invention of the game. The Civil War, Lincoln, and Doubleday are recurring themes in baseball’s nineteenth-century mythology. Baseball is a nineteenth-century game. Americans created the modern form of baseball in the nineteenth century. It became the American national pastime during the nineteenth century. And in many ways, the game tries to remain a nineteenth-century game. It has long rejected modern advances such as a game clock, instant replay, or the use of metal bats in the major leagues. It sells itself as a relic from the pre-industrial world. But like so much of baseball, this is a myth. After all, players try to use the latest chemicals to enhance their play while management employs sophisticated statistical analysis to make personnel decisions. In baseball, however, the myth is often times more important than the facts. This dissertation’s title underscores the role baseball played during the nineteenth century. “Glorious Summer,” is from William Shakespeare’s historical play, Richard III. In the play’s opening soliloquy, Richard of Gloucester plots to take the throne. Richard’s

1 William B. Mead and Paul Dickson, Baseball: The Presidents’ Game (, DC: Farragut Publishing, 1993), 9.

2 Ibid.

1

brother, Edward IV, has just taken the crown after winning a victory during the Wars of the Roses. Richard reflects, “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York.” In other words, with Edward’s victory, was now enjoying peace. Of course, Richard is setting the stage for a coup. In terms of United States history, the Civil War was the American winter of discontent. In the years that followed, Americans glamorized the war and saw it as glorious. As Americans bound the nation’s wounds in the decades after the war, they ignored the war’s racial issues and glorified the combat experience. Baseball encouraged that process. After all, Americans celebrated baseball, a summer game, as a glorious pastime derived from the Civil War. Shakespeare’s reflection of the era after a civil war could have fit American history as well as British history. With baseball’s antebellum period as its spring of beginnings, my study follows baseball in its metaphorical summer, a heyday of growth and possibilities. The post-Black Sox era autumn was a resurgence, a golden age of celebrity players that captured the nation’s attention. Now professional football earns more revenue and large- market teams dominate baseball. With the sport also mired in doping scandals, perhaps the national pastime is in its winter. Baseball, the game of the nineteenth century, remains important to the American sporting culture—but it no longer stands alone in the spotlight. For the 2012 season, over 80 million spectators will attend a game. Major League Baseball alone will gross over seven billion dollars in revenue, thanks largely to teams’ lucrative contracts with regional cable networks. In contrast, the National Football League will exceed nine billion dollars in revenue in 2012. The pre-game television programs for National Football League games enjoy better ratings than prime-time baseball playoff contests. Football’s popularity may be due to the speed and violence of play. Professional football also plays fewer games and is also popular at the college level, feeding into the professionals. By comparison, baseball’s pace is much slower. Games can continue for hours without a score. It is not as television-friendly as football. At times, it is a relic from the nineteenth century. The central question of this dissertation examines how baseball, in its nascent stage, influenced nineteenth-century American history. Baseball, as the national pastime, shaped ideas about war, masculinity, and remembrance of the Civil War. Baseball

2 constructed a history that reinforced its place in nineteenth-century American culture. In this constructed history, baseball emphasized its Civil War past. During baseball’s early years, the game also influenced ideas about masculinity. Long before Bill Stern created the Lincoln assassination tale, other Americans invented baseball’s history. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans struggled to explain baseball’s origins and dynamic growth. Thus, they created a history for the game based on fact and fiction. This created history reflected important themes and events from the nineteenth century. Baseball was a product of nineteenth-century American culture. The Civil War, post-bellum normative ideals of masculinity and femininity, and the Industrial Revolution all had a profound influence on the game and its culture. As the game reached its national pastime status, it tapped into romantic myths about war, masculinity, and even the frontier. An examination of baseball during its early years is also an appraisal of the United States during the nineteenth century. As a form of mass culture, baseball shaped American life during the nineteenth century. Thus our focus is on the long nineteenth century, examining baseball in a larger framework. Historian Jacques Barzun wrote, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.”3 Barzun’s pithy quotation is particularly apropos when discussing baseball during the nineteenth century. The game evolved, grew in popularity, and attained its place as the national pastime during the late 1800s. To give a sense of the sport’s dramatic growth, consider that, in 1857, 16 baseball clubs attended the first baseball convention in New York City and joined the National Association of Base Ball Players, baseball’s first regulating body. Within the next few years, dozens of new teams sprouted up across the city. While the Civil War limited growth on the home front, soldiers managed to take the game with them to the battlefront. After the war, baseball spread beyond the urban northeast to the Midwest. By 1865, over 100 teams had joined the National Association. Two years later, over 300 teams attended the National Association’s convention.4 Teams across the country enjoyed the adoration of thousands of fans. Thousands more read

3 Barzun, Jacques. A Jacques Barzun Reader: Selections from His Works (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 437.

4 Alexander, Charles. Our Game: An American Baseball History (New York: Fine Communications, 1997), 14. 3 newspapers dedicated solely to baseball and the sporting culture. By the 1870s, the game professionalized. The game also spread to other levels. Not only were children and professional clubs playing the game, but college teams began to pick up bats and balls. By the close of the century, baseball had become a major industry. Baseball’s growth and financial power followed a pattern of the larger economic transitions taking place in the United States. During the late nineteenth century, the United States was the epicenter of an industrial revolution. Baseball benefited from the subsequent urban growth, revolutions in public transportation and communication technology. Baseball needed a large fan base that could afford to go to games. The city also provided the media for a sporting culture. Baseball mirrored other facets of American culture. During an era of white male dominance in the public sphere, the game excluded women and non-whites as players. White baseball clubs refused to play African-American teams. In the late 1800s, excluded black players. Women, although they played baseball, were mocked and derided for their efforts. Baseball is intimately entwined with nineteenth-century American history. I argue in this dissertation that baseball helped to reunify the nation recently torn apart by Civil War through its symbolic and mythic enactments and language. The legends attributed to baseball (and its ostensible spread during the war, as well as the role of the military man Abner Doubleday) sought to reunite a country around a common myth of a national pastime that emerged from a shared national trauma. Mythmakers simultaneously ignored the carnage of war and highlighted the contributions of veterans to reuniting the nation through sport. This dissertation argues that baseball is a symbol of how Americans mythologized America’s most cataclysmic war and used a sport to form a national identity. Baseball created a mass culture. Americans followed a shared game and united in a common experience. Baseball influenced American memory of the Civil War, formed a national culture, and reflected the growing concerns about American men and muscle. Americans played the sport while at war. The game dramatically spread in the decades following the war. Baseball’s advocates subsequently turned that connection with the Civil War into a mythology. To highlight the martial, masculine and physical benefits of the game, they underscored baseball’s factual and fictitious connections to America’s most costly war.

4 Historiography Baseball scholarship is frequently frustrating, for it often focuses narrowly on the sport. The game’s historiography often fails to connect to a broader historical context. Thus I wanted to connect baseball to larger historical events of the nineteenth century and to elevate the level of baseball scholarship. Meanwhile, scholarship of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States often ignores baseball as inconsequential or as a cultural detail. Michael McGerr’s 2003 book on the Progressive Era, A Fierce Discontent, includes baseball only as a part of a greater leisure trend. McGerr’s book is a culturally oriented examination of the Progressive Era. But baseball finds a place in McGerr’s book only as a pastime along with ragtime, vaudeville, and motion pictures. T. J. Jackson Lears’ Rebirth of a Nation illuminates the transformations taking place in the decades after the Civil War. Lears’ dense cultural history, published in 2009, ignores the national pastime entirely. Lears argues that the decades after the Civil War were a time of regeneration and recuperation for the United States. Following the death and destruction of the Civil War, the United States embarked on an era of reform and improvement, with a Protestant Christian agenda. But in addition to temperance and anti- vice movements, American regeneration took the form of staggering economic growth during the Gilded Age. Lears couches numerous historical phenomena such as the fad of bodybuilding, prohibition efforts, and even World War I as crusades to regenerate the United States. The regeneration takes place against the backdrop of an uncertain future. Economic scarcity provided conflict between working class and capital and increased tensions between ethnic groups. Regeneration also took the form of militarism and jingoism. Imperialism provided both personal and national opportunities for heroism and conquest. Tragically, the culmination of the regeneration process only led to another conflict, World War I. Americans saw the war as a crusade to prove their national greatness and individual heroism. The rise of baseball in the late nineteenth century reinforces Lears’ central argument. Although Lears connects his theme of regeneration to the physical body and the fears held by many Americans, he does not examine baseball. He does give the Young Men’s Christian Association and the Muscular Christianity movement as examples of American

5 culture fighting to restore its physical prowess. Baseball cast itself as a heroic game that could reinforce themes of militarism. Ostensibly, baseball was a wholesome sport that could save and restore the masculine form. According to its supporters, baseball was even an important contributor to the World War I crusade. Baseball celebrated its Civil War experience while providing the very regeneration Lears examines. Another text that also underscores the imperialism of the Progressive Era is The Rise of Militarism in the Progressive Era by Roger Possner. The 2009 text argues the American military establishment worked to invoke a martial spirit in the American people. Possner sees this militaristic impulse as a vein of . After all, Progressives and the military valued a united, uniform society that advanced the American agenda. Possner focuses on William McKinley’s administration, including Elihu Root, , and . The American military advocated training at the high-school level. These leaders also wanted a stronger National Guard and a professional recruiting campaign. Military tournaments and shooting exercises were popular spectator events that sparked interest in military affairs. Of course, as Possner points out, the National Guard would be used domestically to subdue racial and labor unrest. Although Possner admits this is an elite history, he fails to acknowledge the power of jingoism in late nineteenth-century American culture. Possner’s biggest problem is ignoring the American culture outside of the military. The Rise of Militarism in the Progressive Era would have benefited from examining sporting life, particularly baseball. The only athletics Possner discusses is the 1908 Army-Navy football game. But by the early twentieth century, baseball had instilled patriotic and militaristic themes in its culture. The game, like American military leaders, romanticized the Civil War and the accomplishments of its veterans. Historian Daniel Bender provides a mixed cultural and economic interpretation of the same era in American Abyss. Also published in 2009, American Abyss examines the industrialization of the era in a racial context. Bender argues that many Americans saw industrialization as the highpoint of civilization. Industrialization was the pinnacle of civilization, with Americans at the forefront due to their racial superiority. At the time, the Stone Age and cavemen fascinated Americans as counterpoints to the success of their society. Bender casts progressive reformers as expeditions into an urban jungle. The

6 view that inferior races failed to industrialize led to nativism and support of . Again, baseball’s nineteenth-century history reinforces elements of Bender’s argument. Baseball sold itself, in part, as a builder of American strength in the face of too much civilization and white-collar jobs. The national pastime was also a means for immigrants to integrate into acceptable American society. The recent scholarship on athletics and masculinity provides a better blueprint of how to study baseball’s early culture and its significance as the national pastime. For example, Kristin Hoganson’s Fighting for American Manhood argues for the importance of gender politics in . In the 1998 text, Hoganson contends that masculine ideals played a role in the American involvement in the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection. Americans fought these wars at a time when the jingoistic culture feared its men were weak. But baseball, the national pastime, is only mentioned once. A more thorough examination of the impact of the militaristic and patriotic themes of baseball is certainly warranted. Fear is a central theme of John Kasson’s , Tarzan and the Perfect Man. Kasson argues in the 2001 text that Americans both feared and envied non-white races for their physical prowess. Ostensibly, Americans grew weaker due to the comforts of modern life. Clifford Putney adds a religious dimension to the analysis of gender and sports in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Muscular Christianity, a 2001 text, Putney contends that American Protestants had disdained athletics, claiming that it was hedonistic and led to vice. But as they feared the supposed weakness of the American male, they chose to embrace sports. American Christians needed to be physically strong to spread the American culture through imperialism. Meanwhile, Michael Kimmel’s Manhood in America has a longer perspective in its study of American masculinity. In the 1996 book, Kimmel argues that male gender identity shaped American culture and politics. Kimmel believes that a desire for success, particularly economic success, reinforced the masculine ideal in American life. But the notion of masculinity was dynamic; historical forces shaped what the masculine ideal should be. Unfortunately, none of these scholars pay significant attention to baseball and its influence on the long nineteenth century. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth

7 centuries, baseball was big business and a cultural force. The game enacted masculine rituals and provided perhaps the biggest public display of masculine traits, and my dissertation explores baseball within the framework of gender. But in order to examine baseball’s gender beginnings, its purported connections to war, specifically the Civil War, deserves attention. Therefore, my work expands on more traditional lenses of analysis such as race, gender and class. It is clear that during the nineteenth century, war and memory had a profound impact on America’s national pastime. The 2008 book, This Republic of Suffering, by Drew Gilpin Faust provides insight into how Americans coped with, and remembered the tragedy of the . Similarly, David Blight’s Race and Reunion examines the memory of the Civil War. Blight’s 2001 text argues that Americans embraced the warrior mythology of the war while ignoring the racial ramifications of the conflict. My work aims to continue the trend of examining the impact and memory of the Civil War. The study of the impact of the Civil War on baseball is another means of examining the war and its memory. As far as the subfield of baseball history, the majority of modern academic baseball histories focus on the twentieth century rather than baseball’s early years. Writers from diverse backgrounds have made substantial contributions to the study of baseball’s nineteenth century, including professional historians, librarians, journalists, and amateur baseball scholars. The wide-ranging backgrounds from the contributors lend diversity to the subfield of baseball history, but it also means that baseball history lacks cohesiveness. These scholars often ignore the larger historical context in their pursuit of interesting baseball stories. The first academic ’s early years was Robert W. Henderson’s Ball, Bat and Bishop: The Origins of Ball Games in 1947. Henderson was a librarian for the New York Public Library, as well as for the Racquet and Tennis Club of New York. Henderson was the first scholar to attack the commonly held belief that former Union general Abner Doubleday invented baseball. Another early academic text, Harold Seymour’s 1960 work, Baseball: The Early Years similarly focuses on the game’s genesis. Published by Oxford University Press, Seymour’s book traces its evolution from eighteenth-century folk games to the amateur era and the beginnings of the major leagues. Seymour and Henderson set a pattern that recent scholarship continues. In the

8 2005 text, Baseball Before We Knew It, David Block argues that , , and paved the way for baseball. Philip Block, a contributor to the book, explores Albert Spalding’s motivations for supporting the idea that Abner Doubleday invented baseball. Philip Block contends that Spalding, a member of the American Theosophical Society, wanted to prove that another former member, Abner Doubleday, invented the game. Major League Baseball’s official historian, , also searches for the moment of invention in Baseball in the Garden of Eden. Thorn’s 2011 book argues that baseball was the descendant of ancient stick and ball games that morphed into baseball over time. Thorn returns to the traditional narrative of nineteenth-century baseball history, following the game’s turn from amateurism to professionalism. Thorn acknowledges the power of mythology in baseball’s past, and attacks the persistent Doubleday story. In the 1980s and 1990s, baseball scholarship turned to economic interpretations, examining the connections between early baseball and economic issues of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example, historians have argued that the development of the modern city was crucial for the growth of baseball. Melvin Adelman’s A Sporting Time, centers his study on sports in New York City. Adelman’s 1986 work connects the process of modernization to the rise of sports. Sports historian Steven Riess echoes this conclusion. In the 1991 text, City Games, Riess argues that the American city provided the necessary infrastructure and culture necessary for sporting life. Urbanization is another of the economic changes that historians have examined while studying early baseball. Warren Goldstein’s Playing for Keeps follows the economic transitions of the late nineteenth century. Goldstein’s 1989 text argues that baseball went through an economic transition similar to class struggles of the nineteenth century. Playing for Keeps is an important book to the field, following the game from its status as social clubs to that of a professional entertainment. Goldstein also launches an important discussion of whether baseball was a sport designed for men or boys. Robert Burk’s Never Just a Game examines baseball in an economic context. The 2000 book argues that players were unable to make gains against management in the early years. Management, Burk argues, believed they were the protectors of a national treasure from the antebellum era, emphasizing the idea that baseball predated the Civil War.

9 More recent scholarship has turned its attention to the explosive growth of baseball after the Civil War. In When Johnny Came Sliding Home, baseball scholar William Ryczek connects baseball growth to the economic changes of the late nineteenth century. In a wage economy, people now had dedicated leisure time to watch or play baseball. Although Ryczek’s book is less a monograph and more a collection of essays, the 1998 text examines baseball’s color line, and the role of women as spectators in the early game. But despite its title, the book lacks a thorough examination of the Civil War’s mythological impact on baseball. Similarly, Baseball in Blue and Gray: The National Pastime during the Civil War explores baseball during the Civil War, but fails to examine the implications of baseball’s martial culture. George B. Kirsch’s 2003 text argues that initially the game’s growth slowed during the war, but the war spread the game to new players. Although Kirsch makes vague suggestions that war connected baseball to nationalism, he does not examine how that connection arose or operated. Baseball in Blue and Gray lacks an examination of the cultural effects of the war on the game, and how baseball used the legacy of the war in the early twentieth century. An emerging aspect of nineteenth-century baseball scholarship is a study of baseball’s international expansion. Journalist Mark Lamster’s 2006 book, Spalding’s World Tour, details the travels of Albert Spalding’s all-star team. In 1888 and 1889, the team toured the world, extolling the benefits of America’s game. Their globetrotting made them heroes at home. But as Lamster points out, the trip was a precursor to labor issues between players and owners. Another text that examines baseball’s international influence is The Empire Strikes Out by Robert Elias. In the 2010 book, Elias argues that baseball played an important role in American imperialism. Baseball promoted American ideology abroad; policymakers enlisted baseball as a tool to westernize colonies. Elias’s analysis does include some discussion of the role of baseball during the Civil War, but it fails to explain how the game became innately connected to the American way of life. His work is missing an analysis of the process of how baseball became a symbol of American strength. Methodology To understand the connections between war, gender, and the national pastime during the nineteenth century, this dissertation casts a broad net. Jules Tygiel’s Pastime:

10 Baseball as History argues for the study of baseball as a leans to explore larger forces in American society and history. Tygiel acknowledges the contributions of Warren Susman’s Culture as History. Tygiel’s work, a collection of essays, applies Susman’s theoretical framework to the study of baseball. Tygiel, as well as Susman, argue that each era in American history has its unique rhetoric, language and rituals. Considering that most baseball histories focus on the twentieth century, this makes the study of the nineteenth-century game all the more valuable. For studying baseball’s early years is a means of unlocking the nineteenth century. Although Culture as History is a series of essays on American history during the twentieth century, Susman’s framework stresses the power of myth to a culture. Susman argues that Americans used history as a means of justifying and eternalizing their past. What happened was not as important as to extolling the greatness and virtues of American culture. Baseball’s conscious emphasis of its nineteenth-century history certainly reflects that theme. History was a means of creating myth. Susman argues that the Americans began their mythmaking in the 1920s, with the rise of a common culture. But baseball was a common form of entertainment and culture long before. It gave Americans common legends and heroes beginning in the 1860s. Thus, this dissertation is an exploration of the complex and sometimes contradictory rhetoric of nineteenth-century baseball culture. Richard Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation also emphasizes the importance of myth in American culture. Gunfighter Nation, part of a trilogy on violence in American history, examines the influence of frontier history and mythology on American culture. Slotkin uses fictional and non-fictional sources to examine how these texts can fuse together to form a common mythology. Slotkin also uses textual as well as visual sources to examine the frontier. This is an approach similar to one that Susman advocates. Baseball sources function the same way; they are often a blend of fact and fiction. Baseball, like the frontier, casts a long shadow on the twentieth century. Slotkin’s work seeks out the themes of heroism, celebrity, strength, and masculinity in frontier literature. While studying the tropes and myths of a sport and its culture, this dissertation is also a gender study. It owes much to the previously mentioned landmark study of masculinity, Manhood in America, by Michael Kimmel. Manhood in America serves as a terrific model for using masculinity as a lens to examine broader American history.

11 Kimmel also examines the models of American masculinity during the nineteenth century such as the self-made man. Another influential work on the relationship between masculinity and history is Elliott Gorn’s The Manly Art. Gorn’s study of bare-knuckle boxing shares much with this dissertation. Gorn’s work is a gender history that focuses on sport during the nineteenth century. Boxing shared a similar historical trajectory to baseball. Boxing, like baseball, descended from an English tradition. It transformed from antebellum folk contests to a popular entertainment by the end of the century. Gorn suggests that his study is folk history. It also delves into working and middle-class history. Boxing and baseball both study the meanings of heroism, celebrity, and escapism in American society. Gorn examines nineteenth-century sporting literature that baseball scholars would also do well to explore, including New York City newspapers, sporting journals and the National Police Gazette. Gorn’s approach is also multi-faceted, using gender, cultural, social, and class historical approaches to examine a nineteenth-century sporting phenomenon, all of which have influenced my own approach to the study of baseball. In terms of primary research, this dissertation relies on a wide array of sources. When studying nineteenth-century baseball, a historian cannot simply delve into a central collection or archive. Instead, baseball historians count on a variety of newspapers, baseball publications, and the writings of players and executives. Of course, journals, diaries and letters are an important source for details about Civil War baseball. But the details of baseball in most of these diaries and journals are relatively small. Baseball is not the focus of these writings; it was just another mundane detail of Civil War life. In terms of examining changing attitudes about the Civil War in the late nineteenth century, the Century Magazine is another important primary source. The Century, a New York City publication, included a wide variety of journalism, fiction and poetry. It began a popular series on Civil War battles and generals in the 1880s. Baseball scholars must be aware of the changing rules of the nineteenth century. It was during this time that clubs standardized rules. Teams embraced overhand pitching, standardized distances on the baseball diamond, and ended the practice of calling outs after catching the ball on a single bounce. The rules appeared in baseball annual guides

12 such as Beadle’s Dime Baseball Player and Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guide. These books were almanacs, but also had advertisements and advice for new players. Perhaps the most important primary sources for nineteenth-century baseball researchers are the sports-themed periodicals of the era. Fortunately, many of these are on searchable databases. Unfortunately, many of these periodicals are incomplete, with missing or damaged issues. One of these important sporting papers was the New York Clipper. Publisher Frank Queen started the weekly newspaper, one of the first devoted exclusively to entertainment, in 1853. Although it covered a wide variety of events, including theater, music and the circus, it heavily promoted baseball, and contributed to popularizing the game. Another important entertainment and sporting newspaper of the era was the Spirit of the Times. The newspaper covered sports including horse racing, baseball, and football. It also included fiction, humor, and theater. Another important sports periodical of the era is the National Police Gazette. The Gazette, a centerpiece of the masculine sporting culture, often featured lurid and titillating images and stories. Since New York City was the epicenter of the game’s development and growth, is also an important source for researchers. It enjoys the added advantage of being complete and easy to access or search. The Times frequently covered early games with box scores and commentaries on baseball in society. The Times started publication in 1851 as a conservative political paper, but over time gained a reputation for objectivity compared to other daily New York newspapers. Another important and popular nineteenth-century newspaper was the Daily Eagle. The Eagle provides baseball researchers invaluable articles on early games. National periodicals are also crucial in examining baseball’s early years. Baseball Magazine is an important source for historians studying baseball of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The magazine often served as a mouthpiece for Major League Baseball, with articles written by owners and management. But it also featured players writing with their ideas about the game. Published from 1908 to 1920, the magazine offers an interesting perspective on baseball’s history, often discussing baseball’s beginnings and history during the Civil War. Outing, a monthly magazine, featured articles on hunting, shooting sports, nature travel and adventure fiction. Another outdoor publication that featured stories about baseball was Forest and Stream,

13 forerunner to Field and Stream. Baseball’s presence in Forest and Stream, as well as Outing, underscores the perception of baseball as a vigorous outdoor activity. In addition to periodicals, there are numerous contemporary books that give historians invaluable insight into baseball’s early years. From 1866, Charles Peverelly's Book of American Pastimes discusses the early years of American sports, including baseball, cricket, rowing, and sailing. The text included a chapter on baseball. Although not a narrative of baseball history, it is an early almanac of games and early clubs. Peverelly’s book also includes the rules set forth by the National Association in 1866. Former players wrote some of the most important texts available to researchers. John Montgomery Ward’s book, Base-Ball: How to Become a Player, is an interesting source for historians to examine. Ward was a Hall of Fame player and . Ward had a keen mind; he was a Columbia University law school graduate. Ward also led the first player’s union, the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players. Ward’s book includes a history of the game. It is also an instruction book for aspiring players and spectators of the game. Another fascinating text for baseball scholars is Albert Spalding’s America’s National Game. As a dominant player, owner, and sporting goods magnate, his text reveals the philosophies and beliefs of one of baseball’s most influential figures of the dead-ball era. Printed in 1911, Spalding attempted to write a comprehensive history of baseball. Spalding combined his own beliefs with Henry Chadwick’s research. But instead of a well-researched history and analysis, Spalding relies on hearsay and mythology. The Civil War and America’s military strength are at the heart of Spalding’s book. Spalding emphasizes the Civil War’s contributions to the game. He highlights the importance of the game to American strength. Spalding’s book also includes the final report of the Mills Commission, which named Abner Doubleday as baseball’s inventor. Along with Ward and Spalding, there are other insightful works by baseball players of the era. For example, wrote of his experiences in Pitching in a Pinch. Mathewson also discusses the psychology of the early game, and includes anecdotes of his playing career. Another former player, Zane Grey, turned his playing exploits into fodder for his early youth fiction. Of course, Grey would go on to greater

14 fame as a frontier fiction writer. Grey wrote three books of baseball stories: The Red Headed and Other Baseball Stories, The Short Stop and The Young . Although he was not a former professional player, C. H. Claudy’s text, The Battle of Base-Ball, is a fascinating artifact. The 1912 text emphasizes the similarities between war and baseball. The book is an instruction guide that gives advice in every facet of the game, making connections between war and the sport. The texts of early twentieth-century physical educators Luther Gulick and Dudley Sargent provide important insight into beliefs about the body and sports. Although baseball is not the central topic of these books, they underscore the burgeoning scientific study of athletics. They also reflect the increasing desire to increase the importance of sports in American Culture. Similarly, Theodore Roosevelt’s The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses also stresses the importance of manly activities and sports. Originally published in 1900, the future president admired the Civil War generation, and feared weakening masculinity. Organization This dissertation uses a thematic approach for each chapter that also follows a tidy temporal advance of baseball through the nineteenth century. The first chapter argues that during the Civil War, the sporting media elevated baseball to the national pastime, emphasizing the masculine, warrior traits of the game. But soldiers played the game as an escape from boredom and horrors. A mythical description of baseball as central to the Civil War experience played a key role in cementing the game in the American imagination. Ultimately, this new national pastime could ostensibly act as a national unifier. In the second chapter, I argue that baseball spread its particular version of masculinity as it proliferated in the post-war era. Baseball expanded a middle-class, northern notion of masculinity. Baseball promised to restore the male body, mind and spirit, and thus, I argue, the sport was already a clearly gendered performance, beginning in its earliest years, adhering closely to the traditional gender roles of the era. Baseball was an exercise for men to prove their strength and virility. Although women were welcomed as spectators, they were rejected as players. The press made light of any effort by women to play the national pastime.

15 In the last chapter, I argue that baseball helped unite American culture in the late nineteenth century. Baseball’s culture emphasized its Civil War heritage to underscore the game’s warrior, masculine, and martial merits. Baseball’s ascent to the national pastime was more than the popularization of a game. The formation of a national pastime was a process where baseball was imbued with patriotic and martial themes. After the Civil War, Americans focused on the military aspects of the conflict instead of its underlying causes and social fallout. Baseball created a warrior mythology that served this purpose: to reunite the country and instill a common culture across the former sectional divide. Baseball is a nineteenth-century artifact that continues into the twenty first century. But baseball is an artifact with a heavy coating of fable. Its past is murky, buried in a combination of history, legend and myth. To unravel this past, as well as to contextualize its larger role in American history, we need to examine how baseball gained its tropes and themes. After the Civil War, the game became a symbol of national unity and pride. Baseball could be a restorer of rugged health and virility. Americans imbued their national pastime with militaristic and patriotic symbols. They cast their national pastime as a wholesome, healthy game with a glorious past. Americans invented a national pastime that marched home from war to rebuild the nation.

16 Chapter One War Games: Making Meaning of Baseball’s Civil War Proliferation, 1857-1870 Introduction The national calamity and the national pastime are brothers in American history. Between moments of drudgery, terror, and boredom, soldiers on both sides of the Civil War found escape playing baseball. But after the fighting ended, the war remained an important element of the national pastime. And in the years following the conflict, the game spread like wildfire. Historians have struggled to define the exact relationship between the war and the national pastime. Baseball scholars have long emphasized the war’s powerful role in promoting cross-cultural exchange. They stress how soldiers taught baseball to each other in camp and prisons. Scholars stress how veterans brought the game home with them, and spread it across the country. But baseball historians have ignored the meaning behind the game’s coming of age during the war. Baseball’s spread out of the Northeast and into the West and South during and shortly after the Civil War had significant implications for American culture. First, baseball’s expansion meant the proliferation of the baseball player as a masculine ideal. The baseball player displayed a uniquely northern version of masculinity. With a Union victory, the notions of northern masculinity trumped the competing southern ideal. In the years after the war, as baseball mythologized its past, the baseball player would be coupled with that of a warrior. The second profound implication of baseball’s proliferation during the Civil War was that the game encouraged a national, unified culture. Thus, baseball was both an agent and a symbol of change for new ideals about masculinity, war, and culture. These ideals were formed in the urban centers of the Northeast, not in the Confederacy. The consequences of baseball’s rise were apparent even before the guns were silent. This chapter will argue that even before the war ended, media elevated baseball to the national pastime and then exploited its role during the war. Thus, the sporting press, and not the soldiers themselves, played the key role in popularizing the game in the aftermath of war and constructed the notion of a “national pastime” around a fundamentally northern game and culture. This chapter will also argue that although baseball was a distinctly northern game, it promoted itself as a national unifier. Subsequent chapters

17 will argue that in the decades following the war, these trends only continued, with baseball’s leaders orchestrating the mythologization of baseball during the war to make baseball a national phenomena; one that millions of Americans consumed as a joint national culture. But Civil War soldiers who picked up a bat and ball were not concerned with spreading a unified national culture or prevailing northern notions of masculinity. During the war, soldiers had a different perception of the game’s role. They played it entirely for fun, without much thought as to whether the game reflected a particular region or fostered a national identity. Baseball was a distraction from the mundane, tedious and dangerous life of a soldier. They did not ascribe any greater meaning to their diversion. Baseball was simultaneously a grassroots movement and a northern media campaign. An example of the proliferation of the game as a result of the war is player Jim “Deacon” White. White, a teenager living near the farming community of Corning, New York, learned baseball from a returning soldier.5 White went on to an outstanding professional career. He spent time with a number of powerful clubs, including the Red Stockings, the White Stockings, and the . An outstanding hitter, White played over 20 years with a career .300 average. White is an example of veterans bringing the war home with them to teach a new generation of players. The returning-veteran-as-baseball-proselytizer stories emerged out of ’s relationship with future baseball magnate Albert G. Spalding. White’s playing time with Spalding is the source of Spalding’s belief in the importance of the war spreading the game.6 Spalding wrote one of the first histories of the national pastime, America’s National Game. The Civil War was at the heart of Spalding’s 1911 book. Spalding believed that the war gave the game its patriotic, martial and masculine virtues.

5 , But Wasn’t It Fun? An Informal History of Baseball’s Pioneer Era, 1843-1870 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publishing, 2008), 154-155.

6 Ibid.

18 Even before the end of the war, the American press glamorized the role of baseball in the conflict. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Civil War mythology played an integral role in the extension of the game. With the Civil War history firmly embedded in the game’s mythology, the sport’s apostles accentuated themes of heroism, manliness, and even patriotism in the national pastime. The patriotism advanced by the national pastime was an attachment and loyalty to a united country; it wiped away the memory of sectional conflict. Baseball’s mythology advanced the idea that regardless of sectional allegiance, a united America played baseball. Baseball’s mythologists supported the claim that baseball united the post-war country. But baseball was a product of the urban northeast and signified a victory of northern industrial culture. It is important to distinguish the game of baseball from the national pastime depiction of the sport. While baseball was a game, the national pastime was the larger mythology that Americans attached to the sport, and that culture emerged out of the Civil War. Baseball’s enthusiasts and leaders, such as Spalding, believed that the war was a critical factor in the proliferation of baseball. They helped to propagate that message. Spalding used his influence as a sporting goods magnate and publisher to promote his version of the game’s history. To thoroughly investigate baseball during the Civil War, I examined a variety of primary sources. Baseball is present in many Civil War soldiers’ letters, journals, diaries and memoirs. Some of these accounts give great details, while others just mention the game in passing. This chapter juxtaposes those sources with the growing baseball coverage in the print media of the time. The New York Clipper and the New York Times supply vital information on baseball’s growing cultural influence. Lastly, the changing rules of baseball’s governing body, the National Association, highlight the game in transition. This chapter begins with an examination of how soldiers took the game with them to war. To the men who fought the war, the meaning of the game was about amusement and passing the time. Secondly, this chapter will examine how even before the war ended, the sporting press had already begun its campaign of elevating baseball to the status of national pastime, exploiting and exaggerating the game’s role during the war. Thus, the press, and not the returning soldiers, glorified the game and constructed a national

19 pastime. Lastly, this chapter argues that baseball, while passing itself off as a national game that could heal the sectional divide, was a sport born in and dominated by the North. The game was the beginning of a unified mass culture for the United States. Baseball During the War: Amusement in Camp and Prison Civil War soldiers played baseball for fun; it was a diversion in a time of boredom and homesickness. They were not consciously advancing a northern culture, nor were they suggesting a curative to link the nation culturally after the war. Life in the army for both the Federals and the Confederates was a tremendous social experience. New recruits left home far behind, many for the first time. They traveled a great distance, and experienced a new life. This included the horrors of battle, but also the cross-cultural connections with other soldiers. Life in the army during the war was transformative. It was a shared experience. The Civil War was a time that many veterans, and the culture as a whole, romanticized and reminisced about for decades after the war. Baseball was a part of that military life and the later romanticizing of that experience. The Civil War was an essential development in the history of baseball in terms of building a collective memory of the game. But in subsequent decades, as baseball fans distorted the game’s military past, the legitimate martial experience of baseball served as the foundation of the game’s mythical ethos. In the years before the war, baseball’s popularity had surged across northern cities, particularly in New York City. But after the war started, teams lost players and fans to the call to arms. But one of baseball’s strongest proponents, the New York Clipper, was optimistic about the game’s future. On January 11, 1862, the Clipper wrote, “the base ball season of 1861, which, despite the interruptions and drawbacks occasioned by the great rebellion, has been really a very interesting year in the annuals of the game, far more so than it was expected it would have been.”7 Baseball could survive, even thrive, despite the Civil War. The Clipper believed that it was already too popular to fade away, even in the face of war. The Clipper wrote, “the game has too strong a foothold in popularity to be frowned out of favor by the lowering brows of ‘grim-visaged war.’”8 The

7 New York Clipper, January 11, 1862.

8 Ibid.

20 Clipper already thought of baseball as a “national” game in the midst of a war that split the country in two. Continuing its analysis of the 1861 season, the Clipper wrote, “if any proof was needed that our national game is a fixed institution of the country, it would be found in the fact, that it has flourished through such a year of adverse circumstance.”9 To the Clipper, baseball was a sport that would continue to prosper, despite the national calamity. Baseball held tremendous cultural power, and appealed to both North and South. As baseball waned at home during the war, it flourished in camp as both Federals and Confederates embraced the game. Historian Bell Irvin Wiley points out the importance of athletic diversions to southern soldiers in his influential work on the experience of an average Confederate soldier, The Life of Johnny Reb. Wiley wrote, “Captain James Hall of the 24th Alabama Regiment observed that his men, while Joe Johnston was waiting at Dalton to see what Sherman was going to do, played baseball ‘just like the school boys.’”10 Wiley argued that Confederate soldiers throughout the South played baseball. Confederates, like their Union opponents, had not attached any particular meaning to the game. They used their free time to return to their normal lives as youths. The April 3, 1862 edition of the Charleston Mercury reported about life in camp for the Confederates. Baseball was one of many activities that soldiers in camp adopted. The newspaper described the boredom, “Every volunteer who has been in service, has realized the tedium of camp life. Between reveille and breakfast –– between morning and evening drill –– there is waste time, which might be used advantageously at such many exercises as cricket, base ball, foot ball, quoit pitching, etc.”11 According to the Mercury, baseball was just one of many pastimes to relieve boredom. Baseball was even more popular on the Union side of the lines. In the Sanitary Commission’s Report to the Secretary of War on the condition of Union camps, baseball

9 Ibid.

10 Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 159.

11 “Camp Games,” Charleston Mercury, April 3, 1862.

21 was one of many recreations enjoyed by federal soldiers. In addition to reading books from camp libraries, soldiers also spent their time writing large numbers of letters and playing sports. Of the 202 regiments surveyed, 42 reported that their regiments played some sort of sports, primarily football or baseball. Charles H. Lynch of the 18th Connecticut Volunteers remembered the joys of playing baseball on Thanksgiving, 1862. Lynch wrote, “The most important event was our first Thanksgiving in camp. Passed very pleasantly. A good dinner, with games of foot and base-ball. The day closing with dress parade. Many visitors from and some from Connecticut. The weather during November was very fine for camp life. Barracks were built for winter quarters to take the place of tents.”12 Here, Lynch’s details of playing baseball are typical of Civil War accounts. Lynch mentions baseball with football, a parade, and food. In many of the instances of ball-playing that Civil War veterans cited in their letters, diaries and memoirs, the game was a fact of camp life. The meaning they attached to the game was one of escape from the drudgery of the war. During the Civil War, soldiers played baseball for entertainment, not to advance a particular political or cultural agenda. Nor did these early warrior athletes imbue their game with a culture of martial culture, patriotism or bravery. Indeed, war interfered with, rather than reinforced, the games soldiers played. George H. Putnam, while fighting for the Union in the Red River Campaign, recalled how war cancelled a game. Putnam, the pitcher and captain of his team, helped to organize games between the rear guard regiments, including elements from Connecticut and . Putnam and his cohorts apparently had an informal agreement with the Confederates. Putnam wrote: The baseball contests were, however, brought suddenly to a close through an unfortunate misunderstanding with the Rebels, upon whose considerateness in this matter of sports we had, it appeared, placed too much confidence. We found no really satisfactory ground for baseball within the lines of our fortifications, and, after experimenting with a field just outside of the earthworks, we concluded to take the risk using a better field which was just outside of the line of the pickets.13

12 Lynch, Charles H., The Civil War Diary, 1862-1865, of Charles H. Lynch, 18th Conn. Vol's. (Hartford, CT: Case Lockwood & Brainard Co., 1915), 163.

13 George H. Putnam, Memories of My Youth 1844-1865 (New York: GP Putnam’s Sons, 1914), 305.

22 Playing a game beyond the pickets was a violation of regulations and special orders. According to Putnam, things were going well for awhile: “We were winning a really beautiful game from the 13th Connecticut, a game in which our own pickets, who were the only spectators, found themselves much interested.”14 But the peace and quiet was not to last, “Suddenly there came a scattering fire of which the three fielders caught the brunt: the centre field was and was captured, the left and right field managed to get into our lines. Our pickets fell forward with all possible promptness as the players fell back.”15 Although the Federals were able to repulse the attack, the fighting resulted in the loss of “not only our centre field but our baseball and it was the only baseball in Alexandria.”16 In this case, soldiers had hoped that a baseball game would stall the fighting. The war ruined their fun. Soldiers played baseball in other less-than-ideal circumstances, too, such as prison camps. With hundreds of thousands of prisoners captured during the war, large prisons were a fact of the conflict. In comparison to their brethren who were back with their units, prisoners had more free time as they awaited repatriation or the end of the war. But baseball was just one of many distractions in prison camps. Prisoners also hunted rats, played checkers, formed debating societies and held classes.17 Glamorizing the National Pastime at the Front In contrast to the soldiers’ experiences of playing baseball during the war as a leisure activity, the American press glamorized the game as the national pastime. Despite baseball’s decline on the homefront in the first few years of the war, they began to cast the national pastime as a strengthener of American might, a game for training soldiers for victory, and even a potential unifier for the nation. This was the beginning of mythologizing baseball’s Civil War experience. Even before the Civil War was over, Americans began infusing baseball with martial, patriotic, and masculine motifs. While soldiers played the game as a release from the

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 George B. Kirsch, Baseball in Blue and Gray: The National Pastime During the Civil War (Princeton: Press, 2003), 42.

23 realities of war, the press began casting the game as a celebration of its soldiers. With the Civil War still raging, the American press started constructing their national pastime with the Civil War as the backdrop. In the first few years after the war, the game underwent a dramatic standardization and modernization as it spread throughout the country. But more importantly, its Civil War mythology propelled it as the national pastime. The premier New York City sporting newspaper, the New York Clipper, worried that baseball might not survive during the crisis of secession and war. Baseball faced declining numbers of players and spectators.18 The Clipper’s worries stemmed from the fact that declining interest in baseball would translate into a decreased readership for the paper, and so the Clipper sought to use baseball’s war experience to add to the mystique and popularity of the national pastime. Throughout the war, soldiers from New York, as well as other northern cities, wrote to the Clipper about sports and their life in the army. In the April 2, 1864 edition, the Clipper claimed that 20 of the 35 members of Company B, 77th New York State Volunteers received the Clipper. It proudly boasted, “We’ll bet that company can fight some, and do not need urging to the front.”19 The newspaper either thought that its readers and baseball players made for brave warriors or that this idea would at least sell well. The Clipper is an important artifact of the intersection of baseball and the Civil War. Before other forms of media, printed text was the primary connection between baseball fans and their beloved sport. They read, nigh consumed, all the writings they could about baseball. The Clipper also demonstrates the links between the sport of baseball and the Union. Throughout the war, the paper remained staunchly pro-Union. In the May 4, 1861 issue, its anger boiled over. The edition included a piece on “How the Romans Served Traitors,” which taught a history lesson: Julius Caesar would turn his army loose on any traitors like the Confederates. Caesar would have “ordered his army to ‘blaze away’ at them, and in a very short time the would-be traitors [were] so frightfully mangled that not

18 Harold Seymour, Baseball: The Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 40.

19 New York Clipper, April 2, 1864.

24 a soul could be recognized—they were reduced to jelly.”20 This edition also believed that if New York were the capital, instead of Washington, the conflict might have been averted. The Clipper roared for action, “Let ‘Extermination’ and ‘Through Baltimore to Washington!’ be the rallying cry until the bitter end of the contest. May God defend the right!”21 There was no question about the newspaper’s political and sectional allegiance. It was catering to its audience; the Clipper’s subscribers wanted to read about baseball. To the Clipper, baseball was the sport of the righteous and loyal. For now, the “national” in “national pastime” meant a pastime only for the Union. The New York Clipper was central in crafting the myth of the baseball-playing soldier. In a report from a soldier, the Clipper assured its readers that Union soldiers were not only fighting, but also playing baseball.22 The newspaper reported on a game between the 14th Regiment from Brooklyn and the 30th New York Volunteers during the summer of 1863. The Clipper included the and commented, “Our soldier boys will have their ‘hand in’ at base ball, it seems, and we commend them there for, as it must be a very agreeable change from dodging leaden balls.”23 The Clipper crafted an image of Union soldiers who were keeping the baseball tradition alive at the front and for whom baseball was a morale-booster in the midst of the calamity of war. As part of the war effort, the newspaper made suggestions to keep soldiers strong and healthy. The Clipper was crafting an image of baseball during the war. The Clipper believed vigorous and powerful men were key instruments for national security. Baseball was an important part of the war effort, a game worthy of the national pastime. The Clipper’s advocacy of physical culture included drastic changes to the American military establishment. The newspaper wanted a strong, peacetime standing army of 100,000 men. The newspaper is anticipating the postwar era and trying to ensure baseball’s importance as military training. Of course, it would take many more than this

20 New York Clipper, May 4, 1861.

21 Ibid.

22 “Base ball in the Camp,” New York Clipper, Oct. 26, 1861.

23 “Base Ball in the Army,” New York Clipper, June 13, 1863.

25 to win the war. But with more prescience, the Clipper also suggested a curriculum of physical education for this large army. The Clipper was optimistic about the possibilities of teaching men good health practices and hygiene. The newspaper preached, “Then war, always a curse, but often a necessity, would be shorn of more than half its horrors, for then the weapon that slays more than the weapons of the enemy would be sheathed; then would disease and imperfect health be banished from the legions.”24 The newspaper suggested a regimen of exercise in the gymnasiums, playing cricket or baseball, running, rowing, and boxing. The newspaper even advocated a health and exercise department, like that of medicine, for the army.25 This progressive agenda would save lives and strengthen national security. The newspaper reasoned that sports should and could contribute to the war effort. From early in the war until the bitter end, the Clipper was there. The sporting newspaper followed the soldiers that were simultaneously fighting the war and playing baseball. The weekly advanced a physical culture that it believed would make a nation militarily stronger. It gave the troops news of baseball, and tried to give them helpful suggestions to make their lives easier. The Clipper blurred the lines between war and athletics. The Clipper was not the only newspaper glamorizing the martial aspects of sports. In the fall of 1861, the New York Times suggested the army prepare itself by playing baseball and training for the offense. The Times believed that sports were the key to victory for the British at the battle of Waterloo against Napoleon. The Times remembered, “he [the Duke of Wellington] turned his encampment into a vast play- ground. The raw soldiers, under the genial influence of cricket and other games, gained vigor and confidence in their own resources.”26 Decades after the Napoleonic wars, the Times wanted the to follow the example set by the British. The Times believed that sports like baseball would prepare soldiers for combat. The Times offered, “Let our army of 150,000 amuse themselves, and let cricket, quoit and base ball,

24 “Physical Education for the Soldier,” New York Clipper, February 29, 1862.

25 Ibid.

26 “The Lines of Arlington,” New York Times, Sept. 15, 1861.

26 alternating with the daily drill, give them vigor and endurance. The soldiers of the Potomac may quietly abide their time, and when victory perches upon successful naval expedition, and the Army of the union hesitates, then, like the fell swoop of the eagle, let them precipitate themselves on the terrified enemy.”27 The Times, which reached a broader audience than the sport-focused Clipper, shaped the mythical connections between baseball and war. The Clipper and the Times were eager to report soldiers jumping at any chance, even if defying orders and safety, to play the trendiest game. In late 1864, the New York Times reported the game among the fortifications and camps along the Appomattox River, “Sometimes a few enterprising minds get up a baseball match, and they are as punctilious over ‘fair’ and ‘foul’ as the most ambitious club at home.”28 For the soldiers in camp, baseball was one of many distractions, including playing other games, reading and writing. In the same article, the Times emphasized the masculine virtues and toughness of the Union soldiers. The Times wrote, “Every face you meet is an earnest one, and the bearer generally has faced perils on the battle field, that have given his feature a tone of manliness and determination strange to see, but natural to find.”29 Of the soldiers in camp, the Times believed “No dandies, nor ladies’ men, are here.”30 In this 1864 article, the Times began the process of melding baseball, war, and manliness. The Times characterized baseball as a sport valuable for training the tough and virile soldiers of the Union army. The Clipper reported on other games during the war. On April 5th, 1865, the drum corps and the privates of the 102nd Regiment of the New York Volunteers played a game in camp near Goldsborough, North Carolina. The Clipper reported, “The match was the result of a challenge from the drum corps to the regiment. The game was much enjoyed

27 Ibid.

28 “The Army of the Potomac,” New York Times, Oct 30, 1864.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

27 by all present after their long and wearisome march from Savannah.”31 The drum corps lost the game by two runs. Beyond written examples articulating popular attitudes to baseball, one of the most vivid expressions glamorizing baseball during the Civil War is the illustration “Union Prisoners at Salisbury, N. C.” by Otto Boetticher. Boetticher, a commercial artist from New York, volunteered for the 68th New York Volunteers at the ripe old age of 45. Southerners captured Boetticher in 1862 and repatriated him for a Confederate officer later that same year. Published in 1863, Boetticher’s illustration of baseball at the prison camp depicts life at the camp before the camp’s conditions deteriorated.32 In Boetticher’s work, the game has a carefree tone with soldiers joyously playing, watching, and discussing baseball. The scene also has a pastoral sentiment, a common theme in artists’ depictions of early baseball. The players are in a large parade ground, surrounded by the camp. Overlooking the camp are several large trees. Even in prison during the midst of a national war, men still had the opportunity to play glorious baseball in the great outdoors. Boetticher’s illustration is more about baseball than prison life. Soldiers are not homesick, melancholy or physically ill. They are not overcrowded, starving or fighting with each other. Their uniforms still appear to be in good order. They are enjoying a wholesome game, biding their time until release. Boetticher’s illustration promotes the bravery of the Union soldiers, as well as their game, baseball.

31 “Base Ball in Camp, Near Golsborough, N.C.,” New York Clipper, April 29, 1865.

32 Kirsch, 42-43.

28

Despite the leisure and excitement that baseball provided soldiers in the pen, prisoners during the Civil War faced terrible living coonditions. The infamous Andersonville prison still looms large in the American memory as a place of starvation and inhumanity. Both sides swelled with captives ass the war progressed. Large numbers of prisoners stressed the camps. Later in the war, the South lacked resources to properly feed and house its prisoners. Combined with brutal treatment on both sides, the prison experience for many soldiers was horrific; it was not the scene Boetticher portrayed. Creating a National Pastime for a United Country Soldiers who already knew baseball allegedly taught it to fellow soldiers in camps and prisons. Veterans took baseball home with them and taught it to others. Baseball enthusiasts and historians have endorsed this view for decades. The previously mentioned Jim “Deacon” White, is an example of a player that learned from a returning veteran. In contrast to a player that learned the game from a returning veteran, there were soldiers that took the game with them to the front. After the warr, the game remained an important part of their lives. For example, Abraham G. Mills took the game with him to war. Mills served with the Fifth New York Volunteer Infantry. AAfter the war, Mills was the president of and player for the Olympic Base Ball Club in Washington, D. C. Later, Mills served as the president of the . He was also tasked by Albert Spalding to lead a commission that sought to discover baseball’s inventor. Giving increased cultural power to the war’s spread of basebaall is the fact that White and Mills were close to Albert G. Spalding. Spalding was one of the most important

29 figures in nineteenth-century baseball. He was a player, owner, and sporting goods magnate. Spalding had played with White and worked with Mills. Throughout his life, Spalding vehemently supported the importance of the war to the proliferation and nationalization of the game. An intriguing example of a soldier that acted as baseball’s cheerleader during the postwar years is John Dickins. Dickins, an English immigrant, served in the 71st New York State Militia. After the war, Dickins married and moved south to work for the Freedmen’s Bureau. Dickins organized baseball clubs in Louisville and Nashville. He also served as an . Dickins was a for the Louisville Baseball Club, which hosted a variety of the era’s most powerful teams. But with an inability to compete and faltering fan support, the team folded after the 1868 season.33 Modern baseball scholars support the importance of the war in spreading the game. For example, in When Johnny Came Sliding Home, William Ryczek writes, “Soon, the soldiers would be returning to their homes, bringing their knowledge of the game to small towns throughout North and South.”34 But not all scholars agree on the extent to which the war helped baseball proliferate. Baseball historian Peter Morris argues that the role of the Civil War soldiers in spreading the game after the war is an appealing, yet imperfect argument.35 Morris cites the collapse of baseball clubs during the war as evidence that the war slowed the growth of baseball. Morris contends that the new clubs were not made of Civil War personnel because the players who formed the clubs during 1866 and 1867 were too young to have seen combat.36 Instead of veterans spreading the game, Morris argues that the proliferation of the game was an uneven process. Morris accentuates the passing of youth and vigor, believing that returning soldiers had other

33 Peter Morris, “John Dickins,” Society for American Baseball Research Baseball Biography,” accessed April 12, 2012, http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/f4bd13cc.

34 William J. Ryczek, When Johnny Came Sliding Home: The Post Civil War Baseball Boom, 1865-1870 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), 15.

35 Peter Morris, But Wasn’t It Fun? An Informal History of Baseball’s Pioneer Era, 1843-1870 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publishing, 2008), 153.

36 Ibid., 154.

30 issues that occupied their time and attention, rather than playing a game from their youth.37 Morris also remarks that the war cost some of the game’s brightest leaders.38 Ryczek and Morris miss a more important consideration. Regardless of the exact effect of the war on spreading baseball, the game both fomented and reflected a cultural shift in the country. After all, baseball was a Northern game. It was a product of the urban Northeast. Baseball worked as an agent of homogenizing the nation to the economically and militarily powerful North’s culture. Its players were mainly middle- class workers from the new industrial capitalist economy. They were clerks and industrial workers. Early baseball players did not own plantations or work on farms in the Midwest. Ryczek does cite the economic transformation of the late nineteenth century, urban population growth, and increased leisure time as providing the basis for baseball’s growth. But Ryczek should push this point further; baseball was a pastime born out of the North’s economic life with a northern vision of masculinity. After all, working for a wage facilitated time earmarked for leisure. Additionally, the northern capitalist boom in the nineteenth century paved the way for the prerequisite infrastructure and print media needed for a sporting boom. The earliest known use of the phrase “national pastime” associated with baseball appeared in the New York Sunday Mercury in December, 1856. The newspaper’s editor, William Cauldwell, was a pioneer in reporting on baseball in New York City. In 1858, Cauldwell hired Henry Chadwick, an ardent supporter of baseball who was a key early figure in reporting on and popularizing baseball.39 In the newspapers of New York City, baseball won the prestigious title of “national pastime.” They promoted it as the national game, even while the nation was coming apart at the seams. Baseball was a Northern sport. Despite claims by the New York Clipper of a loyal Southern readership and sporadic baseball contests in , baseball’s epicenter was in New York City. The New York version even defeated competing games. It won

37 Ibid., 157.

38 Ibid., 158.

39 Tygiel, Jules. Past Time: Baseball as History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3.

31 favor over regional and folk variations of baseball. These competing versions of the game, such as one from Massachusetts, were also primarily from the North. The biggest difference between New York baseball and its Massachusetts rival were the games’ different structure. used a square field without a foul territory, while the New York rules used a diamond with greater distances between bases. The Massachusetts game also had one out per half inning versus the traditional three outs per half inning. The New York game dictated nine players in the field while the Massachusetts game used between 10 and 14 players. The Massachusetts game allowed “soaking” or striking a player with the ball for an out. One of the modern features of the Massachusetts game was that a ball must be caught on the fly for an out. The New York game continued allowing a bounce before catching a hit ball for an out until 1865. First adopted in 1845, the New York version or the version of the game updated and standardized the sport. The rules could be quite fluid during this era. In 1857, New York teams formed early baseball’s dominant governing body, the National Association of Base Ball Players. At the 1857 convention, the National Association set the game’s length at nine innings. In contrast, the Massachusetts game was over when a team reached 100 runs. The Knickerbocker Rules’ popularity was due to New York City itself. The city’s size combined with its economic and political power wielded tremendous cultural influence. The cultural heart of baseball was also in New York City with its many newspapers actively covering the game. In addition, the best teams and athletes were from the New York City area. Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times, an important weekly New York City newspaper that focused on sports and entertainment, reflected on the dominance of the Knickerbocker Rules. In 1865 the newspaper wrote, “The National Association or ‘New-York game’ is now almost universally adopted by the Clubs all over the country; and the Massachusetts, and still more ancient style of playing familiar to any school-boy, called ‘town ball,’ will soon become obsolete.”40 Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times thought the New York version was the more modern and sophisticated version of baseball. The newspaper rejoiced, “No lover of the pastime can regret this, as the New-

40 Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times, March 18, 1865.

32 York mode is superior and more attractive in every way; and better calculated to perpetuate and render ‘our national game’ an ‘institution’ with both ‘young and old America.’”41 Of course, the newspaper, published in New York City, would benefit financially from the dominance of the New York version of the game. After the Civil War, the National Association sought to formalize New York’s control over the game. Since its inception in 1857, the National Association of Base Ball Players sought to create a healthy national pastime. The National Association wanted baseball to be the American game. In the years after the Civil War, the National Association sought to continue its dominance over the game. At its convention in December 1867, the National Association moved to reduce the power of new delegates from regions outside of the urban Northeast. The Ball Player’s Chronicle feared that too much power in the hands of outside delegates “would have driven the four sections of the country into four distinct Associations, viz., Eastern, Western, Southern, and Northern.”42 The National Association feared that competing versions of baseball meant going backwards, of devolving to competing versions of the game from other parts of the country. Instead, it wanted unity with the New York-based National Association in charge. The Ball Player’s Chronicle opined, “instead of a code of playing rules covering ever reputable club throughout the land, we should have four or five distinct styles of playing base ball, and the term ‘National Game’ would have become a misnomer.”43 Just as the North wielded economic, military, and cultural power over other regions of the nation with a victory in the Civil War, northern baseball consolidated its hold over sectional competitors. The December 1867 National Association conference also began baseball’s color line. It voted “against the admission of any club which may be composed of one or more colored persons.”44 Again, baseball influences as well as reflects the larger nineteenth- century American culture. At the same time baseball moved for a Northern agenda, it

41 Ibid.

42 Ball Players’ Chronicle, December 18, 1867.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid.

33 excluded African-Americans from competition. The National Association consolidated its power in the hands of white, urban, Northern players. Although baseball was clearly a New York City game, baseball’s propagandists had hoped that the game’s popularity and appeal would foster sectional unity after the war. By the end of the war, baseball wielded tremendous cultural power. Americans began to believe in the importance, power, and national scope of the game. The highly publicized experience of baseball play by both sides during the war gave the game potential as a unifier. Once Americans had deemed baseball as the national pastime, they had high hopes for the game’s potential to bind the nation’s wounds. The National Association of Base Ball Players believed that baseball could help reunify the country. The National Association’s 1866 convention declared, “the flattering reception given them [the delegates for the baseball clubs] as their names were announced, and especially the applause which greeted the responses from the Southern clubs, afforded ample proof of the truly conservative feeling which prevailed in the Convention. But if anything more was needed it was presented in the form of the compliment paid the Southern delegation, in the selection of a candidate for the presidency of the association from among their number.”45 Baseball historian George Kirsch argues that proof of the reunification was due to the proliferation of clubs in the South after the war, along with the national tours of prominent teams. But, the growth of the sport in the South was much slower than in other regions. And touring teams rarely went south. However, when the did make a tour to New Orleans in December 1869, Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times hoped that baseball would work as a pacifier between the sections. The newspaper wrote, “This National Game seems destined to close the National Wounds opened by the late war. It is no idle pastime which draws young men, separated by two thousand miles, together to contest in friendship, upon fields but lately crimsoned with their brothers’ blood in mortal combat.”46 The newspaper hoped that friendly contests of baseball could

45 The Tenth Annual Convention of the National Association of Base Ball Players, in Early Innings: A Documentary History of Baseball, 1825-1908, ed. Dean A. Sullivan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 54.

46 Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times, quoted in George B. Kirsch, Baseball in Blue and Gray: The National Pastime During the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 121.

34 replace the death and carnage of war. Where politics failed to unite and pacify, baseball could bring the nation together again. The hope that baseball would help bind the nation’s wounds was ascribing the national pastime with a terrific power. This is a romantic view of post-war baseball. Baseball historian Peter Morris takes aim at the hopes that a national pastime would unify the North and the South. Morris provides the example of an aborted game between the Union Club and a team from Richmond, Virginia. Morris writes, “In Richmond, Virginia, for instance, the Union Club challenged the Richmond Baseball Club in 1866 and received this acid reply: ‘We are not or [sic] do we expect to be members of the National Baseball Convention. Our reason: we are Southerners.’”47 The Richmond Baseball Club wanted nothing to do with the Northern-dominated National Association. Northern teams also exercised sectional prejudice. The Excelsiors in Brooklyn also exorcised their for fighting for the Confederacy.48 Clearly, these incidents belie the claims that baseball served as a means to reunite the nation in harmony. Another issue with the argument that baseball rose above the sectional crisis is the fact the game did not blossom in the South even in the immediate years after the war. In the late 1860s, talented professional clubs often made multi-city tours, playing the best local teams. Baseball historian William Ryczek writes, “every club capable of raising the money for rail fare set forth on a playing tour. They went east, they went west, they went north but they rarely went south.”49 The made repeated plans for a tour to the South, but it never materialized. Finally in 1870, teams from Chicago, along with the Cincinnati Reds and New York Mutuals, made visits to New Orleans, but the touring clubs could not sell enough tickets to make a trip viable.50 Unlike the North, the South lacked high-quality professional teams of its own. This was another indication that

47 Morris, 159.

48 Ibid.

49 William J. Ryczek, When Johnny Came Sliding Home: The Post Civil War Baseball Boom, 1865-1870 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), 149.

50 Ibid.

35 the baseball craze had not permeated the South. Teams from Washington, D. C. and Louisville were from the border region, not the Deep South. Instead of going south, the game went west after the war, expanding to cities such as Chicago, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. Baseball’s path as a true national unifier would take a long time. In the first few years after the Civil War, the game expanded across the country. While the game billed itself as the “national pastime,” it was a game from the urban Northeast. During the late 1860s, the National Association controlled the future of the game. But baseball’s propagandists underscored its abilities to reunite the nation. Baseball’s culture was increasingly complex and contradictory. It was a northern game, yet represented an opportunity for a unified culture after the Civil War. Conclusion In the past, baseball scholars have ignored cultural questions about the relationship between the war, gender identity, and the construction of the national pastime. It is only through the lens of the Civil War that baseball historians can understand the implications of baseball’s rise to a national pastime, and its role as the national pastime. In addition to the role of soldiers spreading the game to different geographic regions, the war’s place in the mythology of the game is also important. The process of what the game meant to the larger culture began during the war and expanded in the ensuing decades. Even before the end of the conflict, the sporting press used the Civil War experience to promote the game as the national pastime, beginning a pattern of romanticizing baseball during the Civil War. And in the first few years after the war, some even hoped that baseball could reunite the nation and bind its wounds. The Civil War was a transformative time for baseball. During the Civil War, Americans began to turn a popular fad into a national pastime. The debate among scholars of the game’s post-war proliferation misses the more powerful cultural ramifications of Civil War baseball. The Civil War experience was a key ingredient in mythologizing the game in the American imagination. In addition to the idea that the war spread the game, baseball’s promoters dramatized baseball’s reconciliatory role. This chapter explored how Americans transformed baseball’s experience during the Civil War. Confederates and Federals alike saw baseball as an escape from the drudgeries of camp life and the terrors of fighting. Baseball, as reflected in their letters

36 and diaries, was entertainment. They played for fun. It was a part of the minutiae of their daily lives, not a revered national ritual. This chapter also argued that even before the war came to a close, Americans began to portray the game as one fit for the brave, a game that soldiers should play. They believed that good baseball players made for good soldiers and vice versa. It was also during the Civil War years the National Association of Base Ball Players began to standardize and modernize rules. In the years after the war, Americans even saw a possibility that baseball could help reunite the country. In reality, though, baseball was a Northern game. Americans began to tie their national game to themes of patriotic, martial and masculine virtues. This was the beginning of mythologizing the role of baseball during the Civil War, a theme that baseball enthusiasts would continue to exploit. As we shall see in future chapters, in subsequent decades, baseball changed attitudes about masculinity and created a united mass culture.

37 Chapter Two Making Manly Muscle: Defining Gender Roles in Nineteenth-Century Baseball, 1862- 1899 Introduction In the decades after the Civil War, baseball spread beyond its incubator of New York City. Baseball transformed into the national pastime. Americans played, even revered, the sport in other regions. As it spread, the game touted its own unique version of masculinity. Baseball united the American culture. It featured a masculine ideal borne out of economic changes taking place in the urban northeast. Baseball was a product of northern, urban, middle-class white men that sought escape on the grassy diamonds sprouting up all over the nation. From the end of the Civil War until the turn of the century, baseball developed as a touchstone for masculinity. This chapter argues that baseball formed nineteenth-century post-war masculine ideals. As it became the national pastime, baseball promoted ideas about masculinity that invaded other sections of the country. This chapter examines how baseball, during the late nineteenth century, spread its version of northern masculinity, the self-made man. But baseball’s proliferation was a symbiotic process. As it won converts in different regions and classes, it also absorbed elements of other cultures. It was a process of cross-cultural exchange. Next, this chapter will examine how baseball’s definition of masculinity stemmed from its middle-class background. This ethos conflicted with rougher working-class sporting life, which emphasized gambling and vice. Baseball established expectations of behavior while men played. The development of standardized not only modernized the game, but also reinforced the roles for men in the game. Next, this chapter analyzes how baseball promoted itself as a physical health movement for men. Lastly, this chapter will examine how baseball established a border between men and women. Women’s presence in the stands ostensibly signified the acceptability of baseball to middle-class tastes. Yet, when women picked up bats and balls, the media savagely derided them. Baseball’s ascension as a role model for men was a process that defined and divided men and women. Baseball’s centrality to American masculinity also emerged in the context of tremendous economic transition for the United States in the late nineteenth century. The

38 United States was the epicenter of a second wave of industrialization focused on the production of steel. Combined with communication and transportation innovations, the American economy surged. With a growing middle class, Americans increasingly worked at more white-collar jobs in commerce and finance. New York became the commercial center of the United States, as well as the baseball center of the United States. The economic transformation was jarring for many Americans. There were two serious economic panics in the late nineteenth century, one in 1873 and another in 1893. There was also a growing economic disparity between rich and poor. Workers tried to organize, but found themselves separated by racial, gender, ethnic, and skill-set divides. Workers’ attempts to fight for better conditions often led to bloodshed such as the Homestead Strike in in 1892, in which 16 people died. Many workers also suffered by living in polluted factory towns and overcrowded tenements. Cities struggled with pollution and crime, and they provided few opportunities for the working class, apart from menial labor. Thus many Americans feared urbanization and portrayed the city as a vicious, dark place. The city supposedly weakened muscles and morals. But the city also created opportunities for a growing group of workers: the urban middle class. Many Americans feared that these clerks’ and managers’ bodies, shut away in offices instead of performing the hard manual labor of the factory workers, would atrophy. Gender historian Michael Kimmel writes, “To some commentators it was the city itself that bred feminization, with its conformist masses scurrying to work in large bureaucratic offices, which sapped innate masculine vitality and harnessed it to the service of the corporation.”51 The city itself had a weakening influence on masculinity. In the city, men had to work as clerks at desks instead of in the fields or as artisans. Americans wanted a sport that rebuilt their manhood while it recalled traditional (i.e. white, male) values. Baseball, the restorer of masculinity, kept women off the field. It is an appealing notion that baseball was a democratic sport that forced the rich to sit next to the poor or working class in the bleachers. But throughout the nineteenth century, baseball remained the sport of the middle class. Historian Donald Mrozek cites the

51 Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America (New York: Free Press, 1996), 121.

39 starting times of games as proof of baseball’s target audience. Afternoon games gave white-collar men time to leave work and enjoy a game before having to go home. Games would start after the close of the Stock Exchange in New York City, while games in Chicago started after the Board of Trade and Stock Exchange had completed business for the day.52 Meanwhile, factory workers labored over ten hours a day, six days a week. Baseball during the nineteenth century was a middle-class sport—the first players were middle class, and as the sport later attracted paying spectators, those people, too, were, middle class. When the game began to gain popularity in New York City in the 1850s, it was white-collar workers who could leave their jobs in the early afternoons to play ball.53 Early baseball teams only added players from other classes when the drive for winning required better athletes.54 The lower-class immigrant populations, by contrast, were not as enamored with baseball, and the game was not widely reported in immigrant newspapers. Above all, immigrants could not afford the time or the price of admission.55 To build the culture of the self-made man in the white-collar economy, men went to great lengths to prove their virility, and sports were an easy means of doing so. The titles of newspaper articles or sports columns such as that from the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel’s August 19, 1875 issue, “Baseball: Making Manly Muscle at Milwaukee, Chicago, Louisville and Elsewhere” reflected how important the sport was in constructing American manhood.56 Journalists liberally employed the word “manly” throughout sporting columns. Sports were a means of assessing men’s level of machismo in the new culture, and women were not allowed.57

52 Donald Mrozek, Sport & American Mentality 1880-1910 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), 31-32.

53 Donald Dewey, The 10th Man: The Fan in Baseball History (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2004), 4.

54 Steven Riess, Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era (University of Press, 1999), 27.

55 Ibid., 36-37.

56 Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, August 19, 1875.

57 Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 244.

40 Historian Warren Goldstein emphasizes the importance of manliness to baseball. Goldstein writes, “‘Manly’ and ‘boyish’ were charged words in mid-nineteenth-century America, perhaps even more so in that of the baseball fraternity. No single word carried more virtue or praise in sporting language than ‘manly.’”58 Goldstein argues that the values tied to manliness were positive, but its precise meaning is blurred. In his 1860 dictionary, Joseph Emerson Worcester defined manliness as “dignity; bravery, stoutness.”59 The 1892 version of Webster’s Primary School Dictionary defined the word “athletic” as meaning “belonging to manly exercises; robust.”60 In the late nineteenth century, an athlete by definition was manly. Americans faced the challenges of urbanization, industrialization and changing gender dynamics after the Civil War. The United States’ role on the world stage was also changing. In addition to imperialistic policies toward American Indians, now the United States was exerting newfound industrial muscle around the world. With dramatic technological, demographic, and economic developments, the pace of change for Americans was accelerating. With all of these dramatic transitions, baseball was a means of holding on to tradition during the changes. Baseball was a sporting tradition since the antebellum era, and its customs recalled a simpler era (even though the sport itself had clearly changed and modernized). Implicitly, this meant a sporting culture that emphasized the superiority of white men. While gender historians have ignored the importance of baseball, scholars of the early game have failed to examine the relationship between gender identity and the national pastime. Baseball Spreading Northern and Middle-Class Manhood The proliferation of baseball’s sense of masculinity followed its move beyond the urban northeast. As the game spread in the decades following the Civil War to become a national pastime, so, too, did its particular articulation of masculine comportment come to be seen as the national model. In the antebellum period, North and South held

58 Warren Goldstein, Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 45.

59 Joseph Emerson Worcester, A Comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language (Boston: Swan, Brewer, Tileston, 1860), 279.

60 Webster’s Primary School Dictionary: A Dictionary of the English Language Designed for Use in Primary Schools (Springfield, MA: G & C Merriam Company, 1892), 16.

41 competing views of masculinity. The South was the last bastion of what gender scholar Michael Kimmel refers to as the “genteel patriarch.”61 This masculine ideal was an aristocratic planter or farmer. The South was a conservative society, with the patriarch controlling the family, the plantation, and politics. Men were the protectors of family reputation and honor. They believed that they were the scions of the Revolution. In comparison, the northern model of masculinity was evolving into the self-made man. This was a more modern version of the manly ideal. Southerners believed that northerners had forsaken honor for money.62 The self-made man was urban, northern, and middle-class. Northern men worked in industry with economic and cultural connections to , and northerners’ work and culture was informed by liberal capitalism. After the war, the self-made man rapidly supplanted the genteel patriarch as the masculine ideal, and the patriarch soon came to be seen as weak, feminine, and a dandy.63 The genteel patriarch’s time had passed; he was the model of masculinity during the early nineteenth century—an anachronism in the face of industrialization. Baseball suited the new self-made man ideology much better. Baseball was a ritual and a stage where men could prove their toughness, strength, intelligence, and prowess. In a society where these traits were increasingly hidden by the city and the economy, baseball would still prove a man’s worth. Yet, as baseball was reshaping the southern ideal of masculinity, it may have also softened the northern male archetype. Baseball was a means of transmitting competing cultural notions, and could absorb contributions from other players; it quickly created heroes out of southern players. Baseball also reveled in the pastoral, rural, and pre- modern. These notions were characteristics of southern culture, rather than the ever- changing urban northern culture. Baseball, a northern game, spread its particular version of masculinity after the Civil War. The Civil War itself was imbued with masculine motifs. The war was a fratricidal

61 Kimmel, 28.

62 Ibid., 75-78.

63 Ibid., 27.

42 conflict, a contest that featured “brother against brother.” An interesting symbol of the perceived victory of northern over southern manhood is the capture of Jefferson Davis in May 1865. At the time of his arrest, Davis was wearing a robe or coat and a shawl that his wife had given him. This started speculation in the northern press that Davis was apprehended while dressed as a woman. Northern newspapers carried cartoons and editorials that chastised Davis as a weakling and a coward. To the northern press, Davis had not acted in a manly fashion. The following cartoon, Jefferson Davis As An Unprotected Female!, which appeared in the May 27, 1865 issue of Harper’s Weekly, was typical of the caricatures deriding Davis and his wardrobe. The image of Davis shuddering in a dress and bonnet juxtaposes the text: “’He is one of those rare types of humanity born to control destiny, or to accept, without murmur, annihilation as the natural consequence of failure.’—N. Y. Daily News, May 15, 1865.” The cartoon was meant to cast doubt on these words, to portray Davis as a weakling. The New York Daily News was a pro-South Democratic newspaper. Davis’s capture and its portrayal in northern media seemed to prove in pro-Union minds that southern manhood was a façade. In the northern press, Davis’ capture was a symbol of the victory of northern manliness over the southern leader.

43

In Manhood in America, historian Michael Kimmel interprets the Civil War in gendered terms. Kimmel argues that the conflict was a contest between a southern ideal of masculinity, the genteel patriarch, versus a northern ideal, the self-made man. Of course, the northern vision of masculinity was tied to its work in the industriaal, commercial capitalist society while the genteel patriarch was an aadvocate of the slave- based agricultural plantation economic system. Kimmmel writes, “northern and southern men questioned each other’s manhood, both on the battlefield and in rhetorical

44 skirmishes.”64 Kimmel argues that it was a war between a genteel landowner – who, in the context of the industrial revolution, had been recast as parasitic and effete – and a newer, dynamic and productive contributor to the industrial boom, either an urban worker or a capitalist entrepreneur. Kimmel writes that the “The Civil War pitted Confederate chivalry against Self-Made Yankees and signaled the triumph of the urban industrial entrepreneur over the genteel southern patrician.”65 Southerners saw themselves as aristocratic preservers of tradition and honor. Meanwhile, they cast northerners as consumed by capitalism; they had forsaken traditional American values for business.66 But in the post-war movement of baseball outside of the urban Northeast, the game spread its vision of masculinity to the rest of the nation. Baseball was born in the industrial epicenter of the North, New York City. It was a game that turned into a business. It rewarded strength, cunning, vitality, and industriousness and further cemented the demise of the genteel patriarch. The proliferation and popularization of a sport is a complex process. Baseball, like so many other business ventures, spread to new markets in the Industrial Revolution. In the decades after the Civil War, baseball spread outside of its urban northeastern home. When baseball spread to the South and West, it was often less organized, formal and competitive. In the West, baseball prospered professionally in St. Louis, Chicago, Cleveland, and Cincinnati. These same cities benefited economically during the war. led baseball’s charge west. Wright was from a family of famous cricket players. He turned to playing baseball for the pioneering New York Knickerbocker club. In 1866, Wright managed the . For the 1869 season, Wright assembled a team of professionals who were mainly from the East. The Cincinnati Red Stockings’ 1869 season was a landmark in baseball history. The team dominated established eastern teams, winning 57 National Association games and losing none. The team traveled the United States from Boston to San Francisco. The team’s success sparked interest in baseball in the Queen City.

64 Ibid., 75.

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid., 76.

45 The 1876 foundation of the National League included teams from the West such as the Chicago White Stockings, the St. Louis Brown Stockings, and the Cincinnati Red Stockings. The National League also included a southern team, the . Baseball’s spread into the West continued with the formation of the Western League in 1885. Initially a minor league, the league’s founding members included teams from the western cities of Indianapolis‚ Kansas City‚ Cleveland‚ Milwaukee‚ Toledo, and Omaha. The league continued in different iterations until the 1899 season, when it reorganized as the , a competitor to the National League. Baseball’s spread to the South was slower. The South lacked major league teams, the talent, and the spectators that the North enjoyed. When thinking about baseball in the South during his youth in the late 1880s and early 1890s, reflected, “I had no fiery ambition to make a career of the game. Professional athletics were something I’d scarcely heard of down there in the backwoods of northeastern Georgia.”67 Apparently, professional baseball was not a dream of the young Ty Cobb. But this excerpt from Cobb’s My Life in Baseball: The True Record should be taken with a grain of salt. Cobb was infamous for telling tall tales and stretching the truth. Of course, the South lacked the urban economic engines that the North, and now the West, enjoyed. Cities were a necessary precursor to major league success. Tours of northern teams, as well as spring training, slowly exported the game to the South. The exact beginnings of spring training are unclear. As we saw in the previous chapter, teams such as the New York Mutuals, Chicago White Stockings, and the Cincinnati Red Stockings toured the South in the 1870s. Baseball historians credit , manager of the Cincinnati Red Stockings of the American Association, for creating modern spring training when he brought his 1888 team to play in New Orleans. By the early twentieth century, spring training at camps in the South and West was commonplace. In 1885, the Southern League brought organized baseball to the South. For the first few decades of baseball, the game’s biggest star players came from the New York City area. But by the turn of the century, star players came from all over the country. This was a sign of the entrenchment of baseball into the West and the South.

67 Ty Cobb, My Life in Baseball: the True Record (New York Doubleday, 1961), 17.

46 For example, Joseph “Shoeless Joe” Jackson was born in Pickens County, South Carolina, in 1887. Jackson was an for the . Ty Cobb, an outfielder who initially played for the Southern League before an outstanding career for the Detroit Tigers, was born in Narrows, Georgia, in 1886. , and manager for the , was born in Hubbard, Texas, in 1888. The West had its share of star power, too. Dominating pitcher was born in Humboldt, Kansas, in 1887. By the turn of the century, model baseball players came from all over the country. Ultimately, players from other regions changed the sport from within. As baseball spread, it absorbed elements of other cultures. Still, in the late nineteenth century, baseball had anchored its vision of masculinity into American culture. Baseball offered men a physical outlet in the new economy. With new wealth, white- collar jobs, and life in the city, many nineteenth-century Americans felt men’s lives were too soft. Americans believed that masculinity was in crisis. Many Americans feared that without a crucible of combat or outdoor life, men would atrophy. Americans believed that their men might be weaklings.68 Many Americans also worried that their boys were increasingly feminized due to the fact that mothers stayed at home alone to raise their children and women now dominated the elementary teaching field.69 The end of the Civil War brought not only a military victory, but also a cultural triumph for the North. The northern version of manhood ultimately triumphed over the older, southern ideal of manhood, the genteel patriarch. The North exported its sport across the country as a national pastime for a unified nation, and via that sport, its particular version of masculinity, too. Defining Manly Behavior The next step in baseball’s rise as a standard-bearer for masculinity was its ability to combat a rougher working-class notion of masculinity. Baseball’s ascendancy to its place as the national pastime relied on society accepting the sport. It displaced rougher working-class sports and behavior. The sporting culture, which revolved around socializing in saloons, was infamous. There, young men gambled, drank, and read scandalous newspapers. In Rereading Sex, historian Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz

68 Kimmel, 122.

69 Ibid., 121.

47 examines this culture. Horowitz argues, “The rough ways of male working-class life encouraged camaraderie and led to disorder. Male sporting culture was emerging on the city’s streets, at odds with middle class respectability.”70 While many Americans feared the corruption of the sporting culture of the big city, it was appealing to these young men that sought shelter from their workaday lives. Thus, in the late nineteenth century, Americans not only started following a northern version of masculinity, but also a middle-class version guided by baseball. The sporting culture was an escape for the young men at work. The sporting culture was sexually charged, dangerous and bawdy. Lefkowitz writes, “Warnings of city dangers accompanied boys and young men migrating from the country, but some of them found the warnings appealing rather than threatening.”71 Sporting culture offered a release through its drinking, gambling and sexual pursuits. Baseball was a middle ground. It was a sport born in the city. It was fun and often raucous. Its enthusiasts were the young workingmen of the city. But baseball promoted itself as a game with rural . Baseball’s promoters and enthusiasts emphasized the benefits of the game. They depicted baseball as a national game that was a good and wholesome activity that made men fit. Baseball promoters and enthusiasts were careful to protect the reputation of the game ever since it had become a business in 1862, when New York Mutuals owner William Cammeyer encircled the in Brooklyn, New York, with a fence and charged admission. Team owners, players, and newspaper publishers wanted to portray baseball as a clean-cut sport in order to differentiate it from the rough-and-tumble pursuits of the era, such as horse racing, boxing, and blood sports. Baseball wanted to portray itself as free from fighting, cursing, drinking, and gambling— as a sport that nurtured upstanding young men. This, too, formed an important part of baseball’s particular iteration of masculinity. Gambling was the most serious threat to the game, because it would not only bring the wrong sorts of fans to the games and foment other vice, but it would also cast doubt

70 Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2002), 135.

71 Ibid.

48 on the integrity of the sport. In 1865, the New York Mutuals expelled players for gambling and purposefully losing a game. In an 1867 issue of the Ball Players’ Chronicle, Henry Chadwick—an English immigrant and tireless promoter of the game— described the ideal baseball player as one who should be “fearless in facing and stopping a swiftly batted or thrown ball.”72 Chadwick went further, discussing the moral attributes of the ideal player, noting, for instance, that the perfect player “never permits himself to be pecuniarily involved in a match.”73 To Chadwick, the national pastime should be more important than money. He wrote, “his conduct is as much marked by courtesy of demeanor and liberality of action as it is by excellence in a practical exemplification of the beauties of the game.”74 To Chadwick, the human frailties of the player should not obstruct the perfect structure of the game, insisting that a player’s goal should be to “characterize every contest in which he may be engaged, with conduct that will mark it as much as a trial as to which party excels in the moral attributes in the game, as it is one that decides any questions of physical superiority.”75 Chadwick wanted a game that was socially acceptable and unassailable by critics. Thus it had to be free from scandal and vice. In 1876, the urge to protect the image of the game became policy. The foundation of the National League was aimed at centralizing professional baseball’s authority. The National League also wanted to supervise scheduling and player behavior. The league was tested almost immediately. In the 1877 season, a strong Louisville team purposefully lost most of its games in the closing weeks of the season. The team expelled four of its players, and the National League barred the team. Although there was some sympathy for the expelled Louisville players, for the Louisville club struggled to meet its payroll obligations, the players were vilified for endangering the game. An exposé by the Louisville Courier-Journal feared the repercussions of gambling on games

72 Henry Chadwick, “The Model Base Ball Player,” Ball Players’ Chronicle, October 31, 1867.

73 Ibid.

74 Ibid.

75 Ibid.

49 by players. The newspaper reported that four players had been “expelled from the Louisville club for crooked conduct was the all-absorbing topic in baseball circles yesterday, and the general impression prevailed that it would result in killing the national game ‘deader than a mackerel.’”76 The possibility that games were rigged – that they were not genuinely manly contests after all – would have wounded the reputation of the national pastime, perhaps fatally. Over the next decades, there were still concerns that baseball may not be good for American men. In 1885, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle admitted the game was improving over time. It wrote that in some ways, “the game is steadily advancing. It is more closely played at all points.”77 The newspaper lauded closely played matches, but feared for the safety of players with stronger athletes throwing and hitting. The Eagle would no longer go along with the idea that baseball was restorative of the national health. The newspaper thought that baseball teams could no longer pretend to be “cavorting about the ‘diamond field’ in the noble and voluntary pursuit of health and physical culture. We used to be asked to admire base ball clubs as schools of instruction for the American in the important lesson that he was giving too much time to work and too little to play.”78 The newspaper argued that the American national pastime was no longer a health movement, but a business played by professionals. The professionals, out for money, were no longer shining examples that enjoyed the game solely for its fitness merits. Baseball had justified itself as uniquely American, a national pastime unlike any in the world. It was a sport advancing a safe, middle-class version of masculinity. But now the Eagle doubted the rise of professionals in the game. Baseball could no longer hold itself up as morally superior to other national games with professional athletes. The newspaper thought, “With our professional nines we can no longer sneer at the English with their professional elevens. The bloom is removed from the ball when we know that the players are all paid and that we must pay to see them.”79 Baseball players were now

76 John Haldeman, “Cussed Crookedness” Louisville Courier-Journal, November 3, 1877.

77 “Ethics and Aesthetics of Base Ball,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 12, 1885.

78 Ibid.

79 Ibid. 50 out for money, not love of the game. Players had gotten far away from the ideals set forth by Henry Chadwick. The paper also doubted that the morals of the game were improving. The Eagle wrote, “we have read so often that ‘Jim’ is a contract breaker, that ‘Joe’ has thrown away an inning, and that ‘Sam’ has been on “a drunken spree” again that we dismiss the subject in more or less confusion.”80 These vices continued to plague the national pastime. Americans wanted a pastime that was fun and strengthened the body. But nineteenth- century society would never tolerate barbarity and coarse behavior, as the debates over football, boxing, and animal sports crystallized. Baseball players had to walk a fine base path between gaining toughness and going too far, becoming a barbarian. Baseball promoted itself as a tool to strengthen men without going too far. Baseball’s rules and attempts to reign in bad behavior made sure that baseball players still fit within Victorian mores. Thus baseball enthusiasts were keenly aware of the benefits of baseball to American manhood. But these same baseball apostles wanted to avoid turning men into barbarians. They wanted to make sure players and spectators alike did not engage in gambling, cursing, cheating, and drunkenness. They did not want the national pastime to devolve into the realm of rabble. It could not be the rebuilder of men if it encouraged crime or immoral behavior. Baseball had to make the right kind of man. In order to be the restorer of men, the game had to be an adult, rigorous game, free from childish elements. To that end, baseball leagues regularly passed regulations for the behavior of its players. The June 24, 1869 issue of the New York Times decried gambling in the national pastime. The Times complained, “We regret very sincerely to hear the current stories relative to the enormous sums which are said to have changed hands in betting upon the exciting games of base ball.”81 The Times hoped that baseball could be saved from professional gamblers, and that the young baseball fans would not be seduced into a life of wagering. About baseball, the newspaper thought, “Surely, there is scope enough for gentry of a certain class to exercise their vocation in connection with prize

80 Ibid.

81 “Base Ball in Danger,” New York Times, June 24, 1869.

51 fighting, faro saloons, rat killing, sham pedestrians, cock fighting and the like, without corrupting a game [baseball] designed, and admirably suited, to afford healthful relaxation to our youth.”82 To be the builder of men, baseball had to be above the levels of crooked games, blood sports, and animal contests. Of an 1887 St. Louis and New Jersey Metropolitan game, the New York Times reported on the dangerous gambling taking place. The Times reported, “During the game all sorts of devices that are used to lessen the bank accounts of the gullible public were brought into execution.”83 The threats of vice included criminals like pickpockets and gambling such as the shell game. Another contentious issue between baseball and moral advocates in the nineteenth century was contests played on Sunday. State and local communities throughout the nation passed blue laws expressly forbidding the playing of games on Sundays. Sunday, after all, was the Sabbath, and religion could not be forsaken for the sake of baseball, no matter what its benefits. Late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century newspapers are replete with stories that detail blue laws and the arrest of Sunday baseball players. In New York City, the sporting culture struggled against reformers who wanted to enforce Sabbatarian laws. Reformers like Anthony Comstock attacked saloons and eagerly reported violations of blue laws.84 In 1873, Comstock created the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The Comstock Law, a federal law named after him, made it illegal to circulate obscene material, including information about birth control and venereal disease. Baseball was also a target of overzealous reformers. In June 1884, the police commissioners of Long Island City directed their officers to stop baseball on Sunday. The owner and manager of the playing grounds, Patrick Ryan, fought back. Ryan obtained an injunction to stop the police. When law enforcement arrived at the playing grounds, they could not stop the playing of baseball due to the injunction. Unable to stop the baseball games, the police decided to monitor the sale of beverages by

82 Ibid.

83 “A Lively Game of Ball,” New York Times, September 5, 1887.

84 Horowitz, 368.

52 commandeering the refreshment stand and insuring that no alcohol was served. Of this incident, the New York Times quoted a clergyman who disagreed with the actions of the police.85 The clergyman thought, “It is much better to have our young men playing base- ball than standing on our street corners and getting drunk.”86 The clergyman saw the benefits of men getting exercise, even on a Sunday. The injunction was not the end of the feud between Ryan and the Long Island police. Two weeks later, over 5,000 young men gathered at the same Sunnyside Baseball Grounds on Long Island. At first, Ryan obeyed the order. But after consulting with his attorney, he told the athletes to play ball. The police informed the crowd, “they would arrest the first man who hit a ball.”87 Ryan said, “All right, then, you’ll have to arrest me.”88 The enraged Ryan picked up a bat and smacked a ball. The police immediately arrested him. In July 1884, when Ryan’s case went to trial, his attorney argued “that baseball, when indulged in for relaxation or recreation, is a mere pastime” and not outlawed by the New York Legislature.89 Ultimately, a judge ordered Ryan released. During the summer of 1884, the Law and Order League of Columbus, Ohio, arrested their hometown team, as well as the visiting Brooklyn baseball club. The League promised to prosecute all “Sabbath-breakers and close the saloons, beer gardens, and poolrooms.”90 To the league, Sunday baseball was as bad as drinking and gambling. The issue of Sunday baseball would remain an issue throughout the nineteenth century. In 1887, the Times reported on a game in New Jersey between the Metropolitans and St. Louis. The Times wrote, “judging from the obstacles encountered in the inaugural game, professional contest on the Sabbath in that section of the country will

85 “Playing Ball on Sunday,” New York Times, June 16, 1884.

86 Ibid.

87 “Sunday Ball-Playing Stopped,” New York Times, June 30, 1884.

88 Ibid.

89 “Ball May Be Played on Sunday,” New York Times, July 19, 1884.

90 “The Sunday Base-Ball War,” New York Times, June 24, 1884.

53 never prove a healthy or paying investment.”91 In May 1903, Forest and Stream reported, “In New Jersey a grand jury has been instructed by Judge Van Syckel that it would be its duty to indict the police from chief down unless ball playing were stopped on Sunday; and this was followed last Sunday by the arrest of many players.”92 Baseball players risked serious punishment in the form of fines and imprisonment for playing on a Sunday. In the summer of 1917, when the Brooklyn Dodgers played baseball on a Sunday in Albany, authorities arrested and arraigned the team’s president, , for violation of blue laws. Ebbets complained, “Why then should an institution which is looked upon as a wholesome and desirable thing in one section of the country, be considered a crime, or at least a misdemeanor in another section?”93 To Ebbets, baseball was a stalwart keeper of American values, training another generation of young men. Outlawing it, any day of the week, was ridiculous. Ebbets also thought that it was unfair that African-American clubs could play on Sundays, while whites could not.94 Ebbets believed that most people would want to play baseball on Sundays: “The issue of the Blue Laws should be determined solely by the majority. And that Majority I am convinced would not be found in opposition to Sunday Baseball.”95 Of course, Ebbets, a team president, and his team would have benefited financially from more baseball. Eventually baseball convinced local authorities to play ball on Sundays. The American League, with strength in western cities, led the way. Beginning in 1902, Chicago, St. Louis and Cincinnati permitted Sunday baseball. With an immigrant population, particularly of German descent, western cities were not as beholden to Victorian virtues, and added to their revenue by serving beer at baseball games. Sunday

91 “A Lively Game of Ball,” New York Times, September 5, 1887.

92 “Sunday Baseball and Fishing,” Forest and Stream, May 16, 1908.

93 Charles Ebbets, “A Defense of Sunday Baseball,” Base Ball Magazine, September 1917.

94 Ibid.

95 Ibid.

54 baseball was also more palatable to moral reformers as Major League Baseball guaranteed cleaning up vice and strictly regulating player behavior. With such concern about the correct and proper behavior of men, baseball organizations regulated the correct behavior of baseball players. The rules adopted by the seventh annual baseball convention in 1863 gave advice to its membership on the type of man who should be on the baseball club. The convention proclaimed, “In admitting new members, be sure they are persons of good habits and character.”96 Although the teams wanted competitors, they did not want to admit rabble or riff-raff to the league. In the era before called balls and strikes, early baseball tried to regulate the play of batters by appealing to their manhood. In December 1865, the National Association of Base Ball Players determined that it was not manly to wait for a perfect . The rules of the Association offered, “his [the batter’s] refusal to strike at good balls, under the plea that they do not suit him, when it is apparent to all that he simply wants to allow his partner to get to his second base. In every respect it is preferable to play the game manfully and without resorting to any such trickery.”97 A batter waiting for the perfect pitch was interfering with the flow of the game, and risked losing the interests of the fans. More importantly, waiting for a perfect pitch deprived the game of its manly challenges. During the Civil War, the National Association of Base Ball Players instituted changes to standardize and modernize the game. Instead of a variety of competing games, uniform rules allowed a single version of baseball to spread across the country. The rule changes also insured that baseball would distinguish itself from other bat-and- ball games. Baseball enthusiasts considered these games for children and less of a test of manhood. The 1863 convention declared, “Boys and even girls can play Rounders without difficulty but Base Ball, to be played thoroughly, requires the possession of muscular strength, great agility, quickness of eye, readiness of hand, and many other faculties of mind and body that mark the man of nerve.”98 With the rule changes, they

96 Henry Chadwick, ed., Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player, (New York: Beadle and Company, 1864).

97 Caroline L. Smith, Popular Pastimes for Field and Fireside; or, Amusements for Young and Old (Springfield, MA: Milton Bradley, 1867), 53.

98 Henry Chadwick, ed., Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player, (New York: Beadle and Company, 1864).

55 considered baseball a man’s game. Kimmel writes, “Baseball’s version of masculinity thus cut with a contradictory edge: If the masculinity expressed on the was exuberant, fiercely competitive, and wildly aggressive, it was so only in a controlled and orderly arena, closely supervised by powerful adults. Psychologically, baseball would always be a boy’s game.”99 Kimmel captures baseball’s complex relationship with gender. While purportedly making the game more masculine, grown men were beholden to rules and umpires. Baseball promoted itself as an innocent game of the past and free of vice or temptations, but one that required an elaborate set of rules and infrastructure to maintain it as such. At the same time, baseball also purported to be a test of body and mind for men, which thus implicitly raised questions about the need for such closer supervision in the first place. In order to regulate the game’s play – and bolster its masculine credentials – leading baseball officials had already begun during the Civil War to lay down uniform rules. In December 1863, baseball’s ruling body, the National Association of Base Ball Players, adopted a regulation bat size. It also dictated the size of the pitcher’s box and required the pitcher to deliver the ball with both feet on the ground. In a move closer to the modern game, base runners could not advance on a . For the 1865 season, the National Association abandoned the bound rule for the fly rule. Now balls hit into the air must be caught before their first bounce in order for the batter to be considered out. Before this time, any fly ball caught on the first bounce was an out. Baseball historian Warren Goldstein writes, “By eliminating the bound catch in favor of the fly catch, they hoped to make baseball a more manly sport.”100 Catching on the fly was actually a development taken from the Massachusetts version of the game, discussed in the previous chapter. Baseball players believed that this adjustment to the rules made the game more difficult and sophisticated. The players were not the only ones who had to act in a respectable fashion. The rules issued for the 1864 season also wanted an umpire above reproach. The regulations

99 Kimmel, 140.

100 Goldstein, 48.

56 stated, “The Umpire should constantly bear in mind that upon his manly, fearless, and impartial conduct in a match mainly depends the pleasure that all, more or less, will derive from it.”101 The umpire, like the players, had to adhere to a certain code of conduct. A code of conduct insured masculine qualities. The rules for the 1864 season added, “He should be one also whose gentlemanly conduct will render him acceptable to all who are liable to make inquiries of him relative to the score of the game.”102 The integrity and reputation of the game depended upon the umpire’s behavior, as well as that of the players. In addition to regulating cursing, gambling and drinking, baseball wanted men to look like wholesome baseball players; appearance and neatness counted.103 The rules adopted in 1889 for the Player’s National League of Baseball Clubs required that players dress well, with each wearing a neat and clean uniform. For their gender performance, men had to dress the part. Baseball’s pioneers, the , were the first club to wear uniforms. The Knickerbockers use of uniforms might have stemmed from the fact that they were predominantly firemen. Their uniforms included wool pants, shirts, and straw hats. By the 1880s, team uniforms included knee-length colored stockings. The color of the stocking (red, blue, white, brown) was a popular way to differentiate teams. The 1880s also saw the introduction of striped uniforms. By the late nineteenth century, teams traditionally wore white at home and another color of uniform on the road. Teams often sported a letter on the front of their shirts to designate their team hometown. Clubs would not use graphic designs, however, until the twentieth century. Baseball uniforms tied players to other heroic figures: soldiers, firemen, and policemen. A fan could easily identify the masculine attributes—strength, speed, vigor—due to the athlete’s clothes.

101 Ibid.

102 Ibid.

103 Peter Morris, But Wasn’t It Fun? An Informal History of Baseball’s Pioneer Era, 1843-1870 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publishing, 2008), 127.

57 The uniform also united a team and defined them in contrast to the spectators. The team had a common cause and wardrobe. In baseball’s early years, accessories varied widely. Initially, baseball teams wore a hodgepodge of hats with their uniforms. Caps were more commonplace by the 1880s. Teams wore leather shoes; spikes did not become standard baseball attire until the twentieth century. The first baseball clubs did not wear gloves. But after broken bones and gnarled fingers, gloves slowly caught on. Early gloves were usually padded leather gloves with the fingers cut off. By the 1890s, most teams wore gloves. From the 1860s onward, baseball advanced a socially acceptable sport to mainstream American culture, and the sport worked hard to control the image and behavior of its players. Americans wanted a strong masculine athletic culture, but within the confines of Victorian social norms. The authorities wanted to make sure that baseball was free from gambling, drinking, cursing, and fighting, as well as free from shabby dress and slovenly appearance. One of the most controversial issues was the outlawing of baseball on Sundays, but this regulation, too, derived from a desire to live up to the proper masculine ideals. The post-bellum masculinity articulated by baseball was loosely Christian, as well as clean-cut, self-made, and capitalistic.104 Baseball as Restorer of the Body, Mind and Spirit Baseball’s definition of manliness in the nineteenth century included portraying men as athletes. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, Americans were increasingly concerned about waning masculine strength. They believed that American men had lost the vigor of the past. The changing economy and modern life had weakened men’s bodies and minds. Baseball’s promoters believed that the game could rescue American men from modern threats. To be manly included being an athlete. Although not a central focus of this study, the interconnection between race and gender is an important one to consider when evaluating baseball’s role in establishing a code for manhood. In Manliness and Civilization, historian Gail Bederman argues that in the late nineteenth century, white American men connected gender and racial identity. In their minds, white males should be the dominant political and cultural force. In the late

104 Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 125.

58 nineteenth century, however, immigrants, the working class and women challenged white male hegemony.105 Men sought to maintain their status in the face of these challenges and a changing economy. The old Victorian ideals slipped away with the new self-made- man ideology that could survive and even thrive in the new economy. To them, white males should also dominate geopolitics. Ostensibly, white maleness represented the apogee of development, the highpoint of civilization. Whiteness was in sharp contrast to other races, which “civilization” defined as “savage” and less progressed. Thus, white American men believed it was their duty to civilize the rest of the world, including the wild non-white races.106 Yet, white men found something admirable in the other, “savage” races. These less-developed men were athletic, virile, and sexually charged. White American men feared they were losing these qualities. In addition to Bederman, historian Kristin Hoganson examines these phenomena in Fighting for American Manhood. Hoganson explores how gender in the United States intersected with race, and how both proved to be motivating factors behind American imperialism. In Muscular Christianity, historian Clifford Putney argues that American Christians accepted athletics after initially rejecting sports. Putney thinks that white Christians feared they were weak in comparison to other races. Through training and sports, white Christian men could gain the physical strength necessary to civilize the world. Baseball could resolve the tensions of white masculinity by maintaining its civility while also indulging in a physical trial. The national pastime was acceptable to middle-class sensibilities, yet could test manhood and instill athletic values. In Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man, John Kasson argues that white American men felt weak in the modern world. Without a military test like the Civil War or a frontier to conquer, white Americans needed a masculine challenge. Kasson also argues that Americans feared that waves of immigration from southern and eastern Europe threatened American strength. White American men thought that increasing their strength and vitality was critical. Americans’ concerns about masculinity were tied to racial attitudes. White men

105 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1996), 15.

106 Bederman, 50.

59 believed they were purer, yet weaker, than African-Americans and immigrants.107 Kasson writes, “It is as if white American men sought to seize the ‘primitive’ strength, freedom, wildness and eroticism that they ascribed to these darker bodies to arm themselves for modern life.”108 Baseball’s traditionalism recalled a time when white masculinity was not under attack – not by immigration, not by emancipation, not by urbanization, and not by any of the other potentially destabilizing consequences of modernization. Kasson concludes that the end of the frontier, as well as life as an office and factory worker, further weakened American men.109 This is also a point that Kimmel echoes. Although Kasson’s and Putney’s conclusions about white male insecurities are correct, the foci of their studies are in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, the fear of weakness that those scholars recognized at the turn of the century had already surfaced in the years right after the Civil War. In 1872, before the time that Kasson and Putney cite, the New York Times fretted that Americans were weaker and sicker than their English counterparts. The Times remarked, “It is a common remark among Americans, who have traveled in Europe, that we are not, as a people, so physically strong as Englishmen.”110 The newspaper feared that, despite their similar genetic background, Americans were now weaker than the English. The Times specifically complained about Americans’ poor diet and lack of physical exercise. By the second half of the nineteenth century, American athletic life sought a return to the strength of the past. They thought clearing the land, working in the fields, even fighting American Indians, built early American vitality. Whether or not these tasks were a real or an imagined part of the past, journalists, athletic experts, and sporting enthusiasts recalled a history of strong physical specimens conquering the frontier space. Americans believed in a rural mythology that underlined a uniquely American identity.

107 Kimmel, 93.

108 John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 10.

109 Ibid, 10-11.

110 “Athletic Sports,” New York Times, Oct 20, 1872.

60 In an 1872 article, the New York Times remembered the glories of America’s physical past. The Times wrote, “Our forefathers had so much to do to earn a living that they were unable to make physical culture a part of their social economy.”111 In early American life, sports like fishing and hunting along with other outdoor activities were built into everyday life. Americans romanticized their past physical exploits in the face of the threats of modern life. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Americans were recovering from the physical devastation of the Civil War. They also lived through a time of tremendous industrial growth that resulted in injury, death, and pollution. Industrialization and immigration fueled urbanization. For the poor, life in the city included slums, crimes, and filth. Immigrant workers toiled at dangerous jobs where they could be easily replaced.112 Workers struggled to escape slums, dangerous working conditions, and urban congestion.113 American cities were also, however, the engines of abundance, and a necessary precursor to the proliferation of baseball. The growth of industrial cities in the Midwest explains baseball’s expansion into that region. Conversely, the lack of vibrant southern cities in the postwar period also explains the slow growth of baseball in the South. In the face of the unsettling and disorienting processes of the economic transformation, Americans chose to fancy their past as a healthy and fit one. Baseball sold itself as a physical restorative, a tonic for the physical threats of modern life. After the Civil War, the pace of industrialization increased. American cities swelled with new immigrants and factories. In an 1872 article, the New York Times detested the lifestyle of young men in the city. The paper lamented, “Here in New York, young men rise at 7 o’clock. They bolt—for they do not properly masticate—a quantity of half-cooked beef- steak, light a cigar, jump on the front platform of a car, and are poring over ledgers and

111 Ibid.

112 Nell Irwin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), xxx-xxxi.

113 Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003), 17.

61 cash-books long before their breakfast can have had a chance of being digested.”114 Living in the city led to terrible eating habits, improper exercise and indoor work. Baseball’s advocates and supporters believed that the game could cure modern America’s physical woes. The game could provide physical, mental and moral renewal. It returned players and spectators to the outdoors. There they engaged in a wholesome, physically rigorous activity. Unlike rougher sports like boxing and football, baseball was less likely to injure its players. Baseball served as a tonic to the perils of the modern world. In Sport in Industrial America, baseball historian Steven Reiss points out Chicago businessmen J. F. Farwell and Marshall Field encouraged their employees play baseball because the two thought that baseball would make for happy, efficient, and healthy employees.115 According to Reiss, by 1870, Chicago merchants formed over 50 teams, allowing their workers time away to practice and play games. The National Police Gazette testified to a baseball health movement beyond New York City. Despite its law enforcement title, the National Police Gazette was primarily a sporting publication. The Gazette also carried adventure stories with tales of murder, mayhem and titillating action. The Gazette exalted the physical benefits of the game. In the May 22, 1886 issue, it argued, “In cities, towns, and villages all over the country, it is the favorite diversion of the small boy, the daily recreation of the lusty and vigorous youth, and the most popular exercise with a multitude of broad-chested, supple-limbed, lithe and agile specimens of early manhood.”116 Much like other periodicals, it used graphic language to describe the benefits of the game. Baseball, like farming from years ago, built men’s muscles. Baseball’s supporters promoted the game for mental health as well as physical improvement. National Police Gazette even believed that it was possible for spectators to enjoy physical benefits from watching baseball. The newspaper argued, “The very sight of a hotly contested, skillfully-played game of baseball is a wholesome tonic for the

114 “Athletic Sports,” New York Times, Oct. 20, 1872.

115 Steven Riess, Sport in Industrial America 1850-1920 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1995), 67.

116 “The Seasons of Out-Door Sports,” National Police Gazette, May 22, 1886.

62 nervous system.”117 Baseball supplied a healthy outlet and recreation, even for its fans. The Gazette crowned baseball as the most important piece of American sporting life. The newspaper offered, “In this and other ways the national game is a useful and beneficial institution; a most invaluable agency of physical culture which is working a great change for the better in the habit and manner of life of Americans, especially in cities.”118 Baseball could relieve stress and improve the lives of even the bleacher bums. The overworked, stressed workers living in an unhealthy environment needed relief. Western writer Zane Grey offered a unique perspective on the merits of baseball. Although Grey is renowned as a twentieth-century western writer, he was an outstanding nineteenth-century baseball player. Before writing, Grey played for the University of Pennsylvania and semi-professional teams in Ohio and New Jersey. Grey’s first attempts at writing success were semi-autobiographical baseball stories. This juvenile literature formed the patterns that Grey would use again in his western fiction. Grey’s frontier heroes were reproductions of his earlier baseball players. The former baseball player saw the connections between baseball and the physical hardiness of our mythical past. Grey found religion in baseball’s offer of restoration through the outdoors. After Grey’s protagonist was arrested for playing baseball on a Sunday, the player defended himself by declaring his experience as a blue-collar worker.119 To Grey’s hero, baseball provided spiritual salvation, “On Sunday those shrieking, boisterous diggers, cappers, puddlers, refiners, had gone back to their boyhood.”120 Grey’s heroes found rejuvenation not in a church pew but on the baseball diamond. After all, Grey wrote, “A man or a boy penned up all the week needs some kind of a fling.”121 To Grey’s ballplayers, an existence confined indoors at menial labor was crushing to the spirit. Baseball provided the exercise and happiness for average Americans. For American men, baseball offered

117 Ibid.

118 Ibid.

119 Zane Grey, The Short Stop (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1914), 241.

120 Ibid.

121 Ibid., 243.

63 physical rejuvenation and spiritual health in the face of modern challenges. Athletics, as defined by baseball, could restore the male form. Baseball was constructing a gender division in American athletics. Women as Spectators As baseball defined the role that men played in the game, it excluded women as athletes and narrowly defined their role as spectators. In this step of defining manhood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, baseball prevented women from playing the game. It separated women in a physical way; their place was ostensibly in the stands, not on the field. As spectators, women reinforced the positive aspects of the game for men. Women’s presence at the game proved the game’s wholesome and heroic aspects. Newspapers often noted women’s attendance at games. Women’s attendance legitimized the sport as acceptable to Victorian mores. If women could watch a game, it must be an acceptable form of entertainment. John Montgomery Ward, one of the early game’s great players, wrote, “It is a fact that the sport has no more ardent admirers than are to be found among its lady attendants throughout the country.”122 Ward was selling the game as entertainment that anyone could watch. Women glamorized the game, increased the attendance and profits, and provided a positive influence on their fellow fans and on the players on the field – teams were convinced that their players would behave better in front of female spectators. The New York Times continued its positive commentary on female attendance: “Their efforts to induce the attendance of ladies at their matches have been the means of enabling them to surpass every other club in the community in this respect.”123 Female attendance was a point of pride for baseball clubs, and many baseball games seemed to be contests for the attention of the women in the stands. Baseball scholar Peter Morris argues that these were “courtship rituals.”124 Baseball teams often had organizations of young ladies that specifically followed that club.125 In a sign of the importance of baseball games as

122 John Montgomery Ward, Baseball: How to Become a Player (: The Athletic Publishing Company, 1888), 34.

123 “Out-Door Sports,” New York Times, July 17, 1865.

124 Morris, 108.

125 Ibid.

64 displays of strength to the opposite sex, teams of married and unmarried men regularly played one another, much the way that teams of different professions vied for supremacy.126 Thus, baseball was a means for testing the better man, whether single or married. But it could also be a test for ranking men according to profession. At an important contest in 1866 between the Philadelphia Athletics and the Unions of Morrisania, the Times noted, “The ladies were out in unusual numbers, and by their presence restrained a crowd that would otherwise have been turbulent.”127 The newspaper thought that the female presence was essential for keeping the men in line. To promote female attendance, the New York Gothams introduced Ladies’ Days in June 1883. During Ladies’ Days, teams did not charge women admission and provided separate entrances. Teams across the country provided special promotions directed at women. The July 11, 1884 issue of the Milwaukee Daily Journal reported on the Milwaukee club’s Ladies’ Day. The Journal reported, “Yesterday was ladies’ day at the ball park, and gypsy hats, red parasols and blonde bangs were scattered promiscuously among the brightly painted chairs in the grand stand.”128 The newspaper reported on the behavior of the women at the game, “The representatives of the fair sex chatted gaily, made small bets on the results of the game and admired the manly forms of the players.”129 Apparently, although women were supposed to be a civilizing force on the game, they were not immune from the temptations to gamble. Underlining the supposed ignorance of women regarding baseball, the newspaper also pointed out, “Of the half hundred ladies who saw the game, not three could discriminate between the ‘ins’ and the ‘outs,’ or know a fair ball from a fly.”130 The Milwaukee Daily Journal reported that the women asked, “questions beyond number about the game, the players and score

126 Ibid., 111.

127 “Out-Door Sports,” New York Times, June 27, 1866.

128 “Women at the —Fast Time on the Track—General Gossip,” Milwaukee Daily Journal, July 11, 1884.

129 Ibid.

130 Ibid.

65 cards.”131 Thus, the newspaper suggested that once women were introduced to baseball, they found their curiosity piqued and sought to find out as much as they could about the game. John Montgomery Ward reflected on the function that women played during the early game. In his 1888 book, Baseball: How to Become a Player, Ward dedicated a chapter to women spectators. Ward’s book is paternalistic in its approach to teaching women the game. It was a man’s role to accompany women to a game and to teach them how to appreciate it. The chapter explained the game to women. Ward explained, “For the benefit of those ladies whose escorts either cannot, or will not, answer their questions, I will attempt to set forth as clearly as possible the fundamental principles of the game.”132 Ward also gave advice to men about how they should introduce the game to women. The former player also knew the importance of women as spectators at the game. Ward argued that women had a beneficial impact on the game, proving its universality and wholesome appeal. Of women’s attendance and understanding of the game, Ward wrote, “she had expected to find it [baseball] so difficult to understand, and she soon discovers that she knows all about it; she is able to criticise plays and even find fault with the umpire; she is surprised and flattered by the wonderful grasp of her own understanding, and she begins to like the game.”133 Ward argued that it was only a matter of time before women became the most ardent of fans. He stated, “As with everything else that she likes at all, she likes it with all her might, and it is only a question of a few more games till she becomes an enthusiast.”134 Ward urged his male readers to take a lady to a game as soon as possible. Of course, going together to a game was another form of courting. According to the sporting press, men needed to explain baseball to women. Emphasizing this point is an advertisement from the July 13, 1891 St. Paul Daily News. The advertisement tried to sell Demorest’s Family Magazine. William Jennings

131 Ibid.

132 Ward, 35.

133 Ibid., 34.

134 Ibid.

66 Demorest and his wife, Ellen, published the magazine. The Demorests were activist publishers, industrialists, and prohibitionists. The summer 1891 edition of Demorest was going to include a “game of baseball, all played out on paper by means of finely executed illustrations, with explicit description of each move.”135 The purpose of this article was to teach women about baseball. Demorest held the same promise as John Montgomery Ward’s book: to teach women about baseball, so they could enjoy the game as spectators. The nineteenth-century sporting media wanted women to attend baseball games, hoping that women’s participation as spectators would reinforce the role that baseball created for men. Women fans supported the idea that the game was a healthy, vigorous, yet wholesome, pastime. But the same media portrayed female fans as confused bystanders in need of help from men. Women as Players Although women were essential to the ritual of baseball as spectators, the early game prevented them from taking the field. If the game was to set standards for masculinity, playing had to be for men only. Baseball magnate Albert Spalding agreed that the role of women should be confined to the bleachers. Spalding wrote, “But neither our wives, our sisters, our daughters, nor our sweethearts, may play Base Ball on the field.”136 Spalding thought while women might excel at other sports, “Base Ball is too strenuous for womankind, except as she may take part in grandstand.”137 Spalding thought baseball was too rough for women; it should be reserved for men. Spalding’s opinion reflects the mainstream ideology about women and baseball. In the face of tremendous criticism, women played the national pastime. In the summer of 1870, the Daily Evening Bulletin of San Francisco, writing about a female baseball club in Detroit, observed, “What with female ball clubs, female boat clubs, and the like, it would seem that the fair sex are likely to secure their ‘rights’ quite as rapidly

135 “Women and Base Ball,” St. Paul Daily News, July 13, 1891.

136 Albert G. Spalding, America’s National Game: Historical Facts Concerning the Beginning, Evolution, Development and Popularity of Base Ball (1911; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 10- 11.

137 Ibid.

67 as the most radical could desire.”138 The Bulletin’s prognostication of women’s rights was obviously premature. Positive attitudes of female baseball play were a minority opinion. A more typical opinion comes from the April 21, 1876 Boston Daily Advertiser. The Advertiser thought, “The Woman’s Journal claims that women are equal in endurance to men, but until a woman can work hard all day long watching a game of base ball, and them [sic] sit up and play, billards [sic] till 2 o’clock in the morning, there doesn’t seem to be much need of arguing the point.”139 The Advertiser thought that women did not have the stamina to work, play or behave like men. Women did not belong in the sporting culture. Thus they did not deserve the same status in society. The Daily Arkansas Gazette reported in 1878 that “The young women of Peterboro, N. Y., jealous of the popular sports enjoyed by the more muscular portion of mankind, have organized a base ball club, and have already arrived at a creditable degree of proficiency in play.”140 Apparently the Peterboro club attracted approximately 50 players, but had to play outside the town, and “away from the gaze of the curious.”141 Women baseball players were an oddity to the public. The sporting press was cruel to women athletes. The Boston Daily Advertiser reported on the poor outing of the players. The Advertiser lambasted the play. During the game, the first pitcher did not look at the batter while pitching. According to the article, the teams then took a timeout to fix their hair. The Advertiser stated, “The batter again took position, when one of the party, discovering that she was holding the bat very much as a woman carries a broom when she is after a cow in the garden.”142 With the next pitch, the batter lunged, let go of the bat, and was hit by the ball in the back. This mistake was followed by “a chorus of screams, and some confusion of skirts.”143 Four of

138 “The Women of Detroit Are Learning to Play Base Ball,” Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), August 6, 1870.

139 Boston Daily Advertiser, April 21, 1876.

140 “Women As Baseball Players,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, September 30, 1878.

141 Ibid.

142 Boston Daily Advertiser, Wednesday August 21, 1878.

143 Ibid. 68 the players then decided that the game was a terrible idea, and ended the contest. The Boston newspaper was relieved, “The game was merely an experiment; and it is just as well it was. Had it been a real game, it is likely that some one would have been killed outright.”144 The report on this game underscores the idea that women were not only incompetent, but dangerous players. Baseball was, ostensibly, no test of feminine qualities. Baseball was reserved as a battleground for men. An article from the summer of 1879 also derided women’s ability to play baseball. And like the game in Danbury, the press again compared women’s hitting style to holding a broom. The Milwaukee Daily Sentinel reported, “The bat was held above the head as nearly perpendicular as might be, and brought down with the grace and force that adorn the act of domestic discipline administered with a broom.”145 In a common practice of these games, teams were divided into squads by hair color. This game, like many of the others, was the source of ridicule. The article described the scene: “Out on the dusty open field the eighteen young women pranced about essaying base-ball until the audience roared itself hoarse.”146 The press made light of the women’s athletic skills, “They have been in practice for four weeks. Such playing had never before been seen, but it was certainly earnest and even savage playing. The viciously whacked ball often passed the pitcher, and the running from base to base was a cross between a skip and jog- trot.”147 Even after weeks of practice, the press believed that women were incapable of the fundamental skills needed to play baseball. The mainstream culture mocked and derided women’s ability. On August 18, 1883, a mixed group of 16 girls and two boys played a baseball game in Philadelphia. The athletes played in front of a crowd of around 500 spectators. The New York Times called

144 Ibid.

145 “Women Playing Baseball: A Study in Blue and Red of the That Usually Masculine Game,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, May 14, 1879.

146 Ibid.

147 Ibid.

69 the match a “ridiculous exhibition.”148 The newspaper was thoroughly descriptive of the player’s attire, reinforcing the fact that appearance of the women was more important than the game. The Times was glad that the “players were modestly dressed.”149 One team wore white dresses with red stockings and the other had blue stockings. They topped the outfit with “jaunty little white cloth hats.”150 The players also wore “base-ball shoes of the regulation style, except one girl, who luxuriated in 15 button gaiters that reached a span above her ankles and must have taken half an hour each to fasten.”151 The Times ridiculed the play of the athletes, as well as their appearance. The newspaper believed that the field was too big for the athletes. It commented, “The throw from first to third base was an utter impossibility. The throwing was a novelty at Pastime, and excited the players who watched the game to uncontrollable laughter.”152 The newspaper described the girls’ method of throwing and catching as incorrect and ineffective. If a line drive throw came straight at a player, she dodged the ball instead of catching it. Of course, it is impossible to know how much coaching, if any, the players had before the game; although the newspaper did point out that the players only had ten days to practice. After nine innings, the Reds defeated the Blues by a score of 84 to 26. The teams were going to play a rematch on September 1, 1883. This time, the players were going to slug it out on a half-sized diamond. The Times looked forward to a game on a smaller field, thinking that “will better suit their style of batting and throwing.”153 To the Times, as well as the crowd in Philadelphia, the game was a novelty. They mocked and ridiculed untrained players. Another attempt at women’s baseball fared even worse. In July of 1888, an all- women team from Philadelphia visited Baltimore. On their trip, they played games in venues such as Oriole Park. Unfortunately, only 32 fans turned out to one of their games.

148 “Girls at Baseball,” New York Times, August 19, 1883.

149 Ibid.

150 Ibid.

151 Ibid.

152 Ibid.

153 “Girls at Baseball,” New York Times, August 19, 1883.

70 With such low attendance, and very little revenue from gate receipts, they had no money to return home to Philadelphia. The New York Times reported, “They are half starved and in a sad plight.”154 Although the Times failed to give any scores or the record of the team, it did mention the hair color of the team members, and judged that their playing skills were terrible. The June 2, 1894 edition of the National Police Gazette detailed another example of women playing baseball. Churches in New Rochelle and Mamaroneck, New York, tried to prevent a game between men and women players. According to the Gazette, “All the country witnessed it. Carriages full of curious people came from far and near. Two military schools marched to the ground in full force.”155 Apparently, the women struggled to bat the ball more than just a few feet. Instead, “The mean men piled up disgracefully large scores. The scorers could not keep tally. It is said the score was 1,000 to 1.”156 Although the accuracy of this score is in doubt, the story reveals the attitude that women were no match for men in this game. Stories like this supposedly confirmed that women were terrible at baseball, and should not compete with men, and possibly avoid playing the national pastime altogether. An examination of women’s sports in the late nineteenth century gives some context to women’s exclusion from baseball. In the late nineteenth century, women attended college in increasing numbers. There, women took physical education courses and participated in athletic clubs and teams. In the 1870s, women raced competitively in pedestrianism (race walking). This was a popular spectator sport for both sexes. The print media covered it, and fans wagered on the sport. Mary Ewing Outerbridge, an American from Philadelphia, introduced tennis to the United States. After learning the game in Bermuda, she played the first lawn tennis game at the Staten Island Cricket Club in 1874. By 1887, women competed in the U.S. Women's National Singles Championship, forerunner of the U. S. Open. In the 1890s, millions of American women flocked to another sport, bicycling. Suffragist and president of the Women’s Christian

154 “Female Ball Players in a Plight,” New York Times, July 8, 1888.

155 “Girls Play Baseball,” National Police Gazette, June 2, 1894.

156 Ibid.

71 Temperance Union, Frances Willard, even wrote a book about how important bicycling was to her. In A Wheel within a Wheel, published in 1895, Willard argues that both men and women should learn to ride so they would have a common experience to share. She also thought biking was an adventure, good for the body, and gave women independent transportation.157 Willard wrote, “The old fables, myths, and follies associated with the idea of woman’s incompetence to handle bat and oar, bridle and rein, and at last the cross-bar of the bicycle are passing into contempt.”158 In an 1896 interview, women’s rights advocate Susan B. Anthony agreed that physical activity, including bicycling, was important for women. Anthony stated, “I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.”159 Cycling was not only an exercise for women, but also a means of independence. Unlike baseball, it gave women an athletic outlet. At the time, society could accept exercise for women, but not competition. One of the few voices in support of women playing baseball does not appear until the early twentieth century. Leslie Carter, writing in May 1909 for Baseball Magazine, was one of the era’s most famous actresses. She starred in theater, as well as silent pictures. Carter argued that her profession, as well as others, required women to be in peak physical shape. Carter wrote, “Baseball is peculiarly adapted to all the athletic advantages of a woman’s physique.”160 Carter cited the fact that women were playing baseball on teams in boarding schools as evidence of women’s ability to play the game. She wrote, “They have learned in their baseball teams the blessed privilege of self- assertion, of individual confidence”161 Carter wanted women to reap the same healthy benefits from baseball that men did. Carter opined, “I wish women could play baseball,

157 Frances Willard, A Wheel Within A Wheel: How I Learned To Ride With Some Reflections By the Way (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1895), 72-73.

158 Ibid., 41.

159 “Champion of Her Sex,” New York Sunday World, 2 February 2, 1896.

160 Leslie Carter, “Exercise—The Fountain of Youth,” Baseball Magazine, May 1909.

161 Ibid.

72 because it is a form of exercise and amusement combined, which is a very difficult matter in these days.”162 Even in the early twentieth century, playing baseball remained a wish for many women. In the late nineteenth century, baseball defined itself as a game for men. Baseball play was meant for male athletes. The point of the game was to strengthen and test men. This was a step in the process of baseball’s establishing a culture of masculinity. Women were supposed to look on and admire the men’s athletic exploits. Baseball celebrated and welcomed women as spectators only. In this role, though, they were an important part of the game, proving that the game was an acceptable exercise for nineteenth-century society. When women took the field, on the other hand, they were the objects of scorn and ridicule. Sporting literature paid more attention to their attire and hair color than the games. They then mocked their athletic abilities. Baseball was an arena to prove strength, leadership, and vigor. This was a realm for men; these virtues were masculine virtues, not feminine. In nineteenth-century sporting culture, women should be in the stands, not on the field. Conclusion As baseball rose to prominence, it defined masculinity in the nineteenth century. From its proliferation during the Civil War until the turn of the century, baseball became a touchstone for masculine ideals. But these notions were not ironclad. Baseball had a symbiotic relation with new players, new clubs, and new cultures. Baseball, formed in the urban northeast, spread the archetype of the self-made man. Baseball’s proliferation of the self-made-man ideal was a progression. First, it established itself in different sections of the country after the Civil War. It spread the northern, middle-class notions of masculinity. It set standards for its players on and off the field. Baseball acted as a restorer of the male body in the face of fears of weakening masculinity. Baseball established gender borders, which involved primarily keeping women out of the game. In the early years of the game, gender was a performance. Men had to prove their physical toughness while behaving within a code. Women, on the other hand, were vital elements as spectators in the baseball ritual.

162 Ibid.

73 Understanding the relationship between gender and baseball underscores larger attitudes defining men and women in this era. Baseball highlighted the general gender inequities of the era. These attitudes included fears that men were weak in the face of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. With the increased role of women in the public sphere, the lack of a war to fight or frontier to conquer, Americans feared that men were not as strong as their ancestors. Men needed a national pastime to bolster their strength, but these athletic impulses had to conform. Meanwhile, women did not belong on the baseball diamond displaying their athletic abilities. Baseball defined masculinity in the nineteenth century. This chapter examined how baseball spread to the South and promoted a northern version of masculinity. This chapter next argued that baseball promoted a middle-class version of masculinity. To promote the game as wholesome and healthy, its governing bodies and culture wanted men to behave. Baseball wanted its players to follow the rules, act professionally, avoid cursing and gambling, and even dress well. Baseball wanted players to live up to an ideal, to improve on the sporting culture, and to define a new manly behavior. This chapter next examined how baseball was supposed to reinvigorate men’s bodies, and it scrutinized women’s place in nineteenth-century baseball. The national pastime wanted women to take part as spectators of the game. They were an important part of the ritual. But sporting literature also believed that women knew very little about the game; they depended upon men to explain the game to them. Lastly, this chapter also examined women’s efforts to play the game. Nineteenth-century sporting literature made light of these games. The sporting culture thought women’s place was supporting their men, not trying to compete with them. After the Civil War, Americans from every region embraced a new sporting fad, baseball. The sporting press dubbed it the “national pastime” and promoted its apparent virtues. As the game spread, it promoted a mass, unified culture. The game touted a new masculine ideal, one derived from the dynamics of post-war economic life and a mythical Civil War heritage. By the end of the nineteenth century, baseball served as an exemplar of masculine behavior. Baseball’s self-defined role as a builder of men would have dramatic consequences. As we shall see in the next chapter, baseball promoted itself not only as a masculine ideal, but also as a training ground for warriors. The game

74 went beyond sport or fad to create a mythology and culture that stressed its martial and nationalistic virtues.

75 Chapter Three Finding Glory in the Summers of Discontent: Building Baseball’s Warrior Mythos and Restoring the Union Introduction Baseball’s strongest connection to the Civil War is mythical. For decades, Americans believed that Union general Abner Doubleday invented baseball while he was a schoolboy in Cooperstown, New York. According to the myth, Doubleday devised and even named the game in 1839. In 1907, a blue-ribbon panel, the Mills Commission, tasked with finding the true , accepted the Doubleday tale as gospel. Sporting goods magnate and former player Albert Spalding highlighted the importance of the Doubleday myth in his 1911 book, America’s National Game. Spalding emphasized the Civil War when he wrote that soldiers were “playing a game that had been devised nearly a quarter of a century before by a youth [Doubleday], who, in the pending struggle, had sighted the first gun in defense of Fort Sumter.”163 The Doubleday myth was central to Spalding’s history of the game. Despite scholars’ best efforts, many Americans still believe the myth. This chapter argues that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans imbued their national pastime with martial themes and motifs that served to reinforce connections to the Civil War in the national memory. This mythologization had important consequences. Baseball contributed to the American culture’s glorification of the war’s military aspects. The mythology also reinforced the idea that baseball solidified North-South relationships. Baseball’s glamorization of its Civil War past also contributed to the American culture’s continued overlooking of the conflict’s racial issues. Ultimately, baseball could serve as another means to reunite the nation around a Civil War in which both sides – the winning one and losing one alike – glamorized its memory. As baseball became a national pastime, Americans celebrated the game’s mythical past as a sport that developed and spread during war, emphasizing the Doubleday origin story. Thus our search is for the cultural connections between baseball and war. This chapter will examine two connected phenomena. In the first section, this chapter will argue that Americans created a warrior ethos for their national pastime. Americans

163 Albert G. Spalding, America’s National Game: Historical Facts Concerning the Beginning, Evolution, Development and Popularity of Base Ball (1911; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 95. 76 believed their sport was a war game. It was a training ground for future soldiers. It was a pastime worthy of a growing international, military, and economic power. By the time of World War I, the warrior motif was a central element in America’s national pastime. Major League Baseball emphasized the importance of baseball to the war effort. Second, this chapter will argue that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans glamorized and glorified baseball’s Civil War experience. This stemmed from the martial themes and tropes that Americans tied to the game. Americans began to attach a glorious Civil War heritage to baseball. This was punctuated by the Abner Doubleday myth. The Civil War mythology also included tales of Abraham Lincoln playing baseball. The creation of a Civil War mythology surrounding a common national game helped end the divisions between North and South as the United States entered another great conflict, this time as a united country. Americans embedded a martial past into their national game. In 1907, a panel of baseball insiders settled a debate over the game’s origins by anointing a Civil War general as the game’s inventor. In 1903, influential columnist Henry Chadwick declared that baseball was a descendant of the English game of rounders. Spalding loathed the idea that America’s national pastime was the bastard child of an English game. In 1905, Spalding requested that a special commission to conclusively determine the origins of baseball. Led by Abraham G. Mills, former president of the National League, the Mills Commission took up the task. The commission had five other members, including baseball executives, all-star players, and two United States Senators. The Mills Commission asked Americans to submit evidence of baseball’s origin. A mining engineer, Abner Graves, saw the call for evidence in Akron, Ohio’s Beacon Journal. Graves wrote a letter to the commission detailing how a young Abner Doubleday modified town ball, a nascent bat and ball game. According to Graves, Doubleday named it baseball during a schoolyard match in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. In reality, Doubleday was attending West Point, where he graduated in 1842. Doubleday steadily rose in rank before the Civil War. He gained fame in action at Fort Sumter, Antietam, and Gettysburg. The commission issued its report in December 1907. The commission reported, “the first known diagram of the diamond, indicating positions for

77 the players, was drawn by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, N. Y. in 1839.”164 The commission’s report lauded Doubleday’s service in the Civil War, highlighting him as a warrior. But Mills was the only member to sign the report. Mills, along with Spalding, seized upon Grave’s letter as gospel, cementing Doubleday’s place as baseball’s inventor. Spalding got what he wanted: an American genesis for baseball and also one that reinforced the ostensible soldierly virtues and military connections of the game. Historians may never know the motivations of the Mills Commission; its documents were destroyed in a fire. But examining the consequences of the Mills Commission is more important than divining its motivations. Americans readily believed and perpetuated the Doubleday myth. There are monuments to Doubleday at Gettysburg and Arlington National Cemetery, where he is interred. During World War II, builders named a Liberty-class cargo ship the SS Abner Doubleday. In an interesting continuation of the baseball myth coupled with the general’s military credentials, the United States Military Academy’s baseball team play their home games on . Americans commemorate Doubleday as both a military hero and inventor of baseball. The Doubleday legend is the culmination of the installation of Civil War mythology in the national pastime. This was a slow process after the Civil War. By the early 1910s, the Civil War mythology was particularly engrained in the story of the national pastime. The war’s meaning had changed over the ensuing 50 years. The issues of slavery and disunion had faded. By the early twentieth century, tales of gallantry and valor supplanted memories of horror and destruction. Americans’ memory of the war emphasized the military experience and increasingly deemphasized the sectional divide. Coinciding with the changing memory of the Civil War, baseball took its place as the national pastime. By the early 1910s, Major League Baseball was a cultural and commercial force. Since 1903, the was an annual spectacle. In the early twentieth century, the United States was also increasingly imperial and competitive with European powers. A national sport that purported to train young men for war emboldened this effort. Americans emphasized the Civil War mythology in the creation of the national pastime, highlighting the game’s warrior, patriotic, and masculine virtues.

164 Ibid., 20. 78 Unfortunately, many of the histories examining nineteenth-century baseball fail to examine the implications of baseball’s Civil War heritage. The seminal text, Baseball: The Early Years, published in 1960, was one of the first scholarly works to address baseball’s nineteenth-century history. The book’s author, Harold Seymour, discusses the possibility that the war spread the game. Seymour, however, does not examine the war’s influence on the culture of the game or the meaning that the war placed on the sport. Similarly, James B. Kirsch’s Baseball in Blue and Gray fails to examine war’s cultural impact on the game. Despite its title, the book ignores how the war influenced baseball in the long . Instead, Kirsch’s brief volume explores the game during the Civil War and the explosion of popularity of the game after the war. Kirsch often mentions or suggests how baseball was influenced by the war, but does not go any further. Kirsch does explore how baseball was a nationalist ritual. Like many other baseball historians, Kirsch also discusses the war’s role in spreading and teaching the game to other parts of the nation, but does not go further on the war’s cultural impact on the game. Kirsch identifies the issue of nationalism as influential to the formation of baseball, but fails to examine concepts of militarism, masculinity or patriotism instilled in the game. He does not explain how American culture infused baseball with military connections and martial meaning. In another text that explores baseball’s early years, But Wasn’t It Fun?, author Peter Morris explores the direct role of the war in spreading the game. But like Kirsch, Morris does not explain how the memory of the war and its symbols were important to popularizing the game and creating a national pastime. Morris does argue that the post- war baseball surge was not due to returning Civil War veterans, and he contends that in the years after the Civil War, clubs were made up of younger players, not veterans.165 Morris does not pursue this story to its conclusion, though, by examining the effects that the war had on the mythology, if not the actual practice, of the game. Despite the title of William J. Ryczek’s When Johnny Came Sliding Home: The Post Civil War Baseball Boom, 1865-1870, it lacks analysis of what role the war played in the

165 Peter Morris, But Wasn’t It Fun? An Informal History of Baseball’s Pioneer Era, 1843-1870 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publishing, 2008), 154.

79 culture of the game. Ryczek argues that the burgeoning financial strength of the United States after the war led to more free time for an increasing number of people.166 Although Ryczek includes significant data about the post-war teams, the author does not provide any other connections between the war and the rise of baseball. The secondary material addressing baseball’s post-war years suffer from a common blunder. Outside of the game played in camps or prisons and the proliferation of the game after the war, they do not address the relevance and the impact of the war on the game. The war and the game’s history during 1861-1865 took a mythical place in baseball’s past. But most baseball scholars are looking for direct links between the war and the game: players that spread the game after the war. I argue, however, that it is the prevalence of the belief that the Civil War generation invented and spread the game, rather than the veracity of this belief, that is central to our understanding of the role of baseball in a unified American culture and identity. With a martial mythology present at the game’s genesis, baseball cemented its patriotic and heroic heritage. It was a uniquely American game with manly, jingoistic and martial overtones for all Americans. Baseball forged a common culture that cut across sectional divides and rallied American attention around a single pastime. Forging Baseball’s Warrior Culture 1864-1918 In the years after the Civil War, baseball touted its military heritage. As the game grew to a national pastime, Americans believed that it was good for the national character. It ostensibly built manly muscle and trained men for the battlefield. The game’s reputation as a war game had dramatic consequences. First, as we shall explore in greater detail later in this chapter, celebrating the game’s glorious Civil War roots and casting it as a war game led to the sport's role in unifying the nation. Historian David Blight writes, “Blue-Gray fraternalism crystallized around the values of manliness, valor, sacrifice, and a mutual sense of honor.”167 By the end of the nineteenth century, baseball was a symbol of manliness and a stand-in for war. Thus, it was a ritual for both north and south. Secondly, baseball cast itself as a substitute for war. As such, it was an important

166 William J. Ryczek, When Johnny Came Sliding Home: The Post Civil War Baseball Boom, 1865-1870 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), 1.

167 David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 199.

80 training ground for soldiers. By World War I, baseball was an important exercise for national security. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gender was a key ingredient in domestic politics and foreign policy. In Fighting for American Manhood, historian Kristin Hoganson argues that at the turn of the century, gender politics connected the fractured reasons for the Spanish-American war. Proving manly character linked the psychic, racial, economic, and strategic explanations for war. Hoganson writes, “The late-nineteenth-century belief that ‘manly’ character was a qualification for full citizenship and political leadership can explain why support for bellicose policies seemed politically astute at the turn of the century and why jingoes triumphed in political debate.”168 Baseball could ostensibly test and prove manly character. Doubts surged about the American male’s character with the passing of the Civil War generation. Americans feared that “unless the nation forged a new generation of soldier- heroes through war, U. S. politics would be marked by divisiveness, corruption, and weakness.”169 Here baseball serves its twin billing of pulling the nation together and training men for combat. In The Empire Strikes Out, baseball historian Robert Elias argues that baseball was an important element of American imperialism. Baseball was important for American soldiers, but it also extended American culture. In the late nineteenth century, baseball became a symbol of American military strength, with real consequences for American foreign policy. Thus baseball’s portrayal as a war game was an important step in the culture of the game and in the culture and politics of the nation. Even before the end of the Civil War, the Americans implanted a military subtext to baseball. For example, in 1864, the New York Times reported on a game between the Newarks and the Unions where, after the game, the president of the Newarks “compared the vicissitudes of the Newarks’ game to the progress of Gen. McClellan’s army.”170 The Unions won the game 12 to 11. In this instance, the newspaper compared a game to the fate of the Union army during the Peninsula Campaign, which had taken place a month

168 Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish- American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 10.

169 Ibid.

170 New York Times, August 4, 1862.

81 before. The Peninsula Campaign was a disaster for the Union army, mainly due to the bungling of its commanding general, George B. McClellan. Here the Newarks’ loss was also a bungling defeat. Baseball gave players the chance to prove their human merits: strength, skill, speed, courage and cunning. But in modern life and war, these traits mattered less. Baseball was an opportunity to demonstrate physical heroism and greatness in the modern world. As early as 1864, the book, The American Boy’s Book of Sports and Games, argued that sports created heroes. The book included rules and instructions for playing baseball, as well as directions for setting up the field. The book argued, “healthy amusements may not actually make [italics from original] heroes, it may certainly cultivate and develop all the heroic elements that may be inherent.”171 Even before the war was over, this sporting guide suggested that sports were an intrinsic part of building heroes, which leads to national strength. Baseball could instill traits important to national security in the next generation. The book thought, “Strength, courage, and a wholesome spirit of emulation, are among the best characteristics of all really great nations; and the presence of these noble attributes in the Man depends upon his training as a Boy.”172 Presumably, a boy’s presence on the baseball field could mean bravery and victory on the battlefield. In the decades following the war, the martial discourse surrounding baseball intensified. In December 1875, the expensive yet popular Godey’s Lady’s Book compared baseball players to marching soldiers. The magazine described the men with a “stern, determined look on each face—a look which said they would die at their country's call.”173 Readers would have been forgiven for assuming that these men were preparing to go fight in the war, and the magazine certainly encouraged this assumption. In fact, though, the men were preparing for a baseball game, as Godey’s matter-of-factly stated a few sentences later: “they were going out to play base–ball [italics from original].”174

171 Nathaniel Orr et al., The American Boy’s Book of Sports and Games: A Repository of in-and-out-door Amusements for Boys and Youth (New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1864), 3.

172 Ibid.

173 “An Imposing Sight,” Godey's Lady's Book and Magazine, December 1875.

174 Ibid.

82 The upscale women’s magazine blurred the line between baseball and a military formation. The magazine reported the formation as marching with pride and determination, like a military unit on its way to a battlefield. Godey’s Lady’s Book compared baseball players with soldiers. The magazine offered, “It was an imposing sight to see them march, each form erect, each step in time, each face bearing that look which warriors wear when the roar of battle is loudest.”175 Apparently, the ballplayers’ visages were the same whether at war or on the diamond. In the 1870s, when the New York Times considered the future of war, it extended the baseball as war metaphor. In a fascinating crossover between baseball and war, the Times prognosticated that the wars of the future would resemble sporting events, particularly baseball. In an 1877 article, “The Battles of the Future,” the newspaper thought that wars would be more genteel. The Times thought that the international shooting matches at Creedmoor and Wimbledon would be influential in future military tactics. The Times wrote, “it must be pointed out that the sort of rifle-shooting now in vogue will necessarily lead to important modifications in military tactics.”176 The Times thought that battles would resemble sports rather than previous wars. The Times believed “There will be an end of the irregular practices of skirmishers who think it a creditable thing to creep as near as possible to the enemy before firing, and in the place of the haste and confusion and rudeness of a charge, there will be the orderly firing of teams or companies, each one of which will be carefully coached.”177 Each side would use markers to measure the effectiveness of their volleys. The need for coaches was just the beginning of the Times’ war-as-sport metaphor. According to the Times, in future wars, the generals would select a dry, level field, like a baseball diamond. Armies, like baseball teams, would only fight on clear days. The battlefield would feature accoutrements like a baseball game: “boys will be detailed to carry lemonade and cake to the combatants, and a few policemen will be at hand to prevent idle or malicious persons

175 “The Battles of the Future,” New York Times, September 14, 1877.

176 Ibid.

177 Ibid.

83 from annoying the troops. Ladies will, of course, be provided with reserved seats.”178 Wars of the future could be adapted to resemble the order of a sporting event like baseball. In an article a few years later, the Times continued on the theme of comparing future wars with baseball. The Times believed that the advent of repeating rifles meant that armies would not advance into range of these weapons. Opposing armies will simply maneuver into positions where one would gain the advantage, so “the umpire—who would, of course, be some entirely impartial person—would therefore declare the game to be a draw.”179 War could take the example from baseball to use an official to decide the victor. The Times thought new technologies meant battles of the future would be less destructive. Ignoring the evidence from the Civil War, the Times wrote, “battles have become less bloody with the successive introduction of improved methods of destruction. Armies no longer fight in dense masses like the Greek phalanx, or even the column formation.”180 Presumably, armies of the future would be unwilling to maneuver within range of each other. Again, forgetting the grisly death toll of the Civil War, the Times wrote, “The introduction of the rifle made it obvious that to fight in large masses was to invite certain destruction, just as the introduction of repeating rifle has made it impossible to storm fortified positions.”181 Ultimately, war would become like a sport or game. The Times offered, “When that time comes war will be as bloodless as a game of chess. It will be reduced to scientific maneuvring [sic] for position.”182 With this new style of battle, the Times believed that large armies and wartime economies were a waste. It would be more humane and civilized, the newspaper argued, if armies would be made of twelve men “to play the game of war.”183 But the Times did not want these new armies to

178 “The Battles of the Future,” New York Times, September 14, 1877.

179 “The Wars of the Future,” New York Times, February 23, 1883.

180 Ibid.

181 Ibid.

182 Ibid.

183 Ibid.

84 be too much like baseball teams. The Times warned, “Care, however, will have to be taken lest the twelve professional warplayers adopt practices analogous to those in use among professional ball-players, and thus reduce the noble art of war to a level with base- ball and compel respectable people to long for the revival of old-fashioned bloody battles.”184 The newspaper probably feared the “practices” of cursing, gambling, brawling, or high salaries. To the Times, baseball players – based on their reputations at the time – were not to be compared favorably to soldiers; they were not a shining example for boys to emulate. The military connection to baseball continued into the early twentieth century. By then, the American military began including athletic sports in its physical training. Instead of ceaseless military drill, new thinkers in the military saw the value in soldiers playing sports.185 Both Annapolis and West Point incorporated baseball into their athletic programs. They began a series in 1901. In the first Army-Navy game, Army won the game when Cadet Douglas MacArthur crossed home plate.186 The American army’s promotion of baseball confirmed the game’s status as a war game. In 1902, War Secretary Elihu Root ordered a dramatic increase in inter-post baseball games.187 In a March 1904 article from Outing magazine, Captain Edmund L. Butts believed that the popularity of athletics in the American army was a direct result of football and baseball play at West Point. Butts wrote, “Make an active body and you have an alert mind. A confident baseball player will be a confident soldier.”188 Butts also thought that sports, including baseball, would teach soldiers independent action and individuality.189 Games could teach necessary skills needed in combat. Butts was

184 Ibid.

185 Lt. General Adna R. Chaffee, “Athletics in the Army,” foreword to “Soldierly Bearing, Health and Athletics” by Captain Edmund L. Butts, Outing, March 1904.

186 Robert Elias, The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U. S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way (New York: The New Press, 2010), 47.

187 Ibid.

188 Captain Edmund L. Butts, “Soldierly Bearing, Health, and Athletics,” Outing, March 1904.

189 Ibid.

85 particularly concerned about the soldiers stationed in the Philippines, where the heat discouraged physical activity. Butts took an example from the British forces occupying India and Hong Kong, who frequently played sports, but avoided the heat of the day. He wanted army baseball teams to play local towns and colleges. To this officer, sports had an important role in the army. He hoped that baseball would help in “developing better and cleaner soldiers.”190 By “cleaner,” Butts meant soldiers free from vice. Taking a cue from the British is an interesting turn, suggesting that the British influenced American military planners, the very influence Spalding spurned. In 1907, the Scientific American reported on early testing of hand grenades, connecting the action of throwing them to that of tossing a baseball. The effectiveness of grenades during the Russo-Japanese War impressed the .191 The Scientific American reported, “it is planned to organize a corps of army ball players, to throw the projectiles as one would throw an ordinary base ball.”192 The magazine thought that the hand grenade would be particularly helpful against Filipino insurgents.193 Of course, in the early twentieth century, the United States military adopted ball-shaped hand grenades as a standard weapon of its arsenal. During World War I, American soldiers rejected their European tutors’ cumbersome method of grenade throwing with a straight arm and locked elbow in favor of hurling the weapon like a baseball.194 The most powerful example of conflating baseball with war is C. H. Claudy’s The Battle of Base-Ball. Claudy’s book, published in 1912, was a manual for playing baseball as if it were a war. Underlying Claudy’s metaphor was the assumption that war was a game, while baseball was a form of combat. Claudy compared the heroic warrior to the baseball player. Claudy wrote, “base-ball is a battle. It has its generals, its captains, its lieutenants, its rank and file. It has its grand strategy, its tactics, and its

190 Ibid.

191 “The Hand Grenade in Our Army,” Scientific American, Dec 21, 1907.

192 Ibid.

193 Ibid.

194 The Inter-Allied Games, (: Ste Ame de Publications Periodiques Paris, 1919), 343.

86 drill.”195 Claudy would make allusions between baseball and battle throughout his book. The author makes direct comparisons between baseball skills and combat. Claudy argued that any manager that can score first puts pressure on his opponent.196 Claudy’s book is an expansive and compelling example of how the national pastime and military affairs intertwined. Claudy drew parallels between the game and national defense, further legitimizing a pastime that some Americans believed was vulgar, a den of gamblers, or a waste of time. Baseball, due to its similarities to war, had value as a preparation for battle. Baseball could help train young men for war. By the beginning of World War I, sports had an important role within the ranks of the American military training for war. In a July 1918 issue of Baseball Magazine, baseball writer J. C. Kofoed urged Americans to take an example from the Allies. He wrote, “There are lots of unthinking people who declare sport in war as a waste of time. They forget the gallant Tommies who dribbled a football across the waste of No Man’s Land to the trenches of the Hun. They forget the added quickness of brain and strength of arm that baseball has given our Sammies and Jackies.”197 Like other countries’ national pastimes, baseball could prepare soldiers for war. World War I seemed to confirm the rhetorical connections between baseball and war. The game contributed to the war effort, including the front-line service of many of the era’s great players. Major League Baseball wanted to make sure that the public knew that the industry was doing its part. Thus the war provided some of the clearest examples of conflating combat with baseball. After the United States’ declaration of war, the 1917 season remained unchanged. But in June of 1918, any male not involved in a necessary industry could be drafted. The federal government dictated that the season end by Labor Day.

195 C. H. Claudy, The Battle of Base-Ball, (1912; reprint, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 9.

196 Ibid., 21.

197 J. C. Kofoed, “Why Athletics Are So Essential in an Army Training Camp: The Value of Outdoor Sport, Particularly Baseball, as a Needful Recreation for the Soldier and Sailor,” Baseball Magazine, July 1918.

87 During the Great War, military leadership embraced baseball as a means of training. Like baseball’s experience during the Civil War, it was a welcome distraction from boredom and horrors. The military, the Young Men’s Christian Association, and the Knights of Columbus promoted baseball as a means to keep doughboys away from drinking and prostitutes. Baseball Magazine, often a mouthpiece for Major League Baseball, ardently defended continuing and celebrating baseball at the front and at home. During the war, it frequently noted the contributions of major leaguers in uniform. Its articles included an advertisement that urged readers to send the magazine to a soldier. Baseball Magazine also pointed out that 76 members out of a possible 400 major leaguers joined the service. In its stories following these men, the magazine regularly featured images of uniformed baseballers. The magazine also reminded the public of the money that baseball contributed to war bonds, the Red Cross, and various Allied charities. Teams provided free games to enlisted men. The Chicago White Sox gave local regiments baseball equipment. In the ultimate expression of the sport’s manly powers, Americans believed that baseball prepared men for war. In January 1916, when the Committee on Military Affairs studied preparing the military for possible action in World War I, it believed that baseball instilled heroism in men. The committee declared, “We all know the effect produced upon a town or a school by the possession of a champion baseball or football team; every boy wants to play ball.”198 The committee considered baseball an important element in prewar planning. The committee invited military experts from Switzerland to testify. They saw the Swiss, who used regular physical training and shooting exercises for much of their nation, as experts in preparing a population for war.199 The committee wanted sports, particularly baseball, to play a key role in the development of soldiers. The committee’s report reads, “There is not a better upbuilder of the body than baseball.”200 To American political and military leaders, baseball could build men into an army. The game’s culture had long advocated its

198 Senate Committee on Military Affairs, Preparedness for National Defense: Hearings before the Committee on Military Affairs, United States Senate, 64th Congress, first session, 1916, Part 21, 1004.

199 Ibid., 1015.

200 Ibid.

88 benefits as building the character, mind, and body. Now, military planners wanted these advantages instilled in their soldiers. During the war, Baseball Magazine made the case for the need for baseball during war. In 1918, the magazine offered, “Major league baseball in proportion to its size has undergone sacrifices and withstood greater losses on account of the war than any other industry.”201 Baseball made these contributions with pride. The magazine declared, “These sacrifices and losses have been borne not grudgingly or complainingly but willingly, eagerly in a spirit of patriotism.”202 During World War I, baseball worked to confirm its importance to the war effort. Baseball enthusiasts believed that the game instilled a superior culture in the United States. In July 1918, Baseball writer J. C. Kofoed argued that a lack of baseball and good sports caused Germany’s barbaric behavior. Kofoed wrote that competitive sports made the English and Americans good sportsmen and gallant soldiers. Kofoed argued, “ might have saved her the stain of mangled Belgium, of the Lusitania, of the ‘scrap of paper’ episode; for baseball would have bred a different national viewpoint.”203 Baseball not only made for a strong army, but also made a better country. Major leaguers fighting the war supposedly proved the martial merits of baseball. In 1917, Boston Braves explained that he enlisted for moral, manly, and dutiful reasons. Gowdy felt it was his obligation to fight; he was the first major leaguer to enlist. As for how a baseball player would fare in a war, Gowdy believed, “for a man who is engaged in professional athletics ought to be in fine physical trim. To that extent, at least, the fact that I have been a ball player ought to be an advantage.”204 Gowdy, and the other major league players, tried to cast themselves, and their profession,

201 F. C. Lane, “Baseball’s Bit in the World War,” Baseball Magazine, 1918.

202 Ibid.

203 J. C. Kofoed, “Why Athletics Are So Essential in an Army Training Camp: The Value of Outdoor Sport, Particularly Baseball, as a Needful Recreation for the Soldier and Sailor,” Baseball Magazine, July 1918.

204 Hank Gowdy, “Why I Enlisted,” Baseball Magazine, 1917.

89 in a manly, patriotic light. They argued that baseball and its employees were valuable contributors to the war effort. Echoing Gowdy, Brooklyn Robins pitcher Leon J. Cadore wrote in 1918, “It is my conviction that baseball players make as good soldiers as there are anywhere. Their training to think fast under fire is also an essential qualification for an officer.”205 Cadore’s reflection supports the notion that baseball trained soldiers for war. Sergeant Louis Malone, a player with Brooklyn, makes another connection between athlete and warrior. In 1918, Malone wrote, “The physical development which a fellow is bound to get in baseball is a necessary thing in the army, and I have found the quick thinking and mental alertness a man has to use on the diamond to be equally valuable.”206 Malone thought that baseball provided him with discipline and stamina, qualities that recruits without a baseball background lacked. Some of baseball’s biggest luminaries volunteered to fight in World War I. Pitcher Christy Mathewson and outfielder Ty Cobb were prime examples of baseball heroes turned warriors. Both served under Major , the president of the St. Louis Cardinals, in the Gas and Flame Division. The division was charged with training soldiers for gas attacks. Unfortunately, Mathewson was injured during a poison gas training exercise. He eventually succumbed to his injuries in 1925. Like Doubleday, the United States commemorated Mathewson by naming a Liberty ship after him during World War II. Americans embraced their major leaguers as heroic warriors on the western front. Their service proved the ability of baseball to train for war. In its martial history, baseball now had an important role in World War I as well as its contributions during the Civil War. During the war, famed evangelist and former baseball player Billy Sunday emphasized connections between war and the national pastime. In 1917, Sunday wrote, “Old Griffith [pitcher and manager of the Washington Senators] was right. Baseball is a war game [italics from original]. We need it now more than ever. Play

205 Leon Cadore, “Baseball News from the Military Camps,” Baseball Magazine, 1918.

206 Louis A. Malone, “Baseball News from the Military Camps,” Baseball Magazine, 1918.

90 Ball!”207 Charles Weeghman, president of the , agreed. He recalled baseball’s glorious past, “I am glad to say that baseball has once more responded to the call upon it and proved its right to be known as the sport of the hour, a true war game.”208 The culmination of the warrior image of baseball players during World War I went beyond rhetoric. American League president instituted military drills for American League teams. This included marching in formation with players using their bats as stand-ins for rifles. World War I was the culmination of baseball’s ascent as the American warriors’ game. It confirmed the martial beliefs that Americans held about baseball since the Civil War. It was the bookend to the Civil War, confirming the value of baseball during war, and strengthening the relationship between war and the sport. Many prominent big leaguers joined the military and served with distinction, proving to the American people that good baseball players made for good warriors. Baseball was part of physical training for soldiers. It was also a welcome diversion, with the hopes that it would keep bored soldiers from engaging in immoral and unsafe behavior. At home, the game would unify the population and boost morale. World War I was the culmination of the interconnection between baseball and war. The fervent patriotism during World War I led to the tradition of singing “The Star Spangled Banner” at the beginning of baseball games. The song itself celebrates an American military past. During the late 1890s, bands played “The Star Spangled Banner,” a particularly martial tune celebrating military perseverance, for celebrations in Philadelphia. But the tune made its first appearance at the . The 1918 series was the first since the government classified baseball as a non- essential occupation and players left for the war. During the seventh inning stretch, a band played the song while players and spectators stood in salute. The tune grew in popularity until Congress selected it as the national anthem in 1931. The years after World War I were a watershed for baseball and American history. As Americans returned to normalcy, baseball endured its worst scandal. Baseball also ended

207 William A. Sunday, “A Defense of the Grand Old Game,” Baseball Magazine, 1917.

208 Charles Weeghman, “Playing Ball for Uncle Sam,” Baseball Magazine.

91 its first epoch, the dead-ball era. Baseball teams began to hit more home runs, focusing on offense and scoring. The 1920s saw the rise of great sluggers such as and . By the end of World War I, baseball was the most popular form of entertainment in the country and wielded tremendous cultural power. The 1919 signifies how far Americans had elevated baseball. As the nation rebounded from war, attendance soared in the 1919 season. But gamblers and crooked players soiled the pinnacle of the season, the World Series. Paid by gamblers, the Chicago White Sox purposefully lost the series to the Cincinnati Reds. For decades, Americans had heaped praise on the heroic ball player. By 1919, baseball was at the pinnacle of American sporting life. In the definitive study of the scandal, Eight Men Out, Eliot Asinof wrote, “the scandal was a betrayal of more than a set of ball games, even more than of the sport itself. It was a crushing blow at American pride. The year before, America had won the war in the image of nobility and humanity.”209 The scandal devastated American pride as well as baseball. The future of baseball itself was at stake in the aftermath of the scandal. Asinof wrote, “The trouble was, America expected higher morals from ball players than they expected from businessmen—or anyone else, for that matter.”210 The scandal revealed the worst of American society, and baseball was no better. Baseball was crooked and corrupt, ruled by gamblers and businessmen. The masculine virtues that baseball purported to advance were a charade. The baseball players, which Americans had held up as idealized visions of men, fared the worst in the scandal. Gamblers gave them little money for cheating, and owners banished them from their profession. Lawyers, management, criminals, and reporters bested baseball’s elite. Ultimately, in the years after the Civil War and until World War I, baseball built a reputation as a war game. This made the game a supposed necessity for strengthening national security. It turned a game into a ritual that celebrated American martial strength. A Ritual for Reunion: Creating a Civil War Ethos for the National Pastime 1900-1916

209 Eliot Asinof, Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the , (New York City: Holt and Company, 2000), 197.

210 Ibid., 243.

92 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, baseball reconciled the sectional divide caused by the Civil War. The game was a ritual that celebrated a mythical Civil War past. The national pastime promoted a unified culture across the country. Baseball emphasized a warrior motif that included glorious baseball stories from both sides of the war. Baseball was a ritual that promoted a particular version of the Civil War, one that fostered reconciliation. In Race and Reunion, historian David Blight argues that Americans made conscientious decisions about the memory of the Civil War. Blight believes Americans chose to commemorate the Civil War experience as a glorious contest between brave worthy opponents. In the post-war cultural discourse, Americans emphasized battles and generals while ignoring the racial issues that started the conflict. Blight argues that the American’s drive for glorification and reconciliation “overwhelmed the emancipationist vision in the national culture”211 and “the inexorable drive for reunion both used and trumped race.”212 In other words, in the pursuit of a unified, healed culture, Americans ignored justice for African-Americans. Blight writes “in American culture romance triumphed over reality, sentimental remembrance won over ideological memory.”213 Baseball glamorized and romanticized its Civil War past to promote its business interests as the national pastime. In turn, baseball unified the nation and built a glorious past in which both North and South could revel. The Civil War’s continuing legacy was not an examination of racial issues, but a celebration of the war’s prominent battles, figures, and culture. When commemorating the Civil War, the American culture focused on the tragedy and military specifics of the conflict instead of the continuing racial problems that caused and continued after the war.214 In his examination of the memory of the war, historian David Blight explores post-war politics, evolving Decoration Day celebrations, and battle reunions. Blight could have included baseball in his analysis. As baseball gained popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the national pastime reveled in and even embellished its Civil War

211 Blight, 2.

212 Ibid.

213 Ibid., 4.

214 Ibid.

93 heritage. As Americans across the country embraced baseball, it served as a cultural unifier. Baseball was imbued with military, manly, and patriotic themes. As Americans played baseball, they celebrated the Civil War and moved toward unification. The move to unification and glorification of the war was a slow one. Initially, as Americans dealt with the carnage and tragedy of the conflict, many returning soldiers were not vocal about their experiences.”215 As memories of death and carnage faded, Americans celebrated the heroic and martial aspects of the war. Americans built a new memory of the war, and highlighted the military aspects of conflict. In the early 1880s, Century Magazine published a popular serial on the campaigns and generals of the Civil War. The 1885 Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. was a best seller. Grant’s recollections focused on his Civil War service, with scant attention paid to his presidency. After its publication in novel form in 1895, ’s was an international best seller. Crane’s book continues the trend started by the Century Magazine and Grant’s autobiography. The book’s focus is on combat, not the sectional or racial issues that touched off the war. An outstanding baseball player in college, Crane conflated football rather than baseball with war. In a letter published in 1900, Crane wrote, “Of course, I have never been in a battle, but I believe that I got my sense of the rage of combat on the football field.”216 The author believed that it was football rather than baseball which gave him an insight into war. With the distance of time, Americans began to celebrate the glory and accomplishments of the Civil War generation. Of the transition from the reality of war to its glorious memory, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. remarked in a speech given Memorial Day, 1895, “War, when you are at it, is horrible and dull. It is only when time has passed that you see that its message was divine.”217 The famed jurist was a proud veteran of the Civil War who believed that the war became more glorious as time passed. Even the 1898 Spanish-American War was, in part, a celebration of a unified nation with a heroic

215 Ibid., 142.

216 “Stephen Crane: His Letters to a Friend About His Ambition, His Art, and His Views of Life,” New York Times, July 14, 1900.

217 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Max Lerner, ed., The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes: His Speeches, Essays, Letters, and Judicial Opinions (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), 23.

94 Civil War past. Former Union general William Shafter along with ex-Confederate general Joseph Wheeler led the campaign in Cuba. The accomplishments and sacrifice of the Civil War generation had saved the Union. In the last decades of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, baseball romanticized the Civil War experience. Baseball reunified the country around a national pastime. Americans believed that the founding and spreading of a national game was another of the Civil War generation’s great accomplishments. In the years after the Civil War, Americans remembered baseball as a glorious experience during the conflict. The 1880 proceedings of the Southern Historical Society recalled a match between captured rebels incarcerated on Johnson’s Island. The society, which glorified the deeds of the Confederates, also perpetuated the myth of the Lost Cause. The Southern Historical Society commingled the story of baseball with Lieutenant Charlie Pierce’s attempts at escape from a prison camp on Johnson’s Island. Lt. M. McNamara, writing for the society, told of baseball on the island: “They also organized base-ball clubs—the Southern nine, composed of those below the rank of captain—of which Charlie Pierce was captain and catcher, and the Confederate nine, composed of the higher officers. Their championship game was considered one of the best ever played, and was witnessed by upwards of 3,000 people, including the prisoners, officers and citizens of Sandusky, Ohio, who eagerly embraced the opportunity to be present.”218 Apparently, the prison staff believed that the game might be a ruse to cover an escape attempt. Thus, the guards opened the prison’s portholes and prepared the guns for firing. The Society used the game to make a political comment: those horrible radical northerners took the grand game of baseball away from the prisoners. After a local newspaper reported the game, it apparently upset some elements within the Union, which removed the prison commandant, and temporarily ended baseball play. Confederate officer Charlie Pierce was the hero in this piece. But he was a hero in baseball, as well as in military affairs. McNamara wrote, “In all the prison sports, Lieutenant Charlie Pierce was regarded as the leader. His versatile talent, genial humor,

218 Lieutenant M. McNamara, “Lieutenant Charlie Pierce’s Attempts to Escape from Johnson’s Island,” Southern Historical Society Papers (Richmond, VA: Southern Historical Society, 1880), 62-63.

95 sterling manhood and undoubted bravery, together with his kindness of heart, endeared him to all, and even commanded the respect of his captors.”219 Beyond baseball, Pierce was also heroic in his attempts at trying to escape from Johnson’s Island. His escape attempts included tunneling, making scaling ladders, and jumping on an offal cart. The society’s report of the exploits of Pierce’s baseball playing reveals a pattern of combining the national pastime and military heroism that baseball propagated for North and South. The 1884 novel Our Baseball Club and How it Won the Championship by Noah Brooks is a compelling articulation of the romanticization of baseball’s ties to the Civil War. Brooks was a journalist and a confidant of Abraham Lincoln. Brooks’ novel, which featured an introduction by no less than Albert Spalding, follows the trials and tribulations of a pioneering baseball team in northern Illinois. Brooks wrote about how returning veterans, the first generation of baseball players, established a national pastime. Brooks writes, “Gradually, the membership of the two organizations changed. The old soldiers retired in favor of their sons and nephews.”220 The membership of the teams passed to a new generation of youthful men who wanted to prove their mettle on the baseball field. Brooks writes that the clubs were “largely composed of young men who worked in the flouring mills and the lumber-yards along the river front, it was famous for the brawn and muscle of its players.”221 Here, Brooks emphasizes the physical stature of the early team’s baseball players. Brooks emphasized the Civil War experience with baseball when the heroes of the novel, the Catalpas, lose a game. Brooks wrote, “Defeat, utter and overwhelming, followed the Catalpas to Bluford, where they played the ‘Zoo-Zoo Nine’ of that city. The ‘Zoo-Zoos’ were picked players, the lineal descendants of a company of Illinois Zouaves renowned in the Civil War for their bravery, dash, and skill as skirmishers.”222 The Zouaves were specialized units during the Civil War famous for their gaudy North

219 Ibid., 63.

220 Noah Brooks. Our Baseball Club and How It won the Championship, in Two Novels from the Early Days of Base Ball, ed. Trey Strecker and Geri Strecker (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 168.

221 Ibid., 169.

222 Ibid., 217.

96 African-style uniforms. In his baseball novel, Brooks has compared an elite baseball team to ostensibly some of the best soldiers from the war. By the end of the text, the experienced baseball players are “battle-scarred veterans.”223 The conflation between baseball and war was on the last page of the novel, in which fans were “watching the mimic combat in the field below.”224 Much like a victorious army, celebrated its victory with a raised American flag over the field. The national pastime was based on a model of war, but now Americans were pursuing a wholesome, glorious game instead of deadly, yet still heroic, war. A continuing celebration of a unified national pastime with roots in the American Civil War appears in John Montgomery Ward’s guide to baseball. An influential player and intellect from the dead-ball era, Ward’s 1888 book included a history of the game. In addition to a career playing for the and the New York Giants, Ward was a successful lawyer and businessman. In his history, Ward emphasized the importance of the Civil War in the history of the game.225 Ward mourned the loss of the early generation of players. He wrote, “In 1865 the friendly contests were resumed, though the call of the rolls showed many ‘absent’ who have never been known to miss a game. More than one of those who went out in ’61 had proven his courage on the crimson field.”226 Here Ward connected baseball to the heroic service of American warriors. In the hands of Albert Spalding, the story of baseball during the Civil War would take on mythological proportions. The Abner Doubleday myth reveals the power of Civil War mythology in the baseball story. Taking shape in 1907, the coronation of a Civil War general as the inventor of baseball insured war’s place in the game’s lore. Considering the reverence for the Civil War generation, a general was the perfect choice to invent baseball. Doubleday could

223 Ibid., 292.

224 Ibid.

225 John Montgomery Ward, Baseball: How to Become a Player (Philadelphia: The Athletic Publishing Company, 1888), 21.

226 Ibid., 26-27.

97 symbolize everything that baseball’s leaders wanted Americans to believe about the game; it was rural, patriotic, and American in origin. Doubleday was a heroic veteran of the Civil War from the opening salvoes of the conflict. He was on the cover of Harper’s Weekly on March 23, 1861, along with Major Robert Anderson and the other defending officers of Ft. Sumter. After the Confederates shelled Ft. Sumter, Doubleday referred to himself as the “hero of Sumter.”227 Following Doubleday’s death in January 1893, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle issued a heroic remembrance of the general. The newspaper opined, “Few Soldiers were more picturesquely associated with the war of the rebellion than General Abner Doubleday.”228 The obituary, however, made no mention of Doubleday inventing baseball. The New York Times obituary also emphasized his Civil War exploits with no mention of baseball. The Times remembered, “he was sent to Gettysburg to support Buford’s cavalry, and upon the fall of Gen. Reynolds took command for several hours till the arrival of Gen. Howard. His division fought gallantly in the battle that followed the next day, and on the third day aided in the repulse of Pickett’s men.”229 Ironically, Americans ignored a story very similar to the Doubleday creation myth. In 1859, future Civil War general Rufus King organized the first three baseball games ever played in Wisconsin. King was a Civil War hero with a real connection to the game; yet this story did not have the cultural power of the Doubleday myth. The King tale was not sanctioned by the Mills Commission. Doubleday’s myth, on the other hand, knew no bounds. There was even a western version. According to legend, while stationed in Texas with the African- American 24th Infantry, Doubleday organized a baseball game in Galveston on Washington’s Birthday in 1867.230 Whether the committee selected Doubleday or acquiesced to Graves’ thin evidence of Doubleday as baseball’s progenitor, their choice was a celebration of a fellow Civil War hero. Three of the members of the commission

227 Larry Tagg, The Generals of Gettysburg: The Leaders of America's Greatest Battle (New York: De Capo Press, 1998), 26.

228 “A Sumter Defender,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 28, 1893.

229 New York Times, January 28, 1893.

230 Kirsch, 117.

98 fought in the Civil War. Two of the members supplied Spalding with tales of playing baseball during the war for his book, America’s National Game. Abner Doubleday was not the only Civil War figure inserted into the national pastime. By the early twentieth century, Americans had turned Abraham Lincoln into a martyred symbol of liberty and strength. In addition to Lincoln’s symbolism as a patriotic leader in a time of crisis, Lincoln’s mythology also included physical strength. Americans knew Lincoln as the tall, strong, rail-splitting backwoodsman that could wrestle or walk for miles to return a book. But Americans would assign another physical activity, baseball, to the sixteenth President. Americans connected their beloved national pastime with their martyred President. The Civil War’s martial and mythical influence on baseball is reflected by tenuous connections between Abraham Lincoln and the national pastime. As Americans romanticized their Civil War past, baseball and Lincoln gained a place of reverence. Although the claims that Lincoln played baseball are suspect, it is certainly possible that Lincoln witnessed contests among soldiers or groups of hastily formed nines in Washington. According to the 1901 book, “Abe” Lincoln’s Yarns and Stories, Lincoln regularly played in a children’s game near the . A witness to these games remarked, “He entered into the spirit of the play as completely as any of us, and we invariably hailed his coming with delight.”231 This anecdote included an illustration of Lincoln running on the basepath with a boy trying to hit Lincoln by throwing a ball. According to the book’s author, Alexander McClure, this incident showed “Mr. Lincoln’s love for children and how thoroughly he entered into all of their sports.”232 The point of this anecdote, along with many others in the book, was to give a human side of the President. The baseball story, in particular, illustrates the youthful, playful nature of Lincoln, and how he embraced the national pastime.

231 Alexander K. McClure, “Abe” Lincoln’s Yarns and Stories: A Complete Collection of the Funny and Witty Anecdotes That Made Lincoln Famous as America’s Greatest Story Teller (Philadelphia: International Publishing Company, 1901), 271.

232 Ibid.

99 A more fanciful account of Lincoln’s playing baseball appeared in Albert G. Spalding’s history of baseball, America’s National Game, published in 1911. In this story, a messenger traveled to Springfield, Illinois, to inform Lincoln that the Chicago Convention of the Republican Party nominated him to run for President. The messenger found Lincoln playing baseball – at a remarkably crucial moment in his life and the nation’s history. Lincoln ostensibly told the messenger, “Tell the gentlemen that I am glad to know of their coming; but they’ll have to wait a few minutes till I make another base hit.”233 Apparently, nothing, not even national politics, could interfere with Old Abe taking an at-bat. Spalding even included a drawing of the supposed interruption of Lincoln’s game. Lincoln, holding a bat, calmly listens to the messenger about his nomination. Although the episode seems implausible, Spalding argued, “The authenticity of this incident I have no reason to question.”234 Spalding’s revelation of this incident reinforces America’s National Game’s major point: the Civil War was crucial to the development of the national pastime. The war not only spread the game, according to the 1911 book’s author, but it imbued it with values of glory, patriotism, and wholesome exercise. To Spalding, baseball and the Civil War were inextricably connected. The episode of Lincoln playing baseball at the time of the notification of his nomination for President in 1860 underlines the importance of baseball and its proximity to American virtue. Lincoln’s presence on the field reinforced the game’s themes of patriotism, strength, and valor. An article in the July 12, 1914 edition of the Washington Evening Star conjectured that it was unlikely Lincoln ever played baseball. But the same article recounted Lincoln watching a game with his son, Tad, in 1862. The Evening Star’s article was based upon the reflections of Winfield Scott Larner, a Washington resident during the Civil War. About Lincoln’s playing skills, Larner conjectured, “I have heard it said that Mr. Lincoln played a good game of ball, especially at first base. As a matter of fact, I do not believe he ever played a game of ball in his life.”235 Larner believed that baseball was not widely

233 Quoted in Spalding, 361.

234 Ibid.

235 “When Baseball Was Introduced in Washington,” Washington Evening Star, July 12, 1914.

100 known in Illinois while Lincoln was a young man. But Larner thought that it was possible that Lincoln played an embryonic form of baseball. While disputing Lincoln’s abilities as a player, Larner told the newspaper that Lincoln attended a game between the quartermaster and commissary clubs of the War Department. The game took place on the circus grounds on the corner of Sixth and K streets. Lincoln, escorted by a cavalry unit, arrived with Tad after the game had started. Larner recalled, “There were no grandstands in those days; indeed, there was not even a seat. Mr. Lincoln, as modestly and unobtrusively as a private citizen, made his way up to where he could see the game and sat down in the sawdust left over from the late circus just behind first base.”236 Like Spalding’s tale, this anecdote emphasized the importance of baseball to the President, even during a time of terrible crisis. It also underscores the democratizing experience of baseball. When at a baseball game, Lincoln was just another member of the crowd, enjoying the national pastime with his young son. At the end of the game, Lincoln waved his hat and gave three cheers for each team.237 According to Larner, the President thanked the teams by saying, “Boys, it was a very good game and I enjoyed it very much.”238 According to the article, baseball arrived in Washington during the Civil War. The national calamity brought the national pastime to the capital. Inserting Lincoln into the story only secures baseball’s Civil War legacy. In addition to the article on baseball’s beginnings in Washington, the July 12, 1914 edition of the Washington Evening Star also carried a section commemorating the 50th anniversary of Confederate General ’s raid on Washington in 1864. With the Lincoln article, the newspaper simultaneously commemorated baseball and the Civil War. Throughout the twentieth century, the American President continued a close relationship with baseball. The Chief Executive throws out the first pitch of the baseball season, the All-Star Game or the World Series. This tradition likely started with throwing out the first pitch of the home opener for the 1910 Washington

236 Ibid.

237 Ibid.

238 Ibid.

101 Senators. Taft was also possibly the inventor of the seventh inning stretch. Baseball writer F. L. Brunner believed that Philadelphia Athletics catcher Wally Schang and pitcher Christy Mathewson lived up to heroic expectations set by America’s presidential heroes. In April 1914, Brunner wrote, “Baseball, the popular sport, only serves to emphasize in the two sterling players named [Wally Schang and Christy Mathewson] that American manhood has not fallen below the high standard set by the men of Washington and Lincoln’s times—that in every work are found men with an almost religious regard for duty; healthy, hearty, efficient men.”239 Again, a text written 50 years after the Civil War was celebrating baseball during the conflict. Baseball enthusiasts wanted more than just to idolize Lincoln like a baseball player. Lincoln as a spectator, or better yet as a player, would prove the worthiness of the national pastime. If such a great man like Lincoln played and watched baseball, then the game was truly worthy of pursuit. Lincoln’s persona gave baseball an air of patriotism, valor, and democratic values, and reinforced baseball’s Civil War heritage. Baseball players, like Lincoln, were intelligent, ethical, and physically strong. Besides the Lincoln example, Spalding’s America’s National Game has many other connections between baseball and the Civil War. By 1911, when the book first appeared, baseball was a booming business. In the years since the 1903 National Agreement, baseball continued to prosper financially. The National Agreement ended financial competition between the American and National Leagues; the National League recognized the American League as its equal. The agreement established a commission to settle labor disputes between the leagues. The agreement also established the American and National Leagues as the major leagues, able to dominate upstart independent or minor leagues. Lastly, the agreement started the World Series in 1903. In the days before World War I and radio, attendance surged. To accommodate growing attendance, teams built large stadiums in the heart of American cities such as Tiger Stadium in Detroit, in Brooklyn, Fenway Park in Boston, and in Chicago. The 50th anniversary of the start of the Civil War was also in 1911. As

239 F. L. Brunner, “Hero Worship on the Diamond,” Baseball Magazine, April 1914, 51.

102 baseball built its future, it also built its past. Baseball, on the rise, tapped into changing emotions about the Civil War to celebrate its history. Spalding compiled a history that largely relied on his opinion and information culled from the papers of baseball writer Henry Chadwick.240 Spalding’s book is not an accurate history of baseball; it is filled with half-truths and unsubstantiated anecdotes. Instead, it represents a history of baseball’s mythology. Thus the book does not represent thoroughly researched history so much as it is a testimony to baseball’s meaning and its role in American society. Spalding explicitly connects baseball to the Civil War in order to confirm the game’s goodness, patriotism and masculinity. By emphasizing baseball’s connection to America’s greatest, most glorious moment, baseball’s most ardent crusader exalted baseball to the highest place in American culture. Spalding argues that the divides of the Civil War experience were put aside for the shared heroics of baseball. Spalding argued, “It was the medium by which, in the days following the ‘late unpleasantness,’ a million warriors and their sons, from both belligerent sections, passed naturally, easily, gracefully, from a state of bitter battling to one of perfect peace.”241 Baseball could heal divisions and foster peace between sections. Baseball was a national unifier. It was appealing to Americans, regardless of sectional background. Spalding wrote, “wherever grounds are available, the great American game is in progress, whether in city village or hamlet, east, west, north or south, and that countless thousands of interested spectators gather daily throughout the season to witness contests.”242 Spalding sold baseball as a game for any American. But Spalding still advertised baseball as a heroic, masculine endeavor worthy of an up and coming nation. Spalding stressed, “Base Ball, I repeat, is War!”243 Spalding is careful, though. He wants to extol the aggressive and martial qualities of baseball. But it is still the national pastime, with the power to heal. Spalding wrote, “But it is a bloodless

240 Benjamin Rader, introduction to America’s National Game: Historical Facts Concerning the Beginning, Evolution, Development and Popularity of Base Ball by Albert G. Spalding. (1911; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), xiii.

241 Spalding, 9.

242 Ibid., 4.

243 Ibid., 9.

103 battle; and when the struggle ends, the foes of the miinute past are friends of the minute present, victims congratulating victors, conquerors pointing out the brilliant individual plays of the conquered.”244 At the end of the game, the contestants can put the game behind and celebrate their accomplishments and glorry of the experience. Much like the end of the Civil War, the former combatants on the field could put aside their differences and celebrate the glory of their triumphs. Some of the most compelling information on Spalding’s perspective is the images he included with America’s National Game. One image, “The Call for Volunteers—1861,” shows recruiters signing baseball players to join the fight. The ball players have stopped mid-game to consider enlisting. Some of them are enlisting while others are listening to a recruiter, and others are running to hear the call to arrmms. The game appears to be taking place on a town square, giving it a sense of ubiquity aand universality. The ballplayers are athletic, strong men. The message from this image is clear: baseball players were patriotic and willing to do their duty. There is no indication in the image whether this was a group of Confederate or Union soldiers—here both sides loved baseball.

244 Ibid., 9.

104 Spalding was eager to compare baseball to war, and highlight the contributions of Civil War soldiers. Spalding concluded that the game was now national in scope and assumed patriotic and martial values instilled into it by the Civil War generation. Ostensibly, even at the height of the Civil War, Americans built the national pastime. Spalding wrote, “on both sides of the line ‘Yanks’ and ‘Johnnies’ were playing ball and laying the foundation for a game which, when war’s alarms would cease, would be national in its spirit and national in its perpetuity.”245 To Spalding, the war was the transformative experience of the game. The Civil War was not only the most important event in American history, but also the most important event in baseball history. Spalding melded baseball and American history in his book. Spalding concluded, “No human mind may measure the blessings conferred by the game of Base Ball on the soldiers of our Civil War. A National Game? Why, no country on the face of the earth ever had a form of sport with so clear a title to that distinction.”246 Spalding also pointed out the benefits of the game during wartime. It was a healthy pastime that served as a distraction from the horrors and boredom of war. Spalding’s interpretation of baseball as the national pastime before the war reveals his northern perspective. A national game implies that there had to be a unified nation. Spalding suggested that baseball was national in appeal and could reunite the nation. Scholars cannot dismiss Spalding as a lone crank. He was a powerful and influential figure. And he was not alone in his ideas about baseball and the game’s connection to the Civil War. Other baseball writers from the early twentieth century celebrated the glorious image of the game during the war. Another text from 1911, The Book of Baseball, agrees with Spalding’s interpretation of the Civil War’s influence on the game. The Book of Baseball observed, “It was spreading, but slowly. It might have remained a New York game for several decades had it not been for the War.”247 Union players took their game to every theater. It wrote, “They played it in Confederate prisons, where they

245 Ibid., 92.

246 Ibid.

247 William Pattten, J. Walker McSpadden, The Book of Baseball: The National Game From the Earliest Days to the Present Season (New York: Collier and Sons, 1911), 17.

105 taught it to their captors. The Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana regiments turned out to watch, and remained to learn.”248 Like Spalding, The Book of Baseball contributed to the mythology that baseball players spread the national game across the country. In 1912, baseball writer Harry J. Casey wrote a history of the national pastime for Baseball Magazine. Casey realized the difficulty of this task of separating fact and fiction. He believed that baseball reflected American uniqueness and personality. Casey wrote, “Its quick action, its intrinsic brilliance, its sudden shifts of fortune, its constantly recurring panorama of the underdog battle from the midst of defeat and emerging a victor, its every essential dovetails perfectly into some chink or cranny of the American heart.”249 Here Casey has connected baseball to themes of battle. Like Spalding, Casey believed that “The Civil War was a great factor in the spread of baseball.”250 He emphasized the glory of battle and linked it to baseball. He wrote, “When an army rested passive, when a welcome flag of truce let tired soldiers lay aside their smoking muskets, from his pack some soldier drew forth a baseball, sides were chosen and a game was on.”251 Casey also believed that baseball was an important release from war.252 Again, the entertainment and diversionary power of baseball to men in combat is a recurring theme. As for the transference of baseball to new players, Casey highlighted the oft-repeated idea that baseball spread in prisons and camps. Casey wrote, “Soldiers from the North, South, East and West learned the game, and took it to their homes. Old veterans of the war will tell how teams from one army met nines of the opposing force, but nothing authoritative can be unearthed.”253 Here, Casey continued the unsubstantiated claim that

248 Ibid.

249 Harry J. Casey, “The History of Baseball: The Spectacular Career of America’s Foremost Game, Part I,” Baseball Magazine, February 1912.

250 Harry J. Casey, “The Story of Baseball: A Brief History of the National Game, Part II,” Baseball Magazine, March 1912.

251 Ibid.

252 Ibid.

253 Ibid.

106 baseball teams from opposing sides laid down arms between battles to play. This is an appealing and romantic notion: that Americans put down their weapons to play a game. Peace and baseball, for a moment, trumped sectional divisions and killing. It appealed to deeper feelings that bonded all Americans beyond the war. During the early 1900s, baseball literature coalesced with the Civil War rhetoric. Americans celebrated the battles and heroism of the war while ignoring or distorting issues of race and slavery. The classic example from the era is D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, released in 1915. Griffith’s film glamorized the war and the while demonizing African-Americans. As baseball grew in popularity during the first decades of the twentieth century, it tapped into a newly celebrated Civil War past to create its own history. As baseball and war intertwined, baseball literature argued that the sport could contribute to training soldiers. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States took a new place on the world stage. As the United States created an empire and fought in international conflicts, the national pastime played an important part. Military leaders turned to athletic sports to keep soldiers healthy and competitive. Meanwhile, Major League Baseball emphasized its warrior past, as well as its military contributions. Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, baseball cast itself as a glorious experience from the Civil War. The game’s odyssey as a warrior sport influenced the American culture for decades to come. According to the mythology, when soldiers returned home from war, they brought a national pastime with them. With a unified experience of the game during the war, Americans could rejoice together in a national pastime. After the war, both former Confederates and Federals could commemorate the glory of a shared national pastime. With its Civil War and martial heritage, baseball served as a unifying force in American culture. Conclusion Even to the most casual observer, baseball’s connection to war is quite striking. The sport’s language is loaded with militaristic lingo. “The ” refers to the pitcher and the catcher. A “rifle shot” could mean either a hard throw or a sharply hit ball.254 Later wars added their own lexicon to the national pastime. For example, “casualty pass”

254 Mark Derr, Gary Mitchem, editor’s note to The Battle of Base-Ball, by C. H. Claudy. (1912; reprint, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 2.

107 meant a walk after World War I, while after World War II “furlough” described a walk.255 A player that has a strong throw is often said to have a gun, a cannon or a rocket for an arm. For example, when a pitcher from Boston easily defeated the in April 1881, the New York Times described his abilities in military terms. The Times wrote the pitcher “sends a ball to the bat like a rifle-shot.”256 Conversely, a pitcher with a bad outing can be “shelled.” When competing leagues clashed over players and fans, the press often described the conflict as a “war.”257 These are just a few of the examples of the interplay between the language of war and baseball. War is an important ingredient to the national pastime. Baseball’s connection to war, particularly the Civil War, was ingrained over several decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the 1920s, baseball was entering a modern phase, with an emphasis on hitters and offense. Hitters were the heroes of the diamond; they quickly became national celebrities. Baseball embraced the new medium of radio as games went out over the airwaves. The game still reveled in its martial rituals and Doubleday myth. Baseball scholar Robert Henderson was the first to unravel the Doubleday myth. In his 1947 text, Bat, Ball, and Bishop, Henderson argued that the commission was careless in its work and its decision. The members of the commission did not take their roles as researchers seriously; only Mills actually reviewed evidence before the commission issued its report.258 There are many problems with Abner Graves’ story. Graves, a mining engineer, originated the Doubleday myth with a letter to the Mills Commission. First, Graves’ letter is the only piece of evidence that supports the Doubleday story. Also, local Cooperstown histories do not record the Doubleday invention.259 In addition, Mills knew Doubleday quite well. They were members of the same Grand Army of the

255 Ibid.

256 “Victory for the Boston Nine: the Metropolitans Defeated by a Score of 16 to 1,” New York Times, April 29, 1881.

257 William A. Phelon, “The War of the Leagues,” Baseball Magazine, August 1914.

258 Robert W. Henderson, Ball, Bat and Bishop: The Origin of Ball Games (New York: Rockport Press, 1947), 183.

259 Harold Seymour, Baseball: The Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 10.

108 Republic post. But Doubleday never told Mills of his inventing baseball.260 There are many other problems with Graves’ account. Graves was only about five years old in 1839. He remembered baseball’s supposed invention 68 years later, and had not told anybody about it in the intervening years. Baseball scholar David Block suspects that Graves started the Doubleday story as a prank or for attention.261 Graves might have confused Doubleday with another Abner Doubleday that lived in Cooperstown in 1839.262 At best, Graves was mistaken, confused or the mastermind of a prank that got out of hand. At worst, he was an insane man trying to insert himself into history. It is also possible Doubleday did in fact show the youths of Cooperstown how to play baseball, a game he learned elsewhere.263 Graves’ personal story has an unhappy ending that calls his sanity into question. In 1924, he murdered his wife and authorities sent him to an asylum. Whatever Graves’ motivation for creating the myth, it was the Mills Commission and then Spalding that gave the story legitimacy and gravitas. George B. Kirsch argues, “No doubt what struck Spalding as particularly marvelous (and useful) about Graves’ story was that Doubleday had subsequently served with distinction as a Union officer in the Civil War.”264 Long before the commission credited Doubleday with inventing the national pastime, the public knew of his deeds in the Civil War. Although historians and baseball scholars work to slowly erode the Doubleday myth, it persists among many Americans. Baseball’s martial mythology held great cultural power. Baseball scholars’ efforts have taken decades to dispel some of the connections between baseball and war. This chapter argued that the warrior mythology was an essential ingredient in the construction of the national pastime. Baseball scholars have largely ignored the martial

260 David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 56.

261 Block, 56.

262 Ibid., 58.

263 Harold Seymour, Baseball: The Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 10-11.

264 George B. Kirsch, Baseball in Blue and Gray: The National Pastime During the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), xii.

109 component and the importance of the Civil War mythology in the creation of the national pastime. This chapter first argued that baseball’s apostles emphasized the military attributes of America’s game. Next, this chapter argued that baseball believed that it was a unifier. The culture surrounding the game drove a common pastime that unified the nation after the Civil War. During the Civil War, sporting literature drew links between the two, but these connections subsided until Americans began celebrating the Civil War anew. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, baseball ardently promoted the national pastime’s Civil War connections. One of the strongest indicators of the importance of the Civil War in the created history of the national pastime was the selection of Abner Doubleday as the game’s inventor. The inclusion of Abraham Lincoln in the national pastime also reveals the importance of the Civil War in the game’s mythical past. Texts such as America’s National Game, The Battle of Base-Ball, and The Book of Baseball underscored the intersection between the game and war. Lastly, baseball during World War I confirmed the role that the sport played defending the country. Baseball players portrayed themselves as warrior-athletes and Major League Baseball touted its contributions to the war. Americans had built a national pastime, one imbued with martial themes. As of World War I, a military past based on the Civil War was an integral part of baseball’s mythology.

110 Conclusion

On the evening of April 8, 1889, a jubilant crowd gathered at Delmonico’s restaurant in New York City. Delmonico’s hosted over 300 rich and famous guests. , Theodore Roosevelt, industrialist Chauncey Depew, and actor DeWolf Hopper dined with baseball heroes. The celebration was a welcome-home fete for Albert Spalding’s world-tour team. Spalding’s group of all-star baseball players had traveled to Egypt, Hawaii, Australia, and Europe. They showcased America’s national game. At the height of the celebration, Mark Twain congratulated the team. Newspapers across the country carried Twain’s speech in the days that followed. Twain preached to the luminous crowd about the virtues of the national pastime: “Base ball, which is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive, and push, and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century!”265 Twain’s observation, nay rallying cry, reveals the cultural power of baseball. Baseball was a product of the times and culture; it was the signature American game. The same year as the Delmonico’s celebration, 1889, Twain published A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Twain’s protagonist, Henry Morgan, awakes in the age of King Arthur. Morgan decides to teach the Court at Camelot to play baseball. In Twain’s novel, baseball was such an important element of nineteenth-century American culture that the time-traveling hero uses as it as an emblem of his era. Morgan believes that crowds of more than 50,000 would turn it to watch the knights play baseball. Much like Spalding’s tour, Morgan thinks that the knights should take baseball around the world.266 Twain’s character also makes the connection between baseball and combat: Morgan decided to teach the knights baseball as a substitute for tournaments. Baseball came of age in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During that era, Americans standardized the game and made it their national pastime. The people, events and culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were profoundly influenced by the national pastime. But early baseball leaders went even further; they

265 Boston Daily Globe, April 9, 1889.

266 Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1889), 406.

111 dramatized baseball’s past. They invented a history for the game, highlighting the American Civil War’s contributions to baseball. Baseball was a major cultural force during the late 1800s. Americans on opposite sides of the Civil War celebrated its mythical, martial past and reunited around a national pastime. Baseball also promoted a version of masculinity – notions born in the urban northeast. Baseball also sold itself as a war game. It was a sport that could turn boys into soldiers. It was a necessary pastime for soldiers in war zones. It also kept patriotism alive at home. Of course, Americans embraced baseball as a fun game to play and watch. But early baseball enthusiasts used this real baseball experience during the war to highlight the game’s heroic and martial attributes. They then concocted the myth that a Civil War general invented the game, giving the game a heroic background, an American origin, and military motifs. From the Civil War to World War I, baseball’s players, leadership, and enthusiasts interwove the game’s ethos with military themes. They argued that baseball would train military men well, making them better grenadiers, for example. In this sense, baseball could serve as preparation and perhaps even a substitute for war. Conversely, military tactics could serve as principles for victory on the baseball diamond. For example, author C.H. Claudy suggested in The Battle of Base-Ball that scoring first in the baseball game is the same as holding the high ground in a battle. Claudy believes that it puts pressure on the opponent.267 The game was imbued with themes of masculinity, military strength, and patriotism. Baseball’s warrior culture was vital to America’s future and helped drive its popularity. In the new industrial economy, Americans worked according to the clock, not in the rhythms of nature. As wage earners, Americans found themselves with dedicated leisure time to indulge in baseball. Cities, a product of the new economy, were a necessary element for baseball’s proliferation. Cities provided centralized populations, cheap transportation, and a print media necessary for the popularity of the game. Immigration fueled the popularity of the game, particularly in Midwestern cities. Baseball historians have largely ignored baseball’s impact on the larger history of the United States. They focus, instead, on more pedantic issues of game play, teams, and biographies. The national pastime, its mythologization, and cultural resonance changed

267 C.H. Claudy, The Battle of Base-Ball (New York: The Century Company, 1912), 21.

112 American history. The game was also indicative of American attitudes on gender. In this area, too, baseball scholars have, again, largely ignored the connections between the game and a larger strand of social history during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This gender analysis reveals not only much about the game, but also exposes the era’s ideas about ideal masculinity and femininity. The game’s Victorian-era legacy is a powerful one, and its mythology, which took hold in the aftermath of the Civil War, is still with us. For example, millions of Americans continue to believe the Abner Doubleday creation myth, and even baseball’s National Hall of Fame holds out hope for conclusive evidence to prove Doubleday’s contributions. The modern game’s military tradition and emphasis on masculine ideals, instilled in the decades after the Civil War, are still particularly striking rituals in the ballparks of America. Today, along with a martial national anthem, baseball parks are filled with patriotic, nationalistic, and militaristic images. During pre-game celebrations, jet planes streak overhead and elite paratroopers fall from the sky. The San Diego Padres are even more committed to blending baseball with martial pride. On home game Sundays of the 2008 and 2009 seasons, the Padres wore camouflage jerseys along with green hats and green pants. Of course, these desert-fatigue style jerseys are available to purchase. The Padres also wear these uniforms on Memorial Day, Labor Day and Independence Day. On Sundays, the Padres host 200 Marine recruits and drill instructors in a reserved section of right field. During the fourth inning, the Padres play the Marine Hymn while encouraging fans to stand at attention with the Marines. Of course, the other teams of Major League Baseball also offer Armed Forces or military-appreciation events with reduced-price tickets and recognition for veterans and active duty personnel. The epic 2001 mini-series Band of Brothers also gave a particularly compelling and modern example of baseball’s importance in the image of the American warrior. In a voiceover at the end of the television program, Easy Company’s commander, Richard Winters, details what happened to the members of his unit after the war. During the voiceover, the soldiers of Easy Company play a baseball game in slow motion. The light turns hallowing, as the music builds to an emotional ending. With great reverence and a hint of melancholy, Winters revealed that in the years since the war, many of his men

113 have died. This depiction plays out as an American version of Valhalla. Instead of going to the warriors’ hall of Norse mythology, after the war the men of Easy Company retire to the baseball diamond. The American warrior’s place, though, is not a fearsome or supernatural reunion with fallen comrades. Instead, playing on the baseball diamond emphasizes the best of the American fighting man. Easy Company was physically tough, athletic, but also had a sense of friendly competition and fair play. They embodied the American way to fight. Like their Civil War brethren, they rejoice in baseball; it is an escape from the horrors and drudgery of military life. It was not by accident that the series creators chose baseball as the backdrop for the film’s glorious end. This is analogous to an American western movie where the heroes ride off into the sunset. Here they play a game of ball as they fade into history. One hundred years ago, Americans celebrated the heroics of the Civil War generation. Similarly, Band of Brothers celebrates the accomplishments of “the Greatest Generation.” As with the Civil War generation, popular culture today links the valor and heroics of the warrior with those same traits in the baseball players. Just as the game is still influenced by its warrior mythology, baseball’s ability to restore masculine attributes is still important to the game. The game’s recent controversy over steroid use is a testament to the attitudes that Americans hold about the game’s value to the culture. Steroids are in direct conflict with the perceived health benefits of the game. Steroids also threaten the idea that baseball and its players are an historic throwback. The game sells itself as a living connection to the American past, with little changing since its inception. Lastly, any scandal, including steroids, challenges another idea instilled in the game during the nineteenth century. Scandals threaten the belief that baseball players are the epitome of the masculine ideal. American society still holds baseball players as manly heroes that children should idolize. As we have seen, baseball’s apostles planted this idea during the game’s nascent years. I set out in this study to write a history of the influence of early baseball on American culture. I wanted to explore the popular myths, beliefs, and practices that surrounded the game at the time of its establishment as our national pastime. I also analyzed how players and other key figures viewed and transformed the game from a regional fad into a cultural power capable of influencing every level of American society. I purposely cast

114 my net widely, consulting an array of different sources. In addition to surveying salient and recent baseball scholarship, I looked at baseball manuals and sporting journals, such as the New York Clipper, the National Police Gazette, and Baseball Magazine. I included close research of several players from the early years. Baseball players such as Albert Spalding, Zane Grey, Stephen Crane, Christy Mathewson, John Montgomery Ward, and Billy Sunday offer a diverse perspective on the rise of the national pastime. I also conducted a thorough examination of mainstream periodicals that regularly covered the early days of baseball. These sources include the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the New York Times, Century magazine, and a variety of newspapers from across the country. I surveyed a changing discourse on baseball from the 1860s to 1920. As baseball took its place as the national pastime, themes of war and masculinity were keys to the sport. At the same time, baseball and its promoters emphasized the health benefits of the game. Nineteenth-century culture had a profound influence on the formation of the national pastime. Baseball’s ascent to its almost universally acknowledged status as the national pastime derived from more than simply the game’s popularity. The formation of a national pastime was a process where baseball was imbued with themes, motifs, and ideals from the nineteenth century. The first chapter examined how the American sporting press promoted baseball during the Civil War as a national pastime. For the soldiers, the game was an escape from a tedious life. But it was also during the war that a sporting press began to connect the sport to war and glamorize its players. The Civil War experience was a key ingredient in mythologizing the game. Since baseball’s history was tied to the glories of the Civil War, Americans on both sides of the conflict could celebrate the game. Next, the second chapter examined how baseball promoted a middle- class, northern version of gender. After all, the game was a gender performance. Baseball followed traditional gender roles of the era. Baseball was an exercise for men to prove their strength and virility. While baseball welcomed women as spectators, it rejected them as players. The press made light of any effort of women to play the national pastime. The last chapter examined how baseball used its Civil War heritage to reinforce the game’s masculine and martial merits. This popular image of baseball gave it tremendous power. Americans, regardless of section, could unite around the national

115 pastime. With its place as the American game, it was a proving ground for young men. World War I confirmed baseball’s impact on warrior culture. The relationship between men and early baseball is a complex one. At the simplest level, baseball attracted players and fans because it was a fun, entertaining, and exciting game. But baseball served an even greater cultural role for Americans. Baseball was the savior of white masculinity. The formation of baseball with this ideology had profound implications for the sport’s future. The late nineteenth century was an era when many Americans voiced concern over the future of white manhood. Americans believed that a combination of urbanization, longstanding peace, the ostensible closing of the American frontier and the increasing role of women in the public sphere threatened the vigor and strength of American men. Americans believed that their beloved national pastime could cure these problems. Baseball could improve men and their behavior, strengthening their minds and bodies in an acceptable outlet. With the correct rules, baseball could even shape proper behavior for fans, as well as for players. Baseball also ostensibly proved its benefits to manhood by defining itself as a specifically male pastime that either barred women from participation altogether or mocked them for trying to play. Throughout the nineteenth century, newspapers lambasted efforts by women to play baseball, connecting gender to proficiency as athletes. Yet, women were an important part of the baseball ritual as spectators. As spectators, women reinforced the social acceptability of the game. They also purportedly served as admirers of the males in the field. As athletes, baseball was the realm of men, and provided masculine identity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but as a larger cultural practice in late nineteenth-century America, women played a significant role as well. During the nineteenth century, Americans elevated a sport to a national pastime. Baseball started as one of many competing athletic pastimes in the 1840s. By the early 1900s, it was the dominant sport in American culture. In 1845, New York City newspapers began regular coverage of contests between emerging clubs. In the years after the Civil War, the game’s popularity expanded dramatically. At the 1865 convention of baseball’s governing body, the National Association, 91 teams sent representatives. Most of these teams were from the New York City area. In 1866, 202

116 teams from 17 states attended the National Association convention. By 1868, there were over 300 teams, too many for the National Association to regulate.268 Due to the astounding growth, the National Association yielded power to state associations. Baseball’s popularity drove clubs to charge admission to spectators. Baseball and sporting magazines sold tens of thousands of subscriptions to these fans. In 1876, eight charter teams formed the National League. During the 1880s, the National League witnessed growth and profitability. Of course, many other Americans watched or played minor league, college, amateur, and youth contests. Amateur teams of different professions competed with one another. The New York State Homeopathic Asylum for the Insane even had a team. By the 1891 season, league attendance was over one million. By 1901, total attendance was over three million. The same year the American League, the former Western League, began play as a major league. Starting in 1903, the winners of the American and National Leagues faced off in the World Series. By 1909, the combined league attendance soared to almost seven million. Attendance figures ebbed during the World War I years, particularly during the strike-shortened 1918 season. By 1919, attendance had recovered, with six and a half million spectators. By the early twentieth century, baseball was a cultural and economic force. Before the advent of electronic mass media, baseball was perhaps the most popular form of entertainment. The 1919 Black Sox scandal illustrates precisely the cultural significance that baseball had achieved in American society by the second decade of the twentieth century. The 1919 Black Sox Scandal highlights baseball’s power to shape American culture. During the 1919 World Series, gamblers bribed the heavily-favored Chicago White Sox to purposefully lose to the Cincinnati Reds. The 1919 World Series was the first after World War I. Baseball attendance was on the rebound after the war. Over 230,000 spectators attended the series. Millions more followed the game in print or by going to halls with telegraph lines that continually updated the progress of the games. Baseball

268 Harold Seymour, Baseball: The Early Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 45.

117 was at the height of its power during the dead-ball era. The scandal risked baseball’s cultural prominence, as well as the game’s revenue. The scandal could jeopardize the image of baseball as a wholesome and masculine sport with a proud martial past rooted in the Civil War. Using a constructed history, baseball had built its players into idealized symbols of American manhood. Major League Baseball had worked diligently to reinforce the importance of the game for American morals, strength, and building character. During the war, several big league players joined the military. Baseball Magazine continually updated the public on the exploits of the athletes at the front. But after the 1919 scandal, many Americans feared that gamblers had tainted the game. Ballplayers risked losing their status as examples of the ideal man. The scandal could sully the image of the baseball player as a brave and strong athlete whose exploits were critical to the nation. Owners worried that a loss of confidence might hurt gate receipts. They reacted by banning eight White Sox players from baseball for life. Owners also hired a commissioner, , to reform the game. With a commissioner, the owners hoped to preserve their business and the integrity of the game. As Americans embraced a fun and entertaining game, they wrote a past for the sport. This mythological past highlighted the heroic aspects of the game and its players. This makes baseball’s history vexing. It is filled with fact, fiction and mythology. And the study of baseball’s mythology is the most telling; it reveals what Americans wanted from their national sport. Americans justified its popularity by highlighting its role during the Civil War and its ability to restore health. They connected the game to a cataclysmic event of the century, emphasizing the contributions of the Civil War generation. Americans used baseball to overcome sectional differences. They stressed the game’s benefits during a time of transition and challenge. In the midst of the 1889 Delmonico’s celebration, Mark Twain spoke of the importance of the national pastime and its place in American life. What might have surprised Twain the most was that Americans were only just beginning to create baseball’s past.

118 Annotated Bibliography

Primary Sources Baseball Magazine, 1908-1920. Baseball Magazine, published from 1908 until 1957 and then again briefly in 1964 and 1965, is an important primary source for baseball scholars focusing on the end of the dead-ball era. The magazine also gives valuable information on how the sport viewed itself and its early history. The periodical was often propaganda for Major League Baseball. It featured articles by team owners, managers, and players. The magazine also wrote interesting articles about baseball during World War I. Baseball Magazine also has many articles on the game’s history for the early twentieth-century perspective.

Beadle's Dime Baseball Player, 1860-1881. Beadle’s Dime Baseball Player was the first series of baseball guidebooks that gave new players instruction and advice on playing the game. At its height, the guide enjoyed an annual circulation of over 50,000 copies. Henry Chadwick, the English immigrant who advocated baseball as the national sport, edited almost all of the guides. Chadwick, developer of the box score, was a pioneer in sports journalism.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1841-1902. Published from 1841 until 1955, this daily newspaper was one of the most popular afternoon newspapers in the country during the nineteenth century. Walt Whitman served as an editor for the newspaper in the late 1850s. The newspaper carried a variety of political, sporting, and legal news, along with editorials. The Eagle was one of the first newspapers to have routine coverage of early baseball games. The newspaper is an invaluable resource for early attitudes about baseball and sporting life in nineteenth- century New York City.

Century Magazine, 1881-1899. Century Magazine was a monthly magazine published from 1881 to 1930. It featured a wide variety of journalistic and historical articles. The magazine also included literature and poetry, even works by Mark Twain. In the 1880s, the periodical began featuring regular articles on the Civil War. These popular features often detailed a campaign or a

119 biographical sketch of a general. Thus the magazine provides historians with insight into the changing attitudes about the Civil War in the late nineteenth century.

Claudy, C. H. The Battle of Base-Ball. New York: The Century Company, 1912. Writer and photographer C. H. Claudy’s book is a baseball playing guide and instructional text that uses war as an extended metaphor for baseball. Claudy goes through each phase of playing baseball including pitching, hitting and defense, comparing all facets to warfare. Claudy’s text represents the height of conflating war with baseball.

Forest and Stream, 1873-1920. Forest and Stream, forerunner to Field and Stream, focused on outdoor sports such as hunting and fishing, regularly featuring articles on baseball. Baseball players also wrote articles about their outdoor adventures such as shooting sports. Baseball’s appearance in Forest and Stream reveals the attitudes of how baseball was an outdoor, physically restorative and healthy pursuit.

Grey, Zane. The Short Stop. New York Grosset and Dunlap, 1911. Grey, Zane. The Red Headed Outfield and Other Baseball Stories. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1915. Grey, Zane. The Young Pitcher. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1911. Zane Grey’s baseball works were his early attempts at fiction. These texts are juvenile fiction, which feature an underdog hero trying to overcome long odds for victory on the baseball diamond. The baseball fiction served as a template for Grey’s future works of Western books. Like his cowboy heroes, Grey’s baseball heroes were rugged individuals with a strong moral compass that won victory through physical exploits. Grey was a talented college and semi-professional baseball player. Thus, Grey’s fiction gives scholars insight into the world of nineteenth century baseball.

Gulick, Luther Halsey. A Philosophy of Play. New York: Association Press, 1920. Gulick, Luther Halsey. Physical Education By Muscular Exercise. Philadelphia: P. Blakiston’s Sons & Co., 1904.

120 Gulick, Luther Halsey. The Efficient Life. New York: Doubleday, 1913. Luther Halsey Gulick was an early advocate of physical education and training. He was a student of physical education pioneer Dudley Sargent. James Naismith, the inventor of basketball, was one of Gulick’s protégés. Gulick’s various works emphasize his concerns about the physical condition of average Americans, particularly men. Gulick fears that modern threats and city life have weakened American men. He advocated regular and strenuous play to keep American men strong. Gulick’s texts are critical for studying the advancement of physical education in the United States.

The Inter-Allied Games. Paris: Ste Ame de Publications Periodiques Paris, 1919. This official documentation of the Inter-Allied Games documents the Olympic-style games between the Allied powers after World War I. Among the events was a well- attended baseball championship series and a grenade throwing contest. Americans believed their ease in winning the grenade toss was due to their baseball throwing style. This is an interesting text for scholars of American games, as well as World War I.

Mathewson, Christy. Pitching in a Pinch. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Originally published in 1912, Christy Mathewson’s text provides scholars with insight into baseball at the height of the dead-ball era. Mathewson was a dominating star of the time, winning the World Series in 1905 with the New York Giants. Mathewson’s book was an instructional text, but also advised players on the psychological facets of the game.

National Police Gazette, 1845-1906. Enoch E. Camp and George Wilkes started the National Police Gazette in 1845. Wilkes later published the Spirit of the Times after William T. Porter’s death in 1858. The Gazette, aimed at men, covered crime and sports with pulp fiction mixed in. The tabloid often featured lurid images of crime scenes and scantily clad women on its covers. The Gazette continued publication until 1977.

New York Clipper, 1853-1870. The New York Clipper is a crucial source for nineteenth century baseball scholars. It gives historians an in-depth look into nineteenth-century sporting culture. Publisher Frank Queen began the Clipper in 1853. It is at the epicenter of baseball’s explosive

121 growth in the nineteenth century. The newspaper was a fascinating weekly New York City newspaper that focused on sports, as well as entertainment. It featured articles about the theater, the circus, and outdoor life. It was one of the earliest American newspapers to focus exclusively on sports and entertainment. At its height, the publication topped approximately 25,000 subscribers. The Clipper covered a wide variety of sports including baseball, horse racing, chess, and football. The Clipper stopped reporting on sports in 1894; it ceased publication altogether in 1924.

New York Times, 1851-1920. The major daily of New York City is a boon to researchers due to its easily accessible and searchable articles. The newspaper featured early and regular coverage of baseball. It covered major games, along with opinion pieces about the game. The Times started as a political newspaper for the Whigs, but veered away from purely a political perspective. Powerful and wide-ranging by the end of the nineteenth century, it had a reputation for strong journalism.

Outing, 1883-1905. Outing magazine covered outdoor sports and life. It included stories about baseball, as well as adventure stories by baseball players. Thus it is an important source for viewing baseball as an outdoor restorative sport with rural connections. The magazine included outdoor fiction such as Jack ’s White Fang. Outing ceased publication in 1923.

Palmer, Harry. Athletic Sports in America, England, and Australia. New York: Union Publishing House, 1889. Palmer’s guide is an informational guide on the background and current status of a variety of sports in the Anglo-American world, including baseball. Palmer also covers horse racing, tennis, football, billiards, and lawn games. The text’s baseball coverage is quite complete, and thus an invaluable resource for the researcher. It includes a history of the game up to that time plus biographical sketches of early baseball writers. It is an advocate of the game, giving historians insight into the attitudes and perceived benefits of the game. It also includes details of Albert Spalding’s world tour. Unusual for the era, it also includes coverage of .

122 Peverelly, Charles A. The Book of American Pastimes. New York: Charles A. Peverelly, 1866. Charles A. Peverelly’s book focuses on a wide range of nineteenth-century sports including baseball, cricket, and rowing. Baseball has its own chapter in the book. Peverelly provided a history of baseball as well as the rules set forth by the National Association in 1866. Peverelly argues that although baseball was a descendant of the English game of rounders, it should be the American national sport. He believed that it was particularly suited to the American temperament and culture. Of particular value to researchers are Peverelly’s meticulous records. Much of the text is really an almanac of early scores and seasons, club histories, and club membership rolls.

Senate Committee on Military Affairs. Preparedness for National Defense. 64th Cong., 1st sess., 1916. In 1916, the United States Senate’s Committee on Military Affairs held hearings in anticipation of American entry into World War I. The committee was concerned with the physical condition of potential American soldiers. Among the experts it interviewed was physical educators from Switzerland. The committee advocated rigorous physical education programs, including baseball, for all young American men.

Roosevelt, Theodore. The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses. New York: The Century Co., 1900. The Strenuous Life is a collection of the speeches and writings of the turn of the century’s most dynamic politician. Throughout Roosevelt’s speeches, he expressed concerns about challenges to the next generation of Americans. He worried they are not physically up to the challenges that lay ahead for them. He regularly celebrated the accomplishments of the Civil War generation and advocates a sporting life with rigorous outdoor activity. The Strenuous Life is not only a look inside an important politician’s mind, but also the thoughts and opinions of one of the era’s most ardent advocates of a sporting life.

Sargent, Dudley. Athletic Sports. New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1897. Sargent, Dudley. Physical Education. Boston: Ginn and Co., 1906. Dudley Sargent was an early advocate of physical education and worked to establish it as an academic field. Sargent taught physical education at Harvard University and started a school for training physical education teachers. In these texts, Sargent was concerned

123 about the state of American masculinity weakening due to modern advances and urban life. Sargent favored gymnastics to restore American muscle.

Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guides. Spalding's Official Base Ball Guides were an annual baseball guide, founded by A. G. Spalding, and published by his American Sports Publishing Company. The guides included the current rules as well as promoted Spalding’s sporting goods. Spalding's Official Base Ball Guide first appeared in 1878. Its name varied slightly over time. In 1940, it merged with another publication to become The Official Baseball Guide.

Spalding, Albert G. America’s National Game. New York: American Sports Publishing Company, 1911. Albert Spalding was the most influential figure of the dead-ball era. He was a dominant pitcher and hitter during the 1870s. He later managed and owned the Chicago White Stockings and was the driving force behind the National League. Spalding was also the founder of the sporting goods company that still bears his name. Spalding was also the initiator of the Mills Commission, which anointed Abner Doubleday as baseball’s inventor. Spalding’s attempt at a history of the game is invaluable to resources for it reveals Spalding’s beliefs about the game. Spalding uses the text to cement the game as the national pastime. Throughout the book, Spalding connects the game to the Civil War and argues that baseball is the best sport for Americans.

Spirit of the Times: A Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature and the Stage, 1835-1861. The Spirit of the Times was a weekly sporting newspaper based in New York City. The newspaper covered baseball, as well as cricket, horse racing, boxing, and track events. In addition to covering athletics, the newspaper also carried theater news, fiction and general interest articles. At its peak, 40,000 readers subscribed to the Spirit of the Times. The newspaper’s history is confusing as it split between the competing Spirit of the Times and Porter’s Spirit of the Times. George Wilkes took over Porter’s Spirit of the Times after William T. Porter’s death in 1858, where it changed to Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times. The Spirit of the Times, along with the New York Clipper and the National Police Gazette, are vital primary sources for scholars of nineteenth-century baseball.

124 Ward, John Montgomery. Base-Ball: How to Become a Player with the Origin, History, and Explanation of the Game. Philadelphia: The Athletic Publishing Company, 1888. This text provides insight from another nineteenth-century baseball player. But Ward was more than an outstanding baseball player. He was a graduate of Columbia University’s law school. Ward led the first players’ union challenge. Ward’s text provides a history of the game, as well as instruction for each member of a baseball team. Ward’s book includes a chapter on how men should explain baseball to women. Secondary Sources Adelman, Melvin L A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics, 1820-1870. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Sports historian Melvin Adelman examines sporting culture in the late nineteenth century. Centered on New York City, Adelman’s study focuses on boxing, cricket, horse racing, and baseball. Adelman argue that sports were increasingly marketed as a benefit to society during the nineteenth century. Adelman differs with many other sports scholars, contending that the rise of sport was earlier than what historians think. The author connects the process of modernization to the rise of sports.

Asinof, Eliot. Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series. New York: Holt Publishing, 2000. Former player Eliot Asinof’s well-written narrative details the 1919 Black Sox scandal. In the 1919 series, gamblers convinced the Chicago White Sox to throw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. The scandal could have been catastrophic for professional baseball. The scandal is a demarcation between the dead- ball and modern eras.

Bender, Daniel. American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. Bender’s examination of the industrialization during the Progressive Era is a fascinating blend of cultural and economic history. A U. S. historian, Bender argues that many Americans saw industrialization as the highpoint of civilization. Thus economic and industrial success was a sign of racial superiority. Lesser ethnic and racial groups would only setback American development. Thus, Bender argues, many Progressives believed that helping or reforming the marginalized would hurt American industry. This leads to the terrifying prospects of eugenics and sterilization.

125 Blight, David. Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. Blight’s landmark book is a thorough examination of the memory of the Civil War in the late nineteenth century. While white Americans, North and South, remembered the war as a glorious experience, African-Americans suffered through discrimination. In the decades after the war, white Americans embraced one another in reconciliation. While the sectional crisis subsided, the racial divide deepened. The meaning of the war changed; Americans ignored the racial politics while focusing on military history.

Block, David. Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. David Block seeks to find the exact moment of baseball’s beginning. Since the start of baseball scholarship, historians have been looking for the moment of baseball’s inception. Block uncovers examples of colonial era baseball. The book connects the game to rounders, cricket, and other folk games. Instead of citing an exact beginning of the game, Block believes baseball evolved from multiple beginnings. One of Block’s most intriguing arguments is his contention that Spalding sought to perpetuate the Doubleday myth due their shared membership in the American Theosophical Society.

Bowman, Larry. Before the World Series: Pride, Profits and Baseball’s First Championships. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003. Bowman’s book traces the growing profits of baseball as it expanded into a profession and transformed into the National League. The text is a survey of the growth, professionalization, and standardization of baseball after the Civil War to 1890. The book includes an in-depth timeline of the late nineteenth-century era.

Burk, Robert F. Never Just a Game: Players, Owners, and American Baseball to 1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. This intelligent work combines cultural analysis with an economic interpretation of early baseball. Burk uses labor history to analyze the relationships between early players and clubs. After the Civil War, baseball transformed from an amateur endeavor to a business with professional teams and players. He also details the fights between players and management. He compares this struggle with other labor struggles during the late

126 nineteenth century. Players were unable to gain wages against management that believed they were the protectors of a national treasure from the antebellum era.

Elias, Robert. The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad. New York: The New Press, 2010. The Empire Strikes Out argues that baseball played a prominent role in American imperialism. Americans enlisted baseball as a tool in the civilizing process during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Elias does not have a substantial analysis of the Civil War and baseball, it certainly shows the consequences of a martial national pastime.

Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. In this text, historian Drew Gilpin Faust examines how Americans coped with the overwhelming tragedy and death from the Civil War. Faust pays special attention to the rise of photographic images during the era, as well as the importance of memorials, and the evolution of the embalming process. This Republic of Suffering is continuing a trend of Civil War history that focuses on the legacy and memory of the Civil War.

Fussel, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Soldier and scholar Paul Fussel’s work is a landmark in memory studies. This text is a must-read for any scholar of how societies interpret their martial experience. Fussel examines how English literature interpreted life in the trenches. Studying published poetry, rumors and myths, Fussel scrutinizes how English literature remembered and mythologized World War I. Fussel’s text serves as a model for historians examining the cultural impact of war and how the meaning of war changes a society.

Goldstein, Warren. Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1989. Goldstein traces baseball’s early history from amateur clubs to its ascension as a big business. The formation of the National League in 1876 was a turning point in the professionalization of the game. Goldstein examines the cultural and economic forces behind baseball’s rise. The author compares the competition between players and management to the same labor strife taking place in other industries. Goldstein views the

127 rise of baseball as a tragic tale. For years baseball players had worked to popularize and standardize their game. Ultimately amateur players lost control of their game to owners and leagues driven by finances.

Gorn, Elliott J. The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Fighting in America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Historian Elliott J. Gorn’s fascinating examination of bare-knuckle boxing serves as a template for other sports historians, particularly of nineteenth-century athletics. Boxing’s transformation was similar to that of baseball. It grew from its English heritage to a controversial antebellum sport. Finally, it was a popular and lucrative entertainment. Gorn uses a variety of historical approaches including social, labor, and gender history. Boxing, like baseball, celebrates the body. It also provided the first American celebrity athletes. Boxing was a form of escapism for the middle and lower classes.

Henderson, Robert W. Ball, Bat and Bishop: The Origin of Ball Games. New York: Rockport Press, 1947. Ball, Bat and Bishop is one of the earliest serious attempts at American sporting scholarship. The work is massive in temporal scope. Henderson uses evidence from ancient engravings and images to unravel the beginnings of modern sports. Henderson, a librarian with the New York Public Library, attempts to trace the beginnings of many different ball games including tennis, golf, billiards, and baseball. Henderson believes these early games were fertility rites as well as mock combat.

Hoganson, Kristin. Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Hoganson derives new and interesting takes on the internal pressures that led to American involvement in the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection. Hoganson argues that gender politics, specifically fears about weakening masculinity, led to American imperialism and jingoism. Hoganson successfully ties together disparate strands of history including imperialism, gender history and American electoral politics. Hoganson’s approach would be useful in analyzing the impetus behind other foreign policy issues.

128 Kasson, John F. Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001. John Kasson argues that Americans felt there was a crisis of masculinity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By examining bodybuilder Eugen Sandow, Houdini, Teddy Roosevelt, Tarzan, and author Edgar Rice Burrows, Kasson contends that Americans were looking for ways to strengthen the male form in the face of challenges from modernity. Kasson’s work is an example of not only well-executed cultural history, but also how gender influenced culture, politics, and even imperialism.

Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: The Free Press, 1996. Sociologist Michael Kimmel’s book is a cornerstone work in studies of American masculinity. Kimmel adroitly mixes cultural history with textual interpretations of modern texts. Throughout their history, American men sought to demonstrate their manhood. Kimmel argues that the masculine ideal transitioned from a wealthy elite landowner to the self-made man. During this era, American men felt challenged by increasing women power, economic dislocation, and industrialization.

Kirsch, George B. Baseball in Blue and Gray: The National Pastime During the Civil War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Kirsch’s book is a thorough examination of baseball during the Civil War. Kirsch reiterates the traditional interpretation of the war’s role in baseball’s proliferation. But Kirsch also examines how, during the war, the New York game became the dominant form of the game. But Baseball in Blue and Gray ends its analysis too soon. It does not answer how the war influenced baseball’s culture. Kirsch argues that Civil War baseball stirred nationalism, but does not answer how that phenomenon operates. But it lacks an examination of the cultural effects of the war on the game.

Lamster, Mark. Spalding’s World Tour: The Epic Adventure That Took Baseball Around the Globe--and Made it America’s Game. New York: Public Affairs, 2006. Journalist Mark Lamster presents a lively and thoroughly researched book that details the 1889 world tour of Albert Spalding’s hand-picked baseball team. Spalding’s tour intended to spread baseball around the globe, and subsequently sell Spalding’s sporting goods. But personal and professional rivalries festered on the holiday. These rivalries

129 gave way to a league conflict the next season, where players revolted against the .

Lears, T. J. Jackson. Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920. New York: Harper Collins, 2009. Rebirth of a Nation seems as if it is a continuation of Lears’ 1981 work, No Place of Grace, which covers the same time period in American history. This time, Lears argues that the post-Civil War United States was in a period of regeneration and growth. He ties the various traditional trends of this era (immigration, industrialization, militarism, urbanization, imperialism) to this theme. At times, Rebirth of a Nation seems to be a synthesis, borrowing from the ideas advanced by historians John Kasson, Richard Slotkin, and Clifford Putney.

McGerr, Michael. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. McGerr’s text examines the Progressive Era, an era when baseball transitioned to a national business. McGerr argues that the Progressive agenda was far from unified with a variety of ideas and competing ideologies. The movement ultimately failed after World War I and the 1920s . McGerr’s text gives crucial context to the era.

McPherson, James. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. McPherson’s text is a concise history of the war and its causes. The award-winning book on the Civil War provides necessary background information of the era. McPherson’s work is all encompassing, going beyond the military and political history to examine the recurring themes of slavery and freedom.

Melville, Tom. Early Baseball and the Rise of the National League. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 1997. Baseball historian Tom Melville argues that the development of New York City was crucial to the popularity of baseball. Melville focuses on the first 30 years of the game, looking for how baseball satiates cultural needs of socializing and defining success. Melville follows the history of baseball from amateur status to the formation of the National Association and the National League.

130 Millen, Patricia. From Pastime to Passion: Baseball and the Civil War. Westminster, Maryland: Heritage Books, 2004. At less than 100 pages, librarian Patricia Millen’s work is really a pamphlet. It is descriptive of baseball during the work, but really lacks much analysis. Alas the work does provide source information for Civil War and baseball researchers.

Morris, Peter. But Didn’t We Have Fun?: An Informal History of Baseball’s Pioneer Era, 1843-1870. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008. Baseball historian Peter Morris is a prolific writer of nineteenth-century baseball books. This examination of the first decades of baseball’s popularity begins with the Knickerbocker Club of New York City, the standardization of rules and behavior at baseball games. Morris argues that these pioneers of baseball played the game for fun and entertainment. Morris believes that other historians have often missed this simple idea. Players and fans embraced baseball as pleasure. Morris acknowledges the Civil War as the end of the amateur phase of the game, but does not examine the cultural consequences of the war on the game.

Painter, Nell Irvin. Standing at Armageddon: The United States 1877-1919, A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987. Standing at Armageddon is a synthesis of history of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It analyzes economic, political, and cultural history at a time of intense transition in American life. In this narrative, Painter emphasizes the role of African-Americans, women and immigrants. Painter shows this era as a clash of modernity and old ideas with an attempt at progress. Painter’s work is another text that gives important context to this dissertation.

Possner, Roger. The Rise of Militarism in the Progressive Era, 1900-1914. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. Possner, a former military officer and librarian, contends that the American military proactively advocated a militaristic agenda that would filter to the rest of the American culture during the Progressive Era. Possner gives examples such as the building of National Guard armories, professional recruiting efforts, and the encouragement of military drill in high schools. He also examines the popularity of military tournaments and shooting sports. Possner’s work is limited by a lack of analysis of the wider

131 American culture, including baseball, which already included many of the jingoistic and martial themes Possner examines. .

Putney, Clifford. Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. Historian Clifford Putney argues that the American Christian establishment changed its mind about athletics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At first, religious leaders rejected sports as hedonistic. But Christians turned to sports as they gained popularity. This was due to a variety of causes, such as modern Christian leaders playing sports as youths and in college. Over time, they embraced athletics as necessary to combat effeminate behavior in men. Americans also believed that Christian men needed to be stronger to face the non-white, non-Christian races during imperialism. This is another text that provides context for the popularization and acceptance of baseball.

Riess, Steven A. City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports 1991. Baseball historian Steven Riess argues that the development of popular American sports coincided with the development of American cities from the 1880s until the 1920s. Baseball grew as the United States transitioned from the early walking cities to the industrial cities. In addition, sports gained a positive image during the nineteenth century as a safe, wholesome alternative to other urban distractions. But the city was more than a stage for sports; it provided the conditions for sports to thrive.

Riess, Steven A. Sport in Industrial America 1850-1920. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1995. In this text, Riess examines the transition of American sport from the pre-modern to the industrialist era in America. Americans began accepting sports due to the possibility that sports could benefit public health. In this era, Americans saw that sports could be morally uplifting and form character. Fear of the city, a dynamic labor structure, and an expanding middle class changed attitudes toward sports.

Riess, Steven A. Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

132 Riess examines the growth of baseball during the changing American culture in the early twentieth century. This time, Riess confines his focus to baseball in Chicago, Atlanta and New York City. Riess argues that baseball’s early nineteenth-century ideology reinforced white Anglo-Saxon dominance.

Rotundo, E. Anthony. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York: Basic Books, 1993. Rotundo, like Michael Kimmel, examines the construction of American masculinity. Rotundo follows the transition of the masculine ideal from the northeastern Puritan traditions with a defined station in society, to one where mobility, aggression and material success were celebrated qualities in men. Rotundo argues that regardless of the changing role of men in society, Americans cast women as inferior, as lesser than men. With few studies in American masculinity, Rotundo’s work, along with Kimmel’s text, is a necessary book for scholars of American masculinity.

Ryczek, William J. When Johnny Came Sliding Home: The Post-Civil War Baseball Boom, 1865-1870. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1998. William Ryczek, a former financial executive, examines the first few seasons of baseball after the Civil War. Ryczek’s text is really a series of essays that discuss particularly important episodes, games, or issues of post-war baseball. A piece examining female attendance at these early games, “The Ladies They Will All Turn Out,” is particularly valuable for baseball scholars studying gender. Other topics that Ryczek addresses include the movement of the game west, and the contributions of Henry Chadwick to sports journalism.

Seymour, Harold. Baseball: The Early Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. Harold Seymour’s book is the first academic work that focuses exclusively on baseball during the nineteenth century. Seymour continues the assault on the Doubleday myth. Considering the date of Seymour’s work, it is ground-breaking in its examination of baseball using social and cultural history. Seymour gives painstaking details on the development of teams, rules, and leagues.

133 Story, Ronald. “The Country of the Young: The Meaning of Baseball in Early American Culture,” Sport in America: From Wicked Amusement to National Obsession. David K. Wiggins, Ed. Windsor, ON: Human Kinetics, 1995. Ronald Story’s essay seeks to explain the explosive growth of baseball from 1875 to 1895. Story seeks to find cultural reasons behind baseball’s popularity. Story argues that baseball was primarily a youth movement. Story contends that historians should look beyond major leagues, to younger teams, to explain the motivation to play baseball. Story stresses the importance of emotions to explain baseball’s popularity.

Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Slotkin argues that the frontier experience was an important part of American cultural life. Slotkin’s expansive study of American frontier literature is a part of a larger study on violence in American life. Another contribution to the larger field is the fact that Slotkin’s work explores the ties between history and myth, as well as the author’s willingness to examine a wide range of sources.

Susman, Warren. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Although focused on twentieth century culture, Susman pushes historians to find the power of myth and legend in history. Susman argues that the key to understanding culture is finding the intersection between mythology and history. Susman examines influential tropes of the twentieth century. Susman also shows historians how to examine sources beyond written words. Culture as History is a must-read for any scholar of American popular culture.

Thorn, John. Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011. Although Thorn adroitly acknowledges the power of myth or legend in baseball and history, Baseball in the Garden of Eden is largely a synthesis of previous nineteenth- century baseball scholarship. But due to Thorn’s status as Major League Baseball’s official historian, his work has earned wide praise. Thorn continues the long tradition where baseball historians feel the need to continue to destroy the Doubleday myth. But Thorn also argues that the contributions of and the Knickerbockers have also been exaggerated in baseball’s lore.

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Turkin, Hy and S. C. Thompson. The Official Encyclopedia of Baseball. New York: A. S. Barnes and Co., 1956. This reference book is an excellent source for nineteenth-century baseball. It includes the size and location of various ballparks, as well as playing statistics of dead-ball players. The encyclopedia also contains important attendance data and revenue statistics.

Tygiel, Jules. Past Time: Baseball as History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Past Time is a collection of essays that examines how baseball serves as a symbol for different eras in American history. Tygiel acknowledges the similarities between his text and Warren Susman’s Culture as History. For example, both Susman and Tygiel contend that each era in American history has its unique rhetoric, language, and rituals. Tygiel examines Henry Chadwick’s contribution to baseball, baseball during the 1920s, and African-American professional baseball during the Jim Crow era.

Wakefield, Wanda Ellen. Playing to Win: Sports and the American Military, 1898-1945. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Wakefield examines how the United States military adopted athletics to train soldiers. This was a paradigm shift for the American military establishment, who had previously emphasized military drill while training soldiers. Wakefield links sports to war and how these became interchangeable in American culture.

Warren, Robert Penn. The Legacy of the Civil War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961. Legendary writer Robert Penn Warren’s extended essay addresses the Civil War in the American memory and imagination. Warren’s essay is a forerunner in studying the war’s legacy. It could also be considered an early work in memory studies. Warren believes that the Civil War was the focal point of American history.

Wiesner-Hanks, Merry. Gender in History. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. Gender in History seeks to broaden the application of gender history. Wiesner-Hanks advocates using gender to study diverse cultures and eras. Gender in History also encourages scholars to expand gender studies to include masculinity. The text provides a

135 concise historiography of gender studies. It also examines themes of patriarchy, religion, economics, and sexuality.

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